Penticton’s original Renaissance man
Physician and lifelong prankster was a man of many worthy causes
EDITOR’S NOTE: In recognition of Canada’s 150th birthday The Herald is running local historical stories. For the next several weeks we are publishing stories from our archives on prominent builders in our community. The following story appeared on Feb. 14, 2007 in The Herald as part of a series on local builders.
He was a human spark plug: a cajoler who could bluster, beguile and sweet-talk people into helping the many causes he championed during his lifetime — a lifetime during which he ventured beyond the staid career boundaries of a modern medical doctor.
As Penticton’s original Renaissance man, Dr. John J. Gibson practised more than medicine. He plunged into various avocations, including game farm president, regional coroner, ski hill developer, amateur historian and artist.
“He was a wonderful, wonderful man and I miss him terribly,” said longtime friend, Gordon “Kick” Bush. “He was a doctor to the very end and he was my wife’s doctor until the day he died — retired or not.”
Renowned for his wicked sense of humour, Gibson dispensed health care with equal doses of candor and high jinx.
At one time, as part of maintaining and upgrading their skills, doctors were required to present papers at Penticton Regional Hospital.
One of the doctors, Hugh Barr, was giving a lecture and soon his colleague, Dr. Bill Wickett, fell asleep — his own lecture notes rolled up in his hand.
Gibson, who was a smoker at the time, lit a cigarette and also lit Wickett’s notes.
Sensing heat on his fingers, Wickett awakened, alarmed to discover his lecture notes — and his chance at the lectern — had gone up in smoke.
Another time, asked to find a door prize for a meeting, Gibson went to a builders’ store and brought back just that, a door. MISCHIEF STARTED EARLY When asked what his middle initial ‘J’ stood for, Dr. Gibson would say “Jesus.” And thus he became John Jesus to his many pals.
Gibson was born in Keremeos, where he lived until age five when he moved with his family to Penticton in 1919. They settled on a 10-acre orchard that is now the site of the Catholic Church on Main Street.
Even at that tender age and barely past toddlerhood, J.J. Gibson’s propensity for mischief was well-known.
He and his siblings were famous for thwarting one of the first passenger trains coming to Keremeos by plying the rails with a bar of their mother’s lye soap. The soap became slick as grease in the hot Similkameen sun and when the train from Oroville applied its brakes, it slid past the bewildered people on the station platform.
Growing up, Gibson and his six siblings rode their saddle horses around town much of which was pastures, orchards and dairy farms.
In 1929, Gibson headed north to Port Essington, an Indian village at the mouth of the Skeena River, where he worked on a United Church Mission Boat as a deck hand, cabin boy and cook.
While working for Dr. R.G. Large, the son of a Methodist medical missionary, Gibson found himself delivering health care to native villages and canneries. The work triggered his interest in medicine and paid for two years of arts courses at Victoria College.
In 1938, he graduated with six years of medical training from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont. As an undergraduate, he had already returned north to single-handedly run a small mission hospital for five months.
From this early exposure to First Nations healthcare, Gibson learned to speak Chinook and became the de facto primary physician to the reserves of the South Okanagan.
“I used to look after the Indians for $25 a month,” Gibson recalled in 1995. “I was the lowest-paid civil servant in Canada. I did more gratuitously than the money in it and I got to look after most of the (First Nations) from Westbank through to Inkaneep and over in . . . Hedley and Princeton.”
After completing his medical degree, Gibson spent two years in the far northwestern mining community at Tulsequah, B.C. and then headed to Prince Rupert.
In 1940, he emerged from the mining camp and married Freda, a girl from Picton, Ont.
When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Prince Rupert became a hive of activity, so Gibson stayed on through the war as one of seven doctors serving a community of 24,000 people.
John and Freda Gibson returned to Penticton in 1946, settling into a home built by F.H. Latimer in 1907 at Eckhardt Avenue and Martin Street. Here they raised three children, son Mark, and daughters Penny and Jeanne.
Gibson was involved in the original development of the Apex Ski hill and helped build the Green Mountain Road.
“We built that as a community effort mainly,” said Gibson in 1995. “First of all, we bought the ranch from Joe Harris. Harley Hatfield, Paul Sharp and I put down the $500 deposit on buying that ranch for $20,000.”
Gibson and his friends bought the ranch to secure the road’s right-of-way, and then resold the remaining acres to the Ray family for $21,000.
In 1967, Gibson gathered a board of directors to buy a cramped, badly run roadside zoo at the turnoff from Highway 97 north of Kaleden Junction.
Set on 600 leased acres, the newly incorporated farm, dubbed “Africa in Canada,” was established not so much as a tourist attraction, but “to protect, preserve and perpetuate the endangered species of the world.”
Gibson reportedly went to the bank and signed a hefty note that made the future of the farm viable. At first, he partnered with Edmonton’s Al Oeming, but took over as president in 1969. He remained in that position for 18 years.
While his old pal Ed Lacey and family ran the day-to-day operations, Gibson went about collecting animals. He ventured as far north as Atlin near the Yukon border where he used either his bare hands or a tranquilizer gun to capture live animals for the farm’s breeding programs.
Within the first 10 years, more than 900 babies had been born at the farm, many of them handraised: lions, tigers, grizzlies, wolves, musk oxen, giraffes, cougars, cheetahs and bison to name just a few.
“He was an extremely curious man . . . a genius as far as I’m concerned,” said Skip Bush.
“I remember a time when one of the Ankara cattle at the ranch broke its horn right into the skull and all the vets in North America said ‘you’re going to have to put this animal down’ and Doc said ‘to hell we are.’”
“So he made a cast and they brought the horn back up into place and wired it across with the other horn and . . . made a plaster cast and the skull healed back and the horn healed back . . . and it was a perfect animal. That’s the type of guy he was.”
In 1999, the farm’s most recent owners, Hugh and Eleanor Oakes closed the Okanagan Game Farm for good, citing a hostile bureaucracy and a stifling series of provincial wildlife regulations as causes of the farm’s downfall. FOND MEMORIES Penticton city councillor Randy Manuel has fond memories of Gibson, who reminds him of the character Julian from the television show Trailer Park Boys.
“Always with a glass of gin in his hand,” said Manuel. “He certainly loved to have a strong drink. He was quite a raconteur. In his later years he loved to hold court in his front room with anybody who would come along to listen to his stories.
“I can remember getting rather racked up badly in a toboggan accident on West Bench Hill and I’m feeling sorry for myself,” said Manuel.
“And this is in the days when doctors actually went door to door. Dad phoned John, who lived up the street from us, and he came in and took a look at me and slapped me on the ass and said, ‘You’re gonna live son’ and then turned to my dad and said ‘Well Al, do you have a beer in the fridge?’”
Dr. Don Gray, administrator of Penticton Regional Hospital from 1960 to 1986, remembers Gibson as a person with a great personality who did a lot of surgical assisting and gave a lot of spirit to the operating room. He also recalls one late evening when a radiologist rushed to retrieve a portable X-ray machine for a patient with a neck injury.
Upon arriving at the storage platform, the technician came face-to-neck with a giraffe standing in a truck that had been surreptitiously backed up to the loading dock in order to access the X-ray machine.
“And it was all in the dark,” said Gray. “It was all very secretive because I guess he (Gibson) didn’t want people to know he was using the hospital as a veterinary clinic.”
On another occasion, Gibson delivered the baby of his good friends George and Barb Lawrence. When it came time for the couple to return home from the hospital, Gibson had the nurse bring them a baby of a decidedly different complexion, while he stood outside the door chuckling and peering at their confused faces.
In addition to his activities with Apex and the game farm, Gibson served as the coroner for 35 years and was a strong supporter of local history and music organizations. He was involved with the Penticton Branch of the Okanagan Historical Society, Penticton’s Heritage Advisory Committee and the Board of Penticton’s R.N. Atkinson Museum and Archives.
As for music, he was the only man on the committee that formed the Community Concerts Group. He played the mandolin. In his later years, Gibson also kept sharp with crossword puzzles, sculpted soapstone, and studied geology, pictographs and Indian medicine.
He died at Penticton Regional Hospital on Friday, April 2, 1999 at the age of 85.