Church team laces up to honour late Sun Run regular Norman May
The descent had been swift but short, and when Norman May poured all his booze down the drain early that one Boxing Day morning, he never touched another drop.
Instead, in his early 50s, he started running, including 24 Vancouver Sun Runs, the last of which was two years ago at the age of 89.
“The reason he took up running when I was a teen was he’d started to drink and realized this is not good,” said May’s daughter, Barbara Rokeby. “It all happened over such a short period.
“He went from having one drink now and again to drinking the whole bottle himself in one evening. One Boxing Day he woke me up really early, I was really upset, and he dumped out all the liquor down the sink. He never took a drink after that, and that’s when he took up running.
“From then on, he dealt with stress through prayer and exercise.”
May, a longtime member of the congregation at Gordon Presbyterian Church in Burnaby’s Edmonds neighbourhood, died last summer at age 91.
In his honour, a team of 16 runners from the church is entering the 33rd Vancouver Sun Run on April 23.
“I remember when I met Norman three or four years ago, I mentioned I’d been doing the Sun Run since 1998,” said Bob Matula, the team leader of the Gordon Presbyterian group. “And he said, ‘ Oh yeah, I’ve been running in the Sun Run for a while, too.’ He was quite a character.”
Born on Jan. 25, 1925, in New Westminster, May was raised by a single mother who sold quilts she’d made to get by.
Nicknamed Bones for his undernourished six-foot frame, May served in the Second World War by teaching soldiers.
“He taught bridge building, bridge dismantling and bridge blowing up,” his daughter said. “He weighed 145 pounds when he got out of the army and he had gained weight during that time.”
May was good with his hands and an army aptitude test suggested he’d be a fine piano techni- cian, which the music lover was for decades at the old Williams Piano House on Granville near Davie.
“He could build anything with his hands if he could visualize it,” Rokeby said. “He built me this big chest with a whole bunch of drawers, from one inch to six inches, for my seashell collection.”
May became a pillar of the church, he sang in the choir right to the end. He also took his family camping every summer for three weeks, borrowing books on plants and animals native to B.C. for Rokeby, her brother and her sister to study on those long sunny days at Long Beach.
“I went on to become a marine biologist as a direct result of that,” she said.
And the running, that was an influence, too. Rokeby and her siblings started running. Cousins ran, grandchildren ran.
“They all probably did it because of dad,” she said.
She has all 24 Vancouver Sun Run T-shirts her dad wore and, in a nod to him and to her paternal grandmother who raised her dad selling those quilts during the Great Depression, Rokeby has begun a little project.
“I’m making quilts from those Tshirts to give to my kids and other family,” she said.