Remembering our roots ~ Ted and Jo Currie

By John Godsman Times Contributor

Ted Currie was born in Nelson, B.C. and completed most of his education in Calgary up to Grade 11. At age 17, he joined the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corp. at Camp Borden, Ont. where he spent the next 18 months training. On his return to Calgary, he worked in the emergency department at the old Calgary General Hospital, and became an ambulance driver. At that time, there were four different ambulance companies in Calgary, and each month, whichever company had the City of Calgary police contract, this was the one the drivers worked for.
In 1970, the city decided to amalgamate all the ambulance contracts to form a paramedic service attached to the Calgary Fire Department. All existing ambulance drivers were grandfathered into the new organization. Every one of them were sent to SAIT, where Ted graduated with honours from the registered paramedical care course. To this day, Calgary is recognized as having created the first ever paramedical service in Canada.
In 1969, Ted married Donna Ellingson who worked with him at Calgary General Hospital, and they had two children – Kevin and Jodi.
During his tenure as an ambulance driver, Ted delivered 13 babies in the back of the ambulance, but his daughter Jodi had hers at home, assisted by Ted, who then arranged for a coworker driver to take her to the Calgary General in his ambulance. Ted and Donna divorced in the early 1980s.
Ted left the ambulance service in 1976 to join an oil and gas company as their chief medical officer on an offshore drilling rig in the Beaufort Sea. This was shift work, and he used his days off to drive tour buses. He remembers one particular trip, when he took a busload of Down syndrome children from Kamloops to Disneyland in 1978 – the first trip of this nature ever to cross the border.
In 1979, following the end of his contract on the oil rig, he joined Alberta Gas Trunk Line (which became NOVA, which merged with TransCanada Pipelines which, in turn, changed its name to TC Energy as of May 3, 2019) as a health and safety supervisor, and spent the next 15 years there. During this time, he met Jo Richardson who was born in High River, and they were married in Calgary in 1982. After leaving NOVA, Ted formed his own consulting company which required him to travel to different parts of the world, and on a China trip in 2002, Jo went with him. After leaving school, Jo attended Mount Royal College, and took a course on early childhood services. Her lifelong dream had been to own her own daycare. But after their marriage, Ted needed her to run his office, so with much regret she left her daycare and became an office administrator at Ted Currie and Associates Ltd.
Following the work in China, they returned to Calgary, where Ted continued to work in the oil patch before joining the Alberta government’s occupational health and safety department as an OH&S officer, team leader and technical adviser. He was forced to retire in 2011 due to health, and started a happy retirement with Jo in Strathmore in 2013, mainly because of the excellent health facilities here.
Ted has been a member of Irricana Lodge #137 since 2005, and joined The Shriners the same year, driving an ambulance in their parades.
The main changes they’ve seen in Strathmore is how the town has grown in size and population.