“Maybe I won’t be here tomorrow. I might be up there,” says Sister Mary Felt.
For over a year now, Sister Mary Felt has been ill with cancer.
“See my bouquet of flowers. Dandelions,” she says, referring to a vase of the flower she keeps in her room. “The dandelion has significance for me.”
She has penned an ode to the dandelion.
“The dandelion doesn’t leave any dried and faded petals – it is simply transformed into another flower. It is like us when we die. We will be totally transformed, totally immersed in the Trinity of infinite endless unconditional love!” she wrote.
Sister Mary Felt was born in Bashaw, Alberta in 1926, one of a family of four girls and seven boys.
Her father, an immigrant from Hungary, gave her a life long love of fishing.
“When we were kids out of the farm we didn’t have very much money and on Saturday my dad would pick us up and we’d go a few miles to what we called chain lakes near Ponoka.”
Her mother would make up a picnic basket for the day, she says. She would make Hungarian sweet buns and fry up chickens she’d dipped in egg and flour.
On Saturday morning her father would pick up the children in a launch and they would go fishing.
Sister Mary recalls the beautiful campfires he would make afterwards.
“I don’t know whether we did more picnicking or more fishing, but I enjoyed it. My dad taught me how to fish. I think I knew how to fish before I knew how to walk,” she says. “Fishing was a good part of my life.”
In 1945, she entered a Roman Catholic convent in Ottawa and in 1948 she started her teaching career at a convent in Red Deer.
In 1960, Sister Mary arrived in Slave Lake to teach at E. G. Wahlstrom School.
Audrey Massel is one of Sister Mary’s former students. She remembers that in those days, nuns still wore habits, but Sister Mary didn’t conform to anybody’s stereotype of a nun.
“She always considered herself, and still does consider herself, a tom-boy,” says Massel. “For her to become a home economics teacher, it was quite a stretch for her. Before we started sewing, I think this was in Grade 7, I later found out that the night before the class she took her habit apart in order to know how to put it together again.”
Massel still keeps in touch with her former teacher.
“She was an excellent teacher and she still is. She still corrects my language and my enunciation. She’s very sweet and dear to me,” she says.
In 1966, Sister Mary was asked by the school superintendent to set up a home economics classroom in Kinuso.
“I said I can’t. Sisters don’t live alone. And I don’t drive,” says Sister Mary. “Sisters at first, remember, didn’t have cars.”
The school ended up arranging for her to travel to Kinuso every morning on a school bus with her students.
“Leave here 7:30 every morning. Arrive in Kinuso the same time as the kids. Imagine that. And there wasn’t a home ec. room yet. I was supposed to set that up. It was in a private home and the kitchen was the size of my own kitchen here and I had to teach them how to do some baking and cooking. When later on I showed them how to sew they went downstairs in this private home and they were cutting out patterns on the floor. That’s the way the home ec. room started in Kinuso.”
It wasn’t until the last two weeks of that school year that she had proper classroom for her students.
Dennis Woodard, who would become principal of E. G. Wahlstrom while Sister Mary was there, remembers that he liked to tease her about her cooking classes.
“After they’d cook something new we’d be invited down to sample what they made and that was always good for a few jokes, because we always used to joke about how dangerous it could possibly be. But it was just the routine type thing, having fun,” he says. “It would always be good, but we always had to give her a bad time first.”
On weekends, Sister Mary would sometimes take her students on fishing trips. “When I came to Slave Lake, often on a Saturday I’d go out to what we called the second bridge. I’d spend the whole day out there fishing with the kids. I’d put their hook on their line and take off the fish.”
Woodard remembers fishing with her on occasion. “Every chance she had she would be out fishing, on the river or if she could get on the lake, or even ice fishing,” he says. In 1981, Sister Mary retired from teaching, but she kept busy. In 1982, she was elected president of the seniors’ organization, the Slave Lake Pioneers. The following year she become the club’s secretary, a position she held for another 18 years.
“The best thing I enjoyed about it, I organized the cribbage from Smith to High Prairie. The best thing about playing cribbage is to skunk somebody,” she says.
Don Whillier, who also served as club president, says she plays a very good game.
“I don’t ever remember skunking her, but I know she skunked me the odd time,” he says. “She sure loved to skunk you playing crib.”
Organizing the cribbage tournaments allowed Sister Mary to meet people from all over the region.
“I loved it. I just loved it, because I met senior from Smith on to Kinuso, Faust, Driftpile, High Prairie,” she says. “I said the best part was skunking people but that’s not true. The best part of playing cribbage is being with your friends.”
In 1994, she played a hanging judge at a mock court as part of a “jail-and-bail” to raise $38,000 for the Cancer Society. She famously made an RCMP officer sing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.
The year after she was on the other side of the law, raising money for a project dear to the Pioneers members, the building of a seniors’ retirement lodge. A group of seniors that included Sister Mary staged mock hold-ups of three local banks.
In addition to a $10 a plate fundraising dinner known as the Trial of the Six Slick Shooters the group raised $100,000 in “bail” donated by Bob Vanderwell. “They took us off the jail for fingerprints. My goodness, I don’t think I could last very long in a jail cell,” says Sister Mary.
Florence Pearson-Thompson was one of Sister Mary’s accomplices. “We were all fixed up. I can remember I had a water gun. No good for nothing, but people didn’t catch on some of them that it was a prank. Sister Mary laughs to this day,” she says.
The effort eventually led to the building of the Vanderwell Heritage Lodge where Pearson-Thompson lives today.
“This is what we got. Right here where I am in this room. That’s the place they built,” she says.
“She’s a walking history book,” says Father Gary Laboucan at St. Peter Celestin Catholic Church. “It’s always amazing whenever I’m in with here anywhere in town and she meets people and they come up to visit her or she goes over to see them and how they’re doing. She just knows their family and everything else. I enjoy watching her relate to people. She’s touched the lives of so many people... You’ve heard of doctors without borders. She’s a nun without borders.”

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