A link to Thompson’s pioneer past was lost Jan. 20 with the death of local sports legend Alexander “Red” Sangster, a Thompson resident since the early days of the community who had his hand in everything from local and regional baseball and hockey teams to the city’s first arena.
Sangster, who turned 90 in October, was born in 1924 near what is now Duck Mountain Provincial Park close to the Manitoba-Saskatchewan boundary but spent most of his life north of the 54th parallel, working in Flin Flon as a grader operator before coming to work as an underground mechanic for Paddy Harrison at Moak Lake and then returning to Thompson in 1961 to work as a mechanic at the mill for Inco and then becoming a grader operator for the Local Government District of Mystery Lake, a role he performed for 18 years. He also served three years as Thompson’s recreation director in the late 1960s and was a long-time Northern Manitoba representative for Carling O’Keefe Breweries and Molson Canada.
But Sangster was known more for his many endeavours in the sporting life of Thompson, organizing and coaching minor and senior baseball as well as hockey teams for youth and adults in a volunteer career that began in the 1960s and continued for more than 50 years.
“It’s a great loss for the community,” said Mayor Dennis Fenske, whose family’s ties to Sangster date back to the 1960s when his mother Mary Fenske, for whom the boardroom in the Thompson Regional Community Centre is named, worked with Sangster in Thompson’s recreation department. “He’s been an icon in the sports side of things.”
Other long-time members of the community, like former recreation superintendent Alex Sutherland, came to the community to play for Red’s baseball team, or Thompson’s senior hockey team, the Hawks, and never left. Sutherland was a member of the Thompson Reds senior men’s baseball team between 1968 and 1973 that was inducted into the Manitoba Baseball Hall of Fame in 2003, six years after Sangster himself was inducted.
Thompson MLA Steve Ashton, in his MLA Report for this Friday’s Nickel Belt News, said Sangster was a key member of the generation that built Thompson in the 1960s and 1970s and that the recognition he received from the city he made his home in recent years – the Thompson Community Foundation Order of Thompson, the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal and the key to the city that he was presented with on his 90th birthday last Oct. 15 – were well-deserved and long overdue. Ashton saw firsthand how Sangster battled and won against the provincial government when it backed off plans to build student housing for the new University College of the North Thompson campus on the land occupied by the ball diamond that Sangster helped build in 1968 and which was named for him in 1992. That refusal to back down was characteristic of Sangster, as was his willingness to leave disagreements in the past.
“I was always impressed by the fact that Red stayed active and vocal too,” wrote Ashton. “Whenever he ran into perimeteritis he called it out. Thompson too far for provincials? Not true and not fair ... and when Red got his way he made sure that everyone that came to Thompson had the best possible reception.”
Though he is literally synonymous with baseball in Thompson, Red was also involved with minor and adult hockey, including the first-ever road trip by a Thompson hockey team. In 1962, Sangster and the 14 players on the bantam team he managed and coached hopped aboard the 4 p.m. train from Thompson on a Friday, taking it from here to Kamsack, Sask. There, they were picked up by car by residents of Virden and driven to the tournament. When the tournament was over, the team was driven back to Kamsack, where they caught the next train back to Thompson, returning on Monday morning.
Sangster, who spent 65 years from 1945 to 2010 with his wife Mary, with whom he had four children, was seemingly ageless, throwing out the first pitch of the men’s AA senior baseball provincials in Thompson in 2012 and remaining involved with local baseball until last summer.
“He was quite active and quite a bank of history, as well,” said Fenske.
Fittingly for a man who spent so much of his life getting people out to the ballpark, Sangster’s requested that his life be remembered with a barbecue and beer gardens at the field that bears his name when the snow finally melts and baseball weather rolls around, said his son Jack.
“Red embodied community spirit and was in many ways a builder of Thompson and saw sports as a way to bring people together,” said Churchill MP Niki Ashton, noting that his spirit would be present in Thompson long after his death.
