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Your Week Weekly k l y CClover l o ver Valley Newspaper
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May 6, 2015 Y www.CloverdaleReporter.com Y
A race with a reputation
The Cloverdale Pub Club (below) won the inaugural bed races in 1977, claiming the coveted bed pan trophy, having survived a six-block sprint and being pelted with eggs, tomatoes and manure ‘somewhat indescriminately’ the Surrey Leader reported.
Cloverdale Bed Races mix zany tradition with fierce competition By Jennifer Lang There must be a bed graveyard somewhere in Cloverdale. If you happen to know where it is, give Cindy O’Brien Hugh a call. She’s one of the organizers of what has to be Surrey’s zaniest and challenging athletic event, the annual Cloverdale Bed Races, celebrating 38 years in 2015. The races – traditionally held on the Thursday before the Cloverdale Rodeo – are an irrepressible mix of creative team names, clever costumes and lightningspeed reflexes. But above all else, fierce competition. Local legend has it the bed races got their start in 1977, when a motley, high-spirited crew called The Cloverdale Pub Club won the inaugural bed pan trophy. It was a six-block marathon involving real hospital beds and raw
courage. Racers and spectators got drenched when one of the opposing teams used fire hoses to blast the winners, and the guys were de-pantsed in the ensuing deluge. In other words, the Pub Club (Rob Turkey Kielesinski, “Bub” Homfield, Shawn Loftus, Lorne Aniuk, Chuck Wallis, “Wang” Peterson, “Kat” Stevens and “Warp” Fruno) won the trophy – but literally lost their shorts. Things really got out of hand when the crowd started pelting eggs, old tomatoes and horse manure “somewhat discriminately,” the Surrey Leader reported. Team members rarely lose items of clothing these days, but injuries can occur during the fastpaced competition: serious cases of road rash and pulled muscles are not unheard of. Then there’s the fine art of los-
ing gracefully. Aaron Hotell of The Vault Restaurant and the Hawthorne Beer Market and Bistro has donned a bright blue dress and puckered up, good-naturedly honouring a gentleman’s bet with Rob “Turkey” Kielesinski, the kingpin behind current champion team Turkey’s Party Makers, which has won the coveted bed pan trophy in the men’s division five years in a row, despite wellmatched competition. Turkey’s bed is actually one of the older beds, says O’Brien Hugh. Nobody can quite remember the origin (it looks suspiciously like the Cloverdale Auto Body bed of past, she confided). The Surrey Fire Service is using a second-generation bed, having retired their first. “Maybe it went up in smoke?” she joked. See BRAGGING RIGHTS / Page 3
IMAGES COURTESY TURKEY KIELESINSKI/CLOVERDALE BIA
Pride in their work, from top to bottom
Driver Chris Briner, left, original production foreman Ron Peters, former GM Peter Van Seters and Aren Van Dyke, original production manager of Intercontinental Truck Body in Cloverdale.
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By Jennifer Lang After tucking into smokies and burgers at a noon barbecue last week, the men and women of Intercontinental Truck Body posed for a photograph next to their 10,000th unit – a step van bound for the City of New Westminster. It’s a proud tradition that began in 1986 with the completion of the familyrun company’s first unit built at the Surrey plant. The photo will join 10 others just like it in the lunchroom upstairs at the plant at 5285 192 Street, which today boasts more than 100 employees. Step vans – like the one that’s headed to the Royal City – are the Cloverdale company’s bread and butter. Their custom, hand-built truck bodies
and trailers aren’t typically found on a car lot. Their clients are in the transportation, service, TV and film, energy and emergency response sectors, and include governments and utilities. Their products are as diverse as their clientele – ranging from mobile dressing room trailers for the stars to the Surrey RCMP’s emergency command vehicle. And they can end up anywhere from Alaska (where there are ITB-built generator buildings at an airfield) to a South Pole research station used by scientists in Antarctica. They call it “BOB,” or Big Orange Box, and it sits on skis. “It’s the world’s most compact nuclear detection system,” according to sales manager John Van Seters, whose grand-
father started the business 40 years ago in Alberta, later expanding to B.C. and more recently to Ferndale, WA. The film industry has been a major part of the business since the 1980s. Aren Van Dyke, the original production manager (now retired), remembers that first client – a supplier to a production company filming the action-adventure TV series MacGyver, starring Richard Dean Anderson as “surely the single most resourceful individual in television history,” as one YouTube commenter noted. “He only needed a Swiss army knife and a paperclip to get out of even the stickiest of situations.”
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