The longtime Fraserview club member and Zone 4 volunteer was 102

Ed Lex on his 102nd birthday with Bruce Main and Peter Young.

Two years ago, before the first round of our Zone 4 Senior Championship, many of the participants bade a hearty hello to one of the men at the registration table, a face that some of them had been seeing at zone competitions for almost half a century. They knew that Ed Lex was a longtime volunteer and as friendly a guy as ever lived. What they probably didn’t know is that the guy scanning his list and checking off names was on that day 100 years old.

Well, in early April, Ed Lex died, a victim of various things but mostly, as is usually the case with 102-year-olds, old age. Bruce Main, his longtime friend and himself a Zone 4 volunteer of some three decades standing, maintained a regular dinner date at Ed’s favourite restaurant until a couple months before his passing. “He’d come pick me up, but then I’d drive,” says Main. “I was scared to let him do it. He was 102!”

Lex was born on September 11, 1922, in Fort Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan, served in the RCAF during the Second World War, then worked from 1948 to 2000 in the meat department of Kerrisdale’s Magee Grocery, which he eventually owned.

He was a member of the Fraserview men’s club, and for decades ran its social function, a job that included stocking up on liquor, which for much of that time would not have been legal except as part of a club’s activities. He began volunteering at Junior events organized by Harry White, and continued on in several other roles.

He was also part of a remarkable trio of men who remained active within the zone well into their 90s. Arly Anderson, who died in 2022 at the age of 98, was a one-time senior champion. Derek Glazer, who turns 100 this year, worked as starter at many events and received Distinguished Service awards from both BC Golf and the PNGA.

As a zone, we’ve been lucky to have had the benefit of their contributions. As humans we should all be so lucky as to live so long and so well.

- Jim Sutherland