Warman becomes a city

Warman fire chief Gord Thompson said he remembers when Warman was nothing but gravel roads and when it only had one sidewalk. Living in Warman for 36 years, he said the community has come a long way.

“We've added a community park, soccer pitches, baseball diamonds and more,” said Thompson. “The twinning of highway 11 is one of the best things that happened for Warman and moving our people and the safety as they went from work and back.”

After the declaration was signed by both Spence and Reiter, the packed arena welcomed Bryan Warman Jr., the grandson of Cy Warman who the city was named after.

“My grandfather was a poet, an author, a wheat broker, a songwriter, newspaper reporter and railroad engineer. Authored 17 books, hundreds of poems and wrote for the railroad industry,” said Warman of his grandfather.

“He died in 1914 after a short illness, 21 years before I was born,” said Warman.

This meant he had to seek out other relatives to hear about his grandfather. Luckily, he still had shelves of Cy's books and poems and newspaper articles.

Warman remembers as a child in Creede, Colorado, bragging to his friends that his grandfather Cy was on Jesse James' hit-list, after writing a series of nasty articles about crime in Colorado.

However, he heard a different version later on.

“Turns out Jesse James was shot by a man Bob Ford before he came to Creede, and it was Ford who settled in Creede. Ford was as bad as James and that's who my grandfather was writing about.”

From his run-ins with the wrong side of the law, Cy passed on a lesson to his family, a lesson his grandson will always remember.

“Never sit in a restaurant with your back to the door,” said Warman about being a wanted man. “To this day when I go into a restaurant, I look around to see where the door is and I pass that on to my children.”

news@panow.com

On Twitter: @princealbertnow

by François Biber

Warman becomes a city

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