CALGARY — Some people say it with flowers. Some with an engagement ring.
For Keith Beggs, it was a brick surrounded by mortar and placed at Calgary’s Olympic Plaza that showed his true intent for the woman who would become his wife.
“She was saying, ‘Are we serious or not?’ So I said, ‘I know, I’ll buy a brick,'” Beggs recalled Friday as he and his wife, Barb, picked up the brick inscribed with their names.
Looking back, he said, there’s only one reason he bought the brick.
“So she’d marry me.”
As part of a fundraiser ahead of the 1988 Olympics, people could purchase and personalize a brick to line the ground of the plaza on the east end of downtown for $19.88. Over the decades, some of the bricks became so eroded, the writing was barely visible, while many others were cracked and gouged.
The Beggs’ brick was one of some 33,000 slated for destruction, as the aging plaza and adjacent performing arts complex undergo a $660-million overhaul. The city had said the bricks would be too fragile to salvage.
But in an 11th-hour turnaround last month, after getting an earful from people dismayed their beloved keepsakes would be trashed, the city said it would at least try to return some.
Hundreds of people lined up Friday inside the Agriculture Building on the Calgary Stampede Grounds at tables marked alphabetically with dozens of bricks laid out neatly behind.
People had a week in December to register online to have the city try and retrieve their bricks.
Kyle Ripley, director of parks and open spaces at the City of Calgary, said there were about 8,000 requests and about 70 per cent, or roughly 5,600 bricks, were recovered.
We’ve done the impossible,” Ripley said.
“We have these bricks that were put in place almost 40 years ago. Five of their six sides were mortared and they were set to be secure and in place for in perpetuity.
“It had horses and humans and motorcycles and you name it that went on to that plaza for events. We had one area of the plaza where we tried to remove them, and the mortar was literally stronger than the bricks and the bricks were turning essentially to dust as we were trying to remove them.”
Peter Soroka, 34, is a couple years younger than the brick he picked up Friday. It bears the names of his parents, Gary and Donna.
He said they each moved to Calgary in the ’80s and met at The Keg Steakhouse on Electric Avenue, once a bustling nightlife district close to downtown.
“They got their brick inscription and then my dad passed away five years ago now, so I wanted to get it for my mom,” Soroka said.
