I grew up in Acadia. That’s not really part of this story, but I’ll make it fit anyway. Our home was a Keith-built home. E.V. (Ellis Vee) Keith was a legendary builder and developer in Calgary. Keith said, “We’ve got housebuilding down now as fine as you can get it without making it complete in the factory,” And most of the prefabricated parts for Keith’s mass-produced houses were made by Keith-owned companies. Below is an advertisement dated October 6, 1960 from the Calgary Herald. Excellent marketing, in my opinion.
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/26251612/acadia_keith_homes/
By 1960, he had built 1200 houses which amounted to about a quarter of all houses in Calgary. He was known to say, “Give them something that they don’t expect.” He did just that. He was responsible for the city’s first golf course community in Willow Park. When he saw manmade lake communities in California, he figured why not build one in Calgary too. So in 1967, E.V. Keith began digging up a massive green space in the city’s southeast to build a lake. Lake Bonavista with its high-end homes became the first manmade lake community in Canada. Enough dirt was moved from this 24-hectare manmade lake to create a 65-foot hill with a waterfall adjacent to the lake. In addition to Lake Bonavista, the 16-hectare Lake Bonaventure was also create, only accessed through the Lake Bonavista neighbourhood.
He pioneered the first architectural controls that builders had to follow in his neighbourhoods, this is still part of the creation of communities today. He was a visionary and would ask his staff: “After all the dust is settled, the community is built and the people are there, what will you say your legacy is?”
I like stories like this because it’s about an ordinary man with a exceptional work ethic, producing quality that still stands the test of time (my 59 year Keith-built home in Acadia is as solid as ever!). Likely most of us will never have the opportunity to take on such bold ground breaking initiatives, but I think the lesson I take away is, our legacy isn’t just about what we did or what mark we made, but it’s how well we did it and if it added value to the live’s of others.
