Frank and Grace Walsh Tumbler Ridge’s first Community Champions

Coming as a surprise left field entry to no one, this month’s community champions are Frank and Grace Walsh.
The two were nominated by most everybody in town, including Sheena Lundgard, Janet Pirlot, Ken Bradley and many others.
According to one nominator, “nobody in this town gives more of themselves than Frank and Grace Walsh. They are always there at every event and run Lions campground. Amazing people.”
This is not the Walshes first award from the Chamber. Back in 2021, they won Citizens of the Year in the Chamber’s first annual Excellence Awards.
“Frank and Grace are very much the core of Tumbler Ridge,” said another nominator. “They volunteer endlessly. They are retired and have spent the last 20 years that i have known them working relentlessly to make Tumbler Ridge a better place to live. Frank and Grace volunteer with the Lions, ensuring that there are always hamburgers and hotdogs at every local event. The Lions are a big part of Tumbler Ridge and Frank and Grace are the Lions. They have run the concession for minor hockey events and practices, they do all of the pancake breakfasts in town, and they run the bingo.”
A third nominator says “Frank and Grace have gone above and beyond for many years.”
In the past, the Tumbler Ridge Chamber of Commerce has run programs that celebrate the local businesses.
But with the Community Champions program, it is a chance for the business community to celebrate the people who make this town what it is.
According to Jerrilyn Kirk, Executive Director of the Chamber of Commerce, a Community Champion program “recognizes outstanding contributions that address critical social, economic and environmental needs throughout our society and communities, including local communities. These are people who the Chamber and business community can give back to and celebrate for what they have done for Tumbler Ridge.”
As a celebration of all they’ve done for the community, they will receive a $100 gift certificate to Home Hardware.
Jan and Dean Turner run the local Home Hardware, and have been here—under various names—for nearly two decades.
Indeed, November of this year will be their twentieth anniversary in town.
Jan says that, when the couple moved here, they were planning on it being their forever home. “We had owned a house here for two years, but we’d been coming even years before we bought our property, too,” she says. “So yeah, we knew we wanted to own a business and this business was for sale. We had a house here, it kind of seemed like a good fit.”
But even before that, they had been coming up for a few years, just to explore and play. They had watched as the mines closed, and then, decided to jump right in by taking over the business. “We look back and think to ourselves, was that brave or was that stupid?” laughs Dean.
“It definitely has been a good move,” says Jan. “Tumbler Ridge is a great place to raise a family and I think everybody’s all happy here.”
Dean says it wasn’t a reflection on the community, but on how young the two were. “We thought we knew a lot, but we didn’t,” he says. “It is blind faith, right? When you take a leap like that.”
They say when the mines shut down in 2014, it was a hard pill. “That set us back a lot of years,” says Dean. “But we came back after that all happened.”
The two opened a second store in Fairview, which they ran for about six years before the stress of running two stores in two different provinces. “At the time, we were still downtown, and we were in limbo. We couldn’t afford the rent there, but there was nothing else available in town.
We signed the paperwork on the Fairview lease and literally a week later the museum spot came up.”
So in 2008, they made the move to their current location. In that time they’ve seen a lot of things change. “Staffing is difficult now,” says Jan. “It was bad then, but it’s worse now to try and find staff.
“And after the pandemic, supply chains are much different,” says Dean. “And … consumer patience, we’ll call it, is gone, while demands are coming out of left field. But that’s part of the deal. We get asked for a lot of things and people act like these are common items. I went out of town once to find one item for a customer, and went to eight different places and couldn’t find it.”
But the biggest change? Internet shopping, says Jan. In fact, the two tie together.
“People are so used to being able to click and getting anything sent to them,” says Dean. “I can get it on Amazon, I should be able to get it at the hardware store. It can create problems, because Amazon or Wayfair or whatever will ship a specialty shower, but not tell the customer that it needs a special left hand fitting when the whole world is right-handed. Or you have to reduce the pipe from an inch and a quarter to a half inch, in an inch worth of space? That takes three four fittings here in the real world. So it creates problems too right? I’ve seen some faucets come in, the hot’s not on the left where it should be, it’s flipped around.”
Because of that, and because of changing consumer demand, the hardware store no longer looks the way it did, and that has nothing to do with new locations or name changes. “There are departments that no longer exist in our store that were there in 2003,” says Jan. “We used to have so much space allotted to sewing. We had bolts of fabric and yarn…that stuff doesn’t exist in our store anymore. And cards are almost a thing of the past. The giftware department is way less, we used to carry so much giftware and now people focus on experience versus stuff.”
At the same time, other departments are expanding. “Plumbing has grown. The candy is not as big, but it’s definitely still popular.”
Dean says there’s things that have been tried and they won’t do again, or just because of Tumbler’s location, its hard if not impossible to get things shipped here. “Freight’s gone up and up and up so now it’s not worth it, because I have to buy a year’s worth of, say, soda. Well, you can’t buy a year’s worth of soda. You end up throwing most of it out.”
And the supply chain is still reeling after Covid. Add to that the port strike, and Dean is worried that Christmas might not be what people are hoping to see. “This is kind of the time frame that all that stuff is flowing into warehouses and then flowing to stores, right? But every year is different. In 20 years, I don’t think we’ve ever looked at a season and go, ‘Oh well this is what we did last year, let’s do the same thing.’ It changes. It changes too much and if you don’t change with it, you’re hooped.”
But the secret to surviving and thriving in Tumbler Ridge, says Jan, is being willing to try different things. “You give things a shot,” she says. “In 2014, when the mine shut down and it was looking pretty bleak, Dean was like, ‘Well, I’m going to increase the candy order.’ I was like, ‘why would you do that?’ But he said when times are bad, people turn to liquor and candy. ‘We can’t sell liquor, so let’s do candy.’ And it was a good decision for sure. Now, looking forward, I can’t even think what’s on our radar.”
Dean agrees. “I’ve always felt we need to read and react, a little bit more, to use a basketball term. You have to read what consumers are demanding now. Is it a one-off demand, or have we been asked nine or ten times? If so, then let’s investigate this. Being in a small town, our demands are so broad, we can’t have everything. But at the same time, it gives us the freedom to try some stuff you wouldn’t normally try in a major centre.”