runner, breaking long distance records in Saskatchewan. He was also a talented soccer player who was chosen to play for the English national team on its tour of Western Canada. He played an exhibition match with the team and ended up scoring the winning goal. He even played a season with the Regina Roughriders as the team’s safety.
As one biographer later said of young Harry Veiner:
“In one day he won a marathon, competed in a 100- and 200-metre dash, played two games of football and went to a dance and made it to work on time the next day.”
It was also the beginning of Veiner’s long fascination with accepting physical challenges which he carried with him later in life. Some of the challenges he undertook became legendary. He competed in a six-hour sugar cane cutting competition while on a federal government-sponsored good-will mission to Cuba in the 1950s. He fought a former Canadian boxing champion in Vancouver. He raced a horse on foot in a 100-yard dash in Brooks. He wrestled an alligator in Florida. Whatever the challenge, he usually won.
He gained international fame for some of these exploits. But as Veiner told interviewer Don Taylor in 1987, it was not merely about generating headlines — there was a spiritual aspect to these challenges for himself as well.
“It’s human nature,” Veiner told Taylor. “I don't say it’s competitive. Life is a funny thing. You want to get in there. You think you can do more ... Because I was in the paper, I would get all kinds of challenges wherever I went. I would take all the challenges I thought would create friendship. I didn’t think I could win everything.”
Veiner was also driven by a profound sense of public obligation and duty. He despised people who went into politics for reasons of personal ambition.
“Politics was just as rotten when I came into it,” Veiner said in the same interview. “I didn’t run for money. I
didn’t try to make profit on it. I did it to help people. My door was always open. Politics, the way it is going, it’s not what I would call real politics to run in there to run the government for the good of the government. There is one thing you have to do is help out the people; help out the poor.”
This sense of public duty was deeply ingrained in Veiner. During the Great War he lied about his age and signed up for the Canadian Army, but was never deployed overseas. When the Second World War rolled around, Veiner once again enlisted and was commissioned as a lieutenant in charge of food and provisions for the German Prisoners of War brought to southern Alberta. He ran victualling and supply for 8,000-10,000
prisoners in both Medicine Hat and Lethbridge, and for thousands of others in smaller encampments throughout the area. By the end of the war, Veiner was a Lieutenant Colonel and widely recognized for his competence, strong management skills and fundamental honesty. He was largely successful in getting rid of graft and waste in the military supply chain at the camps.
Despite his Jewish heritage, Veiner also won the regard of most of the German prisoners he worked with. Although, he admitted later on to making a personal example of anyone he met with overtly Nazi leanings throughout the 1930s.
“I used to fight a lot,” admitted Veiner. “I was against the fellow that was a Nazi. And if he was a Nazi I bloody well let him have it. I was a good street fighter. I got in a lot of fights. There was a lot of anti-Semitic feelings when Hitler came in. There were some crazy fools.”
Although personally ambivalent to his family’s faith, Veiner never lost sight of who he was or where he came from. In 1998 Wendall Wilks wrote a letter to the editor of the Medicine Hat News where he recalled a chance encounter with a recently retired Harry Veiner at a sidewalk cafe in Paris in the late 1970s. Veiner was on his way to his annual
pilgrimage to Israel to give out gifts and plant a tree in memory of Holocaust victims.
“Harry showed me some weather beaten, dog-eared, personal papers that to this day haunt me,” said Wilks. “The one document I recall most vividly was an inked original letter signed by Canada’s External Affairs Minister C.D. Howe, written in 1938. It was a response letter to Canadian Jews who wanted to create a Jewish settlement for persecuted German and other European Jews in the large uninhabited areas that are now described as the Suffield range.”
Veiner carried his public profile gained in the war, and his many years of credibility built up as a successful rancher and business owner, into the Medicine Hat mayoral seat in 1952. He served from 1952-1964 and then get roped back into the role from 1968-1974.
During his tenure he would be the driving force behind attracting international attention to Medicine Hat and bringing in large manufacturing companies like Goodyear, Western Cooperative Fertilizers and Cancarb to the city. He donated every dime of his salary he received as mayor to go alongside the thousands of dollars he already spent of his own private earnings annually to fund charities and answer personal appeals from individuals in need.
When asked in 1983 on “Harry Veiner Day” about how he managed to be so successful as mayor, Veiner answered profoundly.
“You must understand human nature and you must love human nature. You must love all kinds of people, no matter what religion or colour they are. You must be tough with the bad people and take people for what they are.”
Harry Veiner passed away in 1991 at the age of 87. He was predeceased by his first wife Fanny. He left behind his second wife Renee and his daughters Natalie and Shirley. He also left behind a legacy of leadership, personal charisma and generosity in southeast Alberta which few, if any, have ever matched. ■
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