Obituary of Shirley Baldwin Leacock

February 12, 1926 – Sedgewick, Alberta

April 24, 2024 – Calgary, Alberta

Shirley Baldwin Hay was the eldest child of Harry and Mabel Hay and had two younger brothers, Lindsay and Ian. Shirley spent her childhood in Sedgewick, AB, living atop a hill where crocuses grew every spring. To complete high school, she moved to Edmonton, AB, where she started her nursing training the following year. In the summer of 1946, when the Banff Springs Hotel reopened (closed during the war to free up manpower) Shirley got a job as a parlour maid and there, met Dick Leacock who was a bellhop. It was a romantic start to a solid marriage and a happy life for the next 35 years. She and Dick headed off to university that fall, Dick to McGill where he was a medical student, and Shirley to the University of Toronto to study physiotherapy. Shirley graduated in 1949, and in 1950 she and Dick married in Montreal.

Shirley loved and excelled at her job as a physiotherapist, helping in the rehabilitation of patients afflicted with polio in the epidemic of the 50s. However, when Dick finished medical school and they moved back to Alberta, Shirley stepped into a new career of motherhood and household management. After nine years in Olds, during which they completed their family and made lifelong friends, they moved back to Edmonton and then Calgary. The life-altering and saddest event of Shirley’s life was the death of Dick at age 56 in 1981.

With her pragmatic nature and her children now grown, Shirley restarted her life with new interests and friends. She walked around Glenmore Park every morning for years, cementing lifelong friendships. She vaulted from that to mountain hiking and camping and then travelling the world in ways adventurous for her time. She was a founding member of a book club which, for the next 50 years, met to read Canadian literature. Shirley read the Globe and Mail and the New Yorker until her 98th year and remembered most of what she read.

She was a lifelong Anglican and a devoted member of St. Laurence Church. Shirley was gregarious by nature, elegant, and stylish. She was a clever, independent person with a great sense of adventure and remained adaptable and progressive as she aged. Her family was her proudest achievement. Her children Susan, Jill, Peter, and Tim and their partners Brian, Ian, Nassereh, and Suzanne were at the center of her life and a source of great joy.

She felt privileged to live long enough to see her grandchildren, Peter (Rami), Elizabeth (Jeremy), Laura (Scott), Christopher (Chelsea), and Josh, and her step-grandchildren, Sari (Charles) and Brian JR (Krisztina) all well-launched into the world. She was delighted with the arrival of her four great-grandchildren, Joey, Owen, Fletcher, and Miles, and a fifth expected in August. Shirley is also survived by her sister-in-law and friend, Barbara Hay, her nieces, Kim McMillan (Doug), Nancy Bullard (Mike), and Pam Leacock (Bruce); and her nephews, Michael Fellows (Barbara), Kent Leacock, and Stuart Hay (Vicki).
 

A Funeral Service for Shirley will be held at St. Laurence Anglican Church (5940 Lakeview Drive S.W., Calgary, AB) on Thursday, June 27, 2024, at 1:00 p.m. Reception to follow at The Inn on Officers Garden (150 Dieppe Drive SW, Calgary, AB) at 2:30 p.m. to celebrate our much-loved matriarch.

Condolences, memories, and photos may be shared and viewed with Shirley’s family here.

In living memory of Shirley Leacock, a tree will be planted in the Ann & Sandy Cross Conservation Area by McInnis & Holloway Funeral Homes, Park Memorial, 5008 Elbow Drive SW, Calgary, AB T2S 2L5, Telephone: 403-243-8200.