This past Tuesday we had the pleasure of hearing an update from Hans Granholm, a charter member of our club. Hans was born in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1943 and grew up in a suburb of Hellerup. His father died in 1945 when Hans was just eighteen months old and his mother raised both him and his older brother Peter, who was six at the time, on her own, with help from family.
The baby boom that had occurred during the war in Denmark, combined with the effects of the war itself, meant that he country’s resources were strained, and school systems were overburdened. Hans never really liked school much, but wanted to be an engineer. He loved working with his hands and finding out how things worked. He once took apart an alarm clock, gears an all, much to his mother’s dismay, but also managed to get it back together and it still worked. He chose to become a tradesman and maybe then go on to take engineering. He completed a four year apprenticeship as an auto mechanic in a Volkswagen dealership, and graduated with an award for excellence in 1964. He also received the King’s Silver medal for the highest trade ranking in Denmark that year.
A friend of his had recently emigrated to Canada and encouraged Hans to join him, so Hans moved to Vancouver in the fall of 1964, to work as a mechanic for a Volvo dealership there. His friend then moved to a Toyota dealer and Hans followed and learned to repair Toyotas and also heavy-duty trucks, becoming a heavy duty mechanic. He then was asked to go to northern BC to work on the heavy-duty logging trucks the company had near the WAC Bennet Dam project. While there he became interested in, and then qualified as, a millwright in 1967. He then returned to Vancouver and the Volvo dealership. His friend had moved on to Edmonton, where he was now the General Manager at another Volvo dealership, Capilano Motors, and offered Hans a position as service manager. Hans moved to Edmonton in 1968 to accept the position. It was there that he met his wife Linda, who worked as a Girl Friday at the dealership. She is the daughter of long time Rotarian Gordon Meneely. In 1970, he was asked to join Volvo Canada as the service manager for all of BC, so they moved back to Vancouver. This job involved a lot of traveling and he was rarely home for long.
In 1972 the service manager for the prairies, Alberta and Saskatchewan, was transferred to Toronto and Hans assumed the prairies as his new territory and moved back to Edmonton. He was now driving about eighty-five thousand miles a year and was gone from home for three weeks out of four. They were now expecting their first child and they decided that he needed to find another line of work where he would be home more often. He resigned from Volvo and went to work for a small company owned by Linda’s father that specialized in infra-red heating, A.I. Distributors. He is still doing this today and is now the owner/manager of the company.
While in Edmonton he joined the Scandinavian Businessmen’s club and remained a member for over twenty-five years. He has served on the board of directors and was president of the club in 1979-80. In 1974 he got together with two business associates, Morley MacCalder and Johnny Germain along with twenty-two other people (Hugh Lehman being one of them), and chartered the Edmonton Strathcona Rotary Club. It was the fifth club in the greater Edmonton area. (There are now over twenty in metro Edmonton) Coincidentally, their son Eric, was born the same day as the club was chartered, 13 June 1974. We were sponsored by the Edmonton South Club, and have in turn sponsored two clubs, Nisku Leduc and Edmonton Avenue of Nations. Hans was president of the club in 1979-80 and the highlight of his year was the completion by our club of the bandstand in Old Strathcona. It was dedicated to the citizens of Edmonton in commemoration of Rotary’s 75th anniversary on Canada Day 1980.
Hans has received the well deserved ‘Rotarian of the Year’ award several times and has a perfect attendance record. Hans has many more memories of his years in Rotary and we hope that he will be able to share more of these with us in the near future.