'Super Dave' Linton Wins June Callwood Award

Jeff Green | Feb 08, 2022

When Dave Linton learned that he is one of 23 individuals or groups to receive the Ontario-wide June Callwood Outstanding Achievement in Volunteerism Awards for Volunteerism in 2021, and the only winner from Eastern Ontario, he reacted in two characteristic ways.

First he deflected.

“I am still trying to get my head around why I should be given an award for doing what I loved to do all these years and enriching my life,” he said in his response to being informed that he’d won the award.

Then he set the record straight.

“I do understand it is to promote community volunteering and so I will give you my full volunteer story, as 15 years were missing from your draft citation.”

The missing years were the result of an understandable oversight by Melissa Elliot, the volunteer coordinator with Southern Frontenac Community Services (SFCS) where Dave has been a volunteer for the past 25 years.

As Dave pointed out to Jennifer Wong, from the award committee, he began his volunteer career in earnest in the early 1980s by tying community involvement to his lifelong interest in the outdoors and in sports. He coached both minor hockey and minor softball for ten years.

Coaching led to work as a league convenor and registrar as well.

In a phone interview last week, he credited his workmates at Dupont, where he worked in the power plant, with making his coaching career viable.

“They were a great bunch of guys, and they would say, 'you head off to the ball diamond to coach the kids, we'll cover for you,” he recalled.

Pretty soon he started getting involved in fundraising campaigns for ball diamond upgrades, a new canteen for the high school, and other causes. His interest in fundraising, which he shares with his wife Jennifer, continues to this day.

In the 1990s he became involved as an organising committee member for Canada Day celebrations in Sydenham.

He did every job that needed doing for Canada Day, including taking his turn at traffic control.

When he was about to retire from Dupont in the late 1990s, he saw an ad in the Triangle, the late great paper that served the communities within the triangle between Verona, Sydenham and Inverary.

“The ad was looking for volunteer drivers and I thought I would give it a try.”

That was the start of his over 20 year career as a volunteer driver for SFCS.

He kept on as a volunteer driver until he 'retired' two years ago, although he still does the occasional drive, when no one else is available.

“I stopped driving when I was 79, over two years ago. I thought maybe I shouldn’t push it. And by then most of the people I was driving were younger than me,” he said.

Driving remains one of his favourite volunteer activities because it is a social endeavor for him.

“I loved it, I really did. One of my challenges was to get the passenger to talk to me, and you know that everyone has a story to tell, but you sometimes have to let them find their way into telling it. Many seniors are disenfranchised in so many ways, so it’s a big deal for them to have someone to talk to. I tried to make their drive a great event.”

In addition to driving for SFCS, Dave has been the chair of the agencies' fundraising golf tournament, organised yard sales, driven around the countryside picking up items for fundraising auctions, and he also plays the piano at events, and for people attending the Adult Day Program that SFCS runs on most weekdays.

And for the one job that he did not want to take on, he found someone who was better suited for it than he was.

“They asked me if I would consider joining the board. I went to one meeting, and they were looking over charts and graphs and talking about policies. I couldn't follow along at all, but I thought my wife Jennifer would be perfect at that kind of stuff, so I asked her to join instead, and she did and then did very well at it. She was already involved anyway because she was one of the people who started the local food bank that is run by SFCS.”

There is even a volunteer component to the way Dave and Jennifer met.

It was in 1968 at the first Miles for Millions walk in Kingston.

“Jennifer was pretty new to Canada, having emigrated from England a couple of years earlier, and she was one of the people on the walk, as was I. We got to talking during the long walk, it was 36 miles and it took 8 hours to complete. We went on our first date that evening. We were young then.”

Another of Dave's great loves is cross-country skiing. He started participating in a marathon ski event in Quebec, at Gatineau Park, in 2001. The massive event, which attracts hundreds of participants each year, is a 51-kilometre ski. Dave has participated most years since then, and has been using it as a fundraising event for SFCS in recent years, earning him the moniker 'Super Dave' among SFCS staff.

He has not skied for the last two years because of COVID, but said “I plan to ski one more time, next year.”

This is not the first award that Dave Linton has received. In 2011, he was one of the volunteers of the year in South Frontenac.

“I am accepting this award on behalf of all the teams of volunteers I have worked with over the years. It is never really about individuals, but groups, that get things done,” he said.