CALEB NICKERSON
John Atkinson was a man of the people.
Whether it was from behind the bar at his watering hole on Hwy. 148 or coaching youth sports, he always knew how to put a smile on people’s faces and make them feel welcome. It was well known that he had a heart to match his burly frame and donated generously to a wide variety of local causes.
Tragically, this pillar of the community passed away suddenly on June 23 at the age of 69.
July 16 would have been the 50th anniversary of John’s first date with his widow Linda. The pair met at a teen dance at Shawville’s Agricultural Hall.
“They were on every Friday night so we went to the teen dance, not together, but we met there,” she explained. “I had gone with my brother and he had to leave for an emergency, so John drove me home that night.
“After he drove me home he asked if I would go to the Pine Lodge dance with him the next night,” she continued. “I kind of felt I had to, he drove me home after all … That was it.”
Linda added that at 16 years-old, she was hesitant to tell her mother that she was dating a fellow four years her senior, but the couple remained an item and were engaged in 1973. They married the following year.
She said that from the first time she met him, she was drawn to his charisma and love for being around other people.
“He seemed to be the centre of everything,” she said. “I don’t know how to say it. He had so many friends and he was always doing something crazy or telling jokes, making people laugh … That’s what he did, John was a jokester.”
In his younger years, John was a talented basketball player and was even offered a scholarship to Syracuse but turned it down because, according to Linda, he didn’t want to leave Shawville. Aside from some brief stints working in Ottawa and taking a radio broadcasting course in Toronto, John remained in his home in the heart of the Pontiac his whole life.
Linda said the two-year course in Toronto was likely the longest he had been away from home. It didn’t end of the greatest of terms, as his brand of humour was deemed too risqué for the airwaves back in 1968.
“He was running out of things to say, and he was doing the weather and he said, ‘So just remember folks, there’s going to be frost in low-lying areas so just make sure you cover up your low-lying areas,’” Linda said. “Now you can say whatever you want but back then that was not allowed, that was scandalous. He got quite a talking to and just got [angry] and came home, never finished the course. John lived his life the way he wanted to.”
Before purchasing the bar that turned him into a community icon, John worked for a local auto parts retailer and played guitar with several bands on the weekends. His brother Les had run the bar, which was then known as Atko’s, for a stint in the mid-80s and John had expressed an interest in taking it on. Though the business changed hands in the interim, John was able to call it his own in 1992 and right from the get-go it seemed that it was meant to be. He opened Atkinson’s Sports Bar October 24, the night the Toronto Blue Jays won the World Series.
“It was a good night to start the bar,” Linda said. “The small little place that it was, it was tiny. It was packed full, that’s for sure.”
John ran the business for 23 years and turned the little watering hole into a popular gathering spot. Over the course of several years he expanded the floor space by taking over the two adjacent units in the building, which were occupied by Mother Nature’s Natural Products at the time. Linda recalled that John always joked that he was the only one to make Mother Nature move twice.
He used the additional space to bring in live musical acts, something that was close to his heart as an accomplished musician himself.
“He wanted to create a venue for people to come and have live music because he thought it was important,” John’s daughter Kristen explained. “He valued the talent of people that played music because he did it so well.”
Kristen added that her dad emphasized a strong work ethic, from when she was cleaning the bar’s bathrooms as a youngster for $10 an hour, to when she was old enough to serve drinks herself.
“He taught me to see problems that were happening before they were really happening, just the way that the bar world worked and I think that gave me a lot of insight into how the world works,” she said. “You almost need a psychology degree, because you’re hearing everybody’s problems, you see them at their worst and you see them at their best. That was part of what was great about the job for him I think, is that he was able to help people when they were down, but he could lift them back up and celebrate the good moments in their life as well.”
Linda said that John had an incredible memory and could rattle off names and numbers like he was reading from a phone book.
“He had such a reserve in his head for remembering jokes and numbers, it was crazy,” she said. “If he ever dialled your number, he would always know what it was.”
This sharp memory also carried over to jokes, and Linda recalled the bus trips to the city that they would organize for sports games. John would be telling jokes from the moment they boarded to when they arrived, without ever repeating himself.
A truly larger-than-life character, John purchased a hearse to transport his patrons home after a night out, kitting it out with some living room furniture in the back.
“He drove tons and tons of people home,” Kristen recalled. “I got driven to my first day of high school in it, which wasn’t so pleasant because you’re already going to a new school, I was the bottom of the totem pole and I showed up in a … hearse.”
On another occasion, the hearse served as a makeshift ambulance when Kristen broke her leg in a snowboarding accident.
“All the nurses were like, ‘Oh my God, we’ve seen so many people go out of here in one of these but never somebody come in one,’” she said.
In addition to his reputation as a joker, John was known for his generous spirit. He sponsored numerous sports teams, golf tournaments and community fundraisers. When he got rid of the hearse, he raffled it off and donated the proceeds to charity.
In 2004, he was honoured with the Helen Keller Fellowship by the Lion’s Club, the first non-Lion to receive the award for community service.
The University of Ottawa Heart Institute was one cause that was particularly important to him as well as Pontiac Students Against Impaired Driving and Mothers Against Drunk Driving. He coached youth sports, with basketball and baseball as his main focus. Linda said one of his former players commented that any night that John wasn’t kicked off the court for debating a bad call was a good night.
More than anything, people were drawn to him. His magnetism was what his friends and family remember fondly.
“He was big, he had a big personality. He loved being around people,” Kristen said. “I think people just really thought he was a really nice honest person. [He was] always quick on the draw with the jokes.”
“I remember when Kristen got older and she would say things to him,” Linda said with a smile. “I started to laugh one day and I said, ‘I think he’s finally met his match, somebody that could whiz one back at him as quick as he could whiz them out.’”
