The Canadian Press has spent the past month interviewing some of Canada’s more than 11,000 centenarians and their families. These are some of their stories. ‘THEY HAD TO FLY IN DOCTORS TO NAIROBI’ Bill Hamill has worn many hats in almost 101 years, including air gunner with the Royal Air Force in the Second World War, world traveller and dad.
The D-Day veteran said his last great adventure happened when he turned 100 last August. Having worked at CN Rail for “40 years and three months,” the company gifted him a trip across Canada. “To go to Toronto from Vancouver was really exciting,” said the father of three.
Though wildfires in B.C.’s interior caused some hiccups, he said the adventure would be hard to top — he’s not as excited for his upcoming birthday as he was for his last.
It was his CN job that took him to Africa in the 1980s to work on a rail project in Tanzania. He said he went back a second time even though he caught malaria on his first visit. “They had to fly in doctors to Nairobi,” he said.
“I (was) kind of embarrassed ...
because by the time I got through to (Kenya), I was pretty well clear.” Hamill was born into a large family in Long Branch, a neighbourhood in Toronto, in 1923. He was the seventh of 10 children, and is the last one living.
“Most of them reached 90 and two were close to (that),” he said. He moved to Gibsons, B.C.
, to live with his daughter after the deaths of his longtime partner, Thelma Weeks, and Larry, one of .
