A Small Saskatchewan Town’s Heritage Minute Close-up

With the exception of two sharp right-hand turns, the drive from the Saskatchewan provincial capital of Regina to Ogema, (pop. 403, pronounced oh-gi-MAH) is notable mostly for its sameness: 116 km of dead-straight travel across flat Prairie fields, punctuated only by the occasional grain mill and a few isolated homesteads. The farther you get from the city, the more likely that those homesteads are abandoned — the owners often simply walked away. By night, the darkness is so complete, that the flashing red lights marking the two stop signs on the trip are visible from more than five km away as the only illumination in land or sky.

All of which makes the bustling community of Ogema all the more remarkable as it stands in sharp contrast to the dozens of similar communities across the province that withered and died in recent decades. I was there recently in my role as CEO of Historica Canada, the non-profit organization that produces the Heritage Minutes. Along with several colleagues and a film production team, we were there to shoot a Minute about Mary Bonnie Baker, the feisty, iconic 1940s and 50s professional baseball catcher. (Among other things, she was the inspiration for the character played by Geena Davis in the 1993 Tom Hanks/Madonna picture, A League of Their Own.) [MORE]