Calgary Stirs Up A Warm Welcome

By Paul A. Witteman/Calgary

The two skaters were inscribing energetic loops around the tidy patch of ice across from Calgary's frumpy, circa 1911 city hall, playing hooky from classes at Mount Royal College. "It's so nice and warm today," says Christine Kilpatrick, 23, flashing a smile that would melt half the snow in the province of Alberta. "It's the friendliness that keeps the city warm," adds Kimberly Palsson, 18. Six hundred forty-seven thousand Calgarians, on the nervous verge of being discovered by a world ready to attend the XV Olympiad Winter Games, are determined to ladle on a downright cordial welcome. "Smile, you're a tourist attraction" has become an unofficial local slogan. To a visitor, plunked down at the confluence of the Bow and Elbow rivers 150 miles north of Montana, Calgary seems to have an unsophisticated, almost south-of-the-border Texas personality. The accent's a little different, is all.

Oil wells operate within sight of the runways at Calgary International Airport. At Coconut Joe's, the joint with the concrete palm trees out front, a favorite drink is root-beer schnapps. And in what passes for subtlety, the two Olympic mascots, male and female bears, are named Howdy and Hidy. Get it? First settled in 1875 by a band of men on horseback representing the North- West Mounted Police, Calgary today looks nearly brand new. Credit that to oil, which lies beneath the surrounding prairie in vast pools and has made a passel of folks as rich as the Ewings from Dallas. Of the 1,000 or so petroleum companies registered in Canada, 800 hang their Stetsons in Calgary. Block after block of antiseptic-looking office towers have popped out of the ground in the past 15 years, creating the illusion on a crisp February night of a skyline cut meticulously from cardboard.

Pickup trucks would have to be designated the city's official vehicle, but the Mercedes dealer does just fine too. Though the oil business has been a tad slow lately, Edgar's Lone Star Mercedes-Benz is Canada's largest independent dealer, selling cars that range right up to $85,000. Contemplating his spanking new showroom with 8,000 sq. ft. of black marble, Mike Edgar is a cockeyed optimist about the future -- like most Calgarians. "We wouldn't have gone to this expense, bordering on decadence," he says, "if we thought the business was going to be dicey, or even questionable."

On a Saturday afternoon there are more pickups than Mercedes in the dirt parking lot at Ranchman's ("Canada's Greatest Honky Tonk!!"). Inside, there are more cowboy hats than cowboys. But there is an aura of at least the '80s Wild Wild West. Tucked in a corner behind the Gunsmoke video game is Punchball, a device resembling a prizefighter's speed bag. For a quarter you can haul off and smash the bag while a meter registers the force of the blow. Splotches of dried blood on the leather indicate that some cowpokes have broken their hands trying to impress that cute little filly from down the road in Medicine Hat. Lance Atwood, 33, one of the real cowboys who calls Ranchman's home, can readily separate a fellow cowboy out of the herd of lawyers, accountants and truck drivers. "You come in here on Saturday at midnight," he says with amused tolerance, "and just imagine how many lies are being told."

The rough-and-rollicking stereotype of Calgary has been created, in large part, by the summer shindig known as the Calgary Stampede, a major stomp on the rodeo circuit that has been drawing revelers since 1912. Some citizens would like to shuck that image. "People think of Calgary as a town full of red-neck, capitalist cowboys driving Cadillacs," complains Rod Love, who works in the mayor's office. "We are the financial and technical capital of Western Canada." There is a stock exchange and a contingent of high-tech companies to back up that claim. There is even a mayor who acts plumb comfortable in pinstripes and silk ties.

A former television reporter with an expressive, Silly-Putty kind of face, Ralph Klein went straight from covering city hall to running it in 1980. Now in his third term and a tireless polisher of his city's image, Klein is full of rosy facts and rousing figures about the Games. Some 80,000 visitors will jam the hotels, and every event should be close to a sellout. The Canadian organizers expect to turn a $23 million profit. In addition, Calgary will inherit state-of-the-art facilities, such as the $31 million indoor speed- skating oval and the ski jumps and bobsled and luge runs at nearby Canada Olympic Park.

The mayor and Olympic officials are trying to stare down one looming controversy as the opening ceremonies approach. A tribe of Indians, the Lubicon Lake Band from northern Alberta, is protesting the Games to bring $ attention to a century-old unsettled land claim. "I support their claim," says Klein, who speaks a dialect of the Blackfoot language. "I oppose their methods." Local police and the Mounties are prepared for demonstrations -- and for the ever present threat of international terrorism. Although security experts privately believe the risk posed by terrorists is low, they are taking no chances. The Olympic Village has been surrounded by a double fence affixed with electronic detection devices.

No precautions can control another specter that hangs over the city. It is the arch of clouds created by the dread Chinook wind that sweeps out of the west each winter at speeds up to 72 m.p.h. The winds can raise the temperature by 18 degrees in the time it takes to grill an Alberta-bred New York strip steak. The Chinook could turn venues in the mountains into piles of slush. Snowmaking machines are already churning away, building stockpiles in case.

Calgary is no one-cuisine culinary backwater, as some smaller Winter Olympics-host towns have been. There is a large and prosperous Chinese community with roots dating back to 1883, when the tracks of the Canadian Pacific Railway were laid. In recent years the scores of Chinese restaurants have been supplemented by a handful of Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese establishments, and there are also French, Italian and Greek entries. A first- rate seafood restaurant, Cannery Row, has fresh fish flown in from Vancouver. Still, a steakhouse is Calgary's idea of a real night out. At Hy's the menu lists seven different steak dishes, and near the bottom is a discreet announcement to gluttons pointing out that a 2-lb. sirloin can be custom ordered for king-size appetites. Seven-ounce fillets, however, outsell 20-oz. T-bones by a 10-to-1 ratio these days. "Even here, eating habits have changed," admits Assistant Headwaiter Beau Yee.

An effort to get restaurants to hold the line on prices and avoid the black eye earned by greedy gouge artists in Lake Placid eight years ago has met with only mixed success. "We are not going to raise our prices in any way, shape or form," says Wayne Bullard, a partner in a group that owns four restaurant- bars along the city's liveliest strip on "Electric Avenue." But only 91 of the area's 1,300 restaurants have pledged to comply with voluntary restraints.

Other prices have escalated. Last winter an adventurous tourist could have had a bone-rattling ride down the Olympic bobsled run for $20. Before the ride ! was closed to tourists last month, the same 60 seconds of terror cost $39. A simulated bobsled run at the Olympic Center downtown is free but is a pale imitation of the real thing. The equally free simulation of the 90-meter ski jump, however, is realistic enough to discourage all but the most demented from thinking about attempting the actual hill. Fortunately, that is a thrill forbidden to foolish amateurs.

One welcome thrill for visitors carrying U.S currency: the greenback goes 27% further in Calgary. Despite the battering the dollar has taken virtually everywhere else, Canadians still refer to it as "real money." A few other measurements differ as well. Nostalgia buffs will be able to buy gasoline once more at Esso stations, but it is sold by the liter, not by the gallon. And then there are the speed limits, which are delineated in kilometers per hour. Calgarians, like most Canadians, are unusually law abiding by American standards. When it comes to speeders, the Mounties almost always get their man. Visitors should slow their pace and accept that Calgary is a small town in spirit. Says Mayor Klein: "People here still say 'Hi' to strangers on the street." By that measurement, whatever the weather, everyone seems certain to have a warm Winter Games.