Ninety-one-year-old Rudi Hoenson perched on a stool in front of a packed, roaring Reynolds Secondary School gym Friday and, with the sound system pumping out Best Day of My Life, watched his hair fall to the floor.
He was having his head shaved for the Cops for Cancer, just like scores and scores of students whose bald pates greeted the Tour de Rock riders when they wheeled up to the Saanich school.
“What completely shocks me is these young girls with their beautiful hair,” Hoenson said later. “To have it shaved off is unbelievable. I’m really proud to be associated with this group.”
He was asked if he had ever gone bald before.
“Yes,” he said. “For three and a half years.” That’s how long he was in the Second World War PoW camp. Shaving your head was a way to keep the vermin away.
Hoenson is remarkable. So are the students and staff at Reynolds and Oak Bay High and all the other schools that have taken ownership of the fight against childhood cancer. No wonder they’re smitten with each other.
The nonegenarian and a group of the Reynolds kids met at last year’s National Philanthropy Day Awards at the Fairmont Empress. The students were being honoured for their fundraising for the Tour de Rock, Hoenson for quietly giving away what he referred to as “a small pile of money” — more than $3 million — to a variety of Victoria charities. They hit it off, the students mobbing Hoenson for selfies, Hoenson asking the young people for a tour of the school.
Hoenson was a teenage Dutch soldier — pretty much the same age the Reynolds kids are now — when the invading Japanese overran what is now Indonesia during the Second World War.
The years he spent imprisoned in Japan were brutal. The boy who went into the camp weighing 130 pounds came out weighing less than 80 in 1945. He was also missing five teeth, the cost of not bowing to the satisfaction of a guard.
Hoenson emigrated from postwar Holland in 1951, choosing Canada over the U.S. after seeing the movie Rose-Marie, with Nelson Eddy as a Mountie riding a horse through the wilderness. He married a Saskatchewan girl named Sylvia Mae, got into the oil business in Calgary, invested well in the stock market, moved to Victoria in 1979.
They travelled the world until age began to take its toll, then turned to philanthropy, establishing the Victoria Foundation’s Rudi and Sylvia Hoenson Foundation, giving stroke-detection equipment to Royal Jubilee Hospital, setting up a Queen Alexandra Centre lab for children with mobility problems. It was after Sylvia died in 2008 that the donations increased, the beneficiaries including the likes of the Victoria Hospitals Foundation, Saanich Peninsula Hospital, B.C. Children’s Hospital, B.C. Cancer Foundation and the Lodge at Broadmead.
Most of us don’t have the capacity to give like that, but we do have the ability to do what we can, which is what delights Hoenson about the students and all those other Tour supporters conquering cancer one toonie, one bald head, at a time.
After all these years, head shaves are still a big Cops for Cancer fundraiser. When Thrifty Foods general manager Jim Dores sacrificed his distinguished mane at the Broadmead Shopping Centre on Friday, it was the culmination of a summer-long effort that saw Thrifty’s staff and customers raise $40,000 for the cause. When Saanich police officer Heather Hunter, a Tour de Rock rider whose school liaison duties take in Reynolds, lost her long blond hair in the school gym on Friday, her brand new husband (they were married just before the ride began) did some of the lopping.
The Reynolds gym went nuts when the results of the school’s fundraising efforts were revealed Friday — a jaw-dropping $93,000, no doubt reflecting the popularity of Hunter and teacher Dean Norris-Jones, riding on this year’s team after driving Reynolds’ campaign for nine years.
The cheer was even louder when the freshly shorn Hoenson wrote a cheque for $7,000, raising the total to $100,000.
