HOPEWELL
Last summer Donald Horne visited the maternity ward of the Aberdeen Hospital.
He was there to see a newborn baby.
“Would you like to hold her?” the mother asked.
He politely refused.
“This jacket I have on hasn’t been cleaned for three years, I wouldn't dare!” he said.
But he touched her and said, “Amelia, you’re going to be a professional pilot someday.”
The baby girl’s name is significant for Horne who is also a pilot, because one of the people he has always admired was Amelia Earhart.
Horne now keeps a photo of little Amelia in his home.
“They tell me if I hadn’t donated the money for the machine, she might not have made it,” he said referring to equipment in the Women and Children’s Unit he donated money for in recent years.
Despite having Scottish ancestry on both sides, he quipped, generosity is something that comes easy to Horne, particularly when it comes to children.
Horne, is 93, and has had, to say the least, a full life.
He served overseas in the Second World War, came home and worked 30 years for telephone companies across Canada before retiring at just 53 years old.
In the four decades that have followed he has piloted airplanes, spent summers in Florida and got as much enjoyment out of life as possible whether it be fishing in the brook that flows by his home in Hopewell or looking down on the beauty of the world from thousands of feet in the air.
Until a couple of years ago he cut eight cords of wood each winter to heat his 19th century home which he restored. He has travelled across Canada and back through the States solo on a motorcycle at 91. He still rides the bike whenever he can and enjoys puttering about at chores around his home. Horne attributes his good health to the oysters he devours whenever he can get them and fish which he eats on a regular basis.
But when his wife died, Horne looked back on his life and had a regret. Despite wanting them, he and his wife never had children.
As a man who had worked hard and taken care to properly invest his money, he was suddenly faced with the question of how best to use his resources.
“I started saying, ‘What the hell am I holding on to all this money for?’ – and mind you it was substantial.”
Instantly his mind went to children. He wanted to do everything in his power to help ease suffering and bring joy to young people. And so he’s set about giving away much of his life’s savings to help wherever he can. He’s given to Camp Geddy, The Aberdeen Hospital, Dalhousie Medical and Shriners as well as to the Presbyterian Church of Canada and others. While he doesn’t like to give exact amounts the donations are very significant says Jim Mitchell, Past Potentate of the Philae Shriners who has witnessed Horne’s generosity first hand.
When Mitchell set out on a campaign to raise contributions in Nova Scotia recently for one of the Shriners’ hospitals in Montreal it was Horne who was the first to give significant amounts of money to help kick-start what resulted in a successful campaign. Mitchell would later find out that unbeknownst to most of the Shriners, Horne had been donating for years to the travel fund which helps transport children and their families to the Shriners hospital to get treatment.
There have been times that Horne’s generosity has brought tears to Mitchell’s eyes.
“I thought people should know about it,” Mitchell said.
Horne for his part is loving every minute of it.
“I’m having a ball because I’m doing it for the children,” Horne said.
