By Thomas Perry, The Daily Press (Timmins)
TIMMINS – Golden Manor does not have any plans in place to change its name to Red Manor.
That might, however, be the limit of what staff and residents won’t do to show their support of efforts to “paint the town red” in celebration of Rogers Hometown Hockey arriving in Timmins next weekend.
Tiffany Lavigne, who works in resident services at Golden Manor, said getting on board with the “paint the town red” initiative seemed like a great idea.
“A lot of people are decorating their windows, but we decided to decorated the statue in front of our building and get the residents involved,” she said.
“We feel it is important to show the community that Golden Manor supports different events and we were really excited to have the Timmins Rock be a part of this.”
Toss a hockey jersey and a toque on said statue, add a hockey stick and a net, with a few bows sprinkled around for good measure, and add a few big letters spelling out “H-O-M-E-T-O-W-N H-O-C-K-E-Y” and you get a pretty impressive looking display.
Gather together the entire roster of the Timmins Rock hockey club — wearing their maroon home jerseys — along with the coaching staff and the trainers and you get an unbeatable combination.
“We are all big, huge Rock fans,” Lavigne said.
“Julie MacLean’s dad (head trainer Dan Ansara) helped us out by getting everybody here today. We are very grateful.”
MacLean also works in the resident services department at Golden Manor.
Ansara noted the Rock players are always eager to get out in the community and help out any way they can.
“They were really pumped to get the chance to come and help out,” he said.
“As soon as practice was over, they went and grabbed jerseys. They certainly all like the chance to help out good causes whenever they can.”
Everybody in the Rock organization, of course, is pretty excited to be part of the Rogers Hometown Hockey visit to Timmins, as well.
“Even our coach (former NHL star Paul Gagne) will be playing for the NHL Alumni team in the game against the Police,” Ansara said.
Ansara, himself, will get to serve as a trainer for the event, as well.
“It’s always a good thing when attention is brought to hockey in our community,” he said.
“We have had a lot of great hockey players come from the North. Back in the ’60s and ’70s, there were quite a few players from the North. Everybody remembers those good old days.
“We are still producing players and we have our Junior ‘A’ team, which is great.”
MacLean noted the excitement level and Golden Manor has been pretty high for some time now.
“Some of the residents have known about this for a couple of days now and they were pretty excited,” she said.
“There is a lot of hype in the building.”
Members of Golden Manor’s resident services department, as well a handful of residents of the facility got the opportunity to pose for photo with the display for posterity Wednesday night.
