Word: canadas
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
Normally, at least in the mind's eye, these pneumonia festivals are staged in intimate Tyrolean villages built on the order of cuckoo clocks and peopled largely by Peter Sellers. But this year's host, for 16 days starting Saturday, is Calgary, Canada, a prairie town muscled into an oil capital, a sprawling city in every sense. Venues may seem a bit more scattered than usual, but this is where Canadian ingenuity comes in. The writer Pierre Berton offers a definition: "A Canadian is someone who could make love in a canoe." After all, isn't intimacy part balance...