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“Many people might say they’re a council watchdog, but I don’t think anyone could live up to the lore of Miss Muriel Franck.”
Those were the words of Penticton’s Mayor Andrew Jakubeit as about 20 city staff and friends and family of Franck gathered to dedicate a bench to the woman who made it her business to hold council to account. In attendance was Cass Robinson, who was a close friend of Franck.
“As she became ill, people began to turn away from her and I turned the other way,” Robinson said, noting that the two became particularly close toward Franck's final years before her late-2015 just before her 98th birthday.
Despite being so active in the city as a municipal activist, Robinson says Franck never had a lot of close friends. However, with both Franck and Robinson being regular attendees of council meetings, the two got to know each other over dinner and city politics.
Franck’s eccentricity was well known in the city, and, according to Robinson, was featured in The Vancouver Sun, The Province and as far out as The New York Times for being the woman who swam in the Okanagan Lake all 365 days of the year.
“She was doing a scientific study about how her body adjusted, how long it took her body to adjust to the very cold water,” Robinson said, adding that Franck meticulously recorded the temperature of the water, her temperature and the wind.
“Everybody who took pictures just thought how cute she was, all four-foot-ten of her. She tried to tell people at the beginning (why she did the experiment), and they just wouldn’t listen, so she stopped.”
Born in England, Franck came to Canada after the Second World War, and after marrying in Ontario, she and her husband drove to Vancouver. The couple lived in various spots around B.C., including Burnaby and a cabin in the bush near Nelson before coming to Penticton.
“This was Muriel’s place to stay forever,” Robinson said. “Muriel loved this city, and she cared, as we’ve heard, about every tree in this city. She cared about the sidewalks that weren’t maintained as they ought to be.”
Franck’s activism included an array of issues, including a pair of cottonwood trees at the Leir House deemed dangerous by the city arborist and set for the chopping block. Franck wasn’t about to let that happen, however, and chained herself to one of the trees, ordering a friend to take the key far away from her.
“Twenty minutes later, the city workers came, and saw that she was chained to this tree, and the arborist came along and then the arborist went and looked at the other side of Leir House and said, ‘Well, these pine trees, they’re also kind of tall and dangerous,’” Jakubeit said.
With that, the city cut down the pine trees, with Franck helplessly chained to the cottonwoods nearby.
Jakubeit acknowledged the irony that, now, the city is honouring Franck with a bench carved out of the trunk of a maple tree. But, that aside, it's fitting that the bench has a clear view of city hall.
