Nickle Family Foundation

OUR HERITAGE

Nickle Family Foundation is a private charitable foundation incorporated in the Province of Alberta. It is the product of two earlier foundations, one funded by Samuel Clarence Nickle Sr. (1889-1971), and the other by his son, Carl O. Nickle (1914-1990). It is now managed solely by members of the third and fourth generations of the extended family, as a vehicle for expressing ongoing commitment to enhancing the quality of life throughout our city and province.

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Family Participation

S.C. Nickle Sr.

Sam Nickle was an entrepreneur, and a pioneer of Alberta's oil industry. He established a number of oil exploration, production and distribution ventures which flourished from the 1940s until his death.

Sam Nickle's father was a custom shoemaker who followed the routes of the early railroads to practice his trade, eventually settling in Philadelphia where Sam was born on November 23, 1889. The family moved on to Detroit and then to Winnipeg where Sam finished his schooling and began his working life-first as a bank clerk and grain company clerk and later as assistant in his father's retail shoe business.

While the family lived in Winnipeg, Sam met Olga Simonson, also of a pioneering family. A concert violinist and winner of a Governor-General's Award, she passed up a scholarship to study music for two years in Brussels, Belgium in order to marry Sam in 1912. She had decided to make her life in the West and later devoted her musical talents to organising and performing in Calgary's philharmonic orchestra.

Shortly after Sam and Olga's wedding, the entire Nickle family moved briefly to Los Angeles where Sam saw First World War Service in the United States Coast Guard. Rejoining the family in Calgary, he entered the shoe business with his father, operating the Nickle Boot Shops. Later Sam established his own store, the Slipper Shop, on 8^th Avenue.

He first caught the "oil bug" in the 1920's, investing in oil exploration in the Turner Valley and Athabasca areas. Exploration methods in those days were crude, elevating the degree of risk to the level of a gamble. The booms and busts of the period made many more empty pockets than fortunes, but Sam Nickle had developed "an itch" that would never leave him. When the shoe business became a casualty of the Great Depression, Sam supported his family as a distributor for Quebec-made canned pea soup and for home-study accounting and business courses. With Bob Brown's major Turner Valley oil discovery in 1936, Sam Nickle decided to forsake his former business interests and devote his career to oil exploration.

Using his Turner Valley leases as collateral, he formed Northend Petroleums and raised capital across the continent to drill several wells. In 1941 one of his wells was drilled to a depth of two miles, at the time the deepest oil well in the British Empire. Raising capital for such ventures at this early stage in Alberta's oil history was sometimes more difficult than the actual drilling. Sam literally wore holes in the soles of his shoes doing the rounds in New York and Toronto looking for backers.

In 1944 when he had established a financial base and a reputation in the oil business, he founded Anglo American Oils and ventured into oil exploration in Nova Scotia. Then, ahead of most of the industry, he started acquiring mineral rights in Saskatchewan and Manitoba prior to the discoveries that turned Saskatchewan into an important oil province in the 1950's. In 1953 he put all his resources on the line to finance the purchase of the refinery and marketing system built by the late A.H. Mayland.

Like the western Canadian oil industry as a whole, Sam Nickle's ventures had their ups and downs. Indeed, he did not achieve independent wealth until he was 70 years of age. Past the age at which most men retire, he continued building and finally merged his businesses into Canadian Gridoil Limited.

Perhaps because of his years of struggle, Sam was exceedingly generous with his wealth. In addition to countless private gifts, Sam and Olga Nickle were founding contributors to the Calgary Foundation in the late 1950s. Later, in 1962, Sam created the SCN Foundation. Between the SCN Foundation and its successor, the Nickle Family Foundation, some $20 million has been invested in strengthening the community. To celebrate his 81^st birthday, Sam donated $1 million to the University of Calgary for the creation of a museum.

In 1971 S. C. Nickle Sr. was awarded an honourary doctorate by the University of Calgary, in recognition of his community service. Shortly afterward, on June 28, he died at the age of 81.

(This is largely an abridged version of an article which appeared in The University of Calgary Gazette, January 18, 1979)

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C.O. Nickle

Carl Nickle was born in Winnipeg in 1914. He came to Calgary as a boy with his parents, Sam and Olga Nickle, where he was raised and educated.

The family was far from wealthy. In 1936, in the depths of the Great Depression, Carl was a student at Mount Royal College. He was anxious to continue his studies, but did not have the money to pay his tuition fees. The principal allowed him to remain anyway — a gesture Carl never forgot.

In 1937 Carl left his job as a reporter with CFCN radio to launch, with sixty-five dollars in capital, a newsletter: Nickle's Daily Oil Bulletin. After the early years of struggles, the Daily Oil Bulletin eventually became the "Bible" of the oil industry.

The 1947 Leduc oil discovery blew the lid off the industry, and the Daily Oil Bulletin as well. Subscription orders poured in from governments in Canada, the United States, and Europe, as well as investment houses, companies and banks. In 1948 Carl, with co-founder Les Rowland, began a second publication, Oil in Canada.

Carl was elected to the House of Commons as a Progressive Conservative member in a 1951 by-election, and was re-elected in the 1953 general election. He retired from Parliament in 1957, in the wake of the "Great Pipeline Debate", over the routing of a trans-Canada natural gas pipeline. In Alberta he fought for, and eventually witnessed, the development of a pipeline network linking the province's natural gas resources to markets in Eastern Canada and the United States. He had formed his own oil & gas company, Conventures, and served on the boards of directors of many companies in Canada and the U.S.

Carl's first love was numismatics. He created a major collection of ancient coins. Parts of this collection were later donated to the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, and the Provincial Museum in Edmonton. In 1970, the main part of the collection, worth at the time approximately $1 million, was donated to the Nickle Arts Museum. That gift in effect matched his father's donation of funds for the construction of the Museum.

Carl became involved in many community organizations including the Boy Scouts, the Calgary Philharmonic, the Calgary Exhibition and Stampede, and the Calgary Chamber of Commerce. In 1955 he established the Nickle Foundation, which among other things provided scholarships to needy students. Carl's father Sam established a charitable foundation as well, in 1962. After Sam's death in 1971, Carl was president of both foundations, and in consultation with the family, merged them to create the Nickle Family Foundation. Carl served as president of the Foundation until 1988.

In recognition of his public service, and his contributions to the university, Carl was awarded an honourary doctorate by the University of Calgary in 1979.

Carl Nickle died in December 1990 at the age of 76 years.

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FAMILY PARTICIPATION

Sam and Olga Nickle had four children: Sam Jr. (1913-1994), Carl (1914-1990), Olga (1916-2005), and Agnes (1917-1998). Sam Sr. invited all four to join in the work of his Foundation. Ultimately three, Carl, Olga and Agnes, became actively involved, with Olga serving on the Board for 28 years until her retirement in 2000. Carl’s wife, Diana, served as President of our Foundation from 1988 until her passing in 2004.

Sam & Olga’s grandchildren, representing the family's third generation, guided our Foundation for many years. And in their turn, the fourth generation now has a majority of the seats on our Board of Directors. In 2011 the first member of the fifth generation joined the Board.

It is our intention to continue our work into the future, and to turn over a strong and vibrant Foundation to the fifth and subsequent generations.

Sam Nickle's daughter Agnes, with her great-grandchildren, on the occasion of her 80^th birthday, September 1997.

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