The week that Tammy Donahue Buziak learned she had been named the 2014 Citizen of the Year had already been an eventful one for her.
She had presented her final report to city council as chair of the committee that organized centennial activities in 2013. As part of that report, Donahue Buziak presented Mayor Ian Hamilton with a scrapbook compiled through the centennial year, filled with photos of highlights of the events and activities.
As it turned out, that scrapbook was presented a couple of days too soon. Another big highlight came just a couple of days later, when Donahue Buziak got the good news from Glen Gantefoer of the Citizen of the Year committee.
“At first I thought he had the wrong person, I was just shocked!” said a tearful Donahue Buziak when she was interviewed by the Regional Optimist. She could not contain her excitement and disbelief as she realized she would be the name joining the long list of recipients of the honour.
“As a member of the community you’re always aware of who your Citizen of the Year is this year, you know,” said Donahue Buziak.
In fact, she had recently been at the Territorial Place Mall selling some of the remaining Reflections of North Battleford books featuring photos from the city archives, where she works. By happenstance, she recalled, right where they were set up they were facing the wall where the pictures honoring the Citizen of the Year and Junior Citizen were set up.
“You’re seeing this and I thought ‘there’s going to be a new Citizen of the Year this year,’” she recalled.
“It’s very emotional, I was just overwhelmed,” she said. “I am so excited.”
She believes the reason she was selected has something to do with her love of North Battleford. “I love my community,” Donahue Buziak said.
She comes from a family dedicated to public service. Her father Tom Donahue was a city councillor in North Battleford from 1986 to his death in 1991 in a boating accident.
“He loved the community,” she recalled. “I walked down the street with him and he knew everybody by name, and everybody knew him.”
Tom Donahue was an avid fiddler, something that translated to Donahue Buziak’s life as well as she learned how to play the violin through the Royal Conservatory of Music and later passed that knowledge along to students through violin lessons.
The family, which included her mother Edna, and her brother Kim and sisters Terry and Diana, settled in North Battleford in 1966, when Donahue Buziak was only six.
She grew up in North Battleford, and following graduation she worked for CIBC as a financial advisor and later enrolled in pre-med classes at the University of Saskatchewan.
Her involvement with the City began in 2002 when she began working as a gallery assistant.
In 2004, Donahue Buziak became a coroner for sudden or unexpected deaths, a position she held until 2013.
“My goal was always to help the families that were grieving,” said Donahue Buziak. “I had lost family members and it’s a very difficult time.”
In 2009, she began working with the City of North Battleford Historic Archives, starting part-time with data entry. She ended up working closely alongside the various members of the community interested in history and the preservation of it, many of whom joined the centennial effort later.
Her interest in history and in her city prompted her to pursue archivist certification, which she earned in 2011.
It was through her job with the City that she found out about the North Battleford Centennial Committee.
She volunteered with the committee while still working with the archives and while still working as a provincial coroner, ultimately taking a leave of absence from the latter job. According to nominators, Donahue Buziak had “stepped up to the plate at the eleventh hour” to lead the centennial effort.
The centennial was a mammoth undertaking, one in which Donahue Buziak wanted to see involve everyone. “Young, old, rich, poor, we wanted everybody to have a part of this and to be proud of our community.”
Events included a New Year’s Eve gala at the Civic Centre that launched the year,
The winter carnival soon followed, and then on May 1, events in Central Park commemorated the 100th anniversary of North Battleford being incorporated as a city.
More celebrations took place Canada Day at the exhibition grounds. And they continued in the fall when the famous “four corners” picture of North Battleford was taken.
The centennial year ended with an event thanking the volunteers at the Dekker Centre Dec. 31, at which time they also gathered up the items to be placed in a time capsule that was sealed in 2014 and will not open for another 100 years.
Those were only some of the notable events of the centennial year that were recorded in pictures in the centennial scrapbook, which itself was modeled along the same lines of a 50-year anniversary scrapbook that celebrated the 1963 Golden anniversary of the city. That scrapbook is now in the city archives, along with the items from a time capsule that was opened in 2013.
Through it all, Donahue Buziak credits the people on her committee for their efforts, saying the award really ought to go to them.
“I was part of it, but it was certainly nothing with me. It was everybody else. I can list you names of volunteers who put so much time and effort, and we all had the same goal. Why are we doing this, it was for our community.”
Yet her committee members might disagree on that point. A good many nomination letters in support of Donahue Buziak’s selection as Citizen of the Year came from fellow members of that committee who held her in high regard.
They spoke of the long hours and dedication she put in to leading the effort.
Leah Milton, who chaired the finance committee for that effort, worked closely with Donahue Buziak.
“For a full year, we worked together,” Milton stated. “Tammy rarely missed a meeting, always had a genuine smile on her face and was a delight to work with throughout the year.”
There were also letters of support for her from those involved in preserving the heritage and history of the community. Gil Bellavance, himself a former Citizen of the Year, stated “it would be hard to imagine Tammy Donahue Buziak, archivist in charge of the North Battleford City (Historic) Archives, not being a significant part of historical research in the Battlefords and District.”
But above all else, Donahue Buziak says she could not have done all of her community activities without the support of her family, including her husband Terry, her two children, Matthew and Lisa, and her granddaughter, Emma, who moved to the community recently. “Every spare moment I spend with her,” she said.
For these and other reasons Tammy Donahue Buziak has earned honors as the 2014 Citizen of the Year.
