By Ted McIntyre
Fred DeCator went out with a bang—more so than he expected. Slated to retire at the end of October after over 35 years as Executive Officer of the Brantford Home Builders’ Association, DeCator received the prestigious David Horton Leadership Award during the Chair’s Gala at OHBA’s Annual Conference in September in Niagara Falls.
And he didn’t see it coming. The phone call from OHBA’s Chief Operating Officer Sajida Jiwani was to wife Dorothy two months previous. Fred was kept in the dark.
Then things got a little curious after he arrived at the conference at Fallsview Casino Resort. “I was looking over the OHBA Conference app and going down the list of attendees,” DeCator shares. “I saw my daughter Christine Perriman of Pro-Mar Electrical Services of the Brantford Home Builders Association and wondered, ‘What the heck is she doing here?’ My wife said, ‘They’ve invited our kids (including son Michael and his wife Lisa) since this is going to be your last conference,’ and I thought, ‘Well, that’s nice!’
“So when they called my name out for the David Horton award, it was a total surprise,” DeCator says. “To get David’s award is very special. I worked with him for a while, and we knew each other quite well. David was a behind-the-scenes type of guy, but you knew he was in full control of the ‘Good Ship OHBA.’ He was always willing to give advice and words of wisdom if the opportunity arose. Things like ‘Don’t sweat the small stuff,’ and ‘There are no free lunches at OHBA’—words that have stuck with me over the 35 years.
“I’ve been very privileged to be part of the association,” DeCator says. “A lot of credit goes to Union Gas, my employer when I started with the association. I worked in Brantford, and my boss at Union Gas, Joe Holota, was the Brantford HBA executive officer and had been with the association for 25 years. You could only have one member per company in the local chapter, but my work territory at the time also covered Haldimand-Norfolk.”
DeCator served in multiple capacities as a member of Haldimand-Norfolk HBA from 1976 to 1999, serving as president in 1989 and 1999, the latter of which saw him named Member of the Year. The CHBA Executive Officers’ Council awarded him the Dave Stuppart Award of Honour in 2001 as executive officer of the year for a small association.
“Union Gas allowed and encouraged us as builder coordinators to be part of the association—‘If you want to talk to these guys and be involved in their business, this is how you do it,’ they told us. So it was part of our job to be involved in the association’s work. I’d also been attending the Brantford meetings at the same time as a guest, so when Joe retired from Brantford in 1989, the association board said, ‘You’ve been here all the time and doing the work anyway, so we may as well hire you on as our executive officer.’ So from 1989-1999, I was a volunteer EO of the association. In 1999, I retired from Union Gas after they offered us an early retirement package. That’s when Brantford hired me as their EO on a part-time basis. So at least I was now getting paid a little for it,” DeCator laughs.
DeCator has handed off to Angela DeVries, who will be the CEO of the Brantford and St. Thomas & Elgin HBAs.
“I extend appreciation to OHBA for awarding me with this honour, and a special thank-you to Sajida Jiwani for all the planning she did to make it a surprise to me—first in having my family there to celebrate my last conference and to keep the secret of the award until it was presented,” notes DeCator, who will stay on in a part-time capacity as Brantford HBA’s treasurer.
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