A Career In The Salvation Army Reward
The Estevan Mercury, Wednesday, September 29, 1971

Mr. Louis Bourquin, Senior, will be celebrating his 77^th birthday on the 22^nd of November of this year.  He is a man with a strong handshake, thin of frame, and sports a full head of white hair.  As he reminisced about his life – particularly those years with the Salvation Army – there was a distinct vitality in his voice that clearly said he had led a full and prosperous life.  Mr. Bourquin was born in 1894, in the small industrial town of Valentigney, France, a few kilometers from the Swiss border.  His father, who was a factory worker, realized the limited opportunities his job offered; and rather than stay at a position that promised little or no advancement, he decided to pull up stakes.  In 1910 the Bourquin family, consisting of the parents, two sons and three daughters left France and immigrated to Canada.  They settled on a Saskatchewan farm three miles southeast of Estevan.  At that time Louis’s mother was the single member of the family able to speak English.   For the others, it was a learning process.  Louis aided himself by a number of correspondence courses in English and discovered that for a lad of 15, it was not all that difficult to absorb the new language.  He was not aware of it at that time, but his formal education had come to an end.