He wears denim and tweed, sports a beard and long hair and has a balding pate that, according to the poem, is the fault of a cow.
"I'm not a 'high fallutin' guy,'" says Moe McGuinty, general manager of the Dekker Centre for the Performing Arts.
Nor, he says, is the Dekker Centre a "high fallutin'" place.
"It's just a great place to come," says the actor/musician/poet turned hospitality professional. "There's nothing high faulting about it other than it's a magnificent building."
McGuinty loves his job. He has been running the $13 million Dekker Centre since May 1, 2012. In fact, he was running it before it actually opened, in September of 2012.
The Dekker Centre is part of city's multipurpose, four-venue CUplex. While not without its controversies during construction, the CUplex is now part of the city's fabric and the Dekker Centre, the performing arts centre component, represents more than 30 years of lobbying by arts supporters for just such a facility.
McGuinty's goal is for the public to see the Dekker Centre as a place of consistent quality; even if they don't recognize the name of an act that's been booked, the public should be confident it will be good "because it's the Dekker Centre."
Because of the size of the markets, he says, "we're not going to draw major, major names here."
While not all the acts will be people everyone's heard of, they will be well worth seeing.
As examples, he points to two upcoming shows. Feb. 25, Canadian musical icons Jackie Richardson and the Joe Sealy/Paul Novotny Duo will be on stage. Joe Sealy is a Juno Award winner and has also been awarded the Order of Canada for his contribution to Canadian music, says McGuinty. He adds Canada hears Novotny every night as the writer of the theme music for The National and The Hour with George Stroumboulopoulos. Richardson is the winner of Dora and Genie awards for acting and has worked with people like Sidney Portier and Keifer Sutherland.
"They'll do a mix of jazz and blues," says McGuinty, and later in March, Diana Panton, an acclaimed jazz singer, will be performing, bringing with her a band that includes two Order of Canada recipients, honoured for their contributions to Canadian music.
"We've been pretty consistent," he says. "Going back, we had the best harmonica player in the world here [Carlos del Junco] and Robert Post is coming, who is a recurring guest on the Today Show and has sold out his one man show on Broadway."
McGuinty says, "I don't know how you get any better."
The Dekker Centre is trying to be accessible to everybody, he adds, pointing to a show booked for May featuring fiddle players and step dancers, "some of the very best in Canada, without question."
Variety will interest fans of a number of genres.
"You go from a jazz group to a standup comedian, to a bunch of fiddle players and over to Valdy, so we're really trying to hit all the buttons," says McGuinty. "But there's a relatively small market for those genres, so over the years we have to get people to be more adventurous."
As for the people he works with, including the volunteers, McGuinty says, "I've been blessed."
"Our volunteers and our staff create a wonderful evening before you even get to the theatre," he says.
The Dekker Centre isn't just about the performing arts, however. McGuinty says the convention and meeting part of the business is integral to the financial success of the centre.
"It certainly appears from the convention standpoint to be filling a niche that just wasn't here," he says. "What you'll never know is how many of these regional meetings that we missed."
It wasn't because the Battlefords were competing amongst themselves, he explains, it was the Battlefords competing with Lloydminster, Prince Albert or Swift Current.
"And now we can play," says McGuinty. "Our next task in management is to get the word out provincially that 'we're here, we're competitive and we'd love to have your business.' Every event we had last year that's an annual event is re-booked for this year."
From the premier to the lieutenant governor, says McGuinty, visiting dignitaries have said the Dekker Centre is as nice as any facility in the province of Saskatchewan.
"And it is," he says. "It's happening."
He says they are very busy with the conference and meeting business, plus events such as retirement parties and celebrations of life.
There have been three celebrations of life held at the Dekker Centre, all organized through local funeral homes. One used the theatre for a 35-minute audio visual presentation, one was a come and go afternoon during which, at the request of the deceased, the bar was open, followed by a supper for 150 invited guests. The third one called for moving the grand piano to the atrium. There were 320 people at that event.
"In every instance it worked well," says McGuinty.
Last week, he says, they got a call about a wedding as a result of the bride's mother being here for one of the celebrations of life.
"We haven't done a wedding yet," he says. "The reason is because the rental rates are higher than anybody in town, and we want them to be. We don't want to compete with other venues."
McGuinty says the governing board made a conscious decision a year and a half ago in setting the centre's rates, that they didn't want to take business from venues such as the Western Development Museum, the Legion and the Knights of Columbus hall.
"One of the ways we can be non-competitive is to set our rates considerably higher," he says. "People have to make a real decision about where they want to host their event."
McGuinty wants the Dekker Centre to be embraced by everyone in the Battlefords. He doesn't want it to be considered a "high falluting" place, as someone suggested to his wife Wendy.
He certainly doesn't consider himself high falluting. In fact, he has a rather off-the-wall sense of humour and likes to express it through music and poetry. He loves kids and he loves writing poetry for them, including his seven-year-old grandson Jaxson, such as the one about a tiny cow who chewed the hair off the top of his head.
He has also written children's songs, and has performed them with local youngsters. Most recently, he sang his composition, I Want a Rhinoceros for Christmas, with the Battlefords Children's Choirs at their December concert at the Dekker Centre.
"I love doing it if somebody is kind enough to ask."
McGuinty's first career was as an actor, singer and songwriter. By the time he was 16, he was singing professionally in North Bay, Ont. and had won a northern Ontario songwriting contest. He had also been named best actor in Ontario at the Sears drama festival.
"One of my first jobs other than music when I first got out of school was associate chairman of Ontario Youth Theatre," says McGuinty.
He helped put together an inaugural plan of how young people could get involved in the theatre arts outside of the school system.
He enjoyed acting and music equally well, he says, but he had to make a living, so took the musical path.
"I could sing six nights a week, or I could act six nights a year."
At 18, he says, he got his first agent in Toronto, and at age 20 was picked up by the Sheraton Hotel chair and spent four years playing in Boston and New York exclusively. From there, he went to Lake Tahoe, Nev. playing major ski resorts and the casino circuit.
"The music business was good to me," says McGuinty. "I raised a family."
He and wife Wendy have a mixed family of five kids, from 22 to 38 years old.
Throughout his musical career, for the most part he played bars - six nights a week, 10 months a year, four 40-minute sets a night.
"Three thousand nights later," he says, "I thought I would do something else."
Fortunately, along the way he had made friends with a few business people from whose experience he was able to learn, and he "made a pretty easy transition out of the music business into the resort management business."
"I had worked my way all the way back to my home town and I had a consultant practice there."
It was the kind of thing he could do anywhere with a laptop and telephone.
"We put our youngest son in college and said, 'Let's get out of town.' We had been in North Bay 17 years."
Wendy had not spent much time in Toronto, so they said, "Let's go for two years and have some fun."
"We went for two years and we had a ball," he says.
Then they decided it was time for a new adventure.
McGuinty says, "I had offers to go to other communities in other parts of the country but I've been to all those other parts of the country, and I'd never been to Saskatchewan."
He threw his hat in the ring to become chief executive officer of the North West Enterprise Region in 2012.
"That's how we got here. I was hired for that job."
They moved lock, stock and barrel, leased a home and he started the job on March 5.
The negotiations for the job had lasted three months, but the job lasted 13 days.
"I started that job on the fifth of March and the provincial budget came down on the 21st and we were gone."
The provincial government discontinued its Enterprise Regions program, which had been designed to help regions attract businesses and jobs, in the 2012 budget.
During the 13 days on the job, says McGuinty, someone from the City of North Battleford had approached him, asking if he knew anybody back east with experience running a performing arts centre. He did.
"So I was making calls back east, getting the wheels in motion," he says. "Ten days later I was calling everybody back, saying 'don't bother, I'll do it.' So it's worked out very well."
When asked how he and his wife Wendy are enjoying the community, he answers, "Well, we bought a house."
"When I left North Bay I said I don't want to scrape the paint off another house," he says, adding economics at their age, as empty-nesters, made more sense to rent. That's what they had done in Toronto for the two years between leaving North Bay and coming to Saskatchewan.
Now they have a house, and are planning a big garden. They have a Battleford apple tree in the yard and he spent hours on the porch last August peeling apples.
"We have apple pies, apple jelly, apple jam, apple everything."
When they made the decision to come to Saskatchewan, he and Wendy had wondered, "'What in the world are we going to find when we get there?'"
He says, "What we found was the nicest people, and really the most unpretentious bunch of folks I've ever run into."
People wave at one another here, and at first it was disconcerting, "especially after two years of Toronto where nobody looks at you," McGuinty adds.
"Standing on any corner, waiting for the light to change and you're in a conversation. That didn't happen in our town and that town isn't a huge metropolis."
The McGuintys also love the scenery, the nearby beaches and the summer weather.
"The summers!" he says. "July and August, I've never experienced summers like them."
Visitors from Ontario have agreed. The first year they were here, five different couples came to visit from Ontario.
"Every one at some point or other would say, 'You know, this is the nicest summer day that I can remember,' and every day was like that."
He adds, "Wendy likes to sit in the sun and I don't. The difference in Ontario is if I'm under a tree, it doesn't matter, it's still hot and humid. But here, you move 15 feet under a tree and the temperature changes 15 degrees. It's glorious."
The mosquitoes haven't been an issue, and, "of course, you don't have black flies. How bad can it be?" he laughs.
Neither do they mind the winters, at least not the temperatures or snow, which are not much different than what they grew up with. The length of winter here is another matter.
"These are long winters, seems there's a extra month on either end."
But they have discovered the time-honoured tradition that helps many a prairie dweller cope with the long freeze.
"We were buying seeds on Saturday."
