‘It looks like my mother’s bonnets, the kind she wore a century ago. It even has holes for where the ears can go,” snickers Bill Kent. He’s referring to the cover design of the bandshell at Douglas Park.

He’s written several “letters to the editor” about the “million dollar gift the taxpayers are giving the City.”

If you hung a rope full of backpacks at one end of ‘the bonnet’ and a string on the other end it could be called the white elephant in the room, “because that is what it is,” Kent says, laughing from his easy chair inside his quaint Langley City home.

Kent is 101 years old, and his new hobby is keeping the City council and mayor honest, he says.

“I pay part of their salary, right?”

Kent has been retired longer than he worked, said the spry senior who gets around town on his scooter.

He’s lived through the two World Wars and the Depression. He’s seen the emerging popularity of the automobile, the first man on the moon, the invention of the TV and much more. So how come he’s lived so long and is still so healthy?

“You know how many times I’ve been asked that?” he said with a smile. “The trick is I’ve never smoked because I couldn’t afford it. Ten smokes costs 10 cents. I could go to the tuck shop and have a cinnamon roll and a coffee for the same price. Ten cents was my budget for each day.”

He is the oldest alumnus of his high school in Alberta and was born the day they laid the first brick for the old Strathcona school.

“Last September I helped them celebrate 100 years. I was treated very well by the students. Only the best and the brightest attend now,” he said proudly, showing off a picture of last year’s grads and a drawing of his Old Scona Academic.

After graduation, Kent went on to the University of Alberta pursuing a career in civil engineering. He graduated in 1931 in a class of seven students.

Somewhere in all of this he met his wife Doris at a dance. With a methodist mother, dancing had been strictly forbidden.

“I found out why that night,” he said with a smile.

Doris and Bill married shortly after meeting in 1934 and came to Vancouver for their honeymoon.

“It was a 70-year honeymoon I guess,” he said. A new resident to B.C., he began looking for work smack dab in the middle of the Depression.

“I wanted to get into construction. My first job was the Lions Gate Bridge. I worked on the foundation, the deck. I was never unemployed even through the Depression,” he said.

Working on the Lions Gate Bridge was a highlight. (See more about his days building the bridge online at langleytimes.com).

When it opened there wasn’t any of the fuss that went on with the opening of the Golden Ears Bridge, he said.

“As soon as we could, four of us got in a car and drove back and a forth to see if there was a bump in the middle . . . actually there was a bit of a bump,” he said.

Kent loved being an engineer and decided to volunteer his time and expertise.

He joined the global CUSO organization and one of the biggest projects he lays claim to is helping build a tuna canning factory in the Philippines.

“I got my keep of $3 a day and stayed nine months,” he said.

“I went to Nigeria, too, with CUSO but the day we arrived the chief of state had been murdered so our project was cancelled,” he recalls.

After falling in love with Southeast Asia, he made more than 30 trips to that part of the world, and isn’t ruling out taking another.

Kent has three children, six grandchildren, even more great grandchildren.

His job took him away from them quite a bit, but Doris and Bill had plenty of time to be together after he retired.

His wife passed away a few years ago but his memories of their long marriage (which The Times featured in a 2003 article) remain strong for Kent.

While he will be keeping his eye on the City’s work, he isn’t going to do it via the Internet.

“I don’t have a computer and I don’t want one,” he said.

Out of all the inventions he’s seen, the most impressive one lives right inside him, he said.

“It’s my pacemaker — I have it with me all the time.”