People

She’s the marrying kind

“… First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes ‘Bob’ with a baby carriage.”

In a roundabout way, the career and service activities of Ann Robinson, a member of the Kiwanis Club of St. Stephen in New Brunswick, models that children’s rhyme.

Ann Robinson, shown with her son, Sam, performs civil wedding ceremonies as a deputy clerk of the court in St. Stephen, New Brunswick.

You see, Ann, a lawyer with her own practice, is a deputy clerk of the Court of Queen’s Bench of New Brunswick (more commonly known in the past as Justice of the Peace). As such, she performs civil wedding ceremonies.

“We have a smallish community of about 5,000 people here in St. Stephen,” Ann says. “About 10 years ago, someone asked me if I could perform wedding ceremonies. There seemed to be a need with only one other deputy clerk at that time, and he was not doing many weddings.”

So Ann received her appointment and discovered the other deputy clerk preferred performing other duties. Hence, she was left with the majority of the weddings, which suits her fine.

“It is fun,” Ann says. “This past year, I had 15 weddings, which is quite a lot for a small community. You get to meet a lot of people from all over.”

Though she has yet to marry a Kiwanis couple, she does have some interesting stories.

A couple from England, for example, nearly missed their own ceremony when they made it over just before a bomb scare that temporarily halted airline travel.

“My husband said, ‘Even Al Qaeda can’t keep this couple apart; they are destined to be together,’” she exclaims.

So there’s the love and marriage.

As for the baby carriage, Ann is concerned about keeping prams out of the scene—at least for middle school children. It’s an issue she raised while serving as Kiwanis club president in 1998-99.

“The ‘Baby, Think It Over’ program serves as a deterrent to students thinking it would be fun to have a baby,” she says. “Our club worked with the middle school to provide mechanical dolls. Students take the dolls home over the weekend to care for them. They are programmed by the teachers to wake and cry at different intervals. To calm the baby, they have to try different things, including ‘feeding’ it a simulated bottle.”

The club honed in on the middle school to reach the 12- to 14-year-olds before they become sexually active.

“This is an ongoing project; we still provide maintenance to the dolls.”

Ann soon will have another experience with the baby program: Her son, Sam Backman, who is vice-president of the newly formed Builders Club of St. Stephen Middle School, will be one of the student “parents” next year.