On his 85th birthday on January 16th, Frank Sisson wasn’t wearing ‘The Bullet.’ But that doesn’t alter the fact that there is a special satisfaction for Sisson in having once been shot during a robbery, then living this long and handsomely outliving all the people who tried to kill him. So, there’s also significance in hanging on a chain the very bullet that a physician once retrieved from his leg, after gangsters pulled a gun on him as he was making a bank deposit from a charity casino event the night before.. Frank and Lorraine SissonFrank and Lorraine Sisson .“But I don’t wear it anymore. It just upsets people,” he says..And when the Sisson family decided to honour him and host old friends and retainers at the Carriage House Hotel, there was no room for upsetting people. Some were there who, like brothers Conrad and Ordean Eberg had first worked with Frank more than 60 years ago..They also welcomed one-time Flames announcer Pete ‘Yeah baby!’ Maher with wife Nancy, Calgary Herald veterans Licia Corbella with Dave and Gwyneth Parker and Darlene Switzer-Foster, whose father Sam Switzer owned and operated a competing casino — although in his autobiography ‘Frankly Speaking,’ Sisson described Sam as ‘a mentor.’.There was a lot to celebrate. No single individual has cast a brighter light over more decades, or touched the lives of more people in Calgary than the Scots-born Frank Sisson, whose war-bride mother brought him to Canada after the war..His entertainment career goes back to running bowling alleys when he was still in school; then in 1958 at the age of 20, he became the youngest bowling alley manager in Canada, running the old Calgary Centre Lanes for the Bronfman family..In 1979, he acquired a former Pepsi Cola bottling plant where over a period of 20 years he built up the Silver Dollar Casino and Action Centre. As the family grew up, it became a genuine family-operation that totally involved wife Lorraine, daughters Michelle and Rhonda and son Alan. Before selling in 2000, the Sissons had hosted literally millions of individual visits to the Centre, where Calgarians ate well, bowled, bet on the wheel and later on the VLTs — another great satisfaction to Sisson as even while he was recuperating from his gunshot wounds, he was taking a prominent part in the fight to keep VLTs legal in Alberta..Action Centre visitors also enjoyed a veritable parade of the late 20th century’s most popular artists… Tammy Wynette, Ray Stevens, Billy Ray Cyrus, Phylis Diller, Chubby Checker, Weird Al Yankovich, Tanya Tucker, Waylon Jennings, Merle Haggard..Some, like Garth Brooks, are still on top of their game..Frank and Lorraine Sisson may be celebrating a notable occasion today. But, they’re not celebrating retirement — not yet, anyway: “We’re looking at an investment property. Gotta stay busy.”
