Kinsmen Discovery Centre Today
On June 1, 2008—almost two decades to the day after it opened—the Kinsmen Discovery Centre reopened. Leo cut the ribbon with a pair of rusty bolt cutters from the Tinkering Loft. He was 71. He didn’t make a speech. He just walked to the Whisper Dishes, leaned into one, and whispered, “Thank you.”
Leo passed away in 2019, but his logbook is now displayed in a glass case near the entrance. The irony is not lost on anyone. The only “Do Not Touch” sign in the building guards the book that taught everyone that touching, trying, and failing is the beginning of all discovery.
“We build for the body,” he said, tapping a blue-print of a new swing set. “What do we build for the mind?” kinsmen discovery centre
The response broke his email server. Hundreds of stories arrived within a week. A man in his thirties wrote about building his first circuit at the Centre, which led him to become an electrical engineer. A grandmother wrote about the day her non-verbal grandson spoke his first word—“echo!”—into the Whisper Dishes. A former volunteer wrote about how the Tinkering Loft taught her that failure wasn’t shameful, just data.
For three years, they scrounged, begged, and built. A bankrupt auto-parts warehouse on the edge of the city’s industrial park became their cathedral. Volunteers—plumbers, electricians, retired physics teachers—worked weekends. They built a whispering parabola so large two people could stand forty feet apart and hear a pin drop. They salvaged a World War II periscope from a scrapyard. A local artist created a shadow-wall that froze your silhouette in phosphorescent light. On June 1, 2008—almost two decades to the
The stories were published online. A local news station ran a segment titled “Saving Saskatoon’s Secret Cathedral of Wonder.” Within a month, a coalition of former visitors, now adults, formed the Friends of the Discovery Centre . They held bake sales, car washes, and a legendary 24-hour telethon hosted from the flooded Gravity Well, which they’d patched with a tarp.
The old Kinsmen Club of Saskatoon had a problem. For decades, they had raised money for playgrounds, hospital equipment, and sports teams—the vital, visible bones of a growing prairie city. But in the winter of 1987, over coffee and donuts in a cramped basement, a young member named Leo pointed out what was missing. He didn’t make a speech
Today, the Kinsmen Discovery Centre still stands, though it has grown. A glass atrium now connects the old warehouse to a new wing called the Innovation Foundry , filled with 3D printers and robotics kits. The original Tinkering Loft remains untouched—same gritty floor, same smell of oil, same bins of mismatched screws.