For six decades, Victor Mah -known to everyone as Vic -was an Edmonton icon.

A restaurateur. An athlete. A junior hockey team owner. A credit union president. A superfan -who rarely missed a game, whether the team playing was the Eskimos, the Oilers, or his beloved Oil Kings. A quiet philanthropist, who preferred to help people privately and discreetly.

Vic Mah was an authentic Edmonton legend. So was his marquee restaurant, the Blue Willow.

Mr. Mah liked to say that his restaurant was his living room, where he entertained his friends. Well into his 80s, he worked that dining room, where he greeted guests by name, a consummate host and showman, a charming conversationalist who made all his visitors, old and new, feel as if they were coming home.

On Friday, Vic Mah died of pneumonia at the age of 91. With him, went a piece of Edmonton's soul.

"He was a great guy," says Mayor Stephen Mandel. "He made a great contribution to the sporting life of this city, and as a leader within his own community."

"Edmonton is a much better place because of people like Vic Mah," says Allan Wachowich, Alberta's recently retired chief justice. "He had such humility, he was such a humanitarian. He was a real great one."

"He was proud to be able to say he knew every captain of the Oilers or the Oil Kings who ever existed," says Patrick LaForge, president of the Edmonton Oilers. "That living link to history? We lost that on Friday."

You might say Vic Mah's life represents a microcosm of the Chinese-Canadian Prairie experience.

He was born in Saskatoon, in 1919 -four years before Canada's infamous Chinese Exclusion Act banned the immigration of Chinese to Canada. His father, an educated man who could read and write in English as well as Chinese, had come from China to work as a labourer on the railway and had gone on to establish a successful café and dry-goods store, and to become a leader in Saskatoon's Chinese community.

But his father died when he was an infant, and his widowed mother returned to southern China with her children. Mr. Mah grew up in a village in Guangzhou. In later years, he said jokingly to his grandson Patrick that the only thing to do there for fun was to poke snakes with sticks.

At 16, he returned to Canada. By then, Chinese immigrants weren't allowed in to Canada -but as a Canadian citizen, Mr. Mah was able to gain entry. He found work, first in Nelson, B.C., then in Prince Albert, Sask., as a busboy and dishwasher. Later, he worked for a time in a B.C. copper mine, saving enough money to open his first restaurants -a café in Fort St. John, and later, one in Dawson Creek, simple places that served liver and onions and ham and eggs to Americans building the Alaska Highway. When he was drafted into the army, though, he sold the restaurant to serve his country.

In 1945, after he was discharged, he and his bride, Esther, came to Edmonton. Their first restaurant here was another humble greasy spoon, the Pan American Cafe on Jasper Avenue.

By 1957, the Mahs were ready for something more ambitious. They tore down the old Pan Am, and in its place put up a gracious and elegant fine dining room, with a gracious and elegant name: The Blue Willow.

No more liver and onions. The Blue Willow served Chinese food to Edmontonians looking for something exotic. Back then, Alberta's quaint liquor laws meant that men and women weren't allowed to drink together; taverns were segregated. The Blue Willow was one of the first places in Edmonton to be granted a liquor licence that allowed couples to drink wine and cocktails together, in the dining room or the lounge.

"It was a big gamble. It was a huge gamble," says Mr. Mah's son, Stan. "But he made it work."

The Blue Willow became one of Edmonton's top supper clubs, with a three-piece dance band and vocalist, the place visiting celebrities came to dine.

"All the big-name entertainers came there," says Stan Mah. "Jack Benny came every year. Liberace. Dean Martin. Harry Belafonte. Nana Mouskouri. The biggest thing I remember was that my dad introduced me to all these people."

But it wasn't only entertainers who made regular calls to the Blue Willow. Vic Mah was a sports fiend -an avid tennis player, and a provincial table-tennis champion. In the 1950s, he sponsored a championship junior baseball team, the Blue Willow Angels. In the 1960s, he became a part-owner of Edmonton's beloved junior hockey team, the Oil Kings.

He always welcomed the young athletes into his restaurant -as long as they behaved like gentlemen.

"He treated them as adults," recalls Patrick LaForge. "As much as it was his restaurant, it was their restaurant. I saw him help turn young boys into men. And if some of them ran short of money, Vic personally gave them a hand so they didn't get tossed out of their apartments."

Later, the Blue Willow became one of the favourite spots for the young Edmonton Oilers.

"Vic and Esther were just a really classy couple," says Al Hamilton, who played for both the Oil Kings and the Oilers. "Vic never seemed to get mad. If he was disappointed with someone, he'd get a frown on his face. But he was fiercely protective of our players."

"He treated all those boys -Wayne and Kevin and Mark and Al -like they were his sons," LaForge says.

Wachowich made his first visit to the Blue Willow when he was a 14-yearold bat boy for the Edmonton Eskimos baseball team, encountering Chinese food for the very first time.

"He was always so kind to us," Wachowich recalls. "The food was always outstanding, and Vic was always there with Esther. He was an Edmonton institution. We called him the Toots Shor of Edmonton."

And just as Toots Shor, the famous New York restaurateur, became a celebrity in his own right, Wachowich says Mr. Mah became one, too.

"People always wanted to have their pictures taken with Vic and hung on the wall.

The Blue Willow wasn't Mr. Mah's only business venture. He was the first president of the Chinatown Credit Union and the first chair of Capital City Savings, now known as Servus Credit Union. For more than 20 years, he also ran a downtown steak house called the Canterbury Inn. Somehow, he still found time to volunteer, teaching swimming lessons, and helping new Chinese immigrants settle here.

"I'm still not sure how he found the time to do what he did," says Mr. Mah's grandson, Patrick. "A lot about grandpa is still a mystery to me -like how he could close the restaurant at two in the morning, wake up at six, and beat people in tennis at seven."

Patrick Mah says his grandfather did face racism over the years -but he never let it defeat him.

"He just treated everyone with respect. That's not to say he would belittle himself. But he was just so personable, friendships and relationships would inevitably develop.

But as Jasper Avenue declined through the 1970s, the Blue Willow lost its gloss. The Mahs shut the doors in 1980 -only to resurrect a new signature Blue Willow in 1983 on 111th Street, in Oliver. Wayne Gretzky helped cut the ribbon.

Right up until a few years ago, Vic Mah was at the Blue Willow, greeting guests and training staff. But his beloved wife and partner Esther died in 2009, and he himself was overtaken in the last two years by the ravishes of Alzheimer's.

Stan Mah, who now runs the restaurant, says his dad used to joke that so many young doctors, nurses and pharmacists had worked their way through school by working at the Blue Willow, they could start their own hospital.

"He was a teacher," says Stan. "My father never told you what to do. He suggested. He liked to talk to people who wanted to talk.

"He loved the people of Edmonton. He'd say, 'This is my home.' He had offers to open restaurants in Vancouver and Phoenix, but he'd say, 'This is my city.'" This was indeed his city -the one he helped to shape. The ultimate host has said his final good night -leaving the rest of us to find our own way home.

psimons@edmontonjournal.com

Twitter.com/Paulatics facebook.com/EJPaulaSimons