The Game of Life
May 26, 2026
UVic alumnus Mark Perkins, Dipl ’74, was a firefighter, a proud Métis and a fierce competitor on the ball diamond who never passed by someone who needed help.
Being off duty never deterred Mark Perkins from stopping to rescue someone in harm’s way. On a family trip to a zoo in Portland, a little boy put his head through the wrought-iron railings of a cage and became stuck.
Mark’s wife Fern Perkins, MEd ’06, pushing their own baby in a stroller, suggested her husband, the firefighter, could free the boy. Trained in childbirth, Mark tilted the boy’s shoulder and wiggled him free. Another time in the Redwoods of Oregon, Mark carried a woman with a broken ankle up a hill. After retiring, he was driving home in Greater Victoria with takeout fish and chips when he spotted a car on fire with a man trapped inside.
Mark earned a diploma in Education at UVic in 1974, but decided to help children another way. “That’s why we have the joke that he’d rather face burning buildings than a classroom full of children,” says Fern. Firefighters have a “special capacity for caring for others,” she adds. Even though his vocation contributed to the cancer that ended his life—Fern insists, he would have done it all again.
The two met on the playground at Victoria’s Frank Hobbs Elementary School. “We were 10 years old. He had a Roy Rogers lunch kit. Roy Rogers was my hero and that was that,” Fern recalls. They remained together—as they married, earned UVic degrees and both later discovered that they had Indigenous roots—a fact obscured by their families, in part because of the risk of residential schools.
Mark climbed the ranks as a firefighter, eventually becoming a Battalion Chief. “He was real, authentic, dedicated, disciplined, cared about others always. He wasn’t perfect. He was a different person on the ball field. He took his baseball seriously.”
Besides Fern and their three children, Mark’s other great love was baseball, which he played semi-professionally. He was scouted by the San Francisco Giants and earned a scholarship at Lewis-Clark State College in Idaho. Mark’s father was an umpire and believed baseball was an allegory for life. It was about development and discipline, not the outcome. It is, like life, a game of failure, says Fern, where achieving one hit out of three is a success.
After retiring, Mark delved into his newly discovered Indigenous heritage. The couple taught Indigenous education in local schools and at UVic, where they met former Chancellor Shelagh Rogers, who turned out to be a relation of them both. He called this exploration of his Métis family “the best retirement gift he could hope for.”
Mark was fastidious, verging on compulsive. Fern and the kids would remind him that he wasn’t the boss once he got home. “And we would tell him, ‘We’re not the fire department and you’re not in charge here,’” she laughs.
Mark was her everything.
“I would never have been able to accomplish my own personal life if it hadn’t been for him. He was my safety and my protection, my best friend. He never ever stood in my way, he always encouraged me to do anything and everything I wanted.”
UVic alumnus Gordon Mark Perkins, a retired Battalion Chief of the Victoria Fire Department, passed away on Dec. 22, 2025 at age 76. He is survived by Fern, their three children and their grandchildren.
—Jenny Manzer, BA '97
This article appears in the UVic Torch alumni magazine.
For more Torch stories, go to the UVic Torch alumni magazine page.