It's been 50 years since a man from England, who was working in Hodgeville Saskatchewan at the time, won a contest that would forever connect him to the prairies. 

Saskatchewan's flag officially turned 50 this past weekend. Designer of the flag, Anthony Drake, describes how he came up with his award-winning design."The first thing that struck me was the appearance of the province. That's an essential part of the flag, it should be. Looking at the general nature of the province I could see that in the north there were a lot of trees and grass. And the south was all crops growing. Wheat and other things. And that always seemed to look like a creamy yellow colour. So the green and yellow I thought would be ideal. I put those on, and then I thought well it can't be just green and yellow."

Drake continued, "So I thought the shield would be another perfect thing to put in the top left-hand corner. And then I thought about the bottom right-hand corner. And about certain possibilities like maybe the famous Saskatchewan bird, or tree, or whatever. And then I looked and discovered that a certain flower was the provincial flower in the sense that it was theirs. I got a picture of that and was quite surprised and amazed (at) how superb it looked. A nice red."

For designing the winning flag, Drake won $1000 in 1968, which is similar to getting just over $7,000 now.Teaching over in England, he read in an educational document that Saskatchewan needed some teachers, they were short. So Drake and his wife decided to make the move."They were offering a free journey to Saskatchewan and a job teaching. We decided that would be a nice change in life, and we decided to go."