Port Alberni, BC 1974

You drive about a ½ hour north of Nanaimo on Vancouver Island and turn left at the seaside town of Parksville onto another highway going west. Or you can take another cut off just north of the Parksville cut off that will take you through the village of Coombs with its famous thatched roofed restaurant with the goats living on top. Either way, you are on your way to Port Alberni. You’ll pass through Cathedral Grove where you can see 1000 year old Douglas fir trees. Then you climb up a very steep hill locally known as "The Hump" with Mount Arrowsmith off to the side. After reaching the top of the hill you will start to descend into the Alberni Valley. If it is a clear day you might notice the smoke stacks up ahead. On your way into town you will pass a few big box stores like Wal-Mart that have opened in the last several years.

Goats on roof in Coombs, BC

Cathedral Grove

 

Cathedral Grove.

 

The highway will take you into Port Alberni and down to the Somass River where salmon fishing is in high gear in the late summer. At this point you have to make a choice. You can either turn left and visit the 2^nd of two downtown areas that are in Port Alberni (you have just passed through the 1^st one) or turn right and travel west for 1-1/2-2 hours to Pacific Rim National Park. (Some people just call that area Long Beach.)

I lived in Port Alberni for about 9 months in the 1974. Like a lot of other things in life, it was a bit of a fluke that I ended up there at all. I was living in Vancouver and needed a job. I wanted to go off somewhere where I could save up enough money to buy a car. In Vancouver I applied and was hired for a job in a mill that was located at a place called Thasis which is near the small town of Gold River on northern Vancouver Island. With a packed duffle bag I caught a ferry to Vancouver Island and hitchhiked my way to Gold River. It was there that I discovered that the only way to get to Tahsis was by boat. There was a scheduled boat trip every several hours. I was sitting on the boat waiting to pay my fare when a crew member asked me where I was going. I told him about my new job. He in turn told me that the mill was shut down due to a strike. Shit! I wasn’t counting on that.  What a bummer!

I had to do some fast thinking. I had some friends who I knew from Banff who had moved to Port Alberni. He was from Columbia in South America and she was from Calgary. In fact I kind of went to their wedding. At least we made an attempt. We got pretty wasted on tequila in Banff the night before and got to Calgary where the wedding was held too late for the wedding but in time for the reception. The gal’s mother took one look at my sorry looking face and made up a bed for me. I have pretty well avoided tequila ever since. For a few months I shared an apartment with this couple in the west end of Vancouver.

So I set off for Port Alberni. Maybe I could find work there? Somehow I managed to find my friends. They were living in a two bedroom suite on the main floor of a small house. Both were working on the “green chain” at a local sawmill. The “green chain” is where workers used to (it is now mostly automated) separate newly cut lumber into piles of planks that are the same size. The lumber is delivered by a conveyor belt. The job can be quite hazardous. Kind of like the I Love Lucy episode with the candy conveyor belt but with a far more harmful product.

The couple was saving up their money for a visit to South America, a trip they planned to do by car. They hoped to trade in their Isizu Ballet sedan (you didn’t see many of those cars) for a van in the coming months. Renting their spare bedroom to me was quite OK with them as it would save them even more money. Now that I had a place to stay the next thing to do was find a job.

I’m not sure if just the guy or both of them had tried their hands at tree planting and I thought I would give it a go. I lasted about a week. The big industry in town was the pulp mill and most of the forestry operations close by including the mills were owned and run by a company called MacMillan-Bloedel. (They no longer exist but were one of the largest forestry companies in BC for decades.) I walked into the pulp mill and was hired on the spot. Getting a job that easily would not be believable to many young people living in Port Alberni today.

The Columbian guy had quite a temper which got him into difficulty when he was planting trees and working on the green chain. He ended up working as a deck hand on a salmon trawler where he only had the captain to deal with.

Columbian guy tossing salmon.

The house where we lived was at the top of a steep hill in Port Alberni. I didn’t have a car but was fortunate enough to be able to use the gal’s bike which I used to get back and forth to work.. I pretty well took my life in my hands with that bike. I would go screaming down the hill and then coast a good part of the way to the mill with the speed I had built up. If any car had ever decided to cross my path I would have been toast.

 

When I first started at the mill I was assigned to work with some millwrights who looked after the maintenance of the machinery. Apparently somewhere in the union agreement I was supposed to carry around the millwright’s toolbox. Unions had a fair amount of power back then. Only certain people could perform certain tasks. One union job that confused me a bit was that of the "oiler" who would go around squrting oil into various pieces of machinery. I'm not particularly mechanical but I think that there is only 2 choices of oils for this endevour, 10-30 or 10-40. Not exactly rocket science.

All new employees at the mill were hired on a trial basis and after 30 days they would get their union card if things worked out. I kept a close eye on the calender that first month.

MacMillan-Bloedel pulp mill 1973.


 

There were a number of different departments involved in the process of making pulp. Each station had a little room with a control panel that monitored production. The panels had the usual stop/start functions and things like flow charts. The stations were run by " the operators" who understood what was going on and an assistant who would do the grunt work away from the control room. The main plan always was to keep things running smoothly. Every now and then the shit would hit the fan and the operation would be shut down. I was an assistant or "helper". Part of my job was to clean up messes. I also had to do some testing.

1974 was forty years ago but I will try my best to describe the departments I worked in back then. I may not be totally accurate but at least you will kind of get a picture of what goes on in a pulp mill.

The Recaust Department. This is where the lime kiln was. A lime kiln is about a hundred yards long. It looks like a giant pipe. The pipe is about 15 feet across and rotates. The pipe is also tilted at a slight angle. The inside of the pipe is coated with special fire clay bricks that can withstand extremely high heat. Basically, what was going on was the lime was being cooked. It would get into chunks that would have to be broken up before they stuff could go through the grates at the lower end of the pipe. My job was to break up the chunks with an iron bar with a kind of rubber fire hose piece at the end of it. The rubber was so I didn’t burn my hands. The residue from this process are called dregs which I soon learned were very acidic. From time to time I had to shovel up the muck which is what dregs look like. One day I was eating lunch in the control room and the operator pointed at my work boots and said “Nice boots you’ve got on”. I looked down and saw that the acidic stuff had eaten holes in the leather.

Me getting the lumps out of the lime kiln.

Next up the ladder was the screen room where the wood chips that had been turned to mush were redirected further up the ladder.

Next were the digesters. In Port Alberni there were 7 of them in the mill. Each one had a 35 ton capacity. Digesters are kind of like giant pressure cookers. They were filled with woodchips and cooked.

There were other operations up the ladder like the bleach plant and the washers but I never made it up that far. At the top of the heap was the paper cutting machines. The operators here had their own small union and were paid a small fortune for their expertise.

To someone not familiar with a pulp mill it can appear to be a bit intimidating . Motors are humming away all over the place. There are metal ladders and catwalks leading to different equipment. There are all kinds of ways to get injured or be killed. Probably the most creepy thing was sewer gas. Apparently if you smell it you are moments away from death.

I remember two chores at the mill I fortunately only had to do once. One of the chores was cleaning some screens by soaking them in an acid bath. The yellow acid liquid literally gurgled and bubbled. You could see the fumes rising off of the liquid surface. The stuff could eat the skin right off of you. The other scary chore I did was being dressed up in a suit that looked like a deep sea diving outfit and blasting crud off of the walls inside a tank with a high pressure gun that could cut my feet off if I wasn’t careful. I got into the tank through a small opening and did the chore by myself. They used to put tags on things that were dangerous and this job had all kinds of tags. My safety net was a couple of co-workers some 20 feet below me. I remember wanting to get them to turn off the gun and not getting their attention because they were facing the other way and having a smoke while they chatted.

One day I was asked to do another chore that after a few minutes I decided I wanted no part of and refused to continue. It was using a water to hose down the sulphur dust in a room at the other end of the kiln. I realized that there were all kinds of electrical wires in the room and the chance of electrocuting myself was not very appealing.

One of the things I remember the most at the pulp mill in Port Alberni is the people I worked with. It was in some ways like the Foreign Legion. Pretty well most of the employees were from other parts of Canada. I wondered a few times if some of them had just run out of highway being that Port Alberni is almost the end of the line when it comes to travelling across Canada.

Spending 8 hours with another person (the operator), you kind of get to know their habits and their idiosyncracies. Some were a little more severe than others as far as their temperaments go but even they would open up at times and tell a few stories.

I spent some shifts working with a guy named Ernie in the screen room. He was a stocky middle aged guy who always wore a ball cap and had one of the deepest voices I have ever heard. He didn’t talk, he bellowed. On afternoon and graveyard shifts Ernie would bring his stamp collection to work. I remember him dipping the stamps into a plastic bowl of water using tweezers. The stamp thing could distract Ernie from keeping an eye on the gauges on the panel that controlled the flow of the pulp mush. A few times they had to shut down the operation for a few hours and I thought at the time it was because he had screwed up. It didn’t bother me. Hosing pulp down a sewer was a nice way to spend a shift. Ernie was the guy who told me about the tsunamis that had come up the Sowmass River to Port Alberni in the 1960s that wiped out a number of houses.

Another operator I worked with was a guy from Montreal who had been in the US Marines. He told me about being in the Philippines or somewhere like that on a survival kind of thing and how they threw rocks at the monkeys and the return fire was coconuts. He also told me about being a guard in a military prison and being beat up by the inmates and ending up in the hospital after he was caught on the inside during a lockdown.

There was an operator who was from Calgary that I absolutely couldn’t stand. He was constantly talking about what a “real man”was. He could be quite derogatory. He enjoyed the power he had over me. I remember him telling me a story about how he had gone into a hardware store and wasn’t getting the help he wanted from a young guy so he told the young guy to get him a “real man”. What an asshole!

The guy I liked working with the best was a guy named Don. I was quite impressed with his ability to do the New York Times Sunday crosswords. He was a really bright guy. Don introduced me to early morning beer drinking. Back then the taverns opened at 9 a.m. and Don liked to have a pint or two every now and then after completing a graveyard shift.

Sometimes the operator would have a radio on during a shift. Particularly at night when things were less busy and senior supervisory staff weren't around as much. One song that I couldn't get out of my mind was The Night Chicago Died. Other tunes from that year were Tin Man, Hooked On A Feeling, Cat's In The Cradle, I Shot The Sheriff, Bennie And The Jets, Feel Like Making Love, Ricky Don't Lose That Number, and Midnight At The Oasis.

Working the graveyard shift in a pulp mill was both eerie and mysterious. The main goal in this shift was just to keep things running. Once in a while I would take a walk around the site. I remember standing on the dock and seeing these giant rolls of newsprint that had Van Nuys, California stenciled on them. The rolls would be taken by barge up the Somass River and down the coast to California. I remember the lights from the mill flickering upon the water. I also remember the sounds of unseen motors whirring away in the darkness. 3 a.m in a pulp mill is spooky.

So what was Port Alberni like back in 1974? For starters it had the 3rd highest per capita income in Canada at the time. The pulp mill was running 3 shifts a day. Things were good. It was quite common to see a Corvette or some other flashy sports car parked in a driveway. Young guys would often get summer jobs at the mill through their dads who worked there and between the decent wages and not having to pay rent at home a shiney new car was a possible goal.

At the top of the hill stood the Woodward's Department Store. (Similar to The Bay or Eaton's) They also had a large grocery deparment. The 1950s group, The Platters, made an appearance that summer at the original Barclay Hotel. (I'm not sure if it burned down or was demolished years later.) The Exorcist and The Sting played at the local movie theatre. (Not the new one that was built years later.)  If there was going to be a strike mosr preferred the fall hunting season as the time to do it.

I believe I started working at the mill in February. I pretty well mostly hung out with the couple I was living with.
We would have a few beers every now and then and even though this was the peak of the hippy era, for whatever reason we didn't get into smoking pot. As the weather warmed up we would sometimes go out to Sproat Lake a few miles away for a swim. Sproat Lake is the home of the large Mars water bombing planes that have helped fight California's brush fires numerous times. We never made it out to Long Beach that year and that may have been due to the questionable reliability of the Isizu Ballet.

Sproat Lake.

One weekend the Columbian guy and his wife invited me to go swimming with them to a place by Nanaimo called the Jinglepot potholes. It was where the old Jinglepot coal mines had been located. What they didn't tell me beforehand was that where we were going was a nudist hangout. It took me a few minutes to become somewhat comfortable without clothes on with my roommates. The wife offered me some Noxema to protect my privates from the sun and I was good to go. Some guy up on a ledge started playing a flute on the whole scene seemed a bit surreal. I had images in my mind of Greek satyrs (goat boys) for some reason.

 

At the end of the summer my roommates sold their Isizu and bought a van and headed off to South America. It seemed like a risky thing to do at the time but they managed to make it there and back in one piece. I still have some bronze looking bookends that they gave me when I next saw them several months later.

  

 

 

 

Rooming house in Port Alberni.

I had to find another place to live and managed to get a room in a rooming house. The guy who owned the house worked for Household Finance (remember them?). He was kind of full of himself and gave the impression that he had it made at HFC. He had a divorced girlfriend with a kid who was kind of demanding. Sometimes she would phone and ask for him and I would make out like I didn’t recognize who she was asking for. Just before I left a couple of guys came around to the rooming house. They repoed the Household Finance guy’s car and slapped some kind of court order on the house. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

I became friends with one of the other tenants who was a steamfitter in the mill and was about my age. He later moved down to Victoria to take some university courses. I hitchhiked down to see him a few times and he was sharing a house on the waterfront in Oak Bay with some other students. The house is no longer there but I would guess the property today is probably worth about 3 million bucks.

On one of those trips to Victoria I got a lift from an old guy who told me an amazing story. He said that he had been working in the coal mines near Nanaimo around 1915 and that there were a lot of strikes. The mining companies would hire strike breakers who would beat up the union guys fairly frequently. The old guy’s younger brother became a target and fearing for his life he took off to Australia. They never saw one another again.

One day I decided to bike up to Mount Arrowsmith. I took the highway up the huge hill until I came to the dirt road that led to the mountain. I ditched the bike in some bushes and started hiking. I stopped to take a break and was taken aback by some very strange birds that seemed to have no fear of humans and came within a few feet of me. I later learned that they are called Moose Birds and are part of the jay family. I kind of lost track of the time and suddenly realized that it was getting dark fast. Fortunately, I found a small unoccupied cabin and lit myself a fire in the stove. I ended up spending the night there.

I think it was sometime in late November that I inserted my last time card into the time clock thing at the mill. I had done my time. I had saved enough to buy a car. I flew back east and bought a 1968 Ford Falcon and drove it back out to BC. It wasn’t the last time I would see Port Alberni.

Car Insurance for my first car, a 1968 Ford Falcon.

A year or so later I made a sales call on the mill for a company I was working for out of Victoria, BC. I had told a few guys at the mill that I planned on getting into sales. I had the feeling that they never really cared about hearing that kind of stuff. It kind of went against the grain for those that believed in the comradery of being one of the “lifers”. I was always an outsider at the mill.

Later on I was working in Vancouver as a sales rep and invited my old friend Don out for a beer one weekend when I was in Port Alberni. Don had a bit of a twisted sense of humour and brought along a guy we worked with who was from Alberta and who I really disliked. Sure enough, the other guy got a bit insulting after a few beers and I could see old Don was enjoying it all. The conversation came pretty close to a fight happening but it didn’t. I rented a boat that weekend and went Salmon fishing in the Somass River. The fish were jumping out of the water all over the place but I never managed to catch one.

Over the next number of years I would pass through Port Alberni on the way out to Long Beach. For a few years my kids and I would spend a week in the summer camping out there. We always stopped in Port Alberni on the way home at the Dairy Queen. By this time we had had enough of campfire food. About 7 years ago my son played in a weekend hockey tournament in Port Alberni. He had little interest in seeing where I had lived in the town years ago or hearing my stories. I guess that's to be expected from a 17 year old.

Port Alberni has seen some very hard times over the last 20-30 years. The forestry industry has diminished drastically. Nowadays the town is more of a mixed economy that includes tourism. It is also an affordable area to retire to with lots of outdoor activities available.

Last fall we were poking around Port Alberni and Mount Arrowsmith on a Sunday drive and I decided to check out the old pulp mill. I parked my car near the administrative buildings and some guy with a red vest came out and asked if he could help me. I told him I was looking for a plaque that used to be on one of the buildings that described how the first mill in the area that produced a paper type of product was one that used old rags imported from the UK and not trees. We also learned that the mill now employed a fraction of the people it used to and that a number of years ago the paper making equipment was dismantled and shipped off somewhere. It was probably sent to the US or China. We also learned that old Don had retired in the past year.

We found a monument that was made from the original grinding stones that had been imported from Scotland in the 1890s. Unfortunately the monument is located in an area that tourists or even the locals will ever see.

Original mill grinding wheels.

 

You can tell the town is struggling. There are quite a number of empty storefronts. A few years ago they built a pier with a number of small shops and cafes but it is kind of out of the way from tourists headed out to Long Beach. For a number of years there was a boat that took people up the Sowmass River for day cruises. The boat was called the Lady Rose. After 70 years of service it is no longer in operation.
 

Photos of pier area

I remember Port Alberni as town of hard working people. Times certainly have changed but here’s hoping things get better. It is well worth visiting if you are in the area.

 

 

Toronto 1970-1972

The first time I ever visited Toronto was in the summer of 1966. Growing up in Montreal I had heard a lot of things about the city of Toronto, that it was the kind of the center of Canada for all things English, that it was growing rapidly and a lot of Canadian head offices were located there, and that it was the home of the Toronto Maple Leafs hockey team. For years, on many Saturday nights, I had heard the nasally voice of Foster Hewitt greeting hockey fans from across Canada with “ Hello hockey fans across Canada and the United States….from high atop the gondola in Maple Leaf Gardens…”

One day I decided to just go and see what Toronto was about and decided to hitchhike there. My guess is the trip along the 401 Highway that connects Toronto and Montreal took about 10 hours. I arrived late in the afternoon and was dropped off on Front Street near the Union train station. The Royal York hotel was across the street. I didn’t have much money in my pockets and there was never any consideration of paying for a hotel room for the night.

The Royal York Hotel and Union Station in the front of it.

I saw the newly built Nathan Phillips city hall with its two curved buildings. A bit later I found myself on Yonge Street and saw the endless neon signs that were now lit up as it was now dark out. It reminded me of St. Catherine Street in Montreal. I think I asked someone on the street how to get back to the 401 highway and was told it was quite a few miles north. I was starting to get tired and was trying to figure out where I could find a place to catch a few hours of sleep. I ducked into a three or four story older apartment building and stretched out the floor of a service stairway landing and managed to get several hours of shut eye. At around 6 the following morning I continued the long walk north on Yonge Street to the 401 and got a lift back to Montreal.

My next visits to Toronto were fairly frequent, starting in the summer of 1967 through the early months of 1968. I was working for CN as a waiter on the trains. The crew stayed at The Walker House Hotel which was right next to Union Station.  We were never in town long enough to do any exploring of the city. Now and then I would grab a beer at the hotel with some of crew before bed. I didn’t make it back to Toronto for about 3 years.

I hitchhiked out to Edmonton and Vancouver in 1970. I really didn’t have much of a plan and after some time out on the coast I decided to head back to Montreal. During this trip I had my only experience of riding on a freight train, on the third diesel. The noise was deafening. A guy about my age outside of an RCMP office talked me into it. We later learned that there had been a washout somewhere and the train we were on wasn’t going to be taking us any further very soon. I ended up crashing at this guy’s parent’s place in Orillia for a few days.

I headed south to Toronto and one the lifts left me in the downtown business sector of the city close to Bay Street. What now? It was a crisp fall night in mid-October and about 8 p.m. I remembered that an old high school friend was living in Toronto and decided to give him a phone call. I had no idea at the time that I would be spending the best part of the next 2 years in the city.

I had hung around with my friend from high school for a year or two after high school before the company he was working for transferred him to the Bahamas. He spent about two years in the tropics chasing women and visiting the casino before being transferred to Toronto. He used to have a casino chip attached to his key chain and once showed me a threatening letter for an unpaid debt at the casino in Nassau.  Back in the post high school days I had been a guest of his a number of times at a ski cabin he was member of in St. Sauveur, Quebec and we spent a number of weekend nights hanging around a folk singing club called the Café Andre in Montreal.

That first night we caught up on what we had been up to over the past few years. There was never any mistaking the fact that I had been living a totally different lifestyle than these two guys. For starters they both had permanent jobs and owned cars. After staying with these guys for a few days I was asked if I wanted to move in on a more permanent basis. After a few months of sleeping on the couch, I graduated to a single bed in the dining room area.

The two roommates never seemed to have a lot in common other than that they were both from Montreal and had mutual friends. Sharing an apartment seemed to be mostly about economics . They were also both avid golfers. I spent most of my time with the guy who had lived in the Bahamas. He knew that I was pretty well always up for anything and hanging out in bars was right up my alley. The other guy was more set in his ways. He had been married and had a young son by his former wife in Montreal. About once a month he would drive down to Montreal to see his kid.  He also became involved with a gal who was about 10 years older than him. He wasn’t much for carousing like us other two. He had a job at a nearby Canadian Tire store that his uncle owned running the sporting goods department. He was also on the frugal side and one of the few people I knew then who bought cigarettes by the carton in order to save a bit of money.

Shortly after I moved in I got a phone call from the guy I had ridden a third diesel with and he told me he was in Toronto. He kind of reminded me of the John Voight character in Midnight Cowboy, a good looking dude without a lot of smarts. I invited him for dinner and we went to pick him up. On the way home we stopped at a supermarket . He told us not to worry about buying any steaks. When we got back to the car we learned that he had stuffed some prime packages of meat inside his coat. I ran into him a few years later on the main drag in Banff, Alberta.

About a month after I moved in a bunch of people came up to Toronto from Montreal for the Grey Cup.  A number of them crashed in the apartment and I had to explain to one of them that I had dibs on the couch. (Miss Grey Cup that year was Nancy Durrell who lived across the street from me in Montreal for a few years. She walked out onto the football field in Toronto arm in arm with Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Her older brother Jim was one of my first friends in life and later became the mayor of Ottawa and president of the Ottawa Senators hockey club. He was recently awarded the Order of Canada.)

Pierre Trudeau and Nancy Durrell.

In the close to 2 years I spent living in Toronto (1970-1972) the hippy culture was in full swing and it had an influence on a lot of people who weren’t just hanging around doing nothing. On people who actually had jobs. The roommate I spent the most time with had shoulder length hair and a droopy mustache at the time which had no negative reaction to his performance as a sales representative. It was kind of interesting back then how the hippie counterculture influenced even conservative middle aged men. Even they were wearing bell bottoms and you might very well see 50 year old man with a brush cut and sideburns.

Up to this point I had only smoked pot about 3 times back in Montreal a few years earlier. I soon learned that the droopy mustache guy was into smoking pot several times a week. Also hash. We were stoned quite a lot of the time. In fact, he had a sometimes girlfriend that worked for the RCMP who was into smoking weed. We usually bought the stuff in a high rise apartment building in downtown Toronto called Rochdale that was crawling with hippies. I remember the distrustful looks we got when we walked into the lobby with ties on and the supplier nervously fumbling with his scales and the baggies in his one room apartment.

I got a job at a company called Irwin Toy on Hannah Street off of Spadina Avenue on the eastern side of downtown Toronto. They made toys like lawn darts, Jim Dandy lawn swings, and frisbees. Luckily for me, the company was located just a few blocks from where my roommate worked and I got a lift back and forth each day.

Old Irwin Toy building.

Often we would hit a bar on the way home. For a number of months we frequented a nightclub called The Coal Bin that had a free smorgasbord. One night I was in this joint alone and pulled off what some might call a nasty thing. I was invited over to a nearby table by a group of folks who were out for the night. I hit it off with a good looking gal and asked the group if they were interested in going to a house party in North Toronto that some people I knew from Montreal were having. They liked the idea and I asked the gal I was interested in if she would like to dance before we left. Long story short, she turned out to have really, really fat legs. There was no turning back I thought. We drove through a snowstorm for about an hour before arriving at the house party. Someone in the car said something about not knowing anyone at the party and did I really think it was OK for me to invite them. To be honest, I didn’t want to be seen with the gal with the heavy legs. I thought for a moment and then I did the dastardly deed. I said “You are probably right. You might be uncomfortable. Thanks for the lift.” and got out the car. I was a real prick.

Another place we hung out at after work was a place called Flannigan’s in the Holiday Inn closer to home. An Irish comedian told one filthy joke after another and the patrons were almost rolling on the floor with laughter. The beer was served in pitchers. One night I threw up in the lobby on my way to the washroom and went back to my seat and drank some more. Oh to be young again like that!

We bought a poster that was a picture of three prisoners holding a birthday cake that said “Fuck You Warden” on it and taped it on the wall over the living room couch which had a floral pattern and probably part of the settlement in the other roommate’s divorce.

As I said we were stoned quite a lot of the time. I remember a lot of the music we played back then. Neil Young’s “Harvest”, Janis Joplin, George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord”, Iron Butterfly’s “In La Gada La Vida” (my heart felt like it was going to burst), a lot of Moody Blues stuff (very trippy). We also listened to Cheech and Chong (“Dave’s not here!”).

Iron Butterfly.

 

 

Cheech & Chong

A typical Friday or Saturday night involved getting toked up at home and then heading downtown via the Don Valley Parkway. I’ll never forget being half out of my mind stoned and seeing the lights on the guardrails go by about 2 feet from the window and wondering how my roommate could keep his shit together navigating his Camaro.

We hung out in a pub on Jarvis street for a few months and then discovered a disco called The Studio that I think was part of the downtown Holiday Inn. This place is one I would rate as one of the all- time pick up joints. I could say that I was my roommate’s point man but that wouldn’t be true. He did it all on his lonesome. He was so good at it he could make eye contact with a gal across the room and moments later she would be standing beside him.  For some reason he had a picture of a rooster over his bed. Occasionally he would go skirt chasing on his own or with another friend and the telltale sign that he shouldn’t be disturbed in his room was if there was a foreign pair of women’s boots near the front door the next morning.

I, on the other hand, didn’t have that much luck with women at the time. I wasn’t exactly Mr. Independent .  I often didn’t have a job and lacked my own transportation. I do remember one night when we both picked up a couple of nurses at a club near a hospital. Another guy at our table was plotting which one of the gals he was going to take home and seemed a bit surprised when I aced him out.

For some reason, we decided to buy a gerbil one day when we were in a mall. I named him Munroe after the giant rat in one of the Monty Python shows that we regularly watched. We built Munroe a rather elaborate cage and bought a mate for him. The little buggers spent hours gnawing away on the metal mesh on the cage and broke out of their jail more than once. Somehow they found a hole in the wall beneath the base heaters and lived in there for a time only coming out to find food. They are really fast little critters and very hard to nab. We worked out a plan to catch them that worked. My roommate had a wooden “fickle finger of fate” (from Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In TV show) and we tied a string around the forefinger while resting a cooking pot on it. We then sprinkled some gerbil food under the pot. Eventually the little guys came out to eat and the string was yanked from the couch trapping them under the pot. Oh yeah. They also bred. And they also eat their young if they aren’t happy in their environment. We found a few legs but the heads and torsos were gone. Eventually the gerbils ended up at the other roommate’s girlfriend’s house.

Rowan & Martin

The other roommate didn’t smoke pot at all and mostly just shook his head when he came home and saw us with our eyes glazed. He had a pretty good sense of humour. One night we formed a plan to freak the other roommate out. We knew approximately what time he was expected home. We were sitting on the couch in the living room in our skivvies at the time. As soon as we heard the door open we got into position and wrapped our arms and legs around each other and acted like we were ready to kiss each other. The look on the other roommate’s face was priceless.

Somewhere along the line I was given a nickname. CT, the initials for my 1^st and 2^nd name.

Over the next year and a half or so we would get together with some other ex-Montrealers  and play golf. For a number of years there was a kind of annual tournament. I remember seeing a friend of the skirt chasing roommate throwing a golf ball over some trees onto the green. I was never that comfortable about seeing people I knew from high school in Toronto. It just seemed kind of surreal to me, kind of like moving a cast of characters to a totally different locale like the Star Trek guys dressed up as gangsters or something like that.

We saw a few of the Mohammad Ali fights on a big screen at Maple Leaf Gardens. I recall the one with Joe Frazier particularly. One of my roommates had an in with a guy who worked at or near the Hot Stove club and we got in for free by walking in that entrance.

I quit the job at Irwin Toy. I never seemed to be able to make it into work on Monday mornings.  I got a job at King Optical selling eyeglasses. I quit that too. Then I got a job in the dispatch office for Atlas Van Lines which was right next to a mushroom growing plant. I can still recall the stench and the mass of flies on the walk back home.

One day I saw an ad in the newspaper looking for summer staff at the Banff Springs Hotel. I had done some waiting on tables on the trains a few years before and this looked like it could be fun. I went down to the Royal York Hotel for an interview and was told I was going to be hired. I never heard anything more about the job in Banff and kind of wrote the whole thing off as a missed opportunity.

As fate would have it we were playing golf one weekend in early June in Toronto and one of the guys we were playing with was a Canadian Pacific personnel administrator.  I told him my little story and the long and the short of it is that I ended up working at the Banff Springs Hotel for the summer.

I kind of considered Toronto kind of my home at that point and when I flew back east from Calgary that fall I moved back in.

We would go down to Montreal about every two months. Sometimes I went with one roommate and other times with the other. We often ended up at the Winston Churchill Pub on Crescent Street. One weekend the roommate with the kid in Montreal invited me to stay at his family’s country place in Vermont.  Apparently he hadn’t told his parents. I remember overhearing his father from the lobby of their house in Montreal inquiring of my roommate if I had a family of my own to visit. It was a kind of uncomfortable weekend for me knowing that I wasn’t exactly warmly welcomed.

In the winter of the next year I took off to Jasper for a few months. When I got back to Toronto my roommates informed me that they were going to rent a penthouse together (Woodbine and O’Connor) and that I was going to have to find somewhere else to live. I wasn’t disappointed. They both had steady jobs and I was a bit of a rover. It was time to move on.

I found a room in downtown Toronto. I think it was around St. Clair and Yonge Streets. My room was half of an attic. It was an old wooden house with some strange tenants.  One of them was an older fat guy with swollen ankles and a drinking problem. He claimed to have been a roommate of Norman Mailer at one time. The house didn’t have a kitchen but every room had a hot plate. A Vietnamese couple cooked up some stuff that almost made me gag. Some of the other inhabitants were students.

I needed some kind of job to support myself and gravitated back to waiting on tables. Over several months I worked at 3-4 different places, the oddest of which was a private club called the Primrose Club that was exclusively Jewish. A German guy in his forties was my boss. He was pretty subservient to the Jewish members and the thought crossed my mind that he must of had some guilt about the Second World War. I worked as a server/bartender in a little area off of where the poker tables were. There were a few phone booths close by where some of the members would place their bets with the bookies.  There was a buzzer kind of thing that hung on a wire from the ceiling in the poker room. Occasionally I would be summoned by the buzzer to perform some task like picking up a piece of Kleenex off of the floor. I also made sandwiches for the patrons. I had never felt a cow’s tongue before. Kind od sandpapery.  I hated the place. The real kicker was one night when I was asked to stand outside the downstairs door to the dining room. The reason I was to be positioned there was to be on the lookout for someone leaving a parcel bomb on the doorstep. As politely as I could, just before quitting, I told them that if someone was to leave a parcel on their doorstep I would be at the end of the block in a nanosecond. My life was worth more than a few bucks an hour.

I moved on to the Ports of Call restaurant on Yonge Street. The restaurant had a sign outside that revolved and I think it had a sailor sitting on a barrel with a mermaid on his knee. I think?  All of the waiters were Greek and they made no bones about not being happy about having a non-Greek working with them. I would describe them as sleazy characters.  They used to talk about “snowballs” and it took me a while to figure out what they were talking about. “Snowballs” meant adding a little zero on top of another zero to make it look like an 8 on the tip section of the credit card bill. They all deserved a good punch in the mouth. It was at the Ports Of Call where I saw a number of the Canada-Russia hockey summit games and Paul Henderson’s big goal. Farley Mowatt, the Canadian writer turned up at the restaurant one night.

Russia-Canada hockey summit 1972.

My last job in Toronto was as a waiter at the brand new Four Seasons Sheraton Hotel. The hotel claimed to have the longest bar in North America.  It was quite a fancy place and we all wore tuxes. They had plates with pictures of the Ontario parliament buildings on them. I remember an Italian waiter who had a skin problem and claimed he had to wear white socks. Not exactly a compliment to the black tux. He was given the heave ho. I worked with a guy from France who I really enjoyed. He was what they call in fancy restaurants, a captain. I remember another waiter giving me the gears one time and the French guy telling him to F off with his delightful accent. I served Cat Steven’s back-up band breakfast one morning.

 

Whenever I had an excess of cash I would check out the local nightclub scene.One place I went to a few times was The Nicklodeon.  Ronnie Hawkins was the entertainment.  I once bet a gal that he was American and had it confirmed by the Hawk himself. I know the guy was pretty savvy in hiring musicians (The Band) but he never really seemed to be a hit maker.

The Hawk

 

A month or two after the hockey series there was a family tragedy and I moved back to Montreal for a few months to help out. I didn’t know it at the time but it was the end of my living in Toronto.  The west was to be my future home. I kind of knew that it would be, even back then. Coming from Montreal, Vancouver always seemed to offer a lot more to me than Toronto.

In the past 40 years I’ve visited Toronto several times. I had a friend who owned a house in Islington that I stayed at a few times. I met him in Banff and we once spent a month in the early 70s skiing in the western US. He told me stories about growing up in TO including working as a lifeguard at the beaches. He became a world traveller but even after being away for months at a time Toronto was still his home base.  As the years went by our lifestyles became more and more different and I imagine he is still roaming the globe.

I stayed in touch with one of my roommates for a number of years with large gaps between the times we talked. Occasionally he would be out in Vancouver on business. I had lunch with the other roommate at Ed Mirvish’s  Warehouse in Toronto about  20 or so years ago.

I went to the former pot smoking roommate’s 60^th birthday at a Keg restaurant in Richmond, BC about 6 years ago, along with a few other guys from high school who  were living on the west coast. He wasn’t into having a chat about those days long ago when we were stoned quite often. There were some other things that were not to be discussed and I thought to myself that after all these years what we had in common was very little. I haven’t talked to him since.

He did say something on one trip to Vancouver that left an impact on me. Actually he had said the same thing more or less years before. The essence of what he said was that he thought with all the travelling around I did when I was younger and all the things I had done that I had lived a life with 3 times more full than he had.  I considered that to be quite a compliment.

As far as Toronto goes it always seemed to have a kind of coldness about it to me. Too many high rise apartments close to the freeways, old people walking through underpasses carrying grocery bags, endless miles of office buildings and manufacturing plants, the back-ups on the highways and the constant lane changing in the rear view mirror. Perhaps like a lot of other Canadians I resented the place as it being the center of commerce in Canada. I guess it just wasn’t my cup of tea.

Whistler, BC

It’s about 4 p.m. on a bright sunny day in the spring. You’ve had about 6 or 7 good runs. You took a break for lunch at the crowded Roundhouse. You saw people sunning themselves outside the restaurant perched on hay bales. The air is pure and you feel both refreshed and a bit tired at the same time. You can feel the warmth of the reddened skin on your face. It has been a good day. Everyone you see seems to be enjoying themselves. All is right with the world for the moment. It is time for that one last run, the one that will take you right to the bottom of the mountain. As you make your way down the road that is the ski out you follow the gradual turns and notice the shadows of the evergreen trees. You are just minutes away. You know what to expect when you get to the bottom. The cool dudes and gals with their sunglasses are having a few cool ones outside of the Longhorn Pub watching the skiers as they make a few esses to slow themselves down and then there is that one last sharp cut that makes the snow or slush fly like a final touch to a glorious day. You ARE too cool for school!

The first time I ever set foot in Whistler was about 40 years ago in the winter of 1973. A friend I had met in Banff the previous winter who was from Toronto was out in Vancouver for a visit and we decided to check out the slopes 80 miles north. The road up to Whistler was pretty treacherous and it would be years before they really got serious about fixing the highway in preparation for the 2010 Olympics.

 

 

 

Back then most people were day skiers. By that I mean very few people stayed overnight. They would get on the road shortly after daybreak, drive for about 2-1/2 hours, on the hills by about 11:00 a.m., get in a half dozen runs or so, stop in somewhere for a couple of pints, head back to Vancouver as the darkness of night approached.

It was the real diehard skiers who owned or shared ski cabins back then. In later years some of them struck it rich when property values went through the roof.

We stayed at the Christiana Inn on that first trip. I remember that the room was very cold and there was frost on the floor by the windows. The window curtains were discoloured. The only other hotel I can recall at Whistler was the Highland Lodge. We skied for two days. There wasn’t much in the way of nightlife back then. The Boot (or Ski Boot?) was kind of wild and woolly place. A lot of the locals who worked on the lifts hung around there. The only other drinking spots that I can recall were two other joints, one that was kind of a cocktail bar around the corner from the Husky gas station that I think was called PJ’s and there was another place called Après Ski that was at the foot of the mountain.

The Husky gas station was kind of the center of things back then. I’m not positive but I think this was the spot where the bus from Vancouver dropped their passengers off. The train station was a couple of hundred yards away. Another place of note was Nester’s grocery store a few miles down the road.

I was kind of familiar with ski resorts having spent time working in St. Sauveur, Quebec and Banff and Jasper in Alberta. I was never an avid skier but more of a casual one. Skiing was mostly an every now and then thing for me although I did once go on a ski trip to the US that included Snowbird in Utah, Sun Valley, Idaho and Aspen, Colorado. I never had much style nor did I ever take any lessons. The skis I owned were Fischers. I was never totally comfortable with my ski boots on. They always hurt.

 

One of my early memories of skiing at Whistler is the number of times the chairlift would stop just before the last crest at the end of the line. Usually the stoppage was because someone down below had gotten tangled up trying to get on the chair. Back up at the top the chair would go up and down like a yo-yo for a few minutes. Once that stopped and that thrill was completed there was the long waiting for the chairlift to start up again. Then the cold brisk winds coming over the ridge hit you hard and you just couldn’t wait to get off the damned thing.

Over the next several years I moved around BC a bit and didn’t get back up to Whistler until about 1977. By this time things had changed dramatically. The Sea to Sky Highway (#99) was improved somewhat but it could still be a hairy road. Almost every time I drove up to Whistler I would see a close call in traffic or red flashing police car lights where someone had totalled their car. Mostly these accidents seemed to happen where two lanes merged into one and some goof thought he could squeeze in.

Whistler was starting to look like other more established ski resorts. The new place to hang out at night was the Keg restaurant. The mountain had a really long ski out. Sometimes it could get pretty slushy at the bottom of the hill and a few poor souls did a face plant in the icy slush.

Ski cabin shenanagans.

The land rush was on. New resorts opened up. Sharing a cabin with 20 or so other folks became more and more popular. The “Village” was still a few years away. I got married in 1981 and my wife at the time had been a cabin member previously at Whistler so we coughed up the fee for the winter season. We were living on Bowen Island at the time and for some reason or another we only used the cabin twice that winter. It wasn’t exactly a good investment.

A couple we knew bought a chalet near Alta Lake. I think they got the place for a steal as the previous owner was a lottery winner who was running out of funds. One summer weekend when we were up there for a weekend by ourselves I built the owners a coffee table. I wonder if it is still intact or was put to good use in the fireplace. I remember the owner of the chalet renting his place out for the summer and not being able to get the tenants out in the fall. Apparently he paid some nearby construction workers in cases of beer to help with eviction.

One summer weekend we were up at the chalet with a bunch of other people we knew and ended up spending the day at a beach on Alta Lake. Somebody had a wind surfer board and I asked if I could use it and was given the OK. I had done some sailing when I was younger but didn’t have much of a clue about how to use a wind surfing board. I ended up at the other end of the lake. I ditched the board and started on the long walk back to the beach. The easiest path was across the new golf course. I was carrying the life vest in my hand when I was approached by a marshal in a golf cart. “Excuse me sir, but are you playing golf?” he said to me with what sounded like a German accent. I thought the life vest might have been a clue. “Would you please leave immediately!” was the next thing he said. When I got back to the beach I found out that a search party had gone looking for me. I can’t recall who recovered the board.

My ex and a couple of pals.

My ex-wife and I skied up at Whistler about 2 or 3 times a year back then. She knew some people who had a lot of cash who were what one might call “the fast crowd”. One guy gave all his friends elaborate looking daggers one Christmas that were used to cut the ends off of champagne bottles. We often hit the disco at night. At the time there was an older guy who dressed himself up in a silver lame suit complete with a cape. He would toss out silver foil wrapped candies to people on the dance floor. Why I have no idea.

We once went to a wedding of a couple of my ex’s friends in Whistler. The wedding was catered by two European guys, Ted and Jan who owned a delicatessen in Whistler. I had met these two guys a few years before when I sold them a cash register for a lunch restaurant they were opening on Howe Street in Vancouver called The Scanwich. It never dawned on me that they were both gay. A number of years later Ted Nebbeling became the mayor of Whistler and went on to be an MLA.

We visited another couple my ex knew that had a chalet a few times. The only reason I am mentioning this is that I left a cigarette burn on their furniture not once but twice. The first time was while holding their baby and my cigarette fell off of the ashtray burning the dining room table. The second time I burned the living room coffee table after getting too stoned in the hot tub.

The last time I skied in my life was in 1987 at Whistler when I was 40 years old. I’m not sure if I quit because I didn’t want to press my luck and break something. I think it was also about the whole production, the long drive to the ski hills, getting the gear out of the car, putting the boots on, trekking hundreds of yards across parking lots to get to the chairlifts with skis over my shoulder, the long ride on the chairlift, the white-out at the top of the hill. Who knows?

Our twins were born in 1989 and even if I wanted to, buggering off to Whistler was out of the question. I’m kind of glad they didn’t get hooked on skiing at a young age because of the costs. My son did get into snowboarding in his mid-teens.

When the kids were about 3 and 4 years of age we took them up to Whistler a number of times in the summer. We stayed at the Lake Placid Lodge a few times. We went for a walk after breakfast one day and I told my ex that I would go and get the car that was parked some distance away. As I was walking back to the car I looked over my shoulder to see where they were and saw a black bear heading straight towards them. The thought crossed my mind that I might have to defend them. Fortunately it was a garbage bear and it past by them as if they weren’t there.

My ex and I split up when the kids were about 5 and over the next several years Whistler was where I would sometimes take them on summer weekends. We usually stayed at the Holiday Inn. We went to The Old Spaghetti Factory one night never to make that mistake again. The kids rang the bell at the top of the rock wall climbing thing and we often rode our bikes around the golf course. To be honest, I prefer Whistler in the summertime.

 

I have a friend who owns a condo in Whistler and I was invited up a few times. I had helped him out along with a sales rep who worked for me on doing some basement work on his house in Vancouver and as a reward he offered his condo gratis for a weekend. The sales rep brought his girlfriend. We got pretty drunk at Buffalo Bill’s one night and I took the liberty of telling my sales rep that he could do better than the girl he was with. I don’t think it went over well. I think New Orleans Is Sinking was playing when I told him.

 

Buffalo Bills became the place I would always end up in in the 1990s. The odd 40-50 year old gal could be found there unlike places like Tommy Africa’s. One winter weekend I brought my kids up to the condo. A deal was made that the guys could go out for the night and my pal’s wife would watch the kids. The next morning I remember taking my kids to a virtual reality kind of place that was very noisy and having about the worst hangover ever. I guess it was the price that had to be paid.

The last time I got really drunk in my life was at Whistler. My friend and I were up by without family and I ordered a round of shooters at Buffalo Bill’s. Nobody seemed into it and I ended up drinking most of them myself. That was 15 years ago and I haven’t been drunk since. On another night I kind of lost track of my friend and only found out that he had been tossed out of Buffalo Bill’s the following morning.

I hadn’t been up to Whistler for about 10 years until a brief visit early last winter in the middle of the week. My friend was doing a few touch ups to his condo and invited us up. Linda had never been to Whistler before. She went off and took a gondola ride on her lonesome. I took a pass on joining her. It was nice to see the snow but for me personally ski towns are now all about the memories of actually skiing and the nightlife. I’m a little too old now for both.

 

Thinking back about spending time in ski resort areas I have mixed thoughts. There is no doubt that the mountains wherever ski hills are located are spectacular. The amenities are always first class. I have always had some admiration for those that seriously enjoy skiing, the folks that just love powder. The way they have formed long friendships with others who are like minded.

Most who work at ski resorts are only in town for a year or two. Kind of like a pit stop in life before they have to get more serious and find a real job. A few decide to stay on permanently and become a part of the community. For many who are just there for a season or two they will never forget the memories of those perfect days and hazy nights.

Having said that, there is to me at least, always a kind of plastic artificialness about ski resorts. There seems to be a lot of posing. It is a place where rich people like to spend time and there are plenty of places that cater to them. If you want to buy some $10,000.00 sculptures or some expensive jewelry or spend a few hundred bucks on dinner or rent a suite for the night for a thousand bucks you won’t have trouble finding these things in most major ski resort towns like Whistler, Banff or Aspen. If you let it, you can become a bit overwhelmed by it all. Different strokes for different folks I guess.

I used to be a bit mystified about how really wealthy people could own property in a place like Banff considering that the town is in a national park. I also remember a number of years ago that almost every store in Banff had Japanese signs in the window when the Japanese economy was humming away and as soon as things went in the dumper for them the signs came down.

Today in Whistler it seems like more than half of the workers in town are Australian. Canadians dream of sandy beaches and bright sunshine in the winter and Australians dream of snow-capped mountains and cold weather I guess. Who knows?

If you don’t already know, Whistler has the longest ski runs in North America. Whistler is also rated at the top as far as ski resorts go. What you might not know is that it is a great place to spend time in the summer. The town has some really great golf courses and whether you are spending time there as a couple or as a family there are a lot of things to do and see.

If you are thinking of visiting Whistler I heartily recommend a condo that my friends Laura and Rory rent out year round at reasonable rates. The place sleeps 7 and is close to everything.

www.yourwhistlerhome.directvacations.com

 

 

As a matter of fact,….if you are looking for an affordable place to stay in Vancouver, minutes away from downtown, Laura and Rory rent out a very comfortable basement suite. They also rent out a gorgeous waterfront chalet on Lake Okananagan complete with a boat dock.

Tell them Colin sent you.