The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

The CBC, Jian Ghomeshi, George Stromboulopooulos, Sun News and Ezra Levant

CBC Television

CBC Televison (the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) began operations in 1952. It is federally funded by the Canadian taxpayer although it does receive some revenue through advertising. It receives a little over 1 billion dollars annually in federal funding and current advertising revenues are about 300 million. This latter figure is expected to decrease dramatically due to the CBC losing any broadcasting rights to any NHL hockey games. Together CBC Television and CBC Radio employ about 6,000 Canadians.

Canada, with a population of about 34 million people, is not a flag waving country like the US is. It isn’t that Canadians aren’t proud of their country, they are, but there aren’t a lot of things that tie us together. Canadian history hasn’t been glorified like it has been in some other countries.

In a lot of ways Canadians have been Americanized. There are Wal-Marts and MacDonalds in almost every city large or small. We watch a lot of American television. Most of us live within a few hundred miles of the American border.

Over the last several decades we have seen our large department stores like Eaton’s and Woodward’s disappear. Our big beer breweries like Molson’s, Labatt’s and Sleeman’s are now foreign owned. The most popular beers sold in Canada are now Budweiser and Coors Light. Canada is a country that is more Tim Hortons than Starbucks. Tim’s has become the morning meeting place for many people in small towns across Canada over the last number of years. Tom Hortons was recently sold to Brazilian concern for something like 16 billion dollars.

 

Canada doesn’t even have complete control of its vast oil resources. Countries like the US, France, the UK, China, Korea, and Norway have big investments in the province of Alberta’s tar sands. The proposed Keystone pipeline from Alberta to Texas isn’t about Canada selling crude oil for the US domestic market. It is about Texas refineries exporting the oil to other countries.

Well at least we have Canadian Tire and Home Hardware that are Canadian owned some might say. Yes they are but almost everything sold in these stores is made in China or some other foreign country.

That’s just the way it is.

 

There isn’t a lot left that we can truly identify with as being Canadian. The one thing that has remained constant in identifying ourselves as Canadians is the CBC. Almost everything about the CBC is about being a Canadian. It is the only place where we are totally represented. In a lot of ways the CBC is our history. It is our institution. We might have other things that we like to watch on TV on other stations but for many of us there is a comfort in knowing that the CBC is there if we want to see or hear Canadian stuff.

The CBC has always been a haven for Canadian talent, about the only place in Canada where actors, writers, and directors could make a living without having to try their luck in the US. The other Canadian TV networks like CTV, Global, and City don’t produce comedy or drama programs. The only investigative reporting series I can think of on Canadian television that isn’t on CBC is CTV’s W5. In my opinion the other Canadian TV networks can’t hold a candle to CBC’s news reporting, particularly international news. The other Canadian networks show programs that originate at American networks NBC, CBS, and ABC.

CBC Television has a wonderful history. Granted some younger Canadians and newer Canadians aren’t that aware of that history but if you grew up in the 50s or 60s you probably have a number of good memories of those early days at the CBC.

CBC has always tried to provide something for everyone. Here is just a short list of some of the stuff that has turned up on CBC TV in the last 60 years.

Maggie, Muggins, Chez Helene, The Friendly Giant (27 years), Mr. Dress Up (29 Years), Tommy Hunter (30 years), Front Page Challenge (38 years), Wayne and Shuster, Hymn Sing (30 years), Good Rockin’ Tonight, The Nature Of Things, The Plouffe Family, Reach For The Top, Kids In The Hall, The Red Green Show, Da Vinci’s Inquest, The Beachcombers (19 years), This Land, The Kids Of Degrassi Street, Country Hoedown, Anne Of Green Gables, Forest Rangers, Telescope, Man Alive, Corner Gas, Little Mosque On The Prairie, King Of Kensington, Murdoch Mysteries, Rick Mercer Reports, This Hour Has 22 Minutes, Don Messer’s Jubilee, Mr. D, Take 30, Mr. Wizard, Dragon’s Den, Seeing Things, What’s For Dinner?, This Is The Law, Tabloid, This Hour Has Seven Days, Venture, The Passionate Eye, Razzle Dazzle, Danger Bay, Air Farce Live, Heartland, Klahanie, The Irish Rovers, Close Up, On The Road Again (19 years), Wok With Yan, Road To Avonlea, North of 60, Wojeck, and Artic Air.

 

 

 

 

Older Canadians can recall the old curmudgeon Gordon Sinclair Sr. on the quiz show Front Page Challenge asking Canadian Olympic swimmer Elaine Tanner what she did when she had her period and had to swim in a race. We remember Danny Gallivan doing the play by play for the Montreal Canadiens and Foster Hewitt doing the same for the Toronto Maple Leafs on Saturday nights when there were only 6 teams in the NHL. Canadians were split in their loyalties to each team. Some were fans of Detroit because Gordie Howe played there. We remember the Hot Stove segment between periods. From Prince George, British Columbia to Corner Brook, Newfoundland Canada was tuned in.

Canada had things like Expo 67 in Montreal and Expo 86 in Vancouver, the summer Olympic Games in Montreal and the winter Olympic Games in Calgary and Vancouver that brought Canadians together for a short while. Most Canadians who were old enough at the time remember Paul Henderson scoring the winning goal in the Canada-USSR hockey series. These were all temporary events.

Canada has 3 main political parties, The Conservatives who have had power for the past 10 years, The Liberals who The Conservatives replaced, and The New Democratic Party (NDP) who are on the left and have never been in national power. The Conservatives were reelected in 2011 with 39.6% of the popular vote. Over 60% of Canadian voters didn’t vote for them.

The Conservative Party is a lot like the Republican Part in the US. They are for the most part anti-union and aren’t thrilled with things they consider to be socialist. They kind of have a bullseye on the CBC because the CBC has unions and is government funded. They also believe that the CBC leans far to the left.

It shouldn’t be any surprise to those on the right that most creative people in the arts lean to the left. The reality is that CBC Television is pretty middle of the road. If odd behavior or criminality occurs in Canadian politics CBC will report on whoever the culprit is no matter what party they belong to. Comedians often make fun of Canadian Prime Ministers and other politicians. When the Liberals were in power they received ridicule too.

What really seems to piss right wingers off about the CBC is their investigative programs like Marketplace that often exposes business scams and The Passionate Eye which often delves into political and business corruption. Right wing climate change deniers pretty well all hate David Suzuki and his Nature OF Things program which often deals with subjects like pollution.

 

In the last few years, using austerity as the reason, the Conservative federal government has cut the number of employees at the CBC. Some on the right would like to see the CBC totally disappear.  

The cost of the CBC is about a third of 1% of Canada’s annual budget. Being that there is little else that mirrors what Canada is about today I personally think it is money very well spent. It is about the only thing we haven’t given the US the keys to.

CBC Radio (Radio Canada)

 

I can’t say I have ever been a big listener of CBC radio. Through most of my life radio meant listening to music. As an adult it was mostly in the car. As I got older I preferred music from the 50s through the 80s. I found a jazz station at 88.5 in Bellingham, Washington but I couldn’t pick it up all of time.

I knew that CBC Radio had a long history dating back to the 1930s. Prairie farmers often depended on CBC Radio for the weather reports. In WW2 Lorne Greene, who later became the patriarch in the US cowboy TV show Bonanza, often read the news on CBC Radio.

Lorne Greene

Peter Gzowski was the voice of CBC Radio and some think the voice of Canada for about 15 years starting in the early 1980s. His background was writing for Canadian newspapers and magazines. At the age of 26 he was the managing editor of Canada’s MacLean’s Magazine. He was a bright guy who knew a lot about the goings on in Canada. In some ways he was kind of a bridge from the old school guys who wrote and talked about Canada like Pierre Berton.

Foy years Gzowki sat in his studio smoking one cigarette after another while he chatted with anyone he thought represented being a Canadian. He had a very relaxed manner which made him easy to spend time with. He also told a lot of stories about his youth. He died of emphysema at the age of 67 in 2002. He went through a lot of women in his life. He had 5 children with his second wife and another child by another woman who he often didn’t pay child support for.

It turns out that Gzowski was a pretty complicated individual in some other ways. He suffered from alcoholism, depression, and loneliness. It seems that he also exaggerated and fabricated some of his stories. A lot of his depression was about his failure to find success on television. Some have said he was a radio guy and not a TV guy and his inability to make eye contact with his guests on TV was disconcerting.

Peter Gzowski

His CBC morning program “Morningside” had 350,000 listeners daily at its peak. In some ways Gzowski created the niche where many Canadians were willing to tune in Canadian radio in the morning to see what was going on in their country.

Gzowski wasn’t the only personality on CBC Radio back then. A Vancouver born gal named Vicki Gabereau was also an excellent interviewer and her 2 hour daily show at CBC Radio lasted from 1985 to 1997.

Vicki Gabereau

Personally, up until about 5 or 6 years ago I hardly ever tuned in CBC Radio. I kind of came upon it accidentally. It is the station my partner Linda listens to in the car. I got rid of my car (van) a few years ago because it mostly sat in the driveway and was a gas guzzler.

I was a bit surprised to find what a gem CBC Radio really is. More than once I have sat in the car in a supermarket parking lot waiting for one of Stuart McLean’s stories to end. The Debaters is often very funny. Randy Bachman’s Vinyl Tap is excellent. And then of course there was the smooth talking hip Jian Ghomeshi.

Stuart McLean-Vinyl Café

Jian Ghomeshi

Jian Ghomeshi

A lot of people got sucked in by Jian Ghomeshi including me. He was the guy on Canadian radio with the exotic sounding name. My guess is that most of us had to hear his name a number of times before we could properly pronounce it. He was born in London, England and his family who were from Iran originally immigrated to Canada when he was seven. He would later tell his radio audience he loved David Bowie as a teenager and how he wanted to be accepted not as an Iranian immigrant but just another Canadian kid. Music was a big part of his life. We knew that he had once belonged to a Toronto band called Moxy Fruvous that had a cult following mostly in the 1990s.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MeQK7JtLpU



Ghomeshi wasn’t the first or only great interviewer Canada has produced. He was the hip radio guy and his buddy George Stroumboulopoulos was the hip TV guy who also did radio. Between them they had the bases covered when it came to current music genres and social issues. Both were very respected by famous American entertainers who appeared on their shows because they asked questions that were well researched. They both had a similar approach in how they interviewed their guests. Simply ask the guests a good question that required a thoughtful response and then step out of the way.

A number of years before Ghomeshi and Stroumboulopoulos turned up there was another Canadian who was respected for his research on the people he interviewed. His name was Brian Linehan and he mostly interviewed Hollywood movie stars. He had a particular talent for finding depth in the people he talked to. Linehan also had the ability to gain trust in the people he interviewed. You can see a lot of him in the way Jian and George talk to their guests. Linehan died in 2004 of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma at the age of 59 just when Stroumbooulopoulos’s and Ghomeshi’s broadcasting careers were starting to take off. Two guys with non-Anglo Saxon sounding names that were hard to pronounce.

Brian Linahan

So what drew us to Jian Ghomeshi? How did he get so big? He had a great radio voice for starters, a kind of quiet casual way of talking. It was quite obvious he was very bright and knowledgeable about a lot of things that concern many Canadians, particularly social issues. For a lot of his listeners who had jobs and families he was kind of the go to guy as to what was going on in the music business. He was a heavy promoter of Indie Music. If you were an old fart like me you really enjoyed Ghomeshi’s interviews with some of the rock and roll greats from the past.

Aside from his love for popular music Ghomeshi seemed to have a lot of compassion for women’s rights and causes. He was empathetic to environmental concerns and people living in poverty. There was little doubt that his politics leaned to the left. Over the years he built up a lot of loyalty. He seemed like a good person with a good heart.

His interview with actor Billy Bob Thornton became big news in 2009 because Thornton didn’t want to talk about the movies he had made. At the time I thought the whole thing was a lot of bullshit. Big deal I thought. Ghomeshi talked to some guy who was kind of famous who didn’t want to be cooperative. It really didn’t  seem to have any importance or significance.

His audience was huge for radio and his broadcasts were picked up by a number of American radio stations. Even right wing Canadian radio show host Charles Adler admired his communication skills. The future looked very bright for Jian Ghomeshi.

And then….Ghomeshi’s father died in October of this year. The next thing we knew he was taking a leave of absence from his “Q” radio show. It seemed quite understandable in that it was obvious that he was very close to his dad.

A few days later we learned that it wasn’t just a leave of absence. He had been fired by CBC Radio for committing violent acts in his sex life. At first a number of famous Canadian women that knew him stood up for him including Elizabeth May, the leader of Canada’s Green Party, and ex Liberal MP Sheila Copps. They had been sucked in like the rest of us.

Ghomeshi did two things almost right away to defend himself. He sued the CBC for something like 55 million dollars and then used Facebook to tell his side of the story. On Facebook he claimed that he was fired from CBC Radio because of a disgruntled girlfriend who couldn’t handle his rejection of her. He admitted to using physical violence in his relationships with some woman but claimed that it was always consensual. He said that although his sex life might not be everyone’s cup of tea it still wasn’t anyone else’s business including his employers.

For some strange reason Ghomeshi doesn’t seem to understand that physical violence against another person is a criminal act. In fact if physical violence happens involving sex it is rape.

So far 14 women have claimed that Ghomeshi either assaulted or sexually harassed them. 4 of these women have revealed their names. Coming forward is a very difficult thing to do. It isn’t like picking a robber out of a line-up. There is nothing sensational about being a robbery victim. There is something sensational about being sexually involved with a famous man whether consensual or not. My guess is that a number of Ghomeshi’s victims don’t want to see their lives totally disrupted simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

We now know that Ghomeshi showed a tape to his bosses at CBC Radio before he was fired. Reportedly the tape shows a woman Ghomeshi dated with bruising that were caused by his fists. There is also a cell phone text message referring to the woman having a cracked rib.

Without a doubt there was a lot of scrambling to the internet to find out more about Ghomeshi’s background and if there were any indications in his past that signaled the violence in his character.

Probably a lot of us thought Ghomeshi was younger than 47 years of age.

His early music takes don’t tell us an awful lot, David Bowie, The Talking Heads, Rush, fairly typical stuff. Not a lot of women are big fans of Rush.

Rush

Beginning in 1985 he attended York University in Toronto. He graduated with a B.A. in political science and double minored in history and women’s studies. He got involved in university politics. In 1989 he was elected president The York Federation of Students. While president he promised increased funding for the Women’s Centre, supported increased safety for women on campus, and co-founded a pro-choice network.

Looking back now it is kind of hard to understand how a man who claimed to support women’s rights could turn out to be so violent with some of them. I’m not saying that this the case but some manipulative men have used their supposed empathy for women as a way to get them into the sack.

In 1990 Ghomeshi was part of a quartet that formed a band called Moxy Fruvous. The band was kind of a cross between The Bare Naked Ladies and The Nylons. They were pretty good at harmonies. Most of their songs were political satire. They were kind of a college crowd type of band that encouraged their audience to have good time. They had a cult following that called themselves “Fruheads”, many of them were teenagers.

Moxy Fruvous

A few days after Ghomeshi was fired by the CBC and old video turned up on YouTube. It was from 1996 when he was with the band Moxy Frouvous. In the video Ghomeshi sings the following lyrics…All of my fans make me sick/all of my fans are pretty thick/I’d like to beat them with a fucking big stick.

See video here....

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2014/11/02/ghomeshi-video-fans-sick-1996_n_6090862.html

The video says a lot. His audience wasn’t people coming to see Yo Yo Ma play the cello. They were probably not looking for deep messages in his band’s lyrics either. They were kids who wanted to have a good time. More than anything else this video shows that he had sense of superiority and a kind of nonchalance about mentioning violence. The video is creepy in a number of other ways. It shows a complete lack of gratitude to those fans that supported him and an ego that was out of control.

At some point after 12 years with the band and getting on in years Ghomeshi must have figured out that there wasn’t much of a future playing one night stands. His love of music led him to radio and he was wise enough to tone his personality down for a broader audience. He morphed into a non-confrontational low key interviewer.

It now appears that Ghomeshi’s penchant for hitting women dates back to at least 1988. In an informal meeting at York University with about 25 people in attendance 2 women claimed that he had hit them and one woman claimed that he choked her in a stairwell. A few years later at the same campus he grabbed a male student’s crotch. It seems like a pattern was developing where he thought he could get away with various unacceptable things.

Ghomeshi hit the big time in radio by getting the prime slots on CBC Radio in 2007. His program was called Q and aired twice daily on CBC and was picked up by over 170 Public Radio stations in the US.

We now know that through all those years he was having violent sexual encounters with a number of women. Choking, hair pulling, punching, and verbal abuse were all a part of his modus operandi. There is little doubt that he was a predator taking advantage of his fame and that he felt he was above it all because he was “special”.

There is a very small % of women that think sex and violence are compatible. I’m sure there are clubs where this happens but if Ghomeshi had joined one he would have been exposed in no time. If he had just been out there getting laid without the violence nobody would have really cared. You would think that as a logical person he would have figured out after 1 or 2 assaults that very few women shared his fetishes and he could have very well found himself in jail.

So why did he do it?  I think his fame and notoriety made him feel vastly superior. It might have something to do with his family background. Middle Eastern culture often has the man as the superior individual compared to women. It’s hard to say.

One thing that seems to be pretty evident is that he was surrounded by a number of enablers both men and women. Unwanted touching, fondling, and dry humping isn’t acceptable in any office. They are criminal acts and not horseplay. It seems that a number of people he worked with turned a blind eye simply because he was the goose that laid golden eggs.

It is hard to feel any compassion for Ghomeshi. His career is over. Nobody is standing with him anymore. 5 years in jail seems about right, after a trial of course.

I find it interesting that at the same time Ghomeshi has fallen from grace that 77 year old comedy icon Bill Cosby has also lost his reputation because of multiple claims of him committing rape. Together these two have disappointed millions of people. It is really sad.

George Stroumbooulopolous

 

I like George. He is one of the best interviewers ever. I’ve watched him for years. He always seemed like a cool dude. And then it seemed like he started to slip. He introduced a segment to his show where he had a panel of 3 Canadian comedians. They weren’t funny and the segment sucked. Most of us wanted to see him interview somebody interesting not hosting a bad comedy show.

The next thing we knew he was down in the US doing an interview show for CNN. CNN George? About the crappiest News network there is aside from FOX. It must have been about the bucks. After 7 episodes his show ended abruptly and it was back to good old Canada.

By now he had spent a lot of years doing interviews on CBC TV and radio. He was also 42. What else could the boy wonder do that would be interesting for him?

George had long let it be known that he was a big hockey fan and that his team was the Montreal Canadians. In November of 2013 Rogers Communications secured the rights for all NHL hockey games in Canada. The price tag was something like 5 billion dollars. Yippee a lot of us thought. More money for the poorly paid NHL hockey players! (not really). It was a 15 year deal and Rogers promised us we would see hockey in a whole new way.

A whole new way some of us thought? Most of us were quite content with the old way thank you very much. But, but, but we are going to bring George Stromboulopoulos to be the main guy between periods Rogers promised. Oh great! Now we are going to able to find out what Sidney Crosby’s favourite tunes are!

We are only a few months into the new hockey season and we are still getting our head around what Roger’s promised us. You can now watch the NHL on your cell phone while you are on the bus going to that crumby job that doesn’t pay enough for you to ever be able to afford to buy a ticket to a live NHL game. We can now watch George, Nick Kypreos with his 46 goals in 446 NHL games, and ex goalie Kelly Hrudey with more losses than wins in his NHL career stand around in suits with hockey sticks in hand and a goal net in the background discuss the finer points of NHL hockey.

Hockey Night In Canada

And how about the “ref cam”?  It looks kind of cool but it could make you dizzy after a while. Here’s an idea. How about a puck that lights up so the TV audience always knows where the puck is or better still why not call the puck Peter? Does this sound familiar?

So CBC gets to keep hockey on Saturday nights for a few more years but they don’t get any of the revenue. The NHL was the CBC’s biggest source of revenue. Basically what Rogers is doing is bleeding CBC for all it can get. Right now it is using a lot of people CBC groomed over the years. When CBC Television is totally out of hockey Rogers will hire all their best people and those they don’t need will twist in the wind.

By then I guess they feel that we will be all warm and comfy with George and not wonder why things seemed perfectly fine before Rogers went and spent 5 billion dollars on wrecking Hockey Night in Canada. Who knows? Maybe Derek Roy needs a bigger country home?

Hockey will never be the same.

Sun News And Ezra Levant

If we ever doubted that Canada was becoming more and more American, Sun News is a prime example that it is. It is basically a right wing TV network in the same fashion that FOX News is in the US. On Sun News anyone with Liberal beliefs (most Canadians) is one step removed from Joseph Stalin. Any type of socialism is pure evil. (Socialist Tommy Douglas was voted the greatest Canadian ever.) Watching Sun TV (as do about 12,000 Canadians daily) is like watching gloom and doom topped off with fear.

The vice president of the SUN News Network is a guy named Kory Teneycke who was at one point Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s director of communications.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper

The host on Sun News who by far gets the most attention is a piece of work named Ezra Levant. Levant is kind of a point man for the Alberta tar sands and Israel. If you question anything about the environmental damage caused by the tar sands or how Israel deals with the occupied territories Levant will quickly identify you as being un-Canadian or a bigot. Don’t hold your breath waiting for Levant to explain to Canadians what Israel has ever done for Canada. With less than 2% of Canada’s population being Jewish one has to wonder why Israel gets far more attention than the Ukraine. There are a lot more Canadians with Ukrainian heritage than there Jews with an Israeli heritage.

Ezra Levant

Shrinking Palestine.

Alberta tar sands

 

It is very likely that the Conservatives are going to get thrown out of power in the next Canadian election. The man who many expect to replace Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper is Liberal Justin Trudeau. Trudeau’s father Pierre Elliott Trudeau was the prime minister of Canada for 15 years from 1968-1979 and from 1980-1984. When Justin Trudeau was a kid his parents split up after 13 years of marriage.

Pierre Trudeau dated a number of women in his lifetime. He had a romantic relationship with Barbara Sreisand before marrying Margaret Sinclair a few years later. After his divorce he dated actress Morgot Kidder (Lois Lane in the Superman movies). Pierre Trudeau’s wife Margaret suffered from bi-polar depression. In 1991 the elder Trudeau at the age of 71 fathered another child with a woman much younger than him. Pierre Trudeau died in 2000.

Earlier this year Justin Trudeau was involved at a function at a hotel near Toronto. There was wedding going on at the hotel and when Trudeau was spotted by the wedding party he was asked to pose in a picture with them. He kissed the bride on the cheek. The whole episode was harmless.

Justin Trudeau kissing bride on cheek.

Ezra Levant decided to turn this brief encounter into a Trudeau bashing rant. He accused Trudeau of forcing himself on a bride half his age. And then he went after Trudeau’s mother and father. He said that Trudeau’s mother didn’t like to wear panties back in the 70s. He called Trudeau’s father a slut. No elected Conservatives made any objections to Levant’s vile rant.

When I heard Levant’s rant I had a few thoughts aside from what a disgusting human being Levant is. Most Canadians, and Americans too for that matter, have had sex outside of marriage. Are they all sluts too? And what about Canada’s Conservative defense minister Peter MacKay and his dalliances with a number of women before he got married? Would Levant call him a slut also?

Peter MacKay and Belinda Stronach

This past November 11^th, Remembrance Day, Levant took it upon himself to condemn the Ontario school board over a memo they had sent out about students attending Remembrance Day ceremonies.

Levant claimed that the memo exempted Muslims from attending ceremonies on November 11^th. It was a big lie on his part. What he was obviously doing was fanning the flames of prejudice towards Muslims.

Levant has been sued a number of times for making false statements. Sun News has had to apologize more than once for his on-air statements.

In October of this year a storefront mosque in a town called Cold Lake in the province of Alberta was spray painted with words like “Go home!” Alberta is the most conservative area in Canada. Cold Lake is a military base. Local residents got together and cleaned up the spray painting.

 

I think I know the answer if most Canadians were asked what kind of country they would prefer, one where bigotry and disgusting allegations are common place or one where people have a tolerance for others with different religious beliefs.

The next federal election can’t come soon enough!

 

 

The Starbucks Experience

My first encounter with Starbucks.

There is a heritage building in downtown Vancouver that faces the city’s waterfront. For many years it was the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) passenger train station. It was built in 1914. By the 1970s long distance travel by train in Canada had lost a lot of its appeal and in 1979 the last scheduled passenger train left the CPR station. After that all passenger trains coming to Vancouver went to the CN station (Pacific Central Station) on Main Street.

In February of 1968 I took the train across Canada to Vancouver and I can still remember my first day in the city. I checked my trunk and walked out of the station. The first thing that caught my attention was a number of third rate hotels including The Ivanhoe on Main Street. Somehow I found my way to English Bay. It was raining lightly. I sat on a log on the beach with one hand holding an umbrella. I can still remember the seagulls screeching as they rode the winds.

In 1977 a floating pier was attached to the CPR train station and a ferry system connecting North Vancouver to Downtown Vancouver was implemented. The ferry system was named SeaBus.

In the early 1980s the interior of the CPR station was gutted and restored. In late 1985 the station also became part of Vancouver’s SkyTrain. The former CPR train station was renamed Waterfront Station. The original SkyTrain line carried passengers from Waterfront Station and the newly built Canada Place next door to the Expo 86 site in False Creek.

Waterfront Station

Waterfront Station

A number of shops opened up on the main floor of the old station building. It was a pretty impressive building to be in with its high ceilings and murals. For a period of time someone would come in and spend a few hours tickling the ivories on a large black grand piano. It seemed to be part of the “yuppification” of Vancouver.

For the first several years after the station had been restored, CPR had their offices on one of the two floors above the main floor along with some other businesses. CPR later moved their offices to Calgary. In 1986 I started my own business. A friend of mine was the head lawyer for Canadian Pacific, and as a favour and not ever having done an incorporation before and wanting to do one at least once in his career, he did all the paper work at cost.

I, of course, secured CPR as an account. (My business involved the sales of business equipment supplies and paper products.)  I also picked up a number of other accounts in the building. I was in and out of the building fairly frequently back then. It was a tricky place to find parking and I picked up a few tickets.

One day in 1987 I noticed a small coffee place that had just opened up at the station. It had a green sign with a mermaid on it. It was the first Starbucks in Canada. I forget what kind of coffee I ordered the first time but I liked the taste and added Starbucks to a list of places I would stop off at in my travels around Greater Vancouver.

Having grown up in Montreal I was partial to food that I had enjoyed in that city like smoked meat, bar-b-q chicken, and delicatessen offerings. If I was in Burnaby around lunchtime I would often eat at The Swiss Chalet. There were 2 places I could get Montreal style smoked meat, Kaplan’s on Oak Street in Vancouver and Phat Phil’s in Richmond, BC. Venice Bakery in North Vancouver was a good place to grab a quick sandwich. Lonsdale Quay and Granville Island offered a variety of fast food places that had an international flavour. My favourite place was in a food court in the basement of an office building in Vancouver that served Mediterranean food. They sold something called a Chicken Shawarma. The chicken was cooked on a slowly revolving spit and basted with a sauce. Slices of the chicken were taken from the spit and placed in a pita with some lettuce and tomatoes and a bit more sauce. I could go for one of those right now.

Starbucks beginning in Seattle.

Something was brewing or percolating so to speak in Seattle in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Several companies from Seattle opened up for businesses within a few years of one another and they would become major players in business in the years to come. The big 3 were Microsoft, Costco, and Starbucks. Before these companies came along a lot of Seattle’s economy had to do with the aircraft manufacturer Boeing and big forestry companies like Weyerhaeuser. They still make a lot of planes in Seattle but several years ago Boeing moved their head office to Chicago. Sadly there are today a number of abandoned sawmills and pulp mills throughout Washington State.

Just how did Seattle become the center of the universe when it comes to coffee? They don’t grow coffee beans in Washington State. When you think about it, a good part of today’s coffee culture has an Italian influence. An “expresso” machine is needed to brew the coffee. A lot of the coffee drinks have Italian names like a Macchiato, Expresso, Doppio, and Cappuccino. At Starbucks a “Venti” is a large cup of coffee. There are a lot more Italians in American cities like New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia than there are in Seattle. Why isn’t one of these cities the center of the coffee universe?

Could it have something to do with all the rain that falls on Seattle which keeps a lot of people inside and having a cup of java is kind of a mellow way to pass the time until the sun comes out again which sometimes might feel like never? Does it have anything to do with Seattle being a seaport and importing things from around the world including large bags of coffee beans?

Seattle

Seattle has been a progressive city for a number of decades. Because of its mild climate in relation to all the areas in the US that suffer through long winters, Seattle has been a draw for a lot of creative types of people. Over the years a lot of the older buildings have been restored and there is a kind of blend of the old and new. Pike Place Market is a good example of the old and new. As a city Seattle seems to welcome new concepts and diversity. There are a lot of people making a very good living in fields like technology but at the same time there is a kind of underground thing going on. Over the years Seattle has been at the forefront in music like grunge and alternative rock. The city has its own unique funkiness.

The original owners of Starbucks were 2 teachers named Jerry Baldwin and Zev Siegl and a writer named Gordon Bowker. They became friends while attending college in San Francisco. Baldwin was born in the UK. With a mutual interest in becoming entrepreneurs they decided to investigate coffee business. Their teacher was a man named Alfred Peet. Peet was in his fifties when the four first met. He was born in The Netherlands where his father ran a small coffee roastery. After the war Peet moved to London and apprenticed at a coffee and tea company. He later found himself in New Zealand and The Dutch East Indies working as a tea taster before immigrating to San Francisco.

Of the 3 original partners in Starbucks, Gordon Bowker is credited with coming up with the name “Starbucks”. He also chose the green colour for their logo. When the company started they bought their coffee beans from Peet. Their sole goal was to sell high quality coffee beans. They had zero interest in brewing coffee or opening up coffee shops. When they opened their first store in Seattle they allowed for some coffee taste samplings but didn’t sell coffee by the cup.

Howard Shultz was born in New York City and graduated with a degree in communications from Northern Michigan University in 1975. He started his business career as a salesman for Xerox. In 1979 he became the general manager of a Swedish drip coffee maker manufacturing company called Hammarplast. One of his clients was a small company in Seattle called Starbucks.

Shultz was impressed with the knowledge that the 3 Starbucks partners had about the coffee business and a year later in 1982 he joined Starbucks as their director of marketing. While on a buying trip to Italy Shultz noticed how many coffee places there were in that country. Drinking coffee was part of the Italian culture and at the time there were about 200,000 coffee bars in Italy. He started to look at the coffee business in a different way.

When Shultz got back to the US he managed to convince the Starbucks owners to try a pilot test of selling brewed coffee. It was a success but the owners didn’t want to get involved what they considered to be the restaurant business. Shultz decided to leave Starbucks in 1985. His wife was pregnant at the time and he didn’t have a lot of money. He needed about 400 thousand dollars to start his own business and open his first store. One of his backers was a Seattle doctor. Shultz’s first coffee place was called Il Giornale.

Meanwhile the Starbucks owners bought Peet’s Coffee and Tea from their mentor. In 1986 they sold their Starbucks retail unit to Shultz for 3.8 million dollars. Shultz immediately rebranded Il Giornale as a Starbucks location and began to expand rapidly. He did not believe in franchising and each new store was directly owned by Starbucks. The Starbucks empire grew and grew and Shultz needed more financing. In 1992 he decided to take the company public and shares were offered on the stock market.

Oldest Starbucks location in Seattle by Pike Place Market

Sometime around 1999 Shultz decided to step away from Starbucks. He was raking in about 9 million dollars a year in salary and stock options. For the next 8 years he spent some of his time writing books. He returned to Starbucks as CEO in 2008. In late 2013 he again stepped away from the company and the new CEO would be a former Goldman Sachs executive.

Today there are 20,891 Starbucks stores in 64 countries. Not every store opening has been a success. In Israel they decided to close all 6 of their stores because of strong competition and a difficult business environment. They would also close a number of locations in the US and Canada that were under performing.

Throughout the years Starbucks has been a leader in introducing new products related to their business including instant coffee in a tin foil pack. It has always been pretty obvious that paying over 4 bucks for a tall cup of coffee is pretty expensive when you can get a cup of coffee for half that price at 7-11. Right from the beginning Starbucks has tried to make a visit to one of their stores “an experience”, the fancy names for their coffee drinks, the comfy couches and chairs, the tidiness of their establishments, the piped in music that is at a low volume, the pastry selection and their healthy sandwiches.

Starbucks is somewhere you can hang out for hours with a book or a laptop and not be rousted. That 4 dollar coffee is like a small entrance fee to a club.

One of the smartest things Starbucks ever did was to introduce the Starbucks plastic credit card. It is kind of like the perfect low cost Christmas or birthday present. The card also brings new people into their store.

Becoming a regular Starbucks customer. 

It wasn’t long after I first discovered Starbucks at Waterfront Station in Vancouver that I started noticing new locations sprouting up all over the Greater Vancouver area. I got to know where most of them were. I was living in Richmond, BC at the time and I became an early morning regular at one of their locations a few blocks from my home. By this time I had a favourite Starbucks drink, something called a Mocha Valencia which was a mocha coffee with a bit of orange syrup. I was really pissed when they stopped selling that drink about 5 or 6 years ago.

For a period of close to 10 years (yes 10 years) I did a lot of internet dating (yes 10 years) and a Starbucks location was often the meeting place. It made a lot of sense. A cup of coffee was a cheap date and was in a public setting. If either party was disappointed one could easily escape. (I’ll have to write a story about those internet dating years sometime.) These days (I’ve been in a relationship for almost 8 years) while I’m waiting for my coffee at Starbucks I’ll often gaze around and see if I can spot a couple on an internet date. Come to think of it, Starbucks was where I first met my significant other, Linda. 

I think what mostly drew me to Starbucks was the slight bitterness to their coffee. It was kind of a compliment to my smoking habit. (Yes I still smoke.)  I never really hung out at a Starbucks. It was always a grab and dash. There were, however, a few things I noticed while waiting for my coffee order. One of those things that I still find amusing is how some people, mostly women it seems, place their order at the till and then go directly to the dispensing area expecting their order to be next and being totally oblivious to others who are waiting for their coffee. I may be wrong but I think sometimes this might be a bit of a statement by some women. It is like they think that they have a very busy life with a stressful job and kids and a lot of responsibility and that they have to stay focused on what they need to get through the day.

I remember walking into my local Starbucks one morning back in the fall of 2001. There was a lot of excitement in the place and I soon learned that the buzz was about the terrorist attack on the towers in New York City. I rushed home to watch what was happening in NYC on TV. At the time the second plane hadn’t yet crashed into the second tower. It was a morning I and many others will never forget.

About 10 years ago I left Vancouver and moved over to Vancouver Island and semi-retirement. I was living about a ½ hour’s drive from the closest city. It was the end of my daily Starbucks habit. A few years later I moved close to Nanaimo, BC and grabbing a coffee at Starbucks became a once or twice a month kind of thing. And then Starbucks kind of popped back into my life.

My short stint at Starbucks.

About 5 or 6 years ago Linda I made plans to visit France for about a month in the coming summer. The trip was going to cost us about 7 thousand dollars each. One day we noticed a sign on a new building in a nearby shopping mall that said a new Starbucks would be opening at that location and that they were hiring new employees. I have a small business that kind of runs itself to a degree and I thought that it might be fun to put in some time at Starbucks and pick up some extra cash for our trip which was still about 8 months away.

I filled out the Starbucks application and about a week later I was asked to come in for an interview which happened at one of the other Starbucks locations. The person who interviewed me was a heavyset gal, in her thirties I think, and she was going to be the manager of the new store. I was no spring chicken at the time. I was 62 years old. She must have liked something about me because I got a phone call about a week later saying that I was hired.

I was kind of excited. It seemed like a fun kind of job. I’m not sure how many people they hired but it was probably something like 30. Altogether I think the training period was about 10 days. It was quite awkward because they trained us in one of the smaller Starbucks locations and we had to sit in among the customers. It became pretty obvious that the manager of that store wasn’t that fussy about having all these extra employees around.

Some of the new employees had worked at Starbucks before including a guy around my age. Some of them were going to be shift leaders which meant they would get something like a $1.50 more per hour. One of the new shift leaders was a guy around 40 years of age who had injured his neck in a car accident. Sometimes he would go across the parking lot to a pizza place to get a padded thing that he wore around his neck heated up in their microwave oven. There were times during our training period that he laid his head down on the table in pain. I wondered if he was going to make it till opening day.

I knew I was going to be working with much younger people but didn’t give it a lot of thought. We learned what went into coffee drinks and how to make them. There were some coffee tastings and we were asked to describe the flavours. Did it have a woody taste? Did it have an earthy taste? It seemed kind of abstract to me. We learned where the supplies were kept, a variety of clean up chores, how to work the till, and a number of the other skills that were required of us.

It was now near mid-December and one day all the new employees were asked to go to the new store. It was one of those Starbucks with a drive through. In the room in the back where there was a little desk, a sink, a place to hang up our coats, and supplies that were stacked up to the ceiling in cardboard boxes. There was going to be a bit of a test run and then there would be a grand opening. So far so good it seemed.

The store manager was pretty gregarious but could be a bit unsettling when she laughed. It was kind of like a high pitched shriek. She was a taskmaster and wanted everything to be right on the opening day. She didn’t want to see anyone standing around and not busy. Leaning against a counter would not be tolerated.

Two gay guys were brought up from Victoria to help with the grand opening. Why I have no idea. One of them told me that he was going to make me dance which I thought was kind of inappropriate. I might have recognized that uncomfortableness as an omen of things to come.

I didn’t realize I would be working with what seemed like a number of Zombies. Things started to get awkward very quickly. It was like having some people spy on my every move. I think the first time I noticed the spying was when I realized the other old guy who was a shift leader was standing right behind me watching me give change to a customer. Then two other younger shift leaders gave me shit for not wiping off the expresso spout when I was the barista. I watched others miss wiping off the spout including the two gals that gave me shit and nobody jumped on them.

The store had two assistant managers, a couple of gals probably in their late twenties. They were easy to work with and I never had any problems with either of them. The same with some of the other shift leaders. There were about 3 shift leaders however that I didn’t enjoy working with. They seemed to enjoy being able to tell me what to do and critiquing my work habits.

One of those shift leaders gave me a small card once that said “Good Shift”. I think it also had a happy face on it. One day I had a little laugh with myself watching her trying to get a sandwich out of the oven and almost burning her hand. She hadn’t figured out the options of quickly sliding the metal spatula under the sandwich or pushing the sandwich to the back of the oven and forcing the spatula underneath it. I guess they don’t teach home economics in schools anymore?

I had trouble identifying with some of younger people who worked at that Starbucks. Some of them liked to gossip about stuff, talk about their boyfriends, or where they were going on Saturday night. We didn’t have much in common and I certainly am not the kindly old uncle type.

One thing that surprised me right away was that for a company that had so many rules, management didn’t seem to mind at all that some of the employees would spend their breaks or lunch periods lying stretched out on the couches that were meant for the customers. Sometimes they had headphones on and other times they lay there with their laptops. Sometimes they even took a nap.

One night a young guy came in with 3 friends and a pizza he had bought at a place across the parking lot. Neither he nor his friends bought a coffee or a drink so I asked them if they wanted to order something and they said no. I asked if would be OK if I asked these people to leave the store because they weren’t customers and was told no. After the pizza was eaten one of them took the pizza box over to the garbage container but found it wouldn’t fit through the hole. He got a bit frustrated and ended up stomping on the box until it fit through the hole. It was a class act.

The busiest time at a lot of Starbucks is around 9:30 in the morning. One day the manager gave me shit for not putting enough whip cream on a drink and the next thing I knew I was working mostly closing shifts. One night I was working with a young guy who I think was in the closet and he started talking about his family speaking in tongues at home. His chatter became even more bazaar and told him I thought he was nuts. The next day the manager told me that this guy had complained about my harassing him. What a little prick!

Everyone is expected to do the same chores at Starbucks but I learned that this wasn’t the case. The closing shift is supposed to remove the rubber mats from behind the counter and mop all of the floors. I can’t remember any girl at Starbucks ever mopping up. I seemed to always get stuck with that chore and taking out the garbage. Some of the girls were like little prima donnas.

On another night a regular came back to the store after taking out two coffees. Both of the coffees were badly made according to him. I hadn’t made the coffees but I tried to humour him a bit and make him relax. It seemed to work. The next day our manager told me that one of the employees had told her that I had laughed at the customer when he complained.

It was becoming more and more uncomfortable to go to work and fortunately I didn’t desperately need the money. I could quit anytime if I wanted to. I started to avoid the people I didn’t like and just go about my job. One day the manager asked me why I looked so serious a lot of the time.  What I was trying to do was not get involved in the petty stuff.

Starbucks draws people from different walks of life as long as they are willing to pop 4 bucks for a coffee and $2.50 for some kind of pastry. Most of the customers are decent sorts but there are also a number who are really a pain in the ass.

 Here’s a list of some of those pain in the asses.

 

#1 People who lean on the coffee dispensing counter oblivious to others ahead of them waiting for their coffee. Sometimes they grab other people’s coffee. Get a freaking Life! It isn’t just your world!

#2 People who are on their cell phones when they get to the till and expect you to wait until they have completed their phone conversation.

#3 Old ladies that order a pot of hot water to use with the tea bag they brought with them to the store. Actually this is more weird than being a pain in the ass.

#4 People who let their kids run around the store like everyone else must think their kids are cute.

#5 The mother/teenaged daughter combo who think they are really cool. Starbucks isn’t a private club and it’s only coffee. And no we don’t think you look like sisters.

#6 People who want to know the exact ingredients in a cookie or a pastry. If you have food allergies maybe a coffee shop isn’t the right place for you.

#7 Women who don’t know where their money is when it is time to pay and spend 5 minutes picking nickels and pennies out their purses when there are 15 people behind them in line.

#8 People who don’t flush the toilet after using it. Yuck!

#9 People who use the drive through garbage can to get rid of anything they don’t want in their car including used diapers.

#10 People who want to tell you their life story while 15 others are standing in line behind them.

#11 People who want to have a chat with the barista when there is a line up out the door. It’s hard to concentrate when you have 15 drinks to make.

#12 Adding an extra chair to a table is OK. Rearranging the furniture isn’t. Starbucks isn’t a good place to meet 30 people. Rent a room somewhere.

#13 Keep your feet on the ground. Starbucks isn’t a hostel or a Motel 6 or a park bench.

#14 Just say “extra hot” if that’s how you want your coffee. You are expecting an awful lot if you want an exact temperature.

#15 If you are in a desperate hurry and there are 15 people in line ahead of you go somewhere else or just skip having a coffee altogether. You are just exacerbating a situation.

Here are some of my own opinions and observations about Starbucks.

#1 Don’t tip and don’t clean up your table after you use it. You are paying over 4 bucks for a cup of coffee that costs about 75 cents to make. You don’t tip a cashier in a grocery store or a counter person at MacDonald’s do you? If Starbucks pays its employees crappy wages why is that your problem?

#2 Starbucks really isn’t that fancy a place. Do they serve you your coffee with that leaf design kind of thing on top of it? All baristas aren’t skilled. Your chances of getting a crappy coffee or not a coffee the way you like it are probably around 30-40%. Lots of coffees have to be remade.

#3 If you get a crappy cup of coffee when going through drive-thru you won’t probably know until you are a block away and at that point you are probably not going to bring it back. Its just too much of a hassle.

#4 If Starbucks is such a great place to work why is it that the staff keeps changing?

#5 Some baristas use the same rag to clean up messes that they clean the coffee nozzle with.

Some perks about working at Starbucks.

#1 You get a free pound of coffee every week.

#2 You get one free coffee drink of your choice per day when you work a shift.

#3 All the food products are dated. It is very common for workers to go home with bags of pastries and sandwiches which have reached their past due date.

#4 They have a pretty decent healthcare plan if you need to use it. It can be a bit redundant in Canada because we have universal healthcare.

The night I quit working at Starbucks.

It was a pretty quiet night when a couple of Asian people came in and ordered some steeped tea. We sold 3 types of steeped tea but it was now about 10 p.m. and the steeped tea had been thrown out. A young gal was serving the Asian couple and made an attempt to make them a new batch of brewed tea. The couple left the store and returned to complain about the quality of their drinks. They were now talking to me. The young gal who had made the tea stepped in and told the couple she would give them a rain check. I took the young gal aside and suggested that she not only give the couple a rain check but also give them their money back as they hadn’t received anything for their money. The young gal took a fit. She didn’t want to be bothered with doing a debit on the till. I walked into the back room, took off my apron, and left the store. I thought life was too short to be involved in this kind of shit. How I lasted for 3 months is beyond me.

We took our trip to France. I was kind of surprised to find a Starbucks right next to The Louvre.

I still go into the Starbucks I worked at once in a while. All the people I worked with are long gone including the manager.

A family affair.

Both of my kids have put in time working at Starbucks. We all agree that there a number of snotty people who visit Starbucks but also a number of nice people too. We also agree that there is a lot of pretentiousness about the business on both sides of the counter. 9 bucks an hour shouldn’t include having to put up with very rude people. Getting up at 5 in the morning to work a 4 hour shift is simply insane.

What I think about coffee in general.

A number of years ago we bought an expresso machine for home. No matter what coffee brand of beans I used I could never get the taste that I wanted. I didn’t see any difference between Tim Horton’s ground coffee at 7 bucks a bag or Kicking Horse ground coffee at 16 bucks a bag.

I still haven’t figured out how expensive restaurants often manage to serve up the perfect cup of coffee. A touch salty with just the right flavor.

I’ve always been a coffee sipper. I don’t really understand how people can chug a huge cup of java.

We did figure out a few years ago that we would be far better off if we drank decaf coffee especially in the evening.

My last coffee story.

Many years ago I had a supplier who got into financial difficulty and went bankrupt. Things were so bad at one point that they used to fill the water cooler with tap water. The owner of the business was a a gung ho guy named Todd. He had gone to college at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington.

After his business failed Todd opened up a coffee place on West Broadway in Vancouver. Behind the counter and on the wall was a huge head of an elephant. The place was called Tony’s and it is still in business today. I thought Todd was pretty creative with that giant elephant head.

The last time I saw Todd he was planning on moving to Sacramento, California to get into the coffee franchise business. My guess is that the probably succeeded because he was a pretty positive guy.

Last spring Linda and I spent a weekend in the Bellingham area doing some sightseeing and shopping. There is a trendy kind of area in the southern part of Bellingham where there are a number of old brick buildings. We had a really nice dinner in one of the restaurants but were a little put off by our  waiter who seemed to think he was some kind of rock star. “You are just bringing dishes to our table and that just isn’t that amazing” I felt like saying but didn’t.

After dinner we went for a little walk. I noticed a sign at the front of a coffee shop. It said Tony’s Coffee. We walked inside and there it was on the wall behind the counter. A giant elephant head. My old friend Todd wasn’t as creative as I thought it seems.

 

 

Tony's Coffee, Bellingham, Washington

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Blog Update: October 10th, 2014

It has been a little over a month since I last posted a story on here and that one was mostly photos of kayaking. Did I run into writer’s block? Well kind of, sort of. I started to write a story about The Middle East and it got very complicated and very long. Often I would have 10 Google tabs open for reference points. The whole deal was becoming more of a book than a short story. Man what a complex subject! In the end I decided to scrap the whole thing. I started thinking who would want to read a 40 page story about The Middle East written by some guy on Vancouver Island? I haven’t totally given up. I will write an opinion piece on the state of affairs in The Middle East today and broad brush some of the details.

I’m not totally sure what I expected when I first launched my blog over two years ago. I knew that I had a lot of stuff stored up in me that I wanted to get out. I also knew I wasn’t getting any younger and that I better get started at it while I had most of my marbles.

I think my goal was to get about 50,000 readers. I pictured in my mind that an NHL hockey stadium holds about 20,000 people. 2-1/2 times one of those stadiums wouldn’t be too shabby. I’m still quite a way from 50,000 readers even with over 42,000 hits on Left Coast Mumblings so far because a number of those readers have checked out my blog a number of times.

It may or may not surprise you that I type using one finger in the hunt and peck method. Years ago I managed to use 2 fingers but for some reason that advancement regressed. I still don’t know how and where other people learned to type using most of their digits. Is there a special room you went to?

I don’t claim to be a brilliant writer but I do believe I have a better memory than most. I suppose that there are times when I could flesh things out a bit more but I am sometimes hesitant to because the objective of my writings on here is to create a “short” story.

I’m pretty sure I have driven the “Typo Nazis” crazy a number of times. I try to edit what I write but sometimes things get missed. To these people I say “You know you are reading my stuff for free right?” And just for the record I do know how to use Spell Check.

Nostalgia

Wikipedia defines nostalgia as a sentimentality for the past, particularly for a place or period in time with happy associations. I guess it’s a good thing that I called my blog Left Coast Mumblings and not Colin’s Nostalgia because everything I write about things past is not always happy. That’s just the way life works.

I’ve never been that keen about people who rewrite history to suit their own purposes. I get the idea that it can be unpleasant dwelling on things uncomfortable but if that is part of the story I’ll probably write about it.

I think that people who have sustained life-long friendships that date back to their childhoods or high school years deserve some credit. You picked your friends well those many years ago. You need a certain kind of personality to manage that. It seems to me that women have deeper friendships with other women than men do with other men. Woman often have an emotional connection where as many men are often content enough knowing that their friends also like golf or MMA fighting and pay for a round once in a while.  

One of the things I have noticed in e-mails I have received from some guys is that they can remember quite well who they got drunk with 40 or more years ago.

Never the less there are many who are a lot better at sustaining long friendships than I. I’ve seen a lot of friends come and go in my life. Sometimes it was just people going in different directions and other times it was just simply moving on to other things.

I have to admit to taking a few shots at some people in my writings. I’ve never been a big fan of being betrayed. It isn’t as if I want to settle some old scores. I’m not the kind of person who thinks that if you screw me around once we are done. You usually have to screw me around several times. I do have a problem with people who are hypocrites in particular. Life’s too short for me be a party to that. Sell that to someone else.

 

Feedback

I have to say that it is quite rewarding getting nice compliments on my stories. I appreciate the fact that someone would take the time. I receive a lot more e-mails than I do comments on my blog. I’ve had a number of interesting conversations with people I never knew back in the day but are familiar with what I am writing about.

Once in a while I get something from somebody who is pissed off at something I wrote but not very often.

One of the stranger things is receiving a comment from people who calls themselves “anonymous”. It’s a bit like receiving an unsigned birthday card.

The Montreal Stories

I’m thinking seriously about writing a book about Montreal in the 1950s and 1960s with a lot more depth than the stories I have already written about the city. I promise most of it won’t be gloom and doom. Would you buy this book? What if I promised to have it edited?

Blog Stats

Here is a list of the top ten most popular stories I have written.

#1 NDG, Montreal…From the 1950s to the 1960s (By far the most readers.)

#2 West Hill High School, Montreal

#3 A Brief History of The Montreal Alouettes

#4 Gone Fishing

#5 Remembering Frank Crabbe

#6 Georgeville and Stanstead, Quebec

#7 Willingdon School, Montreal

#8 Confessions of a 1950s Child TV Addict

#9 Port Alberni, BC 1974

#10 Road Trip Back East-Travels With Cooper

Top 10 Countries Where People Have Viewed My Blog (Approximately)

#1 The US 16,000 (About 2,000 more viewers than Canada)

#2 Canada 14,000

#3 France 2,500

#4 Germany 2,000

#5 Russia Under 1,000

#6 The UK Under 1,000

#7 Ukraine Under 1,000

#8 Turkey Under 1,000

#9 China Under 1,000

#10 Poland Under 1,000

Oddest Location To View My Blog

A US Air Force base in The Indian Ocean. About 20 hits. It must have been a quiet night.

Pageviews By Operating System

Windows 71%

MacIntosh 9%

iPad 4%

iPhone 3%

Android 2%

Blackberry 1%

iPod 1%

Pageviews By Browsers

Internet Explorer 31%

Firefox 24%

Chrome 23%

Safari 11%

Opera 4%