Working in Montreal 1964-1970

It is my own personal belief that you can piss away your twenties travelling and trying a variety of jobs as long as you find something along the way that is going to provide you with a decent income for the rest of your life. I say this in hindsight. For the first part of my working career, particularly in Montreal, other than the last job I held there, I didn’t think I was learning an awful lot that would help me later.

Altough I left Montreal around 1970 with no plan of returning, I did come back for a few months in 1972 because of a family emergency. It was always easy to pick up a job as a waiter and that is exactly what I did. In fact I worked at 3 different places in that short time before catching a plane to Calgary and a 2nd tour of duty at the Banff Springs Hotel.

I was a waiter at Miss Montreal. I remember their flaming Pu-pu platters, their soggy coleslaw, and that some of the waitresses were groupies of the jockeys who raced horses at Blue Bonnets.

I got a job in room service at The Airport Hilton. I had to wear a kind of a costume that included a brightly coloured shirt and a string tie, a vest, and a sash around my waist. One day I was picking up empty trays from outside the rooms and was pushing a cart. I came around a corner (the building was circular) and noticed a guy in a shark skin suit on a pay phone. Our eyes met and we recognized one another. No words were spoken but I was deeply embarrassed.

The other place I worked at in those months was a restaurant near the Dorval airport (Mirabel didn’t exist then) called Le Vieux Amsterdam (The Old Amsterdam) that specialized in Indonesian food. They seemed to put fried eggs on a lot of things and peanut sauce was prevalent. One of the regulars was Dickie Moore, a former Montreal Canadiens hockey star. He always had an admiring posse with him. The tips were great at the restaurant but it became time to move along.

Before beginning my saga about the jobs I held as a young guy in Montreal I would like to add a few things.

Back in those days there were some people I knew that seemed to have kind of wriiten me off as a loser in life. Quite possibly because I was a high school drop out.

I did OK in life starting when I was about 28 when I really got into sales. I ended up starting my own business that was quite successful. I may have dropped out of high school but I wasn’t stupid.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

The following is a list of most of the jobs I worked at in Montreal from the age of 17 to about 23. They aren’t all in order as far as time goes because…it is hard to remember everything.

#1

The first job I ever got a paycheque from was working as a salesclerk in the men’s department downstairs at Morgan’s (later The Bay) on Queen Mary Road in an area called Snowden. I was hired along with a friend for the Christmas season. I remember the viyella shirts. Although the job only lasted a month or so, I continued to use the store manager as a reference for the next year or two which must have pleased him to no end.

 

#2

In early 1964 I dropped out of high school and spent a couple of months, if that long, working at Nymark’s Lodge up in the Laurentians by St.Sauveur. The story about Nymark’s Lodge can be found elsewhere on my blog.

Speaking of the Laurentians…does anyone ever wonder who this St. Laurence guy was? He sure had a lot of things named after him for for a guy who never knew that Quebec even existed. The mountains, a river, a market, a street, a district in Montreal. Even a brand of sugar.

#3

J. P. Porter and Sons was a dredging company located in downtown Montreal. I was hired to work in their accounting department. My specific job entailed using a manual adding machine hour after hour after hour. My responsibility was to check the payroll to see if any errors had been made. I worked with a gay guy and a woman who wore glasses and was about 35. The two of them would chat a bit with one another from time to time but never invited me in on the conversation. It was a lonely 8 hours. I was being paid $160.00 a month for this drudgery. I don’t think I ever discovered anything bigger than a 15 cent overpayment.

About once a week I would be sent down to the main bank in Place D’ Armes with some bank drafts to be deposited. An old guy who had some kind of nervous disorder would shakily hand me the bank drafts in a brown envelope along with a 6 cent bus ticket. I used the bus ticket the first time I went to the bank but quickly figured out that I could make better time walking than taking the bus. I would cut through the underground mall beneath the Place Ville Marie.

One day, upon returning to the office after my trip to the bank I was ushered into the old guy’s office, given a lecture on honesty, and fired on the spot.

A few years later I was reading the local paper (The Star or Gazette) when I came across an interesting article. J.P. Porter & Sons, along with some competitors had been charged with price fixing and collusion in their dredging operations. Go big or go home I guess.

 

#4

The longest office job I ever had in Montreal lasted 9 months. It was at a company called Bailey Meter and they were located in Westmount near Greene Avenue. I can’t remember exactly what I did there. I know it involved some filing and sitting at a desk. I worked with a confusing goofy (to me at least) engineer named Grant. They had an interesting concept as far as training engineers. They hired some young guys from places like Western University who would alternate one semester at school with an equal term working at the Montreal office.

When I first started at Bailey Meter I was designated as the guy to go to if there was a problem with the new Xerox photocopier. Any training I had as far as trouble shooting with the copier mostly went in one ear and out the other. One day I was called to fix a paper jam. I forgot about pulling some lever and the copier drum was ruined and the company was given a hefty bill for a new one. I was no longer the go to guy. The irony of it all is that a number of years later I became a copier salesman and sold well over a million dollars of them in the Vancouver area.

Bailey Meter made control panels. I seem to remember vaguely something about pitot tubes. At any rate, in the early 1970s I did a couple of stretches in some pulp mills in British Columbia and I actually got to see the Bailey Meter control panels in action. They recorded the flow of something or other and produced the results on a circular chart. TMI?

#5

I don’t think I lasted more than a few days at the Maison Danoise (The Danish House), a Scandanavian furniture store in the mall underneath the Place Ville Marie. The woman that ran the place was a bit of a tyrant. ( It think she was one of the owners.) It was kind of hard to look busy in an empty store and my eyes got sore looking at Atlas Copco frying pans in catalogues. I was given the quick heave-ho.

 

#6

I worked in the stock transfer department of Canada Permanent Trust. One of my tasks was to check out the authenticity of share forms. I did this at what kind of looked like a bank wicket. A lot of these stock certificates had very detailed drawn pictures on them. I remember the Massey-Ferguson and the Massey-Harris ones. They made some mighty fine looking tractors.

The guy that ran the place seemed like an affable type but I still managed to get called into his office to be fired. It seems that he had got wind of the fact that I really didn’t have a place to stay and that I had been crashing on one of the office secretary’s couches. Apparently this was a no-no. Who knew?

#7

I spent a few months working for the Canadian Pacific Railway. In a way it was like having two jobs. In the morning I would catch a bus to the Place Viger train station east of downtown Montreal. I worked in the “on hand” department tracing shipments. It was quite common to find mice turds on top of the boxes of thin paper slips. The building was so old that I swear I saw the silent movie cowboy actor Tom Mix’s name scratched onto the washroom door.

In the afternoon I would catch a bus to the garment district at the north end of St Lawrence Boulevard where I would hang around as a CPR guard by the freight elevators in a building that housed sweatshops. The owners were all Jewish and the seamstresses were mostly French. One of the companies in the building was Cortez Clothing. I think the address was 9600 St. Lawrence Boulevard.

I got to share those afternoons with a French guy who didn’t speak English and he was a guard for CN. For some reason he thought I was fair game to be teased. He would take little pieces of fake fur and make it look like a dead rat and toss it at me. One day I got tired of his teasing and throttled him. Needless to say my afternoons by the elevator shaft were over.

#8

I did a short stint as a waiter at a bar/restaurant off of Decarie Boulevard. It  was called The White Elephant Pub. It didn’t take me long to figure out that the place was mobbed up. I got fired during a barbershop convention for pouring a waitress a free drink after she continually cajoled me into providing her with one. That was one creepy place.

 

#9

I spent a couple of months working on construction in 1966 at the Western Canada Pavilion at Expo 67. This story is also on my blog.

#10

I worked for a company called Canadian Refractories at their order desk for a number of months. They manufactured fire clay bricks used in industrial kilns in places like pulp and paper mills. They had a warehouse off of Decarie Boulevard. One day I was sent out there to get familiar with the product. At lunch time I asked some guy if it was OK if I took the forklift for a spin through the plant and he said OK. I sped down one the aisles and yanked the steering wheel to make a turn and the forklift went up on two wheels. It scared the living crap out of me. I handed the keys back.

I had lied on my job application saying that I was taking university night courses at Sir George Williams (now Concordia University) when I was actually taking night courses to get my high school matriculation. Little did I know when I was filling out the form that my boss was in his 3^rd year at the same place trying to get his Bachelor of Arts at night.

I managed to keep the ruse going for a few months and then my boss called me into his office and fired me. He also offered me some advice. “Stay out of sales.” he said. It was an interesting comment. I’ve spent most of my adult life in sales and have done very well at it, thank you very much!

 

 

#11

I think I lasted about 6 months as a sales clerk at Hughes Owens store on Mansfield Street. Oddly enough, the building where I worked was either the exact spot or the lot next to where my mother grew up in a walk up apartment building that had been torn down. Her parents lived there until the 1950s.

Hughes Owens sold artist supplies. Winsor Newton and Grumbacher  were two of the brand names of oil and acrylic paints they marketed. They also sold drafting supplies. There isn’t much more boring than standing around a quiet store all day. There were a few eccentric artists that frequented the store. One guy had a heavy accent and was from somewhere in Europe and bought scads and scads of supplies. He must have been pretty good because his wife would turn up with him wearing an expensive fur coat. I can’t recall why I was fired from this job. What I can remember is meeting my friend Jay Simpson for lunch each workday at a greasy spoon that had a waitress with amazingly large breasts. Waitresses weren’t getting boob jobs back then.

#12

I did a hitch for a few months in the hardware department at Simpson’s in Fairview Shopping Centre out in Pointe Claire. I became really good friends with a guy at work named Gil Bushe who was East Indian. We went fishing once on Lake St. Louis with some other guys from work and I had to get lathered with Noxema when I got home because I had not bothered to use any suntan lotion. Gil had a Jewish girlfriend who ditched him for someone else. An itersting mix of religions.  We once drove down to Massachusetts in his Mustang with a cracked windshield. Gil would get that car up to over 130 MPH and I almost crapped my pants hoping that the windshield wouldn’t cave in. I remember we were driving through the mountains somewhere in New England and a car was tailing us quite closely using us as a guide. We went around a corner and Gil turned off the car headlights. It scared the bejesus out of the guy behind us when he turned the lights back on. Gil was a fun guy.

After being at Simpson’s for a few months I was called into the store manager’s office. Apparently the department stores in Montreal kept records of anyone who they ever caught shoplifting. When I was about 14 I got caught trying to swipe a red ascot from Eaton’s downtown store. A red ascot, what was I thinking?

The long and the short of it the store was going to let me go. There were no second chances. Fair enough I guess. What really cheesed me off is the manager showed me a life magazine he was reading that had an article with pictures of naked hippies. I remember him asking me about the state of young people at the time. I wanted to tell him “Look Jack, you just canned me for some lousy ascot I stole when I was 14 and now you want to have a philosophical discussion about the morals of hippies?” What a jerk!

#13

All in all I think I spent about 10 months working on the trains as a waiter in 1967 and 1968. I plan on writing a short story about those days.

 

#14

The last job I had in Montreal was working as a procurement clerk for an industrial machine manufacturing company out on Cote Vertu Road in St.Laurent. The pay was $70.00 a week. The Company was called Alceco Machine Manufacturing. They built industrial presses. The place was run by two brothers and they had a financial partner who was a German guy with a very shiny face. Someone told me that the siny look was the result of some injections he had in Europe to make him look younger. One day the German guy’s wife took me aside and told me that her daughter was mixed up with one of the Cotroni brothers (Mafia guys) and that her daughter couldn’t get away from them. Why she picked me to tell her story to I’ll never know.

The workers in the plant were all Greeks except for the shipping guy who was German. Sometimes at lunch the German guy would tell me stuff about WW2 not being the Germans fault. I wasn’t buying any of it. The workers all wore dark blue lab coats. I was living in a frat house at the time at the top of University Street in downtown Montreal and it turned out that the Greek guys all lived on the east side of Mount Royal not far away from where I lived. A deal was struck for a fee where I would get a lift from the Greeks to and from work. I can still remember the gold teeth shining in the dark when they picked me up in the early morning and the smell of garlic that floated around in that crowded car.

I had a desk in a room that looked out on the shop floor. Behind me were several occupied draftsmen desks. There was one draftsman I really liked. I think his last name was Eric Bishof. He was from somewhere in Europe and had a great sense of humour. He once told me a story about picking up a hitchhiker. After a few miles the hitchhiker started to complain about it being cold in the car. The complaining went on for a while. Eric stopped the car and asked the hitchhiker to get out and see if there was a flat tire. While the guy was checking the tires Eric slowly drove off. The hitchhiker started to run after the car. Each time he got close Eric accelerated a bit. By now the hitchhiker was panting. Finally Eric stopped the car and told the guy to get in the car. “What the hell did you do that for?” the hitchhiker demanded. “Are you warm enough now?” Eric responded.

Although the money wasn’t great I thought I was learning something and I took a lot of pride in the job I was doing. I was making some work decisions on my own. I saved the company some money a few times by buying materials wisely through negotiating. By all accounts I was performing well.

I used my week of vacation time to travel down to the US with a friend. On the way we stopped in Magog, Quebec to get a tour of a foundry where molds were made of different parts of the presses the company I was working for manufactured. A foundry is kind of a primitive place and the basic process is over a thousand years old.

I blew every last cent I had on my vacation. When I returned to work the following week I was told that I was going to be laid off. It would be fair to say I was deeply disappointed.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………

I went on to a variety of jobs over the next number of years and worked all over Canada. Some of those jobs were better than others. In 1976 I went for an interview at an office equipment company in Vancouver called Benndorf-Verster Ltd. It was there that I discovered my niche was is sales.

In the past few years I have been somewhat amused about the concept of hard work and people succeeding because of it. In the US they sometimes call it The American Dream.

Hard work to me is the guy who digs a ditch with a shovel, the 70 year old greeter at Wal-Mart standing on a concrete floor all day, immigrants who work in sweatshops doing piece work, the fruit and vegetable pickers out in the hot sun all day, the welders working a few hundred feet up on a bridge. (Is this starting to sound like The Grapes of Wrath?)

The reality is that very few toil 12 hours a day and work on weekends trying to build a business. Most of those that do are folks who come from very poor countries and are willing to do whatever it takes but they aren’t the average person trying to be successful.

I’ve known all kinds of people in life who have started small businesses. Yes they put in some extra hours for the first year or two but it wasn’t exactly hard labour. In no time they were back out on the golf course and eating in fine restaurants and driving new cars. Or they failed because they didn’t know what they were doing and didn’t understand their marketplace.

To me, working three jobs just to have a roof over your head and making sure the kids are fed is hard work. Not so much wearing soft Italian shoes and wining and dining a big customer.

Having had so many crummy jobs earlier in life, later on when I owned my own business, I always paid my employees a decent wage. It just seemed like the right thing to do,

 

 

 

 

Expo 67

I still have the guide book.

In a lot of ways I think Expo 67 was the last hurrah for a lot of English speaking Montrealers. Politics in the province of Quebec were clearly making them more and more uncomfortable. On the other hand there were some hopeful things occurring in the city. Montreal was finally going to have a first class subway system and a number of large office towers had been built. In fact, Montreal had a bit of an early start compared to Toronto by building the landmark Place Ville Marie. The city was still home to a number of Canada’s largest corporations. CPR, CN, CIL, Canada Steamships, Sun Life Insurance, Alcan all had large offices in Montreal.

If you were English and thinking of moving away to another province or the US, there was a good chance you were going to put those thoughts on the back burner and stick around for the party that was going to be Expo 67. There was a lot of pride in the city at the time. People came from around the world. It was like a 6 month high. It was hard to get that Bobby Gimby song out of our heads. “Ca-na-da….One little, two little, three Canadians….We love thee…..”

I have to confess that that I really never had the “total experience” of Expo 67. I tried to get a summer job there but had no luck. Instead I spent the months of Expo 67 working as a waiter for CN on the trains. In other years working on the trains in the summer was a coveted job for university students but not this time around.

In the 6 months Expo 67 was in operation I only made about 3 or 4 visits. I did take my parents to see the RCMP Tattoo at the Autostade but I would hardly call that an overly exciting evening. At the beginning of the fair I was too broke to buy a season’s pass and then when I got the job on the trains the pass thing didn’t make a lot of sense because I was out of town for such much of the time.

Not only did I miss out on most of Expo 67 but two years later, for some reason, I also missed out on Woodstock which happened only about 430 or so km away. It was just a 5 hour drive. “Going up the country. Babe, don’t you wanna go?”

In Canada, the trains were crammed with tourists headed for Montreal and you could feel the excitement. I think some of the older folks coming from places like small town Ontario had impressions of Montreal as being a wide open city where crazy things happened. Well we did have a lot of bank hold ups. The truth is that the mayor Jean Drapeau’s right hand man, Pax Plante, had cleaned the city up considerably years before.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

My Expo 67 experiences were mostly about the few months in the summer of 1966 that I worked there on construction. I was living in the Delta Upsilon Fraternity house on McTavish Street in downtown Montreal. I was 19 at the time and between jobs as they used to say. Like a lot of frat houses at the time, with the students gone for the summer, it made sense to rent out the rooms while they were gone.

Delta Upsilon rent receipt 1966. Note party expense.

There was a group of older guys staying in the house. They all worked for a company out of Winnipeg called Daley Display (spelling) who had the contract to create the interior of The Western Canada Pavilion at Expo 67. One night, at dinner, I was asked by the owner of the company if I would be interested in working as a labourer for them. I hadn’t been doing much other than moving some guy’s car around while he was away in the cramped parking lot behind the frat house. A Plymouth Valiant with push button gears.

Would I be interested in a job? Your damn right I would! The job paid $2.52 an hour and it was a 55 hour work week, 10 hours a day Monday through Friday, and another 5 hours on Saturdays. This was almost double the pay I would make at any other job I ever held in Montreal. About 138 bucks a week. I was young and had a lot of energy and this job looked like pretty easy money to me.

In the dark early the next morning I climbed into a truck with the rest of the crew and we headed down to the new island that had been built in the middle of the St. Lawrence River. When I was a kid, I had seen the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway so I was kind of prepared for the massiveness of the project.

At this point almost all of the earth and rocks had been brought in to create the island. Canals had been formed but there was no water in them. Most of the pavilions had been constructed and the exteriors were being finished. Landscaping and paving were still not underway.

The Expo site kind of looked like a giant ant farm. There was a lot of movement. Thousands of tradesmen turned up each day. There were cement trucks coming and going, huge cranes maneuvering materials, and earth movers redirecting the dirt. The whole deal was a pretty amazing feat. I am sure that there were lots of difficulties in coordination along the way. One day I heard through the grapevine that about 16 thousand dollar’s worth of plate glass had fallen off a scaffold at the French Pavilion.

The Western Canada Pavilion represented the 4 western Canadian provinces, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia. The building was designed in the shape of a tree stump with a circular shingled roof with a hole in the middle of it. Giant Douglas fir trees brought in from B.C. poked through the roof opening. I remember seeing these huge slabs of wood that had been cut off the fir trees and I thought that they would be ideal for a coffee table. The fact that they weighed about a ton killed that idea.

Western Canada Pavillion Expo 67.

Starting time was 7:00 a.m. and my job was to clean up debris and assist the tradesmen when I was needed. The first week went by fairly smoothly. It was a bit of an adventure and the novelty hadn’t worn off. In the back of my mind I kept thinking of my big juicy paycheque.

After about 2 weeks I started to wear down a bit. 10 hour days and 5 more on Saturday were starting to take a toll on me. Like many other 19 year olds, I liked to party a bit which didn’t exactly fit in with getting up before 6 in the morning.

The Western Canada pavilion had a number of themes, all representing different industries in Western Canada. There was a fish cannery, a simulated mine shaft, a potash mine, and a variety of farm equipment used on prairie wheat farms. I believe that they also had a machine that created a mist in the center of the pavilion where the huge trees were.

One of the artisans at the pavilion was a British guy who built kinetic sculptures. I didn’t have a clue what a kinetic sculpture was before being informed. Basically it is a sculpture with moving parts. In this case, the British guy welded together a number of machine parts and one of the things he incorporated into the finished product was a chainsaw.

One day we were sitting out at the back of the pavilion by the still dry canal having lunch (a high point of the day for me) when we spotted a guy in the distance in the canal walking towards us. We wondered what he was up to. As he got closer his face appeared to be very white and we could see that he had a guitar over his shoulder. His face was white because he had pancake make-up on and the reason he was carrying a guitar was because he was Gordon Lightfoot. Pretty cool.

(I was curious to see if I could find anything on YouTube with Gordon Lightfoot at Expo 67.I found a music video called “Crossroads” that does indeed show Lightfoot at the Expo 67 construction site. Unfortunately, the video doesn’t show him in the canal before it was filled with water.)

Gordon Lightfoot.

One of the small projects I was given to do was to empty large plastic bags of potash and chop the stuff into cubes that were then lathed into the walls to give the effect of being in a potash mine. Kind of sludgy stuff but it probably was the one bit of work I did that later visitors could actually see.

By the end of the summer some fatigue was starting to overtake me (and too many Labatt 50’s the nights before) and I began to find ways to hide out a bit on the job. I never actually took a nap but I wasn’t always pulling my weight. I don’t think it took the powers that be too long to figure out that they weren’t getting their money’s worth out of me.

The summer came to an end and the crew had to find new digs what with the frat boys coming back to town. For some reason, I hadn’t made any plans to find another place to live. I might have just assumed that I would move wherever the other workers moved. I was wrong about that.

I was told, rather politely, that my services would no longer be required. Although I knew that they were wise to my less than stellar performance I didn’t see losing my job coming. I had to do some quick scrambling and ended up moving into a tourist lodge that was a lot more expensive than the frat house. Any money I had put aside started to disappear quickly.

I didn’t work for the next several months. In some ways I was kind of like today’s “street person”. I would crash wherever I could. I stayed up at the McGill residences for a bit of time and used a student I knew from the US’s number with his OK to get free meals in the cafeteria. Somebody ratted me out and the cops were called and not having anything better to do I waited for them. I spent an afternoon in a jail cell at the #10 police station before being released with the promise I would not return to the residences.

I moved on to sleeping on another friend’s floor in a frat house. He was from Falls Church, Virginia. (He went on to become a professor at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.) It was here that my hard hat from Expo 67 disappeared. I suspected an Egyptian guy who I spotted wearing my friend’s sleeveless sweater as an undershirt.

Expo 67 was 45 years ago and all I have left as a souvenir from working on construction there is this badge.

My construction badge from Expo 67.
 

I would love to hear from others on their experiences at Expo 67. Maybe even put them up on my blog.

Motoring West

Cooper.

 

After spending about 2 weeks this past summer in Ontario, Quebec, upstate New York and Vermont, it was time to head back to Vancouver Island where we live. All in all, I put about 13,000 kilometers on the odometer including the drive across Canada.

It can get pretty hot on Vancouver Island in the summer but there is always a bit of a breeze. Linda and I had forgotten how close and humid it can get in the summer back east. It can be kind of draining if you are not used to it. Now I know why older folks who go on long road trips always seem to plan them in the fall or springtime.

Our basic plan was to cross into the US at Michigan and make our way to two particular spots along the way out to the Pacific Ocean, Mount Rushmore and Yellowstone National Park.

We had no idea that the temperature would be as high as 105 degrees. In fact, last summer was the hottest on record in the US since something like 1889. Linda likes air conditioning in the car and I prefer the windows open and the breeze coming in. The latter isn’t much of an option when it really gets hot out.

We crossed over the border at Port Huron and a few hours later found a beach with sand dunes along the shores of Lake Michigan, a good place for our dog to have a swim. We spent our first night in a motel just outside of East Lansing, Michigan.

Lake Michigan.

The next day we put in a lot of miles. We went through Indiana and Illinois and ended up in the small town of Leclaire, Iowa. We stayed at a motel up on a hill overlooking the Mississippi River below. The back entranceway to the motel was clogged with dead mayflies. There were thousands of them. I drove around looking for a place that had take-out food and found a little sandwich shop by the river. I overheard some people talking about visiting the building that the American Pickers operate from. American Pickers is a TV show about two guys from Iowa who drive all over the US looking for lost treasures they can make a buck on.

American Pickers.





We checked out of our motel fairly early the next morning hoping to beat the heat for at least a few hours. That didn’t work. It was really hot out at 8 a.m. We drove down to the river and stopped where a Mississippi riverboat was moored. It took a little bit of time to find it, but up the road a bit we found the warehouse and office for the American Pickers. In front of the building there was a rusted old Hudson sitting up on a mound. Apparently the parking lot is often crammed with tourists. We were the only people there when we visited.

Old Hudson.

American Pickers home base Leclaire, Iowa.

Mississippi riverboat, Leclaire, Iowa.

We got back on the main highway and about an hour later pulled off the highway to visit a little community called The Amana Colonies. There are seven little villages in the area and it is populated by a religious group called The Ebonezer Society or The Community of True Inspiration. Most of them have German ancestry and they have a self-sufficient local economy. Everything looked very tidy. I grabbed a pastry at the local baker’s and we bought some sausages at the butcher’s.

Amana Colonies.

We drove past endless corn fields in Iowa. The temperature in the daytime was now as high as 105 degrees Fahrenheit. Each morning we packed up a small cooler that we kept in the back seat of the car. The back seat was our dog Cooper’s spot and we made sure he had plenty of water to drink. We pulled into Sioux City, Iowa and found a motel.

Cornfields.

I’m not sure what day it was that we started to feel we were in some kind of marathon. The weather was starting to tap us. Even when we stopped to get gas or something to eat it was hard to find any shade. We took turns driving and there were long stretches of not seeing much off of the highway that was interesting. By the end of every day we were just happy to find an air conditioned motel room.

All across the US, other than fast food joints, we found the restaurant food to be awful. We weren’t sure if many of the restaurants lacked in knowledge of food preparation or just didn’t care. Maybe it was a small town thing as we avoided staying in larger cities. Americans seem to love things like biscuits and gravy with the gravy being kind of lumpy. In hindsight we should have brought a list of diners, drive-ins and dives. After a long day it can be a kind of empty feeling when the salad you ordered turns up with wilted lettuce with brown ends.

About a month ago I posted a comment on a site on the net about the crappy food we experienced and someone commented back that we had chosen the worst states to drive through expecting something reasonable to eat. He said he was a travelling salesman and the first rule is to stay away from square shaped states. Who knew?

We spent a forgettable night in Sioux City, Iowa and made our way into South Dakota the following morning. Linda had made notes of things to see along the way and we stopped off at The Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota. Apparently about a half a million people visit this tourist trap every year. We wandered around for about an hour. At one of the shops I saw a big blanket that had famous American Indians depicted on Mount Rushmore instead of the dead presidents. I thought it was funny. All in all the town was a bit….corny.

Corn Palace, Mitchell, South Dakota

We arrived in Keystone, South Dakota in the late afternoon. Keystone is the closest town to Mount Rushmore. We were attracted by a large flashing neon sign that advertised motel rooms for $59.00 a night. The motel was perched on the mountainside overlooking Keystone. It turned out that the advertising was just bullshit and the rooms were more like $159.00 a night.

We drove around town looking for another motel and saw another $59.00 a night neon sign. Again it was bullshit. We checked into a modest motel at about $100.00 a night and stayed there for 2 days. As we were unloading the car we struck up a conversation with some middle aged bikers who were sitting outside their rooms with their wives and girlfriends having a few pops. It turned out that they were all from Port Coquitlam, BC not far from where we live.

About the only thing we found interesting about Keystone was the local museum and some bronze sculptures by the guy and his son who built the Mount Rushmore monument. Their names were Gutson Borglum and Lincoln Borglum. When he was younger, the father studied in Paris and actually knew the famous French sculptor Auguste Rodin. The Mount Rushmore Memorial was started in 1927 and completed in 1941.

Mount Rushmore

We never got really close up to the monument as we couldn’t be bothered with the pay parking lot and you could see the thing very clearly from other vantage points.

The food in Keystone was probably the worst of our trip. We tried the breakfast buffet in one joint that had greasy eggs and partially cooked bacon. I ordered a donair in another place and was served some fried luncheon meat on microwaved pita bread. I placed an order for a 3 cheese grilled sandwich for take out and they gave my order to another customer. They actually ran down the street to recover it. I also made the mistake of buying some fudge that was below room temperature.



Every night in Keystone they stage some kind of native Indian thing with a whole lot of hooping and hollering. A lot of the shops had fake fronts making them look like they were from over a hundred years ago. Sort of. There were a lot of signs advertising 50% off. All in all a tacky, tacky little town.

Keystone, South Dakota.
 

We went for a drive around the area and it was well worth it. There were lots of short tunnels through parts of mountains and lots of pine trees. On our second day there I decided to see if I could find a good place where the dog could swim. It took me well over an hour to find a place that was accessible and it ended up being in a park in another small town that had a brook running through it.

Tunnel.

We visited the Crazy Horse Memorial about 20 miles away from Mount Rushmore. Again another tourist trap but a lot more tasteful than Keystone. You can’t get very close to the actual monument as it is a work in progress. It was started in 1848 and it appears it will be well over 100 years from now when it will be completed. It is much bigger than Mount Rushmore and at this time only the head of Crazy Horse has been accomplished.

Crazy Horse Monument

We left the Mount Rushmore area and headed into Montana. We spent the night in a place called Red Lodge. The next morning we found ourselves on The Bear Tooth Highway that starts in Montana and ends up in Wyoming. It was absolutely spectacular and one of the high points of our trip. And I do mean “high point”. The highway winds and winds its way up to the mountain tops with lots of hairpins. We were up so far that there were snow banks that hadn’t totally melted in the summer weather.

Goat herd near Red Lodge, Montana

We saw a few marmots, alpine lakes, and wildflowers everywhere. It was totally amazing. I got a little nervous at times because the road was narrow and there were thousands of feet drop offs just off of the road and often no barriers. The speed limit was 15 miles per hour in some places.



Hairy road.

Our dog Cooper swimming in Alpine lake.

 

We found our way to the park entrance to Yellowstone National Park. We were on a roll as far as spectacularscenery goes. Years ago, I spent some time living in Banff and Jasper, Alberta in the Canadian Rockies and Yellowstone gives them a run for their money.

Gatehouse to Yellowstone.

The wild buffalo herds alone are enough to blow you away. The scenery is awesome. We saw mountain goats, deer, and elk. There were lots of creeks and small lakes. We took a pass on going to see Old Faithful as we had seen a number of other geysers. We really only spent one day at Yellowstone but was a day we will long remember.





Mountains.

Mountain Goat. Dead center of pic.

Buffalo.

Geyser.

Cool tour bus.
 

We did stop at Wounded Knee in South Dakota and Little Big Horn in Montana and both times we decided to take a pass. One of reasons we opted out was we couldn’t leave the dog in the car and another reason was we would just be looking at an open field with little to see other than people selling souvenirs.

Entrance to Little Big Horn

We ended up spending the night in a forgettable town called Belgrade, Montana. We asked the front desk gal if she could recommend a good place to eat and she suggested a truck stop across the highway. I got to eavesdrop on a conversation between some truckers at a nearby booth. It was mostly about women. Our food came and it was another culinary disappointment.

On the road.

We were about to begin our mad dash for home. We had had enough of the unrelenting heat. There wasn’t a lot to see out of the window that was of much interest by this point. We did notice in different spots across the west that wind turbines had been set up over the last number of years as another source of energy.

Wind turbines.

We crossed the mighty Columbia River and into Washington State. The eastern part of Washington is desert like in a lot of places. In other spots they grow wheat and corn and some vegetables. We spent out last night in Ellensberg, Washington about 100 miles east of Seattle. (Hey…I’m an old guy and I still use miles and Fahrenheit when I can.)

Columbia River.

As we got closer to Seattle we could see the thick forests we are familiar with in BC. We were almost home. We stopped off at a MacDonalds for breakfast. There was a white guy about 40 years of age sitting with a black teenager at the next table. A prayer was said before they ate. It made me think of the good rock stations we listened to on the road trip that faded away before us then hearing some religious sermonizing and us deciding to just turn the radio off.

Seattle.

We stopped off at Bellingham, Washington and went to the local mall and bought a bunch of clothes. Also picked up some duty free booze near the border.

We had a bit of waiting to do at the ferry terminal near Vancouver and after a long day and a 35 day trip it was good to be home. One of the first things I did was go to the grocery store the next day to get some decent food.

 

 

 

Georgeville and Stanstead, Quebec and Lake Memphremagog

Our family spent part of the summer of 1955 in Georgeville, Quebec. Georgeville is a small town about halfway down the eastern side of Lake Memphremagog in the Eastern townships south of Montreal.



We rented one of the several cottages that were dotted about on a large property that I believe was part of a working farm. There was a large farmhouse with a veranda. In the back of the house there was an outdoor hand water pump. In the front of the house there was a mowed lawn where they set up a croquet pitch. I remember being surprised that a girl from my grade school class back in Montreal was also staying at the same place. There was a dining room in the farmhouse that catered to guests who rented rooms there and the cottage renters.

Old farmhouse, Georgeville, Quebec circa 1955

Same farmouse 1982.
 

I vaguely recall hanging out with some other boys my age that summer and riding the swings behind a little one room schoolhouse. I also remember the local general store where you could buy a Popsicle or blackball candies that were 3 for a penny.

There was a rather tiny beach area on the property and most of the activity seemed to be centered around a cement pier that was a short walk away. At one time, a paddle wheeler docked here back in the early part of the last century.

Maison McGowan or McGowan House as it used to be called, is an old wooden building that once was a summer boarding house. It stands right on the shore of Lake Memphremagog and appears to still be a going concern with an outdoor restaurant. It also looks like they rent kayaks. Across the lake is Elephant Mountain.

Dock at Georgeville, Quebec

Farm on western side of Lake Memphremagog.

Elephant Mountain, Lake Memphremagog

McGowan House, Georgeville, Quebec

McGowan House, Georgeville, Quebec
 

On the day we were in Georgeville this past summer there was some kind of festival going on but we had arrived when things were petering out. I believe the old farmhouse that we used to dine at had been torn down or burned down a number of years ago. We took a walk up a lane and I recognized the landscape as where the cottages were over 50 years passed. A few seemed to be still intact with some additions.

I had read somewhere that Donald Sutherland owned a home in Georgeville. This was confirmed by a few of the local weekenders we talked to. We could clearly see that the little village that once was almost exclusively English had transformed over the years and had become a popular weekend retreat for many French Canadians.

The old general store was still in operation and had been considerably updated. Instead of blackballs they were now marketing upscale food products.


General store, Georgeville, Quebec circa 1982



General store, Georgeville, Quebec 2012

 

There is a small town on the Oregon coast that reminds me of Georgeville. It is called Manzanita. One of those places when you are driving that you spot at the bottom of a hill that looks interesting and if you didn’t stop you would miss it going up the hill after passing it.

Stone ring, Stanstead, Quebec

Not far up the road from Georgeville is the town of Stanstead, Quebec. It is located on the Canadian side of the US border adjacent to Derby Line, Vermont. I can’t remember visiting Stanstead as a kid but I am sure we passed through it. On either side of the main drag that goes through the town there are a number of amazing looking Victorian mansions and old churches.

Stanstead College

Old house in Stanstead, Quebec

A church in Stanstead, Quebec.
 

Stanstead College, from what I understand, caters to international students and Canadians who want to experience getting a grade school and high school education at a private institution. A friend of mine from high school spent his whole adult life teaching at Stanstead. Kind of reminds me of the movie Goodbye Mr. Chips. About 18 years or so ago, I tried to look him up in Stanstead. It was Labour Day Weekend and he was away somewhere with his family. I left my business card stuck in the door jamb of his house and later tried to e-mail him. I never got a response. I hope I didn't freak him out. Hi Andy!

Newport, Vermont, Lake Memphremagog.

Sailor, Newport, Vermont.

There is something about this area around Lake Memphremagog. Time just seems to slow down and nobody seems to be in a terrible hurry about much. Kind of neat.

Old barn.

Cows.

Wicked weather vane.

Covered bridge.

Kelley's Motor Court & Restaurant, Derby Line, Vermont 1950s.