Читать книгу George Garrett - George Garrett - Страница 14

Money was always hard to come by. My dad was a hard worker and generous to a fault, but there was always a grocery bill at Koshman’s Store, the one with the big Coca-Cola sign, four long blocks from our house at the edge of Moose Jaw. After he was paid, Dad had a weekly habit of going for a few beers with the boys from work, and sometimes the pay envelope was pretty thin when he got home at night, often by taxi. My mom was a teetotaller and did not approve of him drinking, but there wasn’t much she could do about it except go downtown and meet him to rescue most of the money on payday. Our family always seemed broke, and if I wanted spending money I had to earn it. I used to hang out at the local stockyards and offer to clean manure out of farmers’ trucks. That meant I would not only get fifty cents for the work but I could also drive their trucks from the loading chute to the manure pile and then to a wash rack. A three-tonne cattle truck was a pretty big deal to a fifteen-year-old kid. However, competition from older boys at the major stockyards forced me to move my operations up the hill to the much smaller facility at Canada Packers. There were fewer trucks but I was the only kid so I did all right.

Around the same time, I was befriended by a gruff old steam plant engineer named Clint Smith. I offered to wash his big Chrysler for a small fee. I can still remember him saying, “You want me to pay you for washing my car—with my water and my beef shroud?” (Used for wrapping sides of beef, the shroud makes an ideal wash rag.) Clint not only paid me to wash his car but helped me line up similar jobs with the plant manager, Wally Gentiles, produce manager, George Smallwood, and sales manager, Cliff Steele. In fact, Clint Smith was so kind to me that he took me in his Chrysler to get my first driver’s licence at age sixteen. Those thoughts came back to me when my sixteen-year-old grandson, Trevor Watt, phoned me to say, “Papa, I just passed my driver’s test.” Believe me, Trevor, I know how important that is!

I supplemented my manure cleaning and car-washing income by setting pins at the Moose Jaw Bowling Alley, long before there were automatic pinsetters. Most of the time it was five pins but occasionally we set ten pins. They are much heavier and they tend to fly through the air like a missile. There were lots of bumps and bruises but we had fun, sometimes yelling back at the bowlers when they threw a ball while we were still cleaning downed pins from the alley. We were paid for every game we set and could make pretty good spending money from league bowling. Much of the money was spent on chocolate bars and pop, but I did manage to save enough money to buy my own CCM balloon-tired bike. It was a beauty. A bike was an essential means of transportation in all but the cold winter months. I rode my bike to high school in the morning, home for lunch (which we called dinner) and back to school in the afternoon. After school and on weekends I would explore every area of the city from River Park to the Natatorium, a pool with mineral water in the middle of the city. I paid attention to everything—how many taxicabs each company had, what kind of cars they were, how many delivery trucks each firm had, what was playing at the movie theatres, where to buy the best milkshake. I knew everything about the town (or so I thought) and just loved growing up in Moose Jaw. I was reminded of my hometown nearly fifty years later when I retired from radio. My boss, Warren Barker, prefaced his remarks about my career with “the kid from Moose Jaw.” I loved it.

I enjoyed high school a lot. I would easily have passed Grade 11 had it not been for my sudden interest in girls. School work suffered as I began phoning girls and carrying their books. What a romantic I was! As a result, I did not pass all my Grade 11 subjects and I did not go on to Grade 12 because my commercial courses had ended. In later life I always regretted not completing school and going on to university.

Getting a job was relatively easy in the early 1950s. Because of my contacts at Canada Packers, I was able to pick up some odd jobs. A not-so-nice one was grasping turkeys by the leg, pulling them out of wooden crates and hanging them on a killing chain. Turkey legs are rough and I did not have gloves. Ouch!

Another interesting job was shaking animal hides to remove excess salt. Once again no gloves, just sore hands with salt rubbed into the wounds. A third job was a little more dangerous—chipping ice off the pipes in the giant cooler where butchers worked about thirty feet below me. Later I got a job on the shipping floor carrying fronts and hinds of beef from the cooler to trucks for delivery to meat markets. I was just a scrawny kid and those hinds and fronts were heavy. One day I was told to take the freight elevator to a second-storey freezer where I was to spend most of the day piling frozen halibut—chicken halibut and jumbo halibut—small and large. I was not told that the only exit from the freezer was the elevator and if it was being used for other products, I just had to wait and shiver! Eventually, thanks to my typing and shorthand skills, I got a job in the office at Canada Packers taking orders over the phone from our salesmen all over southwestern Saskatchewan and in person from customers who came to the plant. I can still recall one customer who smoked. He would let the ashes accumulate on his cigarette until they tumbled down onto my typewriter and desk. Smoking was so common then that no one complained, especially about second-hand smoke. In fact, we had never heard of it.

My brother Bob owned an old 1929 Pontiac. I was itching to drive it, especially when he left it at home and went away on a holiday. He gave strict instructions to our mother and grandmother not to give me the keys. It took only about a day before I was able to con them out of the keys. One of my friends was babysitting so we decided the house where he was babysitting would be a good place to have a party. We did not have alcohol, just a record player and lots of fun. After a day or two we were hungry, but we had no money for food, although the baby was well looked after. It dawned on me that my mother had two chickens. I took one of them. We chopped its head off, put it in hot water so we could pluck the feathers, then cleaned and cooked it. It was a very old chicken and the toughest meat I had ever chewed. For weeks and months later my poor mother would say, “Whatever happened to my chicken?”

We had great fun in Bob’s old ’29 Pontiac. Its brakes were not very good so I learned how to slow by gearing down. (Of course, it was a gear-shift car, long before automatic transmissions were invented.) One day, coming down a steep grade on North Hill, the gearing down was not effective, so I had to jam the car into reverse to stop. It was a wonder the transmission didn’t explode!

Eventually my buddy Willie Flahr and I bought Bob’s car. We used it to pick up girls, but they always had to be home before dark. Willie had a beautiful girlfriend named Delores, whom he later married. My date one night was a girl named Jeanette Olynik—whose nickname was Jelly Bean. Willie and Delores would be cuddling in the front seat while I tried to get close to Jelly Bean. No such luck! Because Willie’s gal Delores had to be home before dark we utilized the built-in curtains in the old Pontiac to darken the interior as we sat parked in River Park. I had no need for curtains, though—Jelly Bean wanted nothing to do with me!

Owning a car was one thing but trying to buy gas for it was quite another. One night we decided we could siphon some gas from a big tanker truck on South Hill. We were hanging out on Moose Jaw’s notorious River Street, parked near a pool hall. I was at the wheel of the car as we sat parked, waiting for darkness, a cigarette dangling from my mouth with my feet hanging out the window. We had a gallon glass jug and a hose on the floor of the back seat that we would use in our siphoning operation. Just as it was getting dark, along came a police officer we knew named Scotty Goodman. As he chatted with us he asked us what we were up to. “Oh, nothing,” we said. He shone his flashlight in the backseat area and said, “Boys, if you are going to siphon gas you’ll need a bigger container than that.”

Then he smiled and went on his way. We should have aborted the operation then and there, but we really needed gas and had no money. We drove to South Hill and parked close to the big gas transport truck. Somehow I was the guy nominated to put the hose in the truck gas tank and suck on it. I will never forget the awful taste of gas in my mouth. Yuck! The taste stayed with me for days. We never tried stealing gas again.

My job on the order desk at Canada Packers was good while it lasted, but adventure beckoned. In early 1952, I decided to quit the job and head out to Alberta with Willie Flahr.

By this time we jointly owned a yellow 1941 Ford convertible. We bought it from Scotty Goodman, the friendly cop who looked the other way when we went out to steal gas. It was a sharp-looking car, or so we thought as we cruised the streets of Moose Jaw, mostly the so-called Golden Mile from North Hill to the CPR station at the foot of Main Street. One night we took the car out on the highway east of Moose Jaw and were challenged to a race. As we roared down the two-lane highway side by side with another group of kids in their car, our hood suddenly sprang up. The latch had come loose at our high speed. I happened to be driving and was able to still see the road through a narrow opening as Willie guided me to pull off the highway. Our racing days were over after that close call.

After we had the hood repaired we drove to Edmonton and applied for work at the Unemployment Office. We were told of jobs at a sawmill in Whitecourt, Alberta. Willie was a stocky guy, better built than me. That was one reason the people at the sawmill decided they would hire him in the mill, while I would take a job in the office. My brief office experience at Canada Packers in Moose Jaw was likely also a factor. In any case, our jobs didn’t last too long. The mill’s union went on strike after we had been there only about three days. We had very little money but decided to hang around for a few more days to see if the strike would end.

During that time our car was stopped by the RCMP in what I was sure was just a routine check. Willie and I were not involved in any criminal activity but the RCMP wanted to know who was in their area and what they were doing. They separated us, leaving Willie in our car while I was taken to the police car. In the end, our stories about what we were doing were similar and we were allowed to go on our way.

I found a job in a small logging operation, and Willie wound up working on a nearby farm. I kept our 1941 Ford convertible at the logging company, owned by a man named Bert and his wife. They asked to borrow our car to go to Edmonton. I agreed to let them take it and was left in charge of the place, a small log cabin on a piece of land surrounded by bush. Bert told me to look after the place and their pet monkey, which was chained to the stove. When I tried to light the fire one morning I found the wood was too damp. I remembered that Bert had used an accelerant in a red gas can, but the can was empty so I filled it with gas I found in the yard. What I didn’t know was that Bert mixed the gas with oil, which I failed to do. Of course, when I poured the gas on the stove and lit a match, it exploded with a bang. Flames shot out of the stove and into the nearby wall. I tried to untie the monkey but it was screaming, and I knew I stood the risk of being bitten. All I had to fight the fire was a small saucepan. I used it to run outside and get water, making several trips back and forth, pouring water on the walls and hoping the fire would go out. I was so scared that I ran to the neighbour at least a kilometre away and asked him to come back with me. As we approached we saw a glow in the sky. The cabin was engulfed in flames. The next morning in the charred ruins of the cabin, I found the monkey’s chain, but not the monkey. It had obviously perished in the fire.

There was nothing more I could do except make my way to the nearest town, Mayerthorpe. I knew Bert and his wife had relatives there. As I trudged into town, having walked several kilometres, I ran into Bert on the street. He said, “What the hell are you doing in town? You’re supposed to be looking after our place.” When I told him the house had burned down, in shock, he asked, “What about the monkey?” The monkey had died, I nervously reported. Understandably he was enraged. I was just a scrawny kid and he was a tough, hefty man. He hit me hard, the blow striking me in the face. I fell to the ground and struggled to get up. He hit me again and I decided the best plan was stay down for a while. When Bert cooled down he told me to go back to the logging operation and clean up. He said I was to get rid of the monkey’s chain. Even as a kid, I knew what that monkey had meant to Bert and his wife—it was like a child to them. Bert and his wife planned to carry on to Edmonton in our car, but I never learned why they didn’t want to return to their cabin to survey the damage and perhaps salvage things. I suspect his wife was so overwhelmed that she could not immediately face it.

Meanwhile, I trudged back to the logging operation in the pouring rain. On the way I thought I saw an illusion. It was a man on a white horse; he called out my name. As I looked up through swollen eyes and a battered face, I recognized it was my buddy Willie. He had borrowed a horse to come looking for me. In a rush, I told him the story of the fire that destroyed the cabin and the monkey. We should return to Mayerthorpe, he said, and recover our car. We rode double on the horse several kilometres back to Mayerthorpe, a small Alberta town that was to become infamous decades later when four RCMP members were killed by a gunman who then turned the gun on himself, taking his own life.

When Willie and I arrived in town, we took a hotel room even though we didn’t have a lot of money. I can still remember hanging up our soaking wet clothes on a hanger on the inside of the hotel room door. Puddles of water seeped out into the hallway. When we went for breakfast a man approached us, looked at my battered face and asked what had happened to me. I told him I had been punched a couple of times by a man whose house I had burned down by accident. He said, “No one has the right to hit a kid like that.” He took me to the RCMP detachment where I reported the details of the fire, the monkey and the assault.

As darkness fell, Willie and I quietly returned to the house where Bert’s relatives lived. There in the backyard was our ’41 Ford convertible. Willie noticed the hood was not properly closed and guessed something had been done to prevent the car from starting. We lifted the hood and found the distributor cap had been unscrewed but was still there. We fumbled in the dark and got it on, then started the car. Willie jammed it in reverse and roared the motor. Unknown to us the front bumper had been caught in a wire fence. Rip! We tore out some fence and sped off down the road. We knew that was the only way to get our car back.

Later, I felt terribly remorseful for what I had done; in fact, I’ve regretted it all my life, especially taking off without trying to make amends. Bert and his wife had lost their home and pet monkey because of me, a stupid kid who wasn’t thinking straight. There was nothing I could do but try to tell them I was sorry, but Bert was so angry he hit me before I got the chance. I know I deserved it. I have thought about it many times and wondered if I had been told he mixed oil with gas or if the can had been full the fire might never have happened. Seventeen-year-old kids have a lot to learn.

Several months later, after I had moved to North Battleford, Saskatchewan, I received a phone call from the RCMP. They asked me to come to the local detachment. The Mayerthorpe detachment had received a complaint about theft of tools from the owner of the cabin I burned down. He accused me of stealing some heavy tools. I told the RCMP all about the fire and the death of the monkey, plus the subsequent assault, which I was sure was already in their files. I explained to the RCMP that since I left the logging camp on horseback, there was no way I could carry heavy tools. I guess they accepted my explanation and the file was no doubt concluded.

In any event, that was the last I heard of it.

The adventurous trip to Alberta with Willie Flahr in our ’41 Ford convertible was my second trip to that province. The year before, at age sixteen, for some reason I thought it would be a good idea to hitchhike to Alberta … in winter. It was a cold January morning when I came out to breakfast in our family home in Moose Jaw. I was dragging an old army kit bag.

“Where are you going?” asked my dad.

“I’m going to hitchhike to Alberta.” It was the first time I had ventured out of Saskatchewan.

Dad was astounded. “How much money do you have, George?” I had twelve dollars, I told him. Dad said, “I can’t give you any money. I don’t have any.” He was flat broke.

I told him not to worry—I would be all right. Much later in life I realized just how much of a worry that would be to any parent—a kid setting off in January who had virtually no money and nowhere to stay. I walked a couple of kilometres up to the Trans-Canada Highway west of Moose Jaw and stuck out my thumb. In no time I had a ride from one of many travelling salesmen who helped me along the way, not only giving me rides but sometimes buying me a meal. I never ran into any difficulty and was always well treated by my benefactors.

In a few days I arrived in Lethbridge, where a friend of my brother Bob was living. His name was Art MacKenzie; his family had lived next to ours on the farm during the Depression and in the first years of World War II. In fact, three of the MacKenzie boys served in the war. Jim and Jack returned home, but Dave was killed overseas. I looked up Art. He was staying with his older brother, Jim, and his wife, and they took me in.

In no time I found a job and moved to a boarding house. That first job was with Western Canada Hardware, a company that handled everything from steel to oxygen tanks used in welding. They also handled dynamite used in mining. I knew that our dynamite delivery truck was making a delivery to a coal mine in the Crowsnest Pass, west of Lethbridge. My sister Muriel and her family lived there, and I wanted to visit, so I asked for a ride. The driver was a real character. The dynamite delivery truck was bright red and was required to fly a red flag to indicate we were carrying explosives. Flying down a hill on Highway 3, the driver waited until we were approaching an oncoming car and turned off the ignition, quickly turning it on again. The effect was a terrific bang! The driver of the oncoming vehicle must have been frightened out of his wits hearing that bang and seeing the red flag of the dynamite truck. We laughed as we carried on, but the truck sounded noisy—he had probably destroyed the muffler.

My next job in Lethbridge was at a local butcher shop. However, on about the third day I cut my hand badly. The owner told me to go to a nearby doctor and have it bandaged. He said he would pay for the treatment and gave me my three days’ pay. He said, “George, I don’t think you’ll ever be a butcher.” I was fired but there were no bad feelings. I understood.

My last job in Lethbridge was with the Lethbridge Laundry and Dry Cleaners. I began by being a swamper—a helper on the truck delivering clean laundry and picking up dirty laundry like bed sheets, pillow slips and towels. Our main clients were the hotels. It was fairly heavy lifting for a kid. I “graduated” to working in the dry-cleaning plant where customers’ clothes were placed in cleaning fluid in a large drum, similar to a washing machine. The process ended with the machine—called an extractor—whirling at high speed to expel the cleaning fluid with centrifugal force. When the machine stopped, it was my job to lift the clothing out of the extractor and put it in a dryer. The wet clothing was heavy and the solvent turned my hands raw. Gloves were not supplied.

One of my fellow workers was a guy who owned a motorcycle. He invited me to go for a ride on a Sunday. It was in the days before helmets. We rode down to the US border at Sweetgrass, Montana, but to my disappointment we did not cross the border. However, we were able to see a very large American flag. I was thrilled. It was the first time I had seen the American flag flying in the United States.

My hitchhiking habits took me far and wide.

While living and working in Lethbridge I would travel on weekends, using my thumb to catch rides. Some weekends I would hitchhike to Medicine Hat and hang around Radio Station CHAT, known in radio as “The CHAT in the Hat.” In Lethbridge, at radio station CJOC, I would run errands for the announcers such as Wally Stanbuck and Ron Hunka, who later became a first-class CBC announcer in Edmonton. I was in heaven hanging around those stations, especially CJOC. I was devastated when I was told, “Hey kid, we don’t want you hanging around here.”

One weekend I hitchhiked to Calgary and took a room in a hotel. I then did something that was so out of character and so despicable that I am ashamed to write about it. I include this terrible story because it was a defining moment in my life.

In the late evening, I returned to my hotel room, passing a room with its door ajar. I looked in and could see a man sprawled across the bed. On impulse I tiptoed into the room and saw the man’s trousers on a chair by the bed. For some inexplicable reason, I decided I would rob the man by stealing his wallet. My heart was pounding as I thought he might wake up, even though I suspected he had passed out from drinking. Audaciously, I picked up a beer bottle with the intention of hitting the man if he woke up. In that pivotal moment I had a realization that I was about to commit a terrible criminal act that was not in my nature at all. I quietly put down the bottle and made my way out of the man’s room, gently closing the door behind me. I returned to my room with my heart still pounding, terribly ashamed at what I had just done.

The next morning, on my return trip to Lethbridge, I was picked up by a truck driver who happened to be a Mormon. We talked a lot about religion and the thought occurred to me that it must have been divine intervention that caused me to stop what could have led to a life of crime. Instead, a bright new career was about to open up for me. It was indeed a day of destiny!