How much a dunce that has been send to roam excels a dunce that has been kept at home!
Cowper

Chapter 23

THIS IS THE PROMISED LAND?

The way from the rail station to Dee’s house reminded me of my experiences in Russia. The streets were dirt, the sidewalks were wooden boards and the wooden houses, some with false fronts, looked like “Potemkin’s villages.”

In the Peace River Country

It felt good to be with familiar faces and to be able to talk things over with old friends. My trip had taken 17 days from Frankfurt to Grande Prairie, Alberta. I had an urgent need to walk on solid ground, so Dee and I walked right into downtown, and he showed me where all the important stores and cafes were. Dee had a story on hand about everyone.

We walked to the York Hotel and into the beer parlor, where Dee treated me to a glass of Canadian beer. The Canadian beer was good, that meant the country was good too. The beer parlor had an entrance for the ordinary lush, and an extra one for ladies and escorts. I thought that was hilarious. In the “For Ladies and Escorts” area, I saw Indian women drink a red liquid. Dee said they were mixing their beer with tomato juice. What a way to ruin perfectly good beer.

Since it was Saturday, the whole hinterland was in town, and there were quite a few “huge” cars. Dee introduced me to at least a dozen people as we walked through the shopping district. It seemed as if all of Grande Prairie knew that I had arrived. I didn’t know how to respond to people when I was introduced to them. My school English wasn’t good enough for chitchatting in Prairie English, but I was very impressed by the friendly attitude of people.

At Dee’s house he told me he had bought it for $2,500. The inside of the house, although sparsely furnished, was reasonably comfy. There wasn’t any indoor plumbing or toilet, only an outhouse in the backyard. Water was stored in a 55 gallon drum inside a kitchen closet. The drum was filled twice a week from a water truck, at 25 cents for ten gallons.

I couldn’t help but think, here I come from a civilized country and I have to put up with these “medieval” conveniences. That was certainly not a move in the right direction. The address for the house was: Main Street, Fifth house east of Windsor Motors. I had never seen an address like that before.

Vera had prepared hamburger with all the trimmings for supper. The weekend evening meal would become a tradition in Bergner’s kitchen. Dee would always act out the Bumstead bit (as in the Blondie comic strip), by piling layers and layers of salad leaves, tomatoes, onions, pickles, mustard, relish and what have you on his hamburger bun. He would open the fridge and looked to see what else was in there that he could pile on. Eating his super-burger was another thing. We had a lot of fun, just horsing around at the kitchen table during those meals.

Then I heard steps outside, and Dee and Vera sighed, rolled their eyes, and said, “Oh no, not the Stuttgart gang again!” Several scruffy looking characters stormed in shouting in German-English, “Welcome in Grande Prairie, de Arsch of de World.” Hanke, Godel, and George came in, the other two of the Stuttgart gang were in Vancouver on vacation. They schlepped several gallons of Whisky in. Well, it was one hell of a party, but I pooped out around midnight. I had to sleep in the living room on a sofa bed, because the two upstairs rooms which I was supposed to get were still rented to Kurt Elsner, a chap from Hamburg.

Some strange customs in Canada where the “strike anywhere” matches. These types were long prohibited in Germany because of the problems with kids. Another strange habit of smokers was using the cuffs of pants for an ashtray.

I negotiated the price of $25.- for room and board per week. I didn’t have a job yet, but Dee said to pay him back when I had my first paycheck. Then we discussed the rental of the two bedrooms upstairs. Kurt would stay until Martha arrived because Dee needed the money.

On Monday, Dee told me that Fred Reeves had talked to Ray Menard at Steel Industries Ltd., a machine shop, and I should apply for a job there. I was scared as hell, because I didn’t know what to say or what kind of a job it was. I talked with Ray and he told me to start the next day, at 95 cents an hour. That was supposedly five cents more than the going rate for greenhorns, since I could speak some English. I was going to work as a machinist. I had never worked on an engine lathe before, but had work experience on pantograph milling machines and knew arc welding. What the hell, I was going to give it a try.

I had to change the language, the profession, and above all, the measuring system, and was expected to perform instantly. I was supposed to know how to set up the lathe, how to grind the tools that were used to remove metal from the work-piece, what spindle speeds and feeds to use for a specific task, and how to measure various dimensions during the machining process.

Who me fixing bulldozers?

The shop foreman, Art Fenton, an old Scotsman, wasn’t pleased with me, because he had to explain everything. At times I didn’t understand what he said and that scared the hell out of me, because I had to earn a living.

My first assignment was to remove the hinge pins off a dozer blade on a D-6 Caterpillar bulldozer. I didn’t know if this was a joke, or a test of my determination. I tried to drift the 2.50" diameter pins out using a fairly big hammer, but they just wouldn’t budge. Finally Orville Nellis, one of the other workers, took pity for me and gave me a hand. He started up the engine of the D-6, and manipulated the hydraulic system to take the weight of the dozer blade off the hinge pins. Then I drove the pins out with a sledge hammer. That I couldn’t have known how to do that job, didn’t concern anybody. Just do it! What a great philosophy, if you succeed, that is.

On my second day one of the other workers, who could speak a bit of German, told me to wait until Kurt Hofmeister, a German from Stuttgart, returned from his vacation. Kurt was a top-notch machinist, and so they assumed everybody from Germany was like him.
On Monday Kurt took me under his wing. We got along just fine and I learned quickly. Every once in a while I goofed, but it wasn’t long before the shop foreman could give me any type of work. When the shop manager found out that I had drafting experience, he put me on a job designing a portable sawmill for a customer. By that time I had seen a lot of the woodworking machinery used by the local mills, but not a portable sawmill. Ray told me what he had in mind and I had some ideas that I thought would work.

The principle customers of Steel Industries Ltd. were the sawmills, the plywood factory and many oil companies. The oil guys had moved into the Peace River area in the early 1950s. Their seismic work crews were looking for oil all over the Peace River country.
Many of their jobs were beyond the equipment we had at the machine shop, but we just did them as best as we could. Even in those days the hourly expenses of an oil drilling derrick were in the thousand Dollar/hour region.

Any German shop supervisor would have had an instant heart attack, had he seen how we executed some of these jobs. Sometimes daring, and sometimes foolhardy would be an appropriate description of the work principles involved.

On the first of September I got my first paycheck of $195.18, of which $100 went to the Bergners for room and board, and with the rest I bought a few tools needed for work.

It was time to see Mr. Ledger, the local immigration officer, and apply for a permit to bring Martha over. Vera was looking forward to her arrival, but I had mixed feelings because of our prior marital problems in Germany. I should have told her, Grande Prairie is the most miserable area I ever lived in, so it would be better if you didn’t come over. But I also had a look at the girls available there and then decided to change my mind.

By the end of September I had permission to bring her over. I rented the two small upstairs bedrooms, and with my next paycheck I bought a bed, and converted a 4x4 ft. closet, with an outside window, into a tiny kitchen. An oil heater was the next thing I installed, and there was some money left for a couple of chairs and a table. The place was livable and I was broke.

A Halloween arrival

On October 17, Martha boarded the ship in Bremerhaven, arrived in Quebec City on the 26th, and rolled into Grande Prairie on Halloween Day. As we walked from the station she saw all the kids in costumes running around to collect their treats. This was a custom not practised in Germany. When Martha asked why all the kids were running around in funny costumes, I told her, “That is because you arrived in town,” and Dee asked, “Where is your broom” but she didn’t get our jokes.

There was a big hello at the Bergners, particularly from the kids, and combined with the Halloween gangs coming and going, it was a riotous reception. To top it all, the Stuttgart gang showed up to greet the newly arrived Stuttgarter. They discreetly stayed down stairs while we tried out the bed. Vera told us later that Rolf had jokingly supported the ceiling below our bedroom while we were making love.

When Rolf came up the stairs later on, he hollered in the broadest Schwabian dialect the equivalent of, “I can smell a pussy,” and burst into the room. I was angry, and Martha was surprised, but that’s the way these guys were. They were helpful in so many ways that one had to ignore their vulgarities.

Martha’s arrival was an excuse for a party. Ray Menard and his boss Mel Rodacker came by from the shop, and Gottfried came with his accordion. Since Schwabian people always have to sing when they have a party, it was a noisy party ‘til early in the morning. It was so noisy that the next door neighbors had called the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), complaining about a bunch of DPs (Displaced Persons) making one hell of a racket. When the RCMP drove up to the house and saw Mel Rodacker’s Lincoln Continental parked in front, they concluded that it was an “acceptable party” and didn’t even bother knocking at the door.

After we had slept off our hangovers, Martha and I went to the supermarket to replace the food Vera had put out for the party. The variety of goods in the supermarket overwhelmed Martha and I had to translate a lot. We were very selective, since there wasn’t room for a refrigerator upstairs, and we couldn’t park too many things in Vera’s fridge. Finally the shopping cart was filled to the top. Martha was flustered and asked if I had enough money to pay for that much food. I said sure, no problem. The total checkout came to $ 15.- she couldn’t believe how cheap food was.

Since Martha had worked in the food business in Germany she had a good way of comparing the prices. Of course the expression “cheap” always has to be brought into relationship with wages, and the wages were at rock bottom in Grande Prairie.

In the following weeks Martha was frustrated because she couldn’t read and understand the newspapers. That was not surprising, since journalistic slang baffled even the Canadians. I told her the best way to learn English would be to get a job, because it would force her to speak the language and interact with other people. She put out her feelers through “the immigrant network”, and found a job at the local “Dairy Pool” (DP).

The DP was a dairy cooperative and the collection point for milk. The farmers shipped their milk in big metal cans. Some farmers were so far away that they had to ship by railroad, others shipped by routing trucks, and some delivered directly. One can imagine what the delivery mode did to the quality of the milk. At the DP the milk was graded for taste and butterfat, which determined how much the farmers got paid. Depending on quality, the DP processed the milk into various grades of drinking milk, butter, ice cream, sweet and sour cream, and then shipped the rest to a cheese or glue factory.

Martha, much to her satisfaction, started in the ice cream processing department. We all loved good ice cream. As an employee she got ten percent off the price of dairy products. Every Friday (payday) she carried home gallons of ice cream and pounds of unsalted butter for the seven people in the house. Martha’s pay at the DP was 60 cents an hour, and combined with my 95 cents an hour, we just made decent wages for one person. Later on, Martha got a special license to be able to work in the laboratory, where she determined the butterfat of the milk. This job entailed a raise of two (2) cents an hour, for the grand total of 62 cents. She couldn’t complain about that, or could she?

The tank that blew the walls

On December 23. 1953 it was bitterly cold, around 25°F below zero, with two feet of snow on the ground. A customer had brought a five-ton truck with an oval metal tank on its bed into the shop. The truck had hauled crude oil from an experimental oil well to the next railway stop, where the crude was pumped into a tank car. The tank was leaking because of a crack, and the shop was supposed to weld the crack.

Before the truck came into the shop, the tank had been “steamed” for 24 hours, to get rid of any oil residue. It was parked in the back shop for several hours, so that the metal of the tank was at room temperature before any work was begun. On the shop wall behind the truck was a big storage rack for the company’s metal bar stock. I had to machine a new wheel spindle, and needed some bar stock. I asked our old Irish shop helper to give me a hand to carry an appropriate steel bar over to the cutoff saw. I was just setting up the saw, when Orville the welder crawled halfway under the truck to start welding the crack in the tank.

All the hatches of the tank were open and soon I saw thick white fumes coming out of them. As I pointed to the tank and opened my mouth to shout a warning, a tremendous explosion rocked the shop. Orville, who had been under the truck, ran out the door. A split second later we heard a terrifying roar and now everyone ran out of the building. The storage rack had been torn from the wall and dumped tons of metal bar stock to the shop floor where my helper and I had been just a minute before.

After everything had calmed down we went back into the building and our eyes could not believe the damage in both shop buildings. The explosion had pushed the wooden walls of the back shop a foot off the foundation, and had blown out all windows and doors. In the front shop, where all the machinery was, a 40 lb. four jaw lathe chuck was blown off the shelve and had crashed to the floor. It was a miracle that nobody was killed or injured.

Within minutes the siren of the Voluntary Fire Department was wailing and their engine was pulling up at the door. The firemen were stunned, and Ray Menard was really pissed off. As manager, he was going to be held responsible for this accident. With all the windows and doors blown, the temperature in the shop dropped like a rock.

We hastily grabbed a few plywood sheets and boarded up all openings, and then searched for the bottle that the Irishman always had handy. It circled until it was empty and we gave Jack money to get another one. Orville was the luckiest of the bunch, some of his clothes had caught fire and he beat the world record in 50 m sprint when he ran outside to roll in the snow to get his burning clothes extinguished. He wasn’t even injured. The next ones were my helper and I. Had we been slower we would have been crushed by the collapsing storage rack of steel bars.

The truck and its tank looked like a big beer can that had been hit by a giant sledge hammer halfway between the two ends and was a total loss. Not only had it popped the tie-down straps to the truck bed, but the explosion had bent the ten-inch wide steel beams of the truck bed. Very expensive damage.

Mel Rodacker, the owner of the company, came over to see what the hell had happened. He was speechless, probably calculating the cost of the damage. Both Mel and Ray were relieved that nobody was hurt and told us to go home, have a Merry Christmas, and report back after the holidays.

A thankful Christmas

When I came home slightly drunk, I had to give them all the details of the explosion and we celebrated my survival some more. Wow, my guardian angel sure had protected me. We now had one more day to prepare for Christmas and it would be one of the best in my life. We were treated to good organ music from the local radio station. Gottfried had found a home as an organist there.

Boxing day, a Canadian tradition, is the day after Christmas, when all the gift boxes of Christmas are discarded. People go from house to house to visit their friends and neighbors, and usually have a drink. It is an excuse for one hell of a party all over town. That year we had so many friends and neighbors come to the house to hear what had happen at the shop, that we drank considerably more than usual.

After the holidays we went back to repair the damage to the shop and the truck. The entire back shop would have to be torn down and rebuilt if we couldn’t get the walls back on the foundation. Ray Menard and Art Fenton came up with an idea that had me in stitches. The back shop was about 40 feet wide by 80 feet long, and about 30 feet high.

Not a small building. Ray had us drill several 1.5 inch diameter holes equally spaced through the wooden outside walls. Then we threaded a number of long 1.5 inch diameter steel rods. Next we drilled a 1.5 inch diameter holes through 1/2 inch thick steel plates. These would function as large washers. The steel rods were pushed from the outside of the building through the holes in the wayward walls, with the plates and a heavy duty nut on the threaded end of the rods outside the walls. This was done also to the opposite wall of the building. Inside, in the middle of the shop, these long rods over lapped and were welded together. We now had constructed a huge vice that had the building walls between the “jaws”.

After this clever preparation, an awful lot of screwing took place in the bitterly cold winter weather and it wasn’t sexy at all. As we turned the various nuts at the end of the rods in sequence, the walls started returning back in the direction they had come from, and surprise, surprise, were soon back on the foundation. A bit of fine adjustment with a 20 pound sledgehammer here and there, and the building was as good as new. A triumph of latter-day-engineering-architecture.

We had everything back to normal in the shop, everything but the truck and the tank. The repair and the fabrication of that tank turned out to be another epic of “flatbilly engineering “ (there were no hills around Grande Prairie).

To begin with, the Steel Industries shop was not equipped to do large sheet metal work, because there was no demand for it. After the building restoration, I was prepared for anything. Coming from Germany’s rigidly structured industrial society, I had never been trained in improvisations. I respected Canadian ingenuity in solving unusual technical problems, with unsuitable tools and with the material that was on hand. When the tank was finished it looked every bit as good as the original tank.

Looking at the new tank my “calibrated eyeballs” told me that the tank was much too long. I asked Ray if he had calculated the volume of the oval tank. To my surprise Ray told me with the straightest of face, that there wasn’t any formula to figure the surface area of an oval, and hence it was impossible to calculate the volume of an oval cylinder. I didn’t know if he was trying to pull my leg and stared at him in disbelief.

As a greenhorn immigrant, I didn’t have the vocabulary to start a mathematical debate with him. I walked away muttering to myself in German, “Das darf doch nicht wahr sein (this cannot be true).” Mind you, I hadn’t figured the volume of an oval cylindrical body since my school days but I knew there was a formula for it.

How many gallons in that “bucket”?

At home I looked into my technical books. I knew that the surface area of an oval was calculated by adding the large diameter of the oval to the small diameter, dividing the sum by two, and then treating it like the diameter of a regular circle. Its radius squared, times pi, times the length of the tank, yields the volume. I found that there is another formula which calculates the area by large diameter times short diameter times 0.785, times the length. It was a simple calculation if you knew how.

The problem for me was that I had to do all that in the medieval British-American measuring system. It drove me nuts, I was accustomed to the much simpler metric system.

Since all dimensions were in feet I now had the tank volume in cubic feet, that was the easy part. I now had to convert cubic feet into cubic decimeters (the equivalent of 1 liter), because all specific weights of water or oil etc. are given per these metric units. After I had calculated that, I had to reconvert that into Imperial gallons, to give Ray an idea of what the volume and the weight of the filled tank would be. This was the more difficult problem, since I didn’t know the specific weight of the crude oil carried by the truck. Electronic calculators didn’t exist then, so I was figuring it with a slide rule and paper. Since I had an itzy-bitzy doubt about my own memory on the subject, I was going to have my results verified by a local high school math teacher, who happened to also teach the English language class for immigrants that Martha and I attended.

A high school teacher with an “F” in math?

The teacher didn’t know what the “oval formula” was. I couldn’t believe that a high school math teacher didn’t know something that basic off the top of his head.

I was convinced I had done it correctly and went to work to present my case. Ray was not inclined to be lectured by a newcomer, and didn’t believe my numbers, but I bet him a case of beer and he accepted. My results showed that the weight of the full tank was close to eleven tons. I didn’t think that would be a safe load for a five ton truck, especially with the road conditions around Grande Prairie.

Then came the tense moment, as the saying goes, “When the elephant lets the water,” and the tank was hoisted atop the truck bed. It was way too long, and the tank had to be taken off and shortened by about three feet. After that, the full tank still weighed about seven tons plus, but that was “acceptable, since they had reinforced the truck bed.” I never saw my case of beer, but from there on I had considerably more clout in the shop. Ray never accepted another “steamed” oil tank for repairs, either.

The Grande Prairie experience was a very valuable apprenticeship. Even though life was hard and often uncomfortable, especially in winter, we lived a contented life with many friends and not many worries.

In God’s deep-freeze

One of the hazards in Grande Prairie was the extremely cold winters. In the three winters I spent there, the lowest temperature was 55 degrees below zero. That is goddamn cold! The folks there determined whether it was cold, damn cold, or goddamn cold in the following way: If they spit on the ground and the saliva stayed liquid for a few moments it was cold; if it froze quickly after it hit the ground it was damn cold (20 degrees below zero); and if it froze before it hit the ground, it was goddamn cold (40 degrees below zero). Cars wouldn’t start, or if they started the wheels had ceased because the bearing grease was frozen solid. In the early fifties multigrade oils were just being introduced, but people didn’t believe the claims of the oil companies. Engine block and dipstick heaters helped to keep the motors alive, but batteries and bearing lubricants were the biggest problem.

Everything slowed down in such low temperatures except the people. They hurried into the warmth of their home or a store, or a coffee shop or to work, to escape freezing to death. Every house and store was overheated, and therein lay the other danger. When I came to Grande Prairie we didn’t have natural gas to heat our houses, even though it was in the ground right under our feet. Everybody heated with oil, wood or coal. The wood stoves were dangerous, since most of them were improperly installed and overheated adjacent walls and ceilings.

Most of the houses were built without a building code. In wintertime an average of one house per week burned down, because even with the best fire department, there wasn’t anything that could be done to stop the fires once the temperature was 20 degrees below zero. Hydrants and hoses froze, and firemen could only try to keep the fire from spreading to adjacent structures.

One of the worst fires in Grande Prairie was in a general store on main street, across the back lane from Steel Industry’s shop. It was late in the afternoon when the fire started, and the fire engines were on the spot within minutes. There wasn’t much that they could do to save the store, but the firemen battled for hours to save the adjacent buildings because if those had started to burn, the whole downtown could have gone up in flames. Enormous amounts of water were used to keep the fire localized.

When I returned to work the next day the runoff water from the fire hoses had formed a foot-thick sheet of ice in the back lane. I went outside to get a steel plate out of the racks, and the lower tiers were covered with ice that had to be melted with a blowtorch before I could get the plate out.

While I was working at it, I heard what sounded like a cat howling somewhere in the material yard. The cat was in one corner, with its tail frozen solidly to the ground. The poor beast had been sitting too long in one place with a wet tail. Orville put his welding gloves on and held the cat, while I carefully tried to melt the ice with a blowtorch. The cat was scared as the dickens by the noise of the torch, and fought like hell to get away. It took three guys to do the job without burning the cat’s tail off. It ran off like a streak of greased lightning.

Far more serious troubles developed during the spring thaw-out period. That time is messy in any cold climate, because the water from the melting snow cannot be absorbed by the frozen ground underneath. In the back lane the additional amount of ice caused by the fire fighting effort inundated the entire shop with water. We had to put on our Wellingtons (rubber boots) and were standing in at least eight inches of water while operating the lathe and milling machines. Quite dangerous in light of the quality of the electrical wiring in the area.

I put on thick gloves to work on the machinery because one faulty ground in the electrical wiring of a machine could kill me instantly. We had to rig up pumps to get the shop reasonably dry, but it took weeks to get everything cleaned up. Since the shop also had an outhouse along the back lane, it didn’t smell too good either. I was reminded of conditions in Russia during the war.

The Stuttgart gang was a perpetual source of hilarity. At least one of them was always in trouble, either with the law, or with the girls, which sometimes also led to brushes with the law. All of them liked to drink, as did everybody else there, and the RCMP wasn’t always looking the other way when it came to driving under the influence.

Rolf was employed by a local body shop and on Christmas eve he was driving the company’s big new tow truck to pick up a car in trouble. At the downtown intersection the RCMP stopped him, and found that he was under the influence. They ordered him out of the truck right in the intersection, and an officer was going to drive the truck back to Lou’s Autobody.

It was one of those fancy rigs, with umpteen gears and hydraulic actuators, and the officer couldn’t figure out how to get the big rig out of the intersection, where it was blocking the heavy Christmas traffic. It was snowing, and cars were soon lined up in all directions, with angry drivers honking, and rear ending each other due to the slippery street. Finally the poor RCMP officer had to admit defeat and let Rolf back into the truck. He ordered him to drive right back to Lou’s and he stayed behind Rolf, to make sure he got there safely. Then he went into the office and read Rolf’s boss the riot act. What happened behind closed doors was never disclosed, but Rolf didn’t have to go to the “grey bar hotel”.

Opa Stamp

I was intrigued by the odd characters I met in the Peace River area. People were loners, some of them real “originals”, others absolute loonies. I attributed much of it to the remoteness of the area which seemed to attract unusual people. Even in the small German colony there were unconventional characters. It was fun to observe and talk to them to find out what made them tick.

One of the old time Germans was Opa (German short form of grandpa) Stamp, a wheat farmer who had come to Canada after World War I. He owned a quarter section of land quite a distance from Grande Prairie, and came into town every Saturday to sell cream, eggs and homemade butter. He was from the northwestern corner of Germany, and spoke in a strong dialect, called Plattdeutsch. In summertime he often got thirsty from all that dust on the gravel roads and to have company he would invite some of us guys to the beer parlor.

Between several of us a lot of beer was required, especially during hot summer days. We didn’t mind keeping Opa Stamp company, as long as he was paying. The Stuttgart gang would sometimes make pigs out of themselves and guzzle down a dozen glasses each without batting an eyelid. Opa Stamp would then go home without making any profit and his wife would rake him over the coals, but he was well preserved by then, and it didn’t bother him at all.

One time a whole bunch of us went out to his farm and he drove us around in his little Austin car which we named his “English Cadillac.” It had a four-on-the-floor gearshift, which Stamp still hadn’t quite figured out. He stomped on the clutch and then bent over to look at the shift pattern, which was marked on the floor. He didn’t pay attention to where he was going and drove into a ditch. We all helped to push his car out, and then we shifted gears in tandem. He pushed the clutch and told whoever was sitting next to him which gear he needed and they would operate the shift lever and tell him to let go of the clutch.

At another time four of us went out to his place and found nobody home. Kurt Elsner, his nephew, was looking around the kitchen and discovered a freshly baked cake. So, we all sat around the table and ate the whole cake, leaving a note telling Grandma Stamp how good it was. The gang sure had a lot of nerve.

In 1954, Dee noticed that many of his kids’ marbles had disappeared under one end of the living room couch. After much observation he concluded that this corner of the house was either lower than the rest, or some strange gravitational anomaly was present. Dee and I discussed that problem endlessly in “well oiled conditions” and figured that more research was necessary to varify the problem, and that a nonpartisan verification was necessary.

A Speed Queen vacuum cleaner salesman, would routinely demonstrated the extreme power of his machines by sucking 1" diameter steel balls clear across living room floors. We called him over to Dee’s house for a demonstration. His machine was unable to overcome the gravitational disadvantages of Dee’s living room floor. Having saved money by not buying a vacuum cleaner, Dee decided to spend it on leveling the living room floor and/or the house.

Greenhorn’s house raising

We started early in March. We dug away the soil bank along the sagging corner of the house to determine the corrective action necessary. Opa Stamp stopped by and said, “Na Jungs is man nen bischen früh” (Hey boys, its a little too early). We ignored him, and of course two days later it started to snow. Dee hastily covered the exposed side of the house with burlap sacks, we relaxed and waited for spring.

Spring came early in May and we now had the only house in the neighborhood situated above a lake. The melting snow and rain had filled the area under the house with water, because we had removed the soil bank. So we again relaxed and waited for summer to dry out the lake.

It was a very slow dry-out and frogs, attracted by the lake, started to disrupt everybody’s sleep with their nightly concerts. Their concert couldn’t compete with “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” by Mozart. It became obvious that action was required. Fortunately an earthen cellar was under the middle of the house, so Dee emptied out the cellar and let the water drain into it. Then we pumped it out. The crawl space under the floor joists was about 15 inches and the ground was still muddy, so we greenhorn house movers removed all the earthen banks around the house. Then we relaxed one more time hoping the ground would dry.

We were into the middle of July and finally ready to start the job. The plan was to push long 6 x 6 beams under the house and then lift and level it. We discovered that there was not enough clearance to push four 6 x 6 x 30 foot long beams under the length of the house. We discovered that the house, originally just a two room shack, had been randomly expanded in all directions by using scrap lumber material. We couldn’t raise the house without a support structure underneath, and the house had none.

We had to rethink the project. We would have to assemble the beams in pieces under the house, in miserably confined quarters between the floor joists and the muddy ground. Eventually we accomplished that with much sweating and even more cursing.
Now the “fun” of lifting and leveling could start.

For this task we needed a minimum of nine hydraulic jacks and also cement blocks to put under the beams when they were raised. First Dee talked all of his friends out of their hydraulic car jacks and told them to call him if they had a flat tire. I borrowed several big jacks from my workplace.

After we had used these jacks for two weeks, Ray Menard finally missed them. He hollered, “Where in the hell are the jacks?” I told him where they were, and to please give me a couple more days to finish the job. That aroused Ray’s curiosity. He showed up at the house to see what the crazy Krauts were doing. When he saw our project, he cracked up laughing, and said, “Keep the jacks long enough to finish the job.”

The biggest problem was to synchronize the jacking and lifting of the house without breaking it into pieces. Very slowly, very sequentially, very carefully, we jacked up the beams, and with much creaking, the poor old house followed the upward pressure.

The house had two brick chimneys which we had completely ignored. During a casual glance upward Dee noticed that one of them resembled the leaning tower of Pisa. Dee hollered at his family to get out of the house immediately. When the kids saw what the chimney looked like, they bet on whether it would topple or not. After inspecting the bases of these chimneys, Dee found that they rested on two 4x4s inside the framework and should have moved with the house. We managed to prop them up with long 2x4s to keep them from collapsing. After 12 hours of hard work we were able to get everything on an even keel and the family was allowed back into the house again.

The next task was to put “something solid” under the beams on which the whole house would rest. Dee found chunks of a foundation on his boss’s property, and brought home several large pieces in an old one-ton pickup. After much digging and shoving these were placed under the beams. We lowered the jacks slowly, and with much audible protest, the house followed and settled down again.

I checked whether the house was level. We let loose a bunch of steel balls on the living room floor, and they rolled randomly.

The house was not absolutely level, but within one inch end-to-end. We considered that ultimate precision, knowing how it was accomplished. A lot of cracks in the house and the chimneys had to be patched, but we figured by the time the next snow fell we could accomplish that. First we had to have one hell of a party to celebrate our accomplishment. I bought a bottle of Johnny Walker Red Label and the four of us drank the bottle all by ourselves.

The Sheriff from Chicago

On a Sunday afternoon during the summer of 1954 Dee opened the door to our stairway and hollered, “Hans, the sheriff is here and wants to talk to you.”

I thought, what sheriff and “What does he want? I haven’t done anything wrong.” When I went downstairs it wasn’t the sheriff, but Martha’s cousin Gene and his wife Mildred from Chicago.
They had driven all the way from Chicago in their new 1954 Chevrolet Bel Air coupe. Their car was covered with a thick layer of dust inside and out, since Gene liked to drive with his windows open. It gave them the right impression of summer driving in the Prairies.

They had checked in at the York Hotel, and Gene had already washed down all his inside dust with Canadian beer, which he said he liked a lot better than the beer in Chicago. They had brought a huge salami sausage, because Martha had complained that something like that wasn’t available in Grande Prairie. Gene and Mildred even let us use their shower at the hotel, because there still wasn’t any indoor plumbing at Dee’s house. After looking at the “Grande Prairie milieu” they shook their heads and said you guys ought to come down to Chicago. We promised we would, as soon as we had the money and a car.

After that visit I decided that having been in Grande Prairie for 18 months, it was time to get my own four wheels. The first step was to get a driver’s license. According to all the information I got from the guys at work, that was the easiest thing in the world. All you had to do was go to the Department of Motor Vehicles, tell them that you want a driver’s license, answer a few questions, tell them you had driven before, and after paying one dollar you were a licensed driver. I had a German class IV license for motorcycles. My father had shown me how to drive a car, on roads out in the farm country. In the military I had driven vehicles for short distances, but I never had a formal driver’s education. Here in the Canadian boonies all that was required was knowing the traffic signs and having one dollar. Truly the land of opportunity.

Many of our friends lived a considerable distance from Grande Prairie, so now I started to think about buying a car of my own. My boss had the Lincoln/Mercury agency, and I looked there first, but he didn’t have any dependable used car in my price bracket. Besides that, because of the harsh climate and horrible roads, a car was only reliable for three years. The road to Edmonton, the nearest big city, was 450 miles long, 400 miles of which was gravel.

I had wondered why General Motors spent millions of dollars to build test tracks for their cars. All they had to do was send the cars to Grande Prairie, drive them over the local roads and they would certainly know what lasted and what didn’t. Car maintenance was an uphill fight because of weather and the mud and gravel on the roads. Broken windshields, axles and wheel spindles provided a constant business for all the automotive shops in town. It was worse in the spring when cars got stuck in the foot deep mud, and better in winter time, after the snow had been compacted on the roads. The problem then was icy ruts in the snow.

On long trips we had to have a jack, shovel, ax, cable or chains, a come-along, and critical car parts, such as fan belts, extra spare tires, preferably snow and mud tires. Also water, food and matches for a fire, in case we got stuck out in the wilderness.

Greenhorn’s car caper

In early spring of 1955 Dee and I decided to go down to Edmonton to look for a used car. The weather had turned warm prematurely but the roads were still frozen and in good shape. Dee hitched a ride with a truck driver and I took the bus. Dee knew businessmen down there who directed me to a finance company and several used car dealers. I didn’t want to spend more then $1,500 for the vehicle.

I finally decided on a 1953 Buick Custom sedan, black, with a straight-8 engine, automatic transmission, radio and heater. It had an Ontario license plate, which meant it had been driven on relatively good roads. It was 18 months old, looked in good shape, and had 15,000 miles on it. The car dealer looked like a Mafia guy, wore black clothing and had two more guys around him who looked the same. They acted like his personal guards. When I mentioned the car that I wanted, the guy strangely enough went into a defensive mode. He said that car was his car, etc. He wanted $1,800, but we finally, after much haggling got it down to $1,700, big deal.

As we drove the car off the lot it began to snow. In the middle of the next intersection we ran out of gas. Luckily there was a service station at one corner, so we pushed the car to the pump and filled it with 16 Imperial gallons. That sucker had a big tank.
We wanted to stay one more night and take off early the next morning. The hotel must have had nylon carpets because the static electricity was so bad, we got zapped every time we touched a doorknob or some other metal object.

We listened to the weather report, and when we heard another cold wave was coming down from Alaska, we decided to leave immediately. We cancelled the hotel, bought some food and went on the road. We drove the car alternately to get used to it, and detect any flaws. We soon discovered that the temperature gauge was not coming off the peg, and that the heater wasn’t warming up. Other than that, there seemed to be no trouble.

We pulled into the last service station at Westlock, north of Edmonton along Highway 2 and filled her up, checked the oil and I asked the mechanic for advice about the heater and the gauge. He suggested putting a piece of card board in front of the radiator, to allow better warm-up. We followed that advice, but it didn’t make any difference.

After Westlock the pavement ended, and we had about 400 miles of gravel road ahead of us. The temperature outside was dropping rapidly. The route to Grande Prairie along the old No. 2 highway ran through very sparsely populated areas. Since the roads were smooth due to compacted snow, we drove at 70 M.P.H. Around 1:00 am we finally saw an open coffee shop at Faust, got a cup of coffee, and asked for the next open service station. The gas gauge showed over 1/4 full and we were told that the nearest station open 24 hours was in Valley View, 65 miles ahead. Holy Moses, it finally dawned on us what fools we were. The thermometer at Faust showed 28 degrees below zero.

Dee and I looked at each other and then at the fuel gauge and decided to try and make it to the station. Dee was driving and he said, “Well, we’ll just have to drive a little faster to get there quicker, that’s all.” By now we were shivering badly because the heater wasn’t working. Even our European overcoats couldn’t keep us warm. The bananas we had bought were frozen and black, but we had cookies. There was no traffic to catch a ride and we didn’t have any matches to light a fire either. At 30 below zero we would last about 30 minutes in the clothing we wore.

When we were 20 miles from Valley View the gas gauge showed empty. I told Dee to slow down to save on gas, but he said, “Hell, then it will take us longer to get there.”

We reached Valley View, and the service station was open. The kid who filled the tank looked at his pump gauge, and said, “You guys have a hole in the tank?” I said, “No, but why do you ask?” He replied, “I filled in 15 gallons, and it isn’t full yet.” All three of us now stared with fascination at the pump’s gauge as it slowly went to 15.75 gallons, and stopped. When we told the kid that the tank capacity was 16 gallons, he just shook his head and said, “Are you two lucky.“

Relieved, and refreshed after a cup of hot coffee, I drove the last 70 miles to Grande Prairie. We tuned to the Grande Prairie radio station whose slogan was, “The voice of the mighty Peace“ (Peace River Country), but more often referred to as “The Boys with the mighty piece.” We both had one hell of a time to stay awake. The low temperature and the fatigue were taking their toll. We sang and told old jokes just to keep awake. When I drove into Grande Prairie at about 6:00 am we were close to collapse. I almost rammed a lamp pole when I turned the last corner too quickly and skidded on the snow. We had brought her home. I parked in front of the house, and we literally dragged ourselves in.

Martha asked what car I had bought, and I told her. She didn’t believe it. I told her to look out the window, but it was too dark to see. Vera greeted us with the news that the newly installed indoor plumbing had frozen, despite her leaving a faucet dripping. Fortunately she had some water in a water kettle. Since we couldn’t do anything about the frozen pipes at the moment, we had a cup of hot tea with lots of rum, and crawled into bed. It took me two hours to get warm enough to be able to sleep. We had been at the brink of hypothermia. Another greenhorn chapter closed.

The next morning Dee couldn’t thaw out the plumbing, so I said I’d drive to the shop and try to get somebody to come with the welding truck to warm up the pipes. When I tried to start my car, it wouldn’t, no matter what I tried. I thought that the coolant might have frozen and called Kurt to see if he could help. Kurt towed my car into the shop, to let it warm up.

Kurt and I drove the shop’s welder truck back to the house. We fired up the big arc welder/generator and clamped one pole to one end of the copper pipe, and the other pole to the farthest end of it, and then turned the juice on (about 80 Amps.) for a few seconds. That did it, and the water started running again.

Returning to the shop, Kurt and I couldn’t find anything wrong with my car. I thought that the coolant in the radiator was frozen and proceeded to heat it carefully with a blowtorch, not realizing that I was melting some solder joints of the radiator. Now it leaked, so I had to plug the radiator with what we called “bearshit”, a brown syrupy gunk that was added to the coolant to seal small leaks. The news that I had bought a car had spread and Ray Menard showed up to look it over. He was impressed but peeved that I hadn’t bought from Mel Rodacker, even though he knew Mel didn’t have anything I could afford. Finally Ray located the problem, badly burned distributor points.

The automotive store was closed on Sundays, but Ray called the manager at home to come and sell me new points and plugs.
After we replaced points and plugs the engine ran just fine. Ray said that the engine must have been running on five cylinders. I thought that was a bit farfetched, Ray was always trying to pull my leg, but it may have been the reason we reached that Valleyview filling station. I found the heater problem and fixed it. Now everybody wanted a test ride, so I drove them around, and we stopped at the beer parlor to treat these guys for helping me. Then the whole Bergner family went for a ride in it and the kids were especially excited.

I had to learn the technical end of car ownership, and how to drive properly. I bought a service manual for the car, and did all the maintenance and minor repair work myself. I had the advantage of having experts around, but I always got umpteen different answers to my questions.

Soon we went on longer trips around the Peace River country. I had grown up in densely populated Europe, and it was a wonderful experience to drive through this vast, sparsely populated country, where I could sometimes drive for 50 miles without seeing another town or car. It required careful planning to stay out of trouble on longer trips. There were few service stations along the roads.

Gone fishing?

Dee always wanted to go fishing and he had heard that Stony Lake was tops. Stony Lake was in the middle of nowhere, about 65 miles from the nearest highway, in an area of muskeg. The area was traversed by one or two “roads”, bulldozed out of the wilderness by oil exploration crews.

Muskeg is an unusual type of terrain and safe only in winter, when the ground is frozen. During the winter the oil and sawmill crews operated in that area. When the spring thaw-out comes these crews had to hustle to get their equipment out to prevent it from sinking into the muck. Countless pieces of equipment had been lost there. We had heard all these stories, and wanted to see for ourselves what it was like “in the bush”. The road to Stony Lake was supposed to be usable during the summer, so we were going to give it a try. Dee had his own car now, a Nash Rambler, and we planned on taking both vehicles in case of trouble.

Initially we were driving through a densely forested area on a good narrow gravel road. Then the road narrowed more and turned yellow in color. The color was unusual, so we stopped, after fording several creeks, to have a closer look. Despite going just 15 M.P.H. we had kicked up an enormous cloud of dust. The road seemed smooth but the material on top was fine textured, almost like flour. While walking on the road, the ground seemed to move under our weight. It was like walking on a plush carpet. Dee, Vera, Martha and I were puzzled, and concluded that the roadbed must be floating on permafrost several feet underneath it. We dared to continue ahead anyway.

We were just getting some picnic stuff out when a thunderstorm formed over the Rocky Mountains and we decided that this was not the place to wait it out. We had also noticed numerous piles of bear shit along the road and that gave us one more reason to get out. We managed to turn the cars around, and started to drive back with Dee’s car in the lead. Suddenly my rear wheels broke right through the road bed, or more precisely road crust, and sank into the muck right up to the rear axle. The differential was sitting on the road surface. Dee had stopped to see what my problem was and how he could help.

First I tried the bumper jack to lift the wheels back up to the road surface. That didn’t work, because the jack sank into the ground, rather then lifting up the rear end of the car. Next came the shovel, to dig a small ramp ahead of each rear wheel, to try and ease moving ahead. That did nothing for forward locomotion. The rear wheels were stuck so solidly that gunning the engine didn’t even spin the wheels. The engine output was all absorbed in the torque converter.

Next my axe came out of the trunk. I chopped down several thin trees, and put them across the road behind the rear wheels. Now the jack had a solid base and the rear wheels finally came up level with the road surface. Next I strung a long steel cable with tow hooks from the front end of my car to Dee’s car. We left some slack in the cable to give Dee a chance to gain forward momentum to literally jerk my car forward on to a more solid road surface. When Dee’s car moved it did indeed jerked my car forward, with the bumper jack flying off the rear end. We went back and looked at the holes where my wheels had sunk into. The cross section of the road looked like a pie, with a thin crust on top and the gooey filling underneath. The crust was no thicker than two inches. That put the fear of god into us and we very gingerly drove our cars out of that area. So much for another adventure in the Peace River country.

In vacation wonderland

In the summer of 1955 we went on our first vacation, to Jasper-Banff National Park. We left early on Saturday morning, and took the recently opened shortcut Highway 43 down to Whitecourt, which was a wonderful experience compared to my trip from Edmonton after the car purchase. It was a paved and straight highway. On our way to the Park entrance I approached an unguarded railroad crossing, then I heard a train coming at full speed. I slammed on the brakes, because I am not the type who tries to outrun trains at crossings.

Martha wasn’t paying attention, and since we lived in pre-seatbelt times, she banged her head against the windshield. She cussed me for braking that abruptly and I asked her if she would have felt better being banged around by the cow catcher of the locomotive. Naturally that didn’t sit too well with her and she complained for the rest of the day about her headache.

We followed what is now called the Yellowhead Highway, and drove through Edson and Hinton to the park entrance near Pocahontas. After a look at Miette Hot Springs we continued to Jasper, where we stayed overnight.

Jasper was neat and clean, but we were surprised by the lack of facilities. It was unlike European resort towns in similar settings. To my great disappointment the 150 mile main road through the park was only a gravel road.

The scenery along the road was breathtaking. We marveled at the 12,000 foot mountains on both sides. I had never been in mountainous country before, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
We stopped near the Sunwapta Pass to see the Columbia ice field, the largest glacier in the Rocky Mountains. Its surface area including the side glaciers is 150 sq. miles and 650 to 950 feet thick. It straddles the continental divide and its waters feed into the Pacific and Arctic oceans. We rode in a half-track vehicle up on the 15 mile long glacier, and really felt the low temperature on the ice.

Continuing south to Lake Louise we admired the view over the lake, and the majestic mountains behind it. To stay here, or even have lunch here, was beyond our meager budget, but we sat in the park of the world-famous hotel, enjoyed the view, and took pictures. The Chateau was comparable to the best of European alpine hotels.

Down the Parkway a road branched off to Moraine Lake in the “Valley of the Ten Peaks” which gave us a spectacular view of this brilliant gem in the park. The water of the lake was emerald-green, and reflected the majestic mountains surrounding the lake. I took many pictures of this beautiful scene from a hill above the lake.

Banff was a sleepy little place in 1955, not much traffic but interesting shops and a few good restaurants. We visited the museum and were impressed by the huge stuffed grizzly bear standing inside the museum’s entrance.

Then it was on to Radium Hot Springs, where we took a swim in the hot spring waters. Next came a boat trip on Lake Minnewanka and our first chair lift ride, up to Mount Norquay. The view of Banff and the Bow River valley was magnificent from the upper terminal.

Much too soon we had to leave, but vowed to come back again with more time and more money. We drove out west to Calgary and stayed there over night. In the city we saw a sign saying “PED-XING” and couldn’t figure out what that meant. I asked the motel clerk and had a good laugh when we were told what it meant. That earmarked us as real country hicks.

Finally I and Martha were back in Grande Prairie, and very pleased with our first major excursion through our new homeland.
The Peace River area has probably the most fertile soil in the world, ideally suited for wheat, rye and barley farming. The only detriment is the harsh winter climate.

The farmers said that if they couldn’t get the seed into the ground by May 15, because of heavy snow or late frost, they could forget about that year’s harvest. At best there was a four and a half month growing season, however with an average of 19 hours daylight. That was sufficient to let grain grow and ripen.

Everything depended on the climate, including the lumber industry. As mentioned before, the heavily forested area south of the farm belt was only accessible to heavy trucks and equipment when the ground was frozen solid. That forced the lumber industry to split their work cycle into felling and rough cutting on location in the winter and the finishing and processing in summertime in town.

The other source of income was the emerging petroleum industry. Seismic work, exploding a string of charges and recording the reflections from various underlying ground formations was done to determine the probability of oil bearing cavities. The existence of large oil reservoirs under the area had already been established and the first test wells were sunk. The roads to the drilling sites were cut when the ground was frozen, and the big bulldozers and heavy mud pumps could only be moved when the ground was solid.

During the winter season the bitter cold made it difficult to keep the mud slurries for the drilling operation flowing properly. Spilled drilling mud froze instantly on the derricks, creating a safety hazard. Injuries and mechanical breakdowns were common. Metal would often fail under the extreme temperatures. That’s were Steel Industries came in, to repair or replace whatever broke down, and it always had to be done in a hurry.

The “toolpush”, the man responsible for the equipment at a drilling site, was always from Texas, and communicating with these guys was difficult because of their accent. They were always pushy, so their job title was appropriate. The jobs always had to be done yesterday, if not sooner. Any malfunction at the rigs cost the companies big bucks, up to $2,000 an hour.

The other guys and I often had to work around the clock to get them going again. One evening they brought in a casing expander, which was used to straighten out caved-in or buckled well casings. The expander was too large in diameter for the casing it had to be lowered into. It was an 1,100 pound piece of steel, that barely fit into the shop’s largest engine lathe, which had a 20 foot long bed. The expander had to be machined down from 16 inches to 12 inches in diameter, which was one hell of a lot of steel to be removed. The lathe didn’t have enough longitudinal tool-travel to machine the full length of the expander in one setup, so the heavy piece had to be turned 180° in the lathe to finish the job. The overhead hoist above the lathe couldn’t handle that much weight.

Art Fenton had started the job, which was estimated to take about 12 hours of continuous machining, and I was going to work a graveyard shift to relieve Art and I finished the job. At the take-over point we were going to turn the expander 180° right over the lathe bed and Art had come up with an ingenious way to do it. He placed a small hydraulic jack dead center under the expander, and used a sturdy vee-block that fit over the ram of the jack to support the expander’s weight during the turn around.

After carefully loosening the chuck on one end, and the tailstock center at the other end, the expander was supported in the center only by the hydraulic jack and nothing else. The turning was the tense moment. Imagine a 1,000 pound piece of steel, about 16 feet long, supported only by a little hydraulic jack, while four hands very carefully kept it balanced and turned it. Had it rolled off the supporting center point, it could have caused extreme injury. The scheme worked and the expander was re-chucked and tail-stocked for the remainder of the machining operation. The continuous band of steel that was removed by the carbide tool was endlessly long and razor sharp and entangled everything in the vicinity of the lathe if not remove constantly during the machining operation. Another triumph of ingenious, but reckless engineering.

The road to nowhere

The Alaskan or Alcan Highway starts at Dawson Creek, 80 miles west of Grande Prairie. Numerous horror stories by people who worked there during its construction could be heard and those stories had peaked our curiosity. Many local people had also been involved at the periphery of that project.

When a construction camp was abandoned because the highway had advanced, the entire camp was auctioned off, rather then moved. That meant everything sold at rock bottom prices. Workers bought what they thought could be resold, or could be used for personal purposes. My boss had made his fortune by selling surplus tires from the Alcan Highway project and the Canadian Internal Revenue was still after him to collect their tax. A lot of used equipment “disappeared” before being auctioned off. Heavy road building machinery did indeed vanish in some swampy areas.

The terrain problems were horrible along hundreds of miles, and combined with the harsh climate in winter, and billions of mosquitoes in summer, made this one of the largest and most challenging construction projects that man had undertaken.

To see what the area looked like some of us immigrants decided to drive up and have a look. We drove the initial 150 miles north from Dawson Creek to get a feel for the scenery. That was enough. North of Fort St. John civilization ended, and we didn’t bother to find out where and when it would reappear.

Along the route I examined a technically interesting curved wooden bridge, actually more of a trestle, which spanned a deep gorge. The structure had been designed by an engineering student, as his first project. It supported the highway on a curved, and properly banked trestle, 200 feet above a creek bed. It looked fragile, since it was a wooden structure, but it had stood up for almost 15 years, and didn’t show any signs of deterioration.

Then we also crossed the Peace River on the bridge nicknamed “The Galloping Gerti”. The bridge had initially been built to span the Tacoma Narrows near Seattle. Four months after it had been opened in 1940 it collapsed in a moderate 42 miles per hour wind. The span towers, the deck and other material was salvaged and later shipped to the Alcan project for a bridge across the Peace River. It was re-erected and served the traffic needs for many years. Years later it collapsed again, because a prolonged period of torrential rain had inundated the soil around the suspension cable anchors. The huge anchors started to slide, slowly enough to get TV camera crews on location. They recorded the final hours of the “Galloping Gerti” before the collapse took place. Several years later I was fortunate enough to catch those shots on the television news. It was quite a show.

In need of a better climate

After three years of exploring and observing the Peace River Country, Martha and I decided that life was too short to put up with the climatic severity in Grande Prairie. In summer of 1956 I began to look into relocating somewhere along the Pacific coast. As so often in life, one little incident, one small bit of information, one seemingly isolated event triggers an avalanche of changes. I don’t remember where I got the newspaper, or what kind of paper it was, but I saw a Help Wanted Ad for a person with pantograph milling machine experience in Vancouver. These machines were not common in machine shops, but I had used them in Frankfurt, where I milled prototype plastic lens frames on them.

After much soul searching, I called to inquire about the job. I told them about my work experience, and the owner of the company asked me to come down. The job paid $2 an hour, which was much better than the $1.25 I was making at Steel Industries Ltd. in Grande Prairie. I hoped a job in Vancouver would open other doors. I felt that my knowledge and experience was unused in Grande Prairie, and I needed to make more money.

When I quit my job, Ray Menard asked me where I was going, and I told him. Ray entered into the universal song and dance routine of all bosses, “ If you want more money, we can negotiate”. These outbursts of “generosity” always annoyed the hell out of me.
Ray told me that when he was in Vancouver he didn’t see any smiling faces in the streets, as if one could see them in Grande Prairie. Friday, July 3, was my last day of work, and I loaded the car with everything I needed down in Vancouver. Martha would fly down after I had found a place to live.

For the Fourth of July, we had been invited to join the celebrations of the United States Independence Day at the American D.E.W. (Distant Early Warning) line radar station near Beaverlodge. We went up to the base with the Stuttgart gang, and together with the Yanks we had a going-away-party for me. In the afternoon I said good-bye to everybody, and drove into the sunset.