Cities have always
been the fireplaces of civilization,
whence light and heat radiated out into the dark.
Theodor Parker
Chapter 24
Back to Civilization
It was a beautiful summer day as I drove northwest out of Beaverlodge on Highway Two. The car had no air-conditioning, but on the dusty gravel roads I would choke if I opened the windows. After 50 miles I entered British Columbia (BC), and soon reached Dawson Creek (Mile Zero of the Alaska Highway) then continued west on the Hart Highway towards Chetwyn. The scenery changed to the densely forested slopes of the Rocky Mountains.
There were stretches of pavement on the road which ended abruptly and without warning, and often dropped more than six inches to the underlying gravel. The car was packed up to the driver’s bench-seat, and the suspension bottomed out. The department of Highways in BC must have notoriously underestimated the amount of pavement mix needed to finish a section of the roadway. I couldn’t afford any damage to my car, because I didn’t have any extra money for repairs. The Buick had to get me to Vancouver, 900 miles (1400 km) ahead.
Cautiously I wound my way over the mountain passes, and shortly before midnight I turned off the road in the middle of nowhere, south of Pine Pass. I slept fitfully until about four o’clock in the morning. A scrub jay in a tree right above the car woke me up with his screeching. I stopped at a small coffee shop at McLeod Lake, filled the thermos with coffee, checked the car and continued south.
At Prince George I was in for a pleasant surprise, the highway was paved from there on, with only short interruptions. The area around Prince George is well known for numerous mining operations in copper, lead, zinc, silver and gold.
South of Prince George I encountered villages with strange names, such as Woodpecker, Hixon, Strathnever, Cinema, and Quesnel. I entered the northwestern end of the central plateau around Lake Williams, where cattle ranching is practised. The area was more populated, so facilities were numerous.
I ate a the 100 Mile House, and when I was south of Cache Creek I stopped along the road, which runs right above the Thompson River, to look down into the river gorge. The air was balmy and moist and it was my first encounter with Pacific air. The difference was so distinct that it surprised me. I didn’t expect that so far away from the ocean.
I continued along the Caribou Highway in steep and mountainous country and into the upper Frazer Canyon. Here the road got narrow and winding with many bad sections of roadbed and bends so sharp I couldn’t see oncoming traffic. I met huge lumber trucks and was sometimes forced to pull over to let them pass. The road was certainly a far cry from the elegant, safe, and well engineered Frazer Canyon Highway that I drove again 35 years later.
Daylight disappears early in steep canyons, so I stayed overnight at a small motel right above the Frazer river near Boston Bar. I was intrigued by the way the road hugged the canyon wall on one side, while the railroad clung to the opposite side. There was only room for either the road or the rail. When the road crossed from one side of the canyon to the other, the railroad was forced to cross to the opposite side. I could imagine the engineering problems that were encountered during construction. So many fascinating new vistas, so many new experiences. I began to understand the enormous challenges that the pioneers had faced coming into this country.
Camels in British Columbia?
The Frazer River Canyon has a fascinating historical connection to the gold rush history of the upper regions around Spences Bridges. To supply the miners, goods were transported by boat from Vancouver up the Frazer River and into the canyon at Spuzzum. Upstream “Hell’s Gate”, a narrow gap through solid rock, made further advances by boat impossible. The goods had to be unloaded, transported over land to above the “hellish” gate, reloaded on boats and shipped to locations farther north. The many attempts to get around Hell’s Gate in the olden days are legend.
At one time a clever operator tried a camel caravan, because camels can carry heavier loads and don’t need water constantly. His experiment ended in a disaster, because the horse or mule trains went berserk and dumped their loads and riders down the canyon when they encountered the camels. A law suit led to prohibition of camels for pack animals. Fascinating books have been written about this area. Before going to sleep I read Frazer Canyon’s history.
I stopped for breakfast at the south end of the Frazer canyon, drove through the town of Hope and entered the final stretch of road to Vancouver. All the traffic into and out of Vancouver was channeled over this two lane East-West Highway Number Three. It was the first time on my long trip that I had to concentrate on heavy traffic.
What, you have blooming fruit trees
I marveled at the fruit trees, the vegetable truck farms, and the flowers in people’s gardens. After three years of living north of the 55th parallel I had forgotten what they looked like. After much bumper-to-bumper traffic, I finally wormed my way into Burnaby. On Kingsway I found a motel, had something to eat, and then went back to my room and plopped onto the bed, to have a snooze. I couldn’t sleep, I was still all wound up. I finally realized that I was back in civilization and I had to get used to it again. My room even had a bath. Wow, I submersed myself in a tub of hot water. It felt almost as good as 1945 when I had returned from the POW camp.
After a cup of coffee I went out and purchased a city map and the Vancouver Sun. Back in my room, I looked at what jobs were available, in case the one I had lined up didn’t pan out. Then I scanned the “For Rent” ads. The car was full of household items which would be an easy target for thieves. I called my potential employer and he advised me to find a place to live first, and then come by his place. He suggested looking over the West Point Grey area, where the University of British Columbia was. Single family home owners in that area rented to students, and now the University was in the summer break.
I was unable to sleep because of the incessant traffic noise on Kingsway.
I got what had never happened before, I got homesick! I was literally homesick for Grande Prairie. That was incredible for a man who had been through as much in life as I had been. Then I remembered Wilhelm Busch’s (a German humorist) sayings, “Es ist ein Brauch von alters her, wer Sorgen hat auch Likör,” meaning, it is an old custom, he who has worries also has liqueur. Another saying of my military days came back which said, “Thirst is worse than homesickness.” So I went to a nearby liqueur store and bought a bottle of Scotch. After a couple of stiff drinks I felt a hell of a lot better.
The next morning I outlined a route on the city map, to get a gut feel for Vancouver. The more I drove around, the more I liked it. What impressed me the most was the city’s location, surrounded by the ocean, the Frazer River delta and the impressive mountains of the Cascades, it overwhelmed me. I wasn’t impressed with the city’s architecture, and the traffic situation was terrible.
I found a small apartment in a fourplex home, in the residential area bordering the university endowment land. The building at West 13th Street had the owner living on the main floor, with two small apartments upstairs, plus a basement apartment. It was in a well kept older neighborhood, with nice gardens. Compared to Grande Prairie it looked like paradise. From a north facing window I could see the mountains across from Burrard Inlet. The apartment had one bedroom facing the street, a small kitchen and dining area and a small living room. It would have been ideal for a bachelor, but was sufficient for a couple without children. The bathroom had to be shared with the other apartment.
A new home
I unloaded the car and after that I went to the nearest supermarket. I stocked up the refrigerator, and prepared my first meal in the new home, which was a cup of coffee and some pastry which I was delighted to find in a nearby bakery shop. The food situation here was going to be much more to my liking. Every once in a while I peeked out the window, looked at the gardens of the neighborhood and the mountains in the background.
The next door neighbor was working on his car, a Jaguar XKE coupe, and the way he went about it told me that he was British. Well, after all, I was in British Columbia now.
I decided to go for a spin in the vicinity of my new home. Following University Boulevard, I looked at the university complex. The first thing that came in sight after entering the gate, was a golf course. Oh dear, I truly was in Britain now, but I told myself, “Steady chaps, this requires a behavioral adjustment and then we shall fit right in.” I continued through the campus and turned into NW Marine Drive down to Spanish Banks Beach. “Heavens my good man, they even have beaches here,” I said to myself. “One can actually swim here and watch girls in bikinis and it isn’t far from home. Extraordinarily well done old chap, you choose your location with impeccable care.” I continued on to Locarno and Jerico Beach, past the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club and Kitsilano Beach and then returned home. I knew that Martha would like this much better than Grande Prairie. She was a city person too. I called her and she was eager to come and join me.
My potential employer had a small machine shop on the main floor, and one pantograph milling machine and two pantograph engraving machines upstairs. One of them was operated by a young woman. She appeared to be in charge of that department. Nothing looked organized, so I wasn’t impressed. I didn’t have any experience in engraving brass plaques and trophies, but what the heck, I decided to give it a try. I was going to start the next day, so I was introduced to some of the other machinists. Two of them were German guys, one of them a tool and die-maker from Berlin. That gave me a little more confidence, since I would be able to get technical advice from them.
The next day Sally, the woman who was doing the engraving work, showed me what I needed to know, and gave me work to perform. Since I thought I knew how to grind the special engraving cutters, I didn’t ask any questions about that, and just went ahead and did it. She wanted to look everything over I did, and she didn’t like any of it. In the beginning I was accommodating, since she obviously had more experience then I did.
As time went on, she became more and more bossy. That didn’t sit well with me and I let her know it. I found no way of getting into a harmonious work relationship with her. After a few weeks I talked to the guys downstairs about it, and they told me that she had even tried to tell them how to do their jobs. Those guys, who had many more years of experience than she did, told her off in no uncertain terms, and were poking fun at her at every conceivable opportunity. Maybe that was the problem, but I couldn’t see myself working comfortably under “gender combat” conditions. The guys downstairs told me about another company that was hiring.
A new job
The other company was Boyles Brothers Drilling Company, and I filled out a job application there. In the meantime Martha had quit her job, packed her things and had come down to join me. She was overwhelmed by the many gardens, fruit trees and flowers, and happy to be in a big city again.
She liked the apartment, and specifically the kitchen, which was several times the size of the cubbyhole in Grande Prairie, and the view of the mountains. We didn’t like flat country. It didn’t have to be mountainous, but had to have hills and valleys to make it interesting. We enjoyed a cup of coffee, and pastry that I had bought at a German store in downtown Vancouver. That surprised her even more, because up in GP we never saw European style food. After seeing that she was pleased with what I had accomplished, I suggested that we better check to see if the bed was satisfactory too. Well, we proved that in a lengthy tryout and increased the satisfaction on both sides.
Martha said that she would look for at least a part-time job as soon as she knew her way around Vancouver. Since we had only one car, and she did not know how to drive, her job would have to be located close to public transportation. Vancouver had electric busses that got their power through overhead lines, like the old track type streetcars, but they were more maneuverable due to the absence of tracks. Downtown parking was always at a premium, so we used the buses whenever we had to go downtown.
There was an enormous number of attractions for the “Prairie gophers”, who had been deprived of a city life for three years. We took advantage of many attractions. We lived relatively close to the Spanish Banks Beach and I had a chance to swim. Martha couldn’t swim, but she enjoyed watching the tides. The tides at that northern latitude are 10 to 12 feet, and we took extensive walks over normally flooded areas, during low tide.
I quit my job at Advance Industries because of the obnoxious woman. Martha was all shook up, but two days later I started at Boyles Brothers Ltd. It was genuine machine shop work.
The machine shop was an enormous glass roofed hall, filled with dozens of engine lathes, about ten vertical milling machines, six automatic screw machines, and several gear hobbing machines. The company was in a mass production mode, and the shop was manned 24 hours a day, in three shifts. It was tough to fit in here. I frequently had to take over the shift with a machine already setup that wasn’t to my liking. I had to get used to the work habits of another operator. He was an older fellow from Estonia with a poor command of the English language, which made talking to him difficult. The job paid the princely sum of $2.50 per hour and so I had a reason to grin and bear.
What, diamonds in a machine shop?
Boyles Brothers Ltd. manufactured and sold hard rock mining equipment. They had contracted to destroy the “Ripple Rock”, a large, underwater rock pinnacle in the middle of the busiest shipping lane of the Inland Waterway to Alaska. This had been tried many times before without success. Over 50 ships had been ripped open by the rock finger, which was in a narrow shipping channel with exceedingly strong currents. Boyles Brothers Ltd., with decades of hard rock mining experience, was probably the only B.C. company that could handle a job of that magnitude and difficulty.
They had to sink a vertical shaft on the adjacent mainland from where they drilled a horizontal shaft under the ocean floor to the center of the Ripple Rock finger. Then a vertical riser shaft was to be drilled and blasted through the center of the massive rock finger. From this central shaft, numerous smaller horizontal shafts would be drilled throughout the interior of the rock finger. This was extremely dangerous, since the outer mantle of the rock finger had many cracks that let water flood into the tunneling operations. Huge pumps kept the inside of the tunneling effort dry. All these shafts and tunnels were later filled with TNT, to blow up the entire Ripple Rock. This effort was in its third year, and rapidly advancing towards completion.
In the Vancouver shop they manufactured the hard rock drilling equipment to keep them going at Ripple Rock. The most interesting and most expensive parts were the diamond studded drill bits that made drilling into hard rock possible. The biggest ones were about 10" in diameter and worth thousands of dollars. All parts for the machinery that turned the diamond bits were also manufactured here. For this job the tools had to be designed and built quickly, and the men were always under pressure to get them done.
I had two weeks on day shift, then two weeks on afternoon shift, followed by two weeks on graveyard shift. My body could never adjust to it, because my sleep was constantly interrupted by noise during the daytime. I can survive if I get at least four hours of sound sleep in every twenty-four hour period, but I wasn’t even getting that much.
Martha got a job as a sales clerk at the Army & Navy store in downtown Vancouver. The owner of the store was Mr. Cohen, who had his office on a mezzanine overlooking the main floor, and who constantly had a big cigar in his mouth. Most of the salesmen were older Jewish men, giving the store an atmosphere of lower East Manhattan. Martha got along just fine, since many of them were immigrants from Europe. The customers of the store were not upper social class people, except before the Christmas holy days, when a lot of Jewish women came to buy gifts for their non-Jewish friends. Martha told me of stories about the various types that frequented the store. The ones she disliked the most were the Hindus, who rampaged through the displayed merchandise in her department, discussing loudly each item, but never bought anything.
The old downtown area of Vancouver, now known as Gastown, was indeed a gas, as far as the characters that roamed around there were concerned. Since I picked Martha up after work whenever my shift work allowed, I got to know some of these local characters. One of the most unusual ones was an old Chinese man, bent over at a 90° angle, who was pushing a wheelbarrow through the back lanes. He was collecting junk in his wheelbarrow, and everybody felt sorry for him, but he served a very necessary function. A couple of years later, I read in the Vancouver Sun that he had died, and although he lived under deplorable conditions, the mattress he slept on contained over 100,000 dollars in cash.
British weather in British Columbia
The climate in Vancouver was British, too. One could always talk about it, and hence it was a marvelous opener for any kind of conversation with a stranger. Fog of London density, 12" of snow on the ground, 65" of rain annually, and anything in between was experienced in the city. The few genuinely British people never left home without their rolled umbrellas. We could, like the British, ignore the weather, but it gave us an opportunity to open a conversation about its extremes.
One night, coming out of my shift around 12:15 am, I found more than six inches of snow on the ground. Nobody in Vancouver was prepared for it, and nobody knew how to drive on snow. I was fortunate in that I still had my snow and mud tires on the car. Driving home I had to negotiate around the stranded and abandoned vehicles from buses to police cruisers. Electric buses had skidded at right angles to traffic flow, and were stuck in that position on hills. My flair for slalom driving enabled me to circumvent the obstacles, but sometimes I had to drive on the wrong side of the street which was possible because there was no traffic. I made it home without a problem.
The City of Vancouver woke up the next morning to tons of bent and dented sheet metal and it took hundreds of tow trucks to clear the debris off the streets. The unusual cold wave lasted for almost two weeks and kept the plumbers working overtime. The most hilarious sight was the university golf course. We drove through there just to look at the winter wonderland. Hardy, undoubtedly British souls, were trying to ignore the snow and played golf. Since colored golf balls were not invented yet, they spent more time trying to find the ball than hitting it, which happen to golfers even in the green grass.
The Pre-Colombian professor
The bigger the city the more difficult it is to make contact with other people. Vancouver was an exception for us. In the apartment below us lived Dick Fredeman and his wife Pat, who had moved to Vancouver from Oklahoma, to teach at the University of British Columbia. We got together over a cup of coffee one day, and hit it off right away. Dick had an outgoing personality and Pat’s was the opposite. She had been one of his student at a southern university, and apparently didn’t feel too comfortable in their marriage yet. Dick had a Ph.D. specializing in Pre-Colombian history.
Martha and I often had problems following his southern puns. We were allowed to attend Pat’s English literature classes. She gave an overview of the classical English literature.
Later the Fredemans moved out to university housing, and I often went out to have high level intellectual discussions with various professors. Some of the professors were European Jews and it was especially interesting to listen to their political views. There was a lot of political tension in the cold war world and also differences of opinion over the future of western democracies versus world communism. The typically left leaning academic world was much in favor of a Marxist world federation. The irony was that they had never lived, nor could they in my opinion bear to live, under such a regime. I had lived under Stalin, hence I considered their “liberal communism” a bunch of hogwash, and told them so in no uncertain terms. “Very interesting but stupid,” was my frequently used expression after listening to their utopian socialistic-communistic fantasies.
Dick had an assortment of pornographic art pictures that he had gotten at the world’s largest collection of ancient pornographic artifacts, the Vatican. This Vatican collection was only accessible to researchers, and only by special permission. Whether one also had to be Catholic to gain access, Dick didn’t say. Dick was Catholic, but he never went to church. After I looked at the depiction of Greek and Roman penises, I changed Dick’s title to “Professor of pre-Colombian pornography”, and introduced him as such.
A frightfully British scientist
Dick and Pat had rented one room of their apartment to a British student, Jim Farmer, who was working to get a degree in biology. He was doing extensive research in UV radiation. Jim was the typical British scientist, conservative to the bone, impeccable English, and unwilling to drive a car on the “wrong side of the road”. He was exceedingly knowledgeable about a very narrow segment of science. He had the British dry sense of humor, and listening to his interactions with the “Pre-Colombian Professor” from the southern U.S. was so comical at times, that I wished I could have recorded it for posterity.
What wasn’t so amusing was Dick’s chauffeuring Jim to church on Sundays. Dick then showed up at our place to have breakfast with us while waiting for the service to end, so he could pick Jim up again. It got to be quite a nuisance and I was especially upset when I had worked graveyard shift, and wanted to sleep as long as I could. I still maintain to this day that all Ph.D.s have to take a compulsory course in “leechography” before they get their degree, and Dick certainly practiced it.
Since Martha and I liked the life in Vancouver, we tried to persuade Dee and Vera Bergner up in Grande Prairie to consider moving down too. Dee finally sold out his share of the business and they came down and rented an apartment. Dee got a job with a large dry cleaning company, but wasn’t happy there. He found another job over on Vancouver Island, and after a short stay they moved to Victoria. It was a good move for them, because the economical situation in Vancouver was going downhill in 1957.
One day two more guests, Geesche Glimm and her mother, acquaintances from good old Grande Prairie, came to visit. Geesche was an attractive, tall and slim brunette, barely 20 years old, and she looked like the twin sister of the actress Jane Wyman, only younger. Geesche had changed her first name to Kay, because nobody could pronounce the old Plattdeutsch name of Geesche. She had been born in Westmark, a small farm village north of the Peace River, and had never lived anywhere but in the Peace River Country.
She had never seen blooming fruit trees before her visit in Vancouver. Kay’s mother was a pleasant and intelligent woman, who had divorced Kay’s father, and was now living in a common law marriage. She liked the good Canadian beer, and lots of it, without ever showing any signs of drunkenness. Unfortunately Kay stepped into her mother’s footsteps, but both of them stayed well mannered, even when filled up to their eyeballs. I had a crush on Kay when we still lived in Grande Prairie. She was a telephone operator, and later worked in Dee’s dry cleaning business.
Kay and her mother were good story tellers, and shared many anecdotes about inhabitants of the far North. Kay’s father had a degree in agriculture from Hohenheim, a well known German agricultural college, but never had any hands-on experience in crop farming as it is commonly practiced in northern Canada. He took out a homestead, and somehow managed to survive a number of years on it. When Kay’s brothers grew up, they had to take over the manual chores on the farm. He worked them like a Prussian drill sergeant, giving his orders from a rocking chair on the front porch. Small wonder the women left the great “dictator” as soon as they could.
My departure from GP must have stirred many of the people up there into considering a similar move, because we were getting all sorts of inquiries. The next couple who showed up were Hank and Erna Appel, on a vacation trip. They took the usual grand tour of the city, and were impressed. Hank asked me to look for a job opening at a local Ford dealer. I could have opened an employment brokerage for all these visitors from up north.
A ship from Hamburg
My mother’s friend, Hans Haak, was a merchant marine officer at the Hapag Lloyd shipping company. From time to time he had the shipping route from Hamburg or Bremen to the Caribbean, through the Panama Canal and up the west coast to Vancouver. My mother would notify me whenever he was coming to Vancouver. When his ship was in the harbor, we went on board.
Many of the German guys at Boyles Brothers looked up the arrival lists at the harbor, and then ganged up on these ships. One idiot got into trouble for trying to smuggle hard liquor off the ship, and was caught in the act by customs officers. That didn’t sit well with the captain of the ship, because he got called on the carpet for selling liquor illegally. Consequently some of the captains prohibited visitors, and on several occasion they had signs at the gangway saying, “Gott schütze uns von Sturm und Wind, und den Deutschen die im Ausland sind,” which in English means, “God, protect us from storm and wind, and the Germans who live in foreign countries.” A fine slap in the face, but well deserved.
I pointed some of the offenders out to Hans Haak, to keep “my captain” out of trouble. We always got good food and drinks on board, and were sharing the expenses with Hans Haak. We had interesting conversations often lasting into the wee hours of the morning. The ships of Hapag Lloyd were a combination freighter and passenger ship, which accommodated up to 12 passengers in first class staterooms. It was a reasonably priced way to travel, if one had the time, since the ships were not the fastest on the oceans.
One day I got a phone call from Kay Glimm in Grande Prairie, telling me that she had broken up with her boyfriend, and was coming to live in Vancouver. We were delighted, especially since the other small apartment on our floor was vacant. We wouldn’t mind sharing the bathroom with her. A few days later she started to work at the local phone company. We introduced Kay to the exciting city life. When her shifts and mine coincided, I took her to the beach, and when Martha’s work time ran parallel to Kay’s, they would go shopping. Kay didn’t have a car and didn’t have much practice in driving either, so the two used the bus to go places.
Vancouver’s climate was generally moderate, with plenty of rain coming out of low pressure systems rolling in from the Gulf of Alaska. Geographically it is at the same latitude as Le Harvre, France, and Mannheim, Germany. When unusual weather patterns occurred, like the winter scenes described before, they provided wonderful conversational material. When I read books about London’s notorious high density fog, I often asked myself how much of the fog stories were writer’s imagination and/or exaggeration? I could not imagine people climbing up a street sign post to read the name on it, until fog came to Vancouver.
When I was on graveyard shift it took me 25 minutes to get to work. One night fog rolled in and it took me an hour to get to Boyles Brothers Ltd. Fortunately I picked up a fellow employee not far from my home. I had to roll the window of the car down, and steer by the barely visible white center line, while my copilot watched out for parked cars along the curb and helped me count the traffic lights we had to go through.
We would drive up to an intersection and couldn’t see the traffic lights suspended above the center of the intersection until we were almost under them. Thank God the Buick’s old fashioned straight-8 engine was a quiet performer, so I could hear other vehicles. We had a few close calls, but never had an accident. After a few days the fog took on a distinctly amber color from all the oil-fired heating systems in the city. Vancouver now had a regular London killer fog on hand, and people were coughing, and wheezing. The air literally stank. People became so disoriented that they couldn’t find their homes, and tried to flag down taxis or police cars to get them to their destination. It lasted for a whole week and then cleared completely. I was convinced now that the London fogs were not writer’s imagination.
Dee and Vera had settled in Victoria, and had bought a new house in the northern Saanich area. They had four kids now, so they were always short of money. We decided one day to visit unannounced. On our way to the ferry we stopped at Freybe’s German delicatessen on Robson Street, and bought a supply of bread, cold cuts, pretzels and cakes, etc. to take with us.
We left at 8:30 pm on the ferry to Victoria harbor. We were hell bent on surprising them before breakfast. Since we were too stingy to pay for a stateroom, we had to spend the night in uncomfortable chairs. The ferry was in Victoria earlier than we had anticipated, and at 4:45 am we didn’t dare to knock at their front door. We slept a few winks in the car, and rang the door bell at 6:00 am. When Vera opened the door she just about fainted as I said, “Is coffee ready, and here are the rolls, we’re hungry.” That woke the Bergner’s household up in a hurry.
First we had to look at the new house, which was nice, but without much furniture. We talked over coffee and breakfast, just like in the “bad old days” in Grande Prairie. Dee had bought a new Volkswagen Beetle, and we wondered how two adults and now four kids could fit into that car. Yes, there was another addition to the family by the name of Jeffrey, and Dee and Vera had to take a lot of good natured joking about their sex life again. I offered to teach Vera how to do it without getting pregnant, but she refused my generous offer. They really didn’t want another child, but the other three kids were old enough now to help with the new baby.
Waiting for the big bang
The Bergners had a television, and so we could see live on TV what I had been working for during the last 18 months, the Ripple Rock blast. It was going to be the biggest non-atomic blast in history. The television cameras were set up on the side of the shipping channel, about one mile from the blast center. The crews who manned the cameras all wore steel helmets for safety.
Since most of the blast surface was going to be under water, it was impossible to know what effect the explosion would have on the surrounding area. There were doubts whether Ripple Rock could really be pulverized. At Boyles Brothers Ltd. we had been shown diagrams of the tunneling and the amount of TNT that had been packed into the shafts. It was a staggering amount, and unless something went wrong with the ignition sequence, the rock could not survive.
The TV announcers were afraid that something could go wrong. The tension climbed as ignition time minus one (minute) approached, and the TV crews braced for the big bang. It came right on time, and with tons of water mixed with big chunks of rocks climbing about 150 feet in the air, and then falling into the channel waters. The first living things back over the blast area were sea gulls, who feasted on the fish killed or stunned by the explosion. Nobody could tell immediately if the rock had been destroyed, the current was so strong that even hard hat divers could not go down to check. It later turned out that the blast was successful, and the narrow channel was now safe for maritime traffic.
The miserable aftermath
What was no longer safe was my job at Boyles. I and many other employees were laid off in November of 1957. In the following months I desperately tried to find another job.
At the beginning of my unemployment, Martha had asked at Army & Navy if she could work full time to help us over the lean times. That was OK‘d and Martha’s income kept us going. Fortunately a cheaper basement apartment was available right across the street. It was a dinky place, but the landlord was OK, and so we moved in.
A few weeks before my layoff, I had run into my old buddy Walter Golz again, with whom I had shared the “Fairsea” trip. We had lost track of each other because Walter had stayed in the province of Quebec to work in a coal mine on the Gaspè peninsula. He had brought his wife over, and later on they moved to Vancouver. Walter was an electrician, and was also interested in electronics. He urged me to enroll in a night school and update my wartime electronics background. I selected television repair courses.
After graduation, I found that the job prospects were not any better than in the machine shop field. Everybody wanted a 20 year old kid with 15 years of hands-on experience. I was dismayed. My unemployment insurance had long run out, and I had spent all my savings to get through the school.
Kay Glimm decided to return to Grande Prairie. She couldn’t find any friends beside us and she was not cut out for city life. I had always wanted her as my lover, but I didn’t have the guts to tell her. When she came to say good-bye, she looked pathetic. She wore a flowery dress and a little old fashioned hat, like one would see in a Norman Rockwell cartoon. I had tears in my eyes when I hugged and kissed her. She was such a lovable, but such a lonesome person, that I felt guilty for not taking better care of her. I saw her off at the bus depot. I also had to take care of the things she had left behind. My garage was full of her empty beer bottles.
Shortly after that Hank Appel called, telling me that he had been fired upon his return from vacation, and was looking for a job around Vancouver. I promised to keep an eye open. What I found, looking through the job ads, was a radio and television business for sale out in Mission City. Mission City was on the Frazer River about 40 miles east of Vancouver. I called the number, and was encouraged by the owner to come out and talk to him.
We hit it off right away. Ed Marler wanted to retire to Santa Barbara, California, even though he was only in his late thirties. He was going to help me learn to run the business.
I didn’t have a penny in my pocket to purchase the business. So I called Hank and reported to him what I had seen in Mission City. I asked him if he would be willing to go into business with me. Two days later Hank called back and said that he would come down and look the books over to see if it was worth the price that Ed wanted.
If you can’t get a job, start a business.
Hank came down in a brand new 1958 Ford Edsel, which had been the reason for his dismissal. Hank had paid the stripped price for the car, yet it was fully equipped. He had buried the difference in the books.
Hank found things in order in Ed Marler’s books, and we sat down and negotiated the terms. Hank had put his house up for sale, but it would take time to get his money out. In order to purchase Marler Television, Hank had to sell the Edsel, and buy a Ford Fairlane. He lent me half the business purchase price, to be paid back in monthly installments to him. It was a risky, iffy kind of a deal.