POSTING # 9

Funds for the Shaw Festival; Old Money; Starting with a Bang; A Brave Man; Short Stuff (Mini-Stories about Kids and Pets)


Funds for the Shaw Festival

The Shaw Festival raises about three-quarters of its budget from ticket sales, gets a small amount from governments and depends on donors for the rest.

The Festival is looking at ways of increasing donor contributions, perhaps because they expect that ticket sales will be down this year, given the economic situation, As part of this effort, the Festival is developing a questionnaire to be sent to people who have bought tickets in the past trying to find out if they might be prepared to join the donor program. I was asked to be part of a focus group this week to review the draft questionnaire---something I enjoyed doing.

I was impressed with the sophistication of the communications program the Festival has developed. In addition to the usual methods of reaching the public, it is making good use of emails, has developed a FaceBook page and is considering joining the Twitter phenomenon.

I was thinking about the speed of changes in digital social networking and remembered a story our son, Andrew, told a few years ago about an incoming class at his university. FaceBook had just started to take off, mainly among high school students, and many of the first year students had their own FaceBook pages. The second year students, on the other hand, were still using MySpace, and our son overhead one of them asking a first year student, “What’s this FaceBook?” (It must have been hard for a ‘sophisticated’ second-year student to seek help from a lowly frosh!)


Old Money

Talking about raising money, reminds me of a queer story I heard while I was working in Amman, Jordan in 2001.

I was living in a hotel and had a deal with a taxi driver to take me to and from my office each day.

In addition to Arabic, he spoke English and Spanish (he and his father had lived for some years in Venezuela). These languages plus his outgoing personality meant he was often sought out by hotel front desk staff whenever they had to find a taxi driver for a special guest.

On the way back to my hotel one evening, he told me that a Spanish-speaking visitor from Latin America asked him to spend the day going to money changers in Amman. He said he was looking for cheap currency from nations (he didn’t care which) whose currency had been devalued, or whose currency had been replaced by new bills and the old ones had only limited or no convertibility. The key thing was that the bills had to be cheap. He asked if the taxi driver could interpret for him.


At first, the money changers thought the visitor was crazy, but when they realized he was serious they reached into the bottom of their safes for bills they had thought they would never get rid of. The visitor would finger the bills and then hold them in his hand as though he was mentally weighing them. He would nod or shake his head as the taxi driver haggled with the money changers.

After each stop, the visitor stuffed the bills into a large suitcase. They found lots of cheap bills and by the end of the day the visitor was beaming.

As he dropped the visitor at his hotel, the taxi driver asked him what he was going to do with the old bills. Was he a currency collector, or what?

The visitor shook his head. He had an uncle in Latin America who was a counterfeiter and was having trouble getting high quality paper for his fake bills. Apparently, anti-counterfeiting agents in the U.S. had managed to curtail the supply of the high quality paper needed by counterfeiters.

The uncle had found a small, clandestine paper maker who could shred the old bills and produce high quality paper. Having cleaned out Amman, the visitor was off to try his luck in another city in the Middle East.

Starting with a Bang

I worked with Frontier College as a labourer-teacher during my three summers while at Queen’s. The College is a charitable organization that used to send university students to work during the day alongside labourers in mines, bush camps or railway maintenance gangs and to teach, counsel or otherwise offer help to the labourers at night.

My first summer was at a bush camp run by the Great Lakes Paper Company, north of what is now Thunder Bay, on the Dog River.

When I arrived in mid-May, the river drive had just started and all the logs cut and stacked on frozen ponds upstream during the winter began, as the ice melted, to float down to the camp. At the camp, the logs would be loaded onto trucks---there is more about this in the next story.

Another fellow, Olaf, and I were sent to one of the many rapids on the Dog River, our job was to make sure that any logs that got jammed between the rocks in the rapids were pulled out quickly before they could create a ‘jackpot’---the loggers’ name for a jumble of logs. Sometimes a small jackpot could be cleared by pulling out a key log but if it became too big, dynamite had to be used.

One day, Olaf and I had had a good lunch of the sandwiches, pie and cheese we had picked up that morning in the cookhouse. We were lying on the bank enjoying the sun, watching the logs go through the rapids. We didn’t have much to do, the water was high and the logs were easily clearing the rapids. The last thing I can remember is that we were chatting about what we would do on the weekend.

Suddenly, there was an enormous bang. Olaf and I jumped up.

“What the hell was that?”. Olaf shouted.

As we looked around, our foreman came ambling down the trail by the rapids.

“Oh, you’re awake now!”

He told us that he had come upon his two sleeping workers, gone back to his truck, got a large, empty glass jug, a stick of dynamite and a fuse. Above the rapids, he had stuck the fuse in the dynamite, lit it, put it in the jug and pushed the jug into the river. The jug cleared the rapids and exploded not far from where we were snoozing.

We learned our lesson, no more naps.


A Brave Man

The river drive was finished, and the logs were all floating in the river by the camp, collected in large booms. On the shore of the river was a jackladder, a wooden structure that sloped into the river with two huge endless chains about eight feet apart that were studded every two feet with nine inch teeth. Logs were fed onto the chains and pulled out of the water, up the jackladder and dropped into trucks for the trip to the pulp and paper mill in Thunder Bay.

I was told to work on the jackladder with a fellow named Fred. We stood on a low bridge in front of the jackladder with our backs to each other. I faced the river and using a pike pole---a long pole with a steel spike and hook in the end---pulled the logs from the boom and passed them under the bridge to Fred who fed them onto the chains.

It was important that the logs went onto the ladder straight across. If a log went on crooked it could injure the men at the top of the jackladder who had to guide the falling logs into the truck parked beneath the jackladder.

Although Fred was very skilled at loading the jackladder, he was no longer young---he was in his late 50s or early 60s----and overweight. I sensed that he found it hard to pull and poke the logs so I found ways of feeding the logs to him so that he just had to do what he was good at----arranging them carefully on the jackladder.

I wondered once or twice about his weight, or, more precisely, how it was distributed. His stomach was large but so were his hips and bottom. He was tall and carried the weight well but from his chest down to his legs he was almost egg-shaped.

We worked well together, and it was satisfying to have the fellows at the top of the jackladder tell us that they missed us when we went on break and others took over.

One day, Fred asked me if I would like to help him pick some Saskatoon berries after dinner. He and his wife were going to make jelly that weekend. As we picked the berries, Fred began talking about his life.

He been in the army in World War I and was badly wounded during a battle in France. He said that in addition to wounds to his legs and back, he had lost his manhood.

After being discharged from the army, he was full of anger, anger that he couldn’t realize his dream of marrying, settling down and having a family, a dream that had kept him going through the mud and horrors of the trenches in France.

He said he had travelled all over Canada and the States through the 1920s and into the 1930s, drinking, fighting and generally getting into trouble.

And then in the midst of the Depression, he had returned home to the Thunder Bay area and met a widow with three children. She was having a tough time raising the children on her own and he offered to help support her.

They liked each other and although the woman knew he could never be a husband in the full sense, they decided to get married. Everyone in the community knew, of course, about the loss of his manhood and when he applied for a marriage license he was told that because he could not consummate his marriage he must have the permission of the Premier of Ontario---Mitch Hepburn, at the time.

He got angry as he was telling me this, his face getting red. It was unfair that he had given so much for his country and now he had to be put through the indignity of begging (his word) for permission to marry.

Calming down a bit, he said the whole thing was made worse because of his hatred for ‘that SOB, Mitch Hepburn’. (Hepburn was a Liberal and Fred was a Conservative).

Permission finally came and he and the widow were married. He said that they had now been together for twenty years. The children had done well at school and were now on their own. And he and his wife were going to make Saskatoon jelly that weekend.

What a brave, tough, good man!



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Later on, I told Fred a story that I had heard during my summer at Mackies in Port Stanley (see Posting #8).

Mitch Hepburn lived on a farm not far from Port Stanley---he grew onions when he was not being a politician.

One busy Saturday night during the 1930s, an Ontario Provincial Policeman came into Mackies and told the owner that he had the Premier of Ontario in the parking lot and the Premier wanted to see him right away. The owner had never been fond of ‘that onion farmer’ and Premier or not, the restaurant was busy. The owner also knew that Mitch Hepburn liked his booze and he wondered if it was alcohol that was prompting the visit. He asked the policeman to tell the Premier that he was really busy, and that perhaps they could meet another day.

The policeman pleaded with him, “Can’t you help me out. The Premier is not going to take ‘no’ for an answer.”

The owner sighed and followed the policeman out to the parking lot. The policeman pulled open the back door of the car and the Premier of Ontario rolled onto the ground, sound asleep and stone drunk.

The policeman lifted Hepburn back into the car and shut the door.

“Sorry”, he apologized, “I’m just his driver.” And he drove off.

Fred enjoyed that story.


Short Stuff (Mini-Stories about Kids and Pets)


When we were touring Britain with the children in the summer of 1979 (see Posting #8) we stayed one night in the Cotswold’s in an Elizabethan mansion that had been converted into an inn.

The owners had obviously spent a good deal of money converting the heritage property into an upscale inn.

The boys’ bedroom had a bidet in the ensuite bathroom, a piece of bathroom equipment that was new to them. One of the boys (I’m not saying which one) decided he would try the bidet. It was the type with a jet in the bottom of the bowl and the user had to adjust both the height of the jet and the temperature of the water---delicate operations, both.

Finally, our son was satisfied that he had things adjusted just right and he straddled the bidet and began to wash his nether regions. Pleased with himself, he shouted to his brother through the closed bathroom door that he should try it---it was great.

Just then, someone in another part of the inn flushed a toilet and the water in the jet turned scalding hot.

The next day, our son was nursing his tender nethers and muttering something about “instant vasectomies”. He is now a father so we can assume that the blast of hot water had no lasting effect.



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See you next Sunday for more stories from our family’s universe!