Train Travel

            Train travel. Now that was a way to go. What a dignified way to get from place to place. You could get up and move around quite easily without stepping on anybody to get into the aisle and you could walk for half a mile from end to end. You didn't get any thrombosis from train travel. You could have your own sleeper and spend the whole trip in there if you were feeling antisocial. It really did give you a chance to meet people either in the dining car or the dome car or the smoking car.

            Now there was a concept - the smoking car. In those days, gentlemen smoked cigars and did it in the privacy of the smoking car. Away from the noise and hurly of women and children. Maybe with a glass of single malt, as well. Sigh.

            But really. Meals were cooked on the spot by a crew of cooks and served on good china, silverware, and linen. I remember on the Empire Builder, the waiter sprinkled crumpled cheddar onto my piece of pie from a little silver bowl. And the names of the trains - the Empire Builder; the California Zephyr; the Coast Starlight; the flying Scotsman. And these trains really did fly along, in the age of steam. Big steam locomotives on the prairies could maintain 120 miles per hour. Diesel locomotives could still clip along at 90 or 100 mph.

            It wasn't until the 1960's that air travel cut seriously into train travel. Fuel was cheap so flights were cheap and the difference in time, hours instead of days, to cross the continent stopped the passenger trains.  Train companies asked for, and got for a time, subsidies to operate passenger service but by the end of the 1970's passenger traffic stopped except in the populated corridors like Montreal, Toronto, New York.

            For a while, the technology stopped growing in North America. Yes, freight locomotives grew to 6,000 horsepower from 3,000 but we never went to high speed electric or continuous rail or concrete ties (only much later) like they did in Europe and Asia. High speed rail (300 kilometres per hour) was able to compete with airlines and now that fuel prices have soared, those countries that refused to let the passenger service go are once again being well served. We have that technology in Canada now. One of our iconic companies, Bombardier, along with its aerospace division, is building high speed trains for other countries. We don't have the political will to do so.

            In Canada, where the price for the western provinces to enter into confederation was a rail link to the east, the federal government has failed to maintain passenger service. Once passenger service was dropped to small communities, freight service as well was allowed to drop. It was, of course, a smooth move by rail companies. The resultant freight vacuum was taken over by trucking whose roads were then maintained at the expense of the taxpayer. To put the trans Canada rail in, the Canadian Pacific Railway was given every other section on which the rail line lay. In a final blow of blind bureaucracy, the rail companies WERE ALLOWED to pull up the rails, to be sold as scrap for 2 cents a pound, so that no one else could put a train on that line, yet they retained the land given for rail and are selling the real estate to this day.

            I have to fly to the east three times this fall. How I yearn to be able to take a high speed train, eat food freshly cooked, snooze in my own bunk or sit in the dome car and watch my country slip by. Instead, I have to report three hours early, be patted and felt, sit with my long legs under my chin, BUY a crappy sandwich, and use a washroom where somebody has already peed all over the floor. Progress. 

Learning to Drive

            At the time that I was eligible to get a driver's licence, you could do the written exam at age 15 1/2 and then do the road test on the day that you turned 16. I had been driving on the sly on the back roads in the '47 Studebaker Champion until I couldn't find anymore gas so I was pretty confident about getting my licence and so it went.

            I turned 16 at the end of November and in the spring my family decided that we would catch a flight back to Finland from where we had come in 1952 and hadn't been back in ten years. The tricky bit was that the plane left from New York City so we were going to drive across the continent. We had 5 days in which to make it to New York so the plan was to drive through the states from Everett on U.S. 2. Only parts of highway 2 are there today as most of it has become Interstate 90.

            Five days for 5,000 miles didn't really leave a lot of time for dawdling. Dad had been a driver since he was thirteen - trucks, buses, trolleys - so hours at the wheel didn't bother him too much but I was just a newby. I think the reason that I can't seem to stick to the puny speed limits that we have now is primarily that cross continent drive. Even when I took my driver exam, speed limit on the highway was 65 miles per hour (104 kph) and often 50 mph (80 kph) elsewhere. School zones and parks were 30 mph (50 kph) so you can see that until the oil shortage of the early eighties, traffic moved along quite smartly. Highway 2 through Montana was entirely a different thing - no speed limit outside of town.

            We had a 1956 Chevy wagon then, straight six engine, three on the tree. It was loaded down with four people, luggage for a month and gear including camping gear and cooler. So when we opened her up in Montana, she topped out at 120 mph (192 kph) - almost 200 kilometres per hour. I loved it. That Chevy did not have power steering so the steering wheel was at least 20 inches in diameter to give enough leverage to turn the nose. I don't think that steering wheels were ever again as large. The wagon also had a hood ornament that was like stylized eagle with outstretched wings. Highway 2 was just one lane in each direction so when we were travelling at speed, we lined up the hood ornament with the centre line (white) and put the pedal to the metal, as was said. When a hill came up, eased it to the right, just in case someone or something was there, and back to the centre when all was clear.

            In the 1960's, and probably today, small western towns had a 25 mph speed limit. When we had been pounding along at 120 for a couple of hours and had to slow to 25, it literally felt like we were standing still. I had learned to drive, from dad, in a relaxed, in the back of the seat, easy grip on the wheel, style so I wasn't tense at high speed. Not so my mother who was relegated to the back seat when it was my turn to drive. I can still feel her breath on my neck as she clutched the back of the front seat so that her short stature could see through the windshield. To her great credit she didn't back seat drive and I expect that she and dad had words about letting me drive flat out, but I never heard about it. 

            Highway 2 paralleled the Great Northern Railway for much of the way to St. Paul Minnesota and passed through western towns that are just as much a part of the Canadian consciousness as American, maybe because of Hollywood. Towns like Missoula, Helena, Butte, Fargo. Great sounding names. From Minneapolis, it was various interstates to Chicago, Toledo, Akron and so on to New York. I was still a fresh faced kid but a veteran driver. But we were lucky too. Lucky not to have a flat tire when I was flying or having to dodge a deer or armadillo.

Bugs

A real soap box racer is a continuous source of pleasure even after it is obviously past its prime but definitely not past its sell by date. When I was a boy, we called these speeders that we built "bugs" and we must have built a bug every summer until bicycle ownership made us range so much further from home that making bugs just fell by the way.

            Our bugs were not nearly as fancy, just a piece of board for a bottom until plywood became universal at construction sites and two lengths of 2 x 4 for axles. Usually a bolt to pivot the front axle was not hard to find but the wheels were always a dilemma.  We sharp eyed kids would scrounge everywhere for wheels that didn't seem to belong to anybody. We never did actually rip wheels off the prams of sleeping babes but that was tempting. Usually we would make a trip to the dump on Como Lake Road and find some. Sometimes the rear wheels were bigger than the front ones so that the whole thing had a fast looking rake to it.

            In those days, there was real soap box racing once a year at the derby in Mission but kids from working class families, who didn't actually live in mission, did not get involved. Firstly, it seemed like such an American thing and secondly, money and time was just too scarce. There was no point even asking about it, even if we had known about the derby. "Build a what? Go out and play." or more likely come here you can help me with this.

            Steering was by ropes to the front axle like reins on a horse. These things could be fast, depending on the steepness of the hill, and woe to you if you dropped a rope or made too sharp of a turn because the axle could turn under the body of the bug. It was never pretty, as road rash was the usual result. Nevertheless, we would drag that bug all over the place to ever steeper hills and in our neighbourhood, Dawes Hill was the Everest of bugs.

            Dawes Hill was so steep that people test driving cars would use it to see how much power their car had. Busses would go around it because it was too steep. Dawes Hill was closed for traffic when snow came. If you fell off your bug, you rolled to the bottom. It was tear streaming, anus clenching excitement. You had to have a lookout to tell you when the coast was clear of traffic on Brunette at the bottom of the hill. If you chickened out part way down and put your feet on the ground for brakes, your runners would be smoking hot. Whoooeee!

            Later in life, we moved onto more mature thrills. Children, these are professionals. DO NOT try this at home.

Firecrackers

            Fireworks were allowed when I was a boy. By fireworks, I mean firecrackers. There were Roman Candles, Cherry Bombs, and the Burning Schoolhouse, but they were never worth the money as far as I could see. But firecrackers were a delight. They came in a bright red and yellow package with all the fuses woven together so that you had to unravel them if you wanted to set them off one by one or, if you were in the money, you could just light the woven fuse and set the whole thing off banging one after the other. I think firecrackers were 5 or 10 cents a package at Henry's Store on the corner of Austin and Hillcrest. Lady Fingers were a little less and you could buy a punk for a penny.

            For those of you for whom fireworks were banned by the ladies safety league, a punk is just like a stick of incense having just enough spark to light a fuse when you blew on it. The punk stayed in the corner of your mouth when you rummaged in your pocket full of loose firecrackers. I suspect that was why firecrackers were ultimately banned - some kid, in an unthinking moment, reached for a firecracker with the punk in his hand. 

            Fireworks today means the Fire Department raising $15,000 in donations and then setting up a display on the dock at Kalamalka Lake on Halloween or July 1. But really, that is like watching TV. Firecrackers, when I was a kid, was the hands-on real thing. The smell of the powder, the lit fuse burning in your fingers, the thrill of letting it fly  before it went off, and then that boom. Sweet.

Cutting the Grass

            Cutting the grass is the biggest waste of time known to man. Cut the grass, water it, feed it, weed it, for what - so you can cut it more often. Is life so without stimulus that man must spend a couple of hours a week, and more, just cutting the grass in an endless cycle? Wouldn't it be more productive to let the lawn take its natural course - let the rain nurture it and when it is a dry spell, let the lawn go to the colour of the Okanagan hills. It will start growing again in October.

            I cut my grass under protest. I water as little as possible, just so the by-law guys don't come and visit. "Excuse me Mr. Korpisto. Your neighbours reported that you have let your lawn die. We can't have that here. This is a family neighbourhood. You are setting a bad example. How can we tax you for the ever-more-scarce water if you don't use it to keep your lawn green".

            I also let the dandelions grow and have for years because I have never heard of anyone dying from dandelion poisoning or dandelions getting into the water table and making the water unusable. In fact, it is just the opposite. Dandelions are very efficient in bringing nutrients from deep in the earth to the surface. It stands to reason then, that the more dandelions that you have in your lawn, the healthier your lawn would be and you wouldn't have to waste your hard earned money on chemicals to make your yard green. Wait a minute. You don't think that lawns were first  introduced to man through a conspiracy of Monsanto, do you?

             I have to say that I did, in my foolish youth, cut lawns for money. I did cut my parents' lawn for food but Mr. Woods next door paid me a couple of bucks to cut his lawn every week. It wasn't so bad and I caught a glimpse of his daughter Linda now and then. Mr. Woods was kind of cool too because he drove the local ice cream truck that tingledy-dinged its way around the neighbourhood. I envied the Netzlaw boys because their lawn mower had a grass catcher and I just had my socks. Imagine, not having to rake too. Sigh.

            I think the answer is lambs. Let a lamb munch his way around your yard and eventually it would all be cropped off evenly. Natural fertilization, too. I suppose it would have to be watered a little bit for I don't think lambs do well on dead grass although what is hay if not dead grass. Hmm. And in December, lamb chops, lamb stew, etc. A win-win situation as far as I can see. We could make it painless.

            I notice now though, that they no longer put poison on the fields in the parks. Burdock, that tends to overtake any other grassy plants, is cut down before it can go to seed. Nor does the highways department poison noxious weeds at the side of the road. This is all good for us. No more birds and bees are dying in our effort to have everything a uniform green. Bees are having a hard enough time world wide that we shouldn't make it worse. After all, without pollinating insects, everything that we eat, again, EVERYTHING THAT WE EAT would die.

            Back to my own lawn. The biggest compliment that I received about my lawn came from a visiting Japanese student. One morning, she was walking around the lawn, bent over examining every blade. "What are you doing?" I asked.  "Oh, when I saw photographs of Canada and all the houses with green grass in front, I thought that it would be very boring. But not your grass. Look it is full of all different types of plants, some have little blue flowers and little white flowers, some have big leaves, some have little leaves". Come to think of it, my lawn is like a cross section of the Canadian population - all different.

G.N.Docks

            One of the jobs that I filled in for summer relief was as watchman at the Great Northern docks in Vancouver harbour. Watchmen were from all stripes of life at the dock. One gent had been a Vancouver policeman in the bad old days when a lot of the force was let go, including the chief, because of graft. This guy passed the time at night by picking every padlock in the place, much to the consternation of the daytime clerks. A son of a railway employee also worked for a while but one night with a friend got into racing around in the warehouse with fork lifts and one went on its side, threw him out, and the mast came down and cut off half of one foot. Another was a PHD English graduate but those jobs were in short supply so...

            The dock was right east of Ballantyne Pier and barges of pulp or rolls of paper would come from pulp mills on Vancouver Island.  Kincome Navigation had a ship that had an open deck for rail cars full of rolls of paper that could tie up at the end of the dock and match the end of the rail spur.  The barges could come in at any time of night depending on weather and tides across the Strait of Georgia and in those days were pulled by these great old wooden tow boats that still had a full crew. That meant skipper, deck hand, engineer, sometimes a 2nd engineer and a cook.  The deck house was long, matching the sheer of the deck, with the wheel house on top at the front. Not all of the tow boats had given way to the practice of using tractor tires for bumpers and still sported rope-work puddings as bumpers. The boats would tie up for a few hours if it wasn't busy and I would sometimes be invited aboard for coffee and pie. The galley door was usually a double dutch door and the cook would set up a spot at the galley table. It was bad manners and probably a superstition to wear your hat into the galley and it could be chucked smartly over the side.

            The barges full of bales of white pulp sheets were covered barges and were positioned in front of one of the two fixed cranes. These cranes were old technology in that a cable ran from a heavy winch in the operators shack over the pulley at the end of an A-frame made of 12 by 12 wooden beams. The A-frame could also be moved by a second winch. The operator was positioned to the front of everything, on a sheeps hide seat (to cushion his piles) and his hands would work the upright levers that raised and lowered the boom or hook and his feet rested on the brake pedals. In order to unload the barge, the longshoremen would have to lower a Hyster heavy duty forklift, and sometimes two, into the barge. The crane operator had to hold the weight of the Hyster with his legs and slowly lower it into the hold. The Hysters didn't have forks but huge paddles that tightened on the paper rolls and they could be rotated to lay a roll on its side, if necessary. One man in the hold would operate the Hyster and bring the paper or pulp under the hook and two guys would put a sling around it and up it would come. Other forklifts on the dock would then move it into the warehouse and stack it. In due course, the product would be loaded into rail cars and sent on its way.

            The waterfront in Vancouver was an active and exciting place. At the foot of Burrard Street, under the shadow of the great art deco Marine Building was the CPR Pier which became known as Centennial Pier when larger cruise ships started using it. In the 1960's, CPR still had a ferry landing just to the west of Centennial Pier, where the new convention centre is. It was more of a ship than the drive-straight-on ferries of today in that you had to load through a door in the side and then manoeuvre into an assigned spot. The passenger areas had lots of brass and mahogany and the dining room still had linen and silverware.

            East of Centennial Pier, where the Heliport is today, were docks that used to be CPR's when they ran steamship service up the coast and a marine ways. Then came Fisherman's Wharf, which is much reduced now, then the Port Captain's office which was located in a building built in 1906 as the offices to the lumber mill that had grown up from the original Hastings Mill, and now as the home of the Flying Angels Seafarer's Centre. then came Ballantyne Pier and the G.N. Dock.

            In the 1960's crews of longshoremen unloaded ships, before containerization became universal. At that time, the White Pass and Yukon Railway, pioneered containerized transport of goods on their shipping docks in Vancouver, close to the PNE. Their ships then sailed to Skagway, Alaska and loaded the containers onto the train which went up the White Pass, next to the Trail of '98, to Whitehorse. Also, I had a chance to go see the first purpose built car carrier to be unloaded in Vancouver at Ballantyne Pier. These cars were Datsuns and one or two longshoremen would be driving cars off while the rest of the crew, a dozen or so men, played soccer on the dock. Now the car carriers all come to the car docks on Annacis Island on the Fraser River and docks with cranes for loading and unloading huge container carriers have replaced the old-time docks. What remains the same in Vancouver Harbour is loading bulk carriers with grain and coal, and lumber is still slung into ship holds a single lift at a time.

Growing Up In Coquitlam

            Growing up in the fifties was really very carefree. For parents too because they didn't know where we were for most of the day. "Oh they're just out playing". And we were, but if it was in today's world, child welfare would have whisked us away. I was ten or eleven when I got my first bike. It had belonged to a Finnish boy whose father was killed building the sea-to-sky highway and he and his mom were moving back to Finland. That bike just expanded my world exponentially. There was usually a gang of us as we headed out in the morning. I would go over to Dave Treger's and probably run into Earl Netzlaw on the way. Dave's younger brother Tim would usually come if we were going fishing in one of the creeks running down the hill that is Coquitlam.

            The key to any successful education is the excellence of the instructors. Dave had an older brother Gerry from whom most of our wisdom came. It was at the Tregers' that I learned to make slingshots. Maple crooks abounded in our bush and there never appeared to be a shortage of bike innertubes for rubber and shoe tongues for pockets.

I have wondered what Mr. Treger thought of all the tongueless shoes that his family sported. Slingshots weren't always used for good when I winged a stone off the pavement into a neighbour girls leg as she was speeding down the road on her bike. It was a good shot but her father chased us into the bush for miles.

            We hung around in the bush a lot. All that is left of that bush now is Mundy Park with its two small bog lakes - Mundy Lake and Lost Lake. We became adept at bringing down tall alders that were 6 or 8 inches at the butt and building log forts. Nobody was crushed by falling trees or whacked with an axe. The same was for building rafts on the lakes. It was usually green alder that was used and it barely floated above the surface. I wonder now if we always travelled with an axe. I didn't have one so it must have been the Tregers. Austin Road ended near our houses and the trail led through the bush to the power-line (the power-line that just fell into the Fraser the other day) and down to Essondale, the mental asylum as it was known then.

            Essondale had extensive orchards and cherry season would draw us down the hill. In those days, a few people who were former inmates had built crude shacks in the bush and had planted gardens and lived, summers anyway, there. We never thought anything of running into people there, that's just how it was. Essondale also had extensive farms, known as Colony Farms, between the Lougheed Highway and the Fraser River where they raised prize winning (at the PNE) cattle, hogs and sheep. In those days, most institutions like that and like penitentiaries had their own farms where some inmates were able to work and the food raised was used in the institution. It seems so logical that good, healthy, meaningful work would be beneficial to recovery.

Occasionally, we would head for Colony Farms and ride the sheep. An end to that came when Earl Netzlaw picked a ram to ride and the ram's horn hooked Earl in the nostril and ripped it open. Don't tell your mom Earl or we'll really be in trouble.

            Parents were on a "Need to Know" basis and unless a limb was lost, they didn't need to know, and probably, didn't want to know. We must have had some close calls but I can only remember one really close childhood call. It must have been about 1954 and we hadn't moved up to Tregers' neighbourhood yet. My friend Ronnie Garneau and I had wandered up to the dump at the end of Como Lake Road. The site is now a high school, Dr. Charles Best. Rumour had it  that some kid had found a 5 dollar bill in some discarded clothing so every kid in the municipality made the dump part of their rounds.

Two men were shooting a handgun at some cans set up on the overturned frame of a car and as we walked well in the back of them, a ricochet drilled a groove into the back of Ronnie's scalp. We were walking side by side and either one of us could have been a casualty. Ronnie told his dad but my parents didn't need to know.

            Towards New Westminster from Colony Farms is Leeder Creek, where the Port Mann Bridge is today. This was an area where log booms were tied up waiting to be processed at one of the many mills in Coquitlam/New Westminster, the largest being Fraser Mills in Maillardville. We often rode in our gum boots, fashionably turned down at the top, and would go fishing from the log booms. Running across the floating logs never seemed to be a problem and when one sunk down it was just logical to jump on to the next one. I suppose we were lucky and the most we got was wet feet although I knew a family who lost one of their boys into the river.

            In the other direction, in Port Coquitlam, were the large Canadian Pacific Railway  yards and roundhouse. I don't know if we always happened there at lunch or what but there never seemed to be anybody around the roundhouse. The turntable for lining up the locomotives with the roundhouse doors was powered by steam and quite simply by turning a handle we could make it go. I don't remember ever being chased away from there. That roundhouse is no longer there but it must have been at least ten miles from our place which was at the top of the hill and the roundhouse was at river level. I would be hard pressed today to jump on a bike and make that trip.

            I know that times have changed and bad things happen to kids who are out on their own but we were carefree. We went where we wanted, didn't really get into bad trouble, weren't harassed by anybody and survived to become self reliant. We grew up with the confidence to tackle anything and often did.

Work

            Starting my working life in the 1960's was, by and large, stepping into a man's world. Not a macho world, but very few women in the hands-on type of jobs. In construction I didn't have a female apprentice until the mid-1980's. In the sixties on the railroad, I only ran into one woman worker, Elinor, a telegrapher, and she took no guff from anybody but still very pleasant as a co-worker. Most of the clerks had a whisky bottle in the third drawer of the desk and weren't shy about indulging - not right in front of the boss, of course, unless he needed a drink too.

            Work was meant to be work. The section gangs still spiked by hand and pushed the ballast under the ties by hand. I saw a video clip recently of a machine that did everything continuously - laid the ties, rail, spiked and tamped the ballast too. The men just made sure that the flat cars didn't run empty. The section foreman in those days, Frank Horne I think he was, encouraged me to continue with school and not get stuck in manual labour. A lot of older men walked all hunched over because hard work had ruined their backs.

            There is a feeling today that if you do manual labour, you just aren't bright enough to do anything else. That is just as opposite from the reality of  it as can be. All the trades jobs - carpenter, plumber, electrician, mill wright, glazier, cabinetmaker, ship wright (forgive me if I have excluded your trade) - requires that the individual can think on his, or her, feet, can articulate to others what is needed or what the problem is, can do complicated calculations of layout, loads, and sizing and if they are working for themselves do the financial side of the business too. Very few other jobs require as much from the worker. And on top of all that they must be able to use their hands to shape their work in a workmanlike manner. Of course, the harshest critics are their co-workers.

            So you can see that it really gripes me when the Federal Government (people that are supposed to be looking after our well being) just legislated civil servants back to work and had the utter gall to legislate the wage rate as well. Of course, the posties' wage rate was legislated downwards, unlike what the MP's do for themselves. I always thought that the job of government was to pave the way, to expedite, to fill the cracks where citizens might fall, in short, to make this a country where all might prosper.  Instead, we now have an us and them situation, where we have a government that is pursuing an agenda of its own and not pursuing our ideals as a country where everyone can enjoy food, family, home, and worthwhile employment. When did we let the cart start leading the horse?

            Back to boat building.  In the late 1960's, Federal Fisheries scientists were aware of declining Salmon stocks on the west coast. Nowhere nearly as bad as today, but declining due to spawning habitat degradation, pollution of the ocean, overfishing by nations with factory fleets beyond our territorial limits.  The government solution was to reduce the number of boats fishing by paying fishermen that were wanting to give up their commercial licences. That was swell in theory but it resulted in the fish boats becoming larger and there wasn't a reduction in the catch and less people were doing the catching. However, for a while there was a boom in building bigger boats. Big aluminum seine boats were being built that could corral a school of fish in one set. I guess to my old fashioned thinking and with some hindsight, it would have been better to limit the size of the boat instead of the fleet. Perhaps then we could have had more people fishing with young people able to afford to buy or build a more modest boat and buy a license from a retiring fisherman. Now, some licence holders have multiple licences and never go to sea but rent out these licences to other fishermen at tens of thousands of dollars. Hmm. 

Boats II

            Gordie Breckon was having the Northern Husky built on the dyke at Annacis Slough in New Westminster. She was to be a 41' troller. Even today, over forty years later, the smell of yellow cedar will send me back to that boat shop. The shop had two marine ways, a small machine shop, and another building for the storage of big balks of timber. Three shipwrights worked there, one being the owner, and they took on all aspects of the work - new construction and re-building and repairs. The standard, at that  time for fishboats, was wooden construction with a few built with fibreglass and aluminum still a few years away. In defence of wooden construction, the Northern Husky   is still fishing for the Breckon family in the Gulf of Alaska.

            The shipwrights didn't mind, or at least overlooked, that the owner would help where possible and I helped the owner. I wasn't new to construction as dad was a carpenter and we had built houses together since I was in my early teens. At the boat yard, I would be sent to pick up parts in Vancouver or New Westminster, or sand and scrape or whatever. This was all over-time as I was either at school or working at the railway, but it was an education of a different sort. As at the railroad, the men here left a person to learn from doing it themselves. This boat was being done to a standard of finish that was not the norm in those days. A work boat would more or less have a ladder that led to the bunks in the foc'sle but Gordie would spend the summer with his family aboard so he wanted a proper stairway that had to curve at the bottom. This, out of the ordinary, caused eyebrows to rise a little bit with the shipwrights as did the crowsnest barrel that was mounted high in the mast for the young boys to climb to.

            There is really nothing else like the smell of a boat yard. Yellow and red cedar, strongly aromatic, for planking. Oak for ribs and backbone. Teak or mahogany for interior finery. A caulking (pronounced corking) team came in to make the hull watertight. They pounded in a thick strand of cotton batting between the planks followed by a string of oakum (tarred hemp). The caulking and the caulking process, tightened the hull into a single unit rather than just a collection of sticks fastened together. The installation of engine and shafts was contracted to mechanical outfits as was the electrical.

            The electrical wiring of boats was being done by two electricians who were working for the B.C. Telephone Company as well. I looked kind of handy so they invited me to work with them, for money. The first boat that I was sent to do on my own was also a wooden troller that this old gent was building really beside a ditch that opened up onto the Fraser River. I was happily stringing wire, boring through beams where necessary, and bored through the main bulkhead beam aft of the wheelhouse and much to my later dismay, bored clean through the main instrument cable from the radar array. I reported this to my boss and I went to finish up another boat and never did hear how things were patched up. To this day, I never bore through anything without seeing what's on the other side.

            The Northern Husky was launched into the river and left at the dock to "take up", that is to let the planks swell and it was no surprise when she leaked a cup full of water and was tight.  The ship inspector from the Department of Transport came to measure the hull, figure out the tonnage, and to check for stability. This consisted of a number of us standing at the same gunwale and then running to the centreline. The resultant rocking was then timed to see whether the hull was "tender" or not. She had a good underwater shape, wasn't tender, and only a small amount of ballast was needed to make her ride on her designed waterline.

            Trollers, unlike gill netters which caught fish in nets, caught fish by pulling six long lines that had numerous lures, through the water. The lines were spread out to the side of the boat by troll poles, which were hinged out from the beam of the boat. The poles had a bell at the tip which alerted the crew to a fish on. Powered reels, or gurdies, hauled the line in so that the fish could be gotten off. Troll fish is gutted and cleaned and iced right away so it is extremely fresh when brought to market. Nowadays, the fish is no longer iced but is, I think, frozen at sea.

Boats

            Boats have, for some reason or other, occupied my idle moments and sometimes my waking moments for as long as I can remember. My earliest memories of boats go back to when I was just 4 or 5 years old in Finland. We were on a family visit to the farms of relatives in the interior of Finland which at the time, the late 1940's or the turn of the decade, were only accessible by water transport. Finns for generations had travelled throughout the country by large lapstrake rowboats. The likes of these boats have never been seen in North America.  These boats could transport whole extended families with 10 to 20 men rowing. Imagine the power and speed with 20 men rowing and often competing with other families as the whole village, for instance, was rowing to church. My earliest memories were of being transported by one of these boats to a relative's farm. My cousin, some years older and used to living on the water, snatched up some pieces of water lilies and fashioned a little pig for me. I remember being impressed.

            Fast forward to New Westminster. In the mid-1950's, the waterfront in New West was an active, vibrant commercial place. The large docks on Front Street still had the commerce that deep sea freighters brought from all around the world. Front Street still had ship chandleries that flourished during the gold rush as did Jones Tent and Awning from who you could still get an arctic sleeping robe that was good to -50 degrees Fahrenheit but you needed a dog sled to carry it. As boys, we used to wander on the docks and talk to sailors from everywhere. The small craft dock, behind the old CPR station at Columbia and Front Street, was home to a large part of the Fraser River gill net fleet as was Annieville and Brownsville, across the river. Here we could get fresh salmon and herring by the bucket full. For that west coast delicacy, the oolichan (eulachon), we just had to drop a dip net in the river when the run was on. We boys would bicycle down to Leeder Creek, where the Port Mann Bridge is today, and go out on the log booms and dip for oolichan, fish for salmon, or sturgeon which had to be at least three feet long before one was allowed to keep it. I remember a 700 pounder which was caught and the news photo in the Columbian paper had half of it in a station wagon and half hanging out.

            In those years, when the salmon were running, the river was open for commercial fishing at least once a week for several days and the river would be full of gill netters from Mission to the mouth and into the Gulf of Georgia.  Gill netters would race upstream, get into position for next to set and drift down with the current, playing their net off the drum and across the stream. Hopefully, with a good set, the net floats would begin to sink below the surface, indicating fish in the net and time to start reeling in before the current took you into a downstream bridge. Boats could play the net from the stern or from the bow (but not both) and sometimes someone had a just an outboard engine powered pleasure boat with a commercial license and he would work the net from the side of his boat, but mostly they were stern pickers with bow pickers coming in later years.

            I went to look at a stern picker that was moored at a small float at the mouth of the Coquitlam River. You had to drive on the dyke around Colony Farms which was the farm for Essondale Mental Asylum, later Riverview, and Colony Farms is now long gone and has been replaced by the Forensic Psychiatric lock up. Any way, that little boat had a clinker built hull, a little flat head six engine with a car rear axle driving the net drum. The boat was old but still sound and was being offered for $300, boat, license, and net.

I was just heading off to work for the Federal Department of Fisheries so declined to buy but within that year there was a reduction in the fishing fleet with a Federal buy-back scheme and the price of licenses went up by tens of thousands of dollars.

            In 1966 or 1967, Gordie Breckon who also worked winters at the New Westminster railway station, had salvaged a 40' troller which had sunk on the north coast. He raised it and then had the old wooden hull sheathed in steel. Gordie, his wife and young sons fished with the Wendy Belle out of Prince Rupert and socked away enough to build a brand new troller. The boat builder was on the dyke in Queensborough, just up from the Queensborough Hotel. That dyke on the Annacis Slough was a warren of boat related activity. A few doors east was a welder who made anchor winches of all sizes and welded up aluminum masts and ladders and deck boxes. Across the dyke was an older man who made his living by making troll poles for the troller fleet. A little further down the dyke was Nelson Brothers Fisheries fleet maintenance yards and still further people lived in dyke-side homes with their boats moored on the river or were building their sailboats, fishboats or houseboats.

Cars

     My first car was a 1947 blue Studebaker Champion, when I was 14, but it wasn't

really that thrilling. Dad had given the car to me so that I could take it apart and learn
how things worked. I was more interested in driving than working so I drove it around
the block until the gas was gone and I had to get the lawn mower gas to get it home.
After that I sold it to the wreckers for $10.

     The first real car to fall my way was a 1951 Pontiac straight eight sedan. My

sister and her family moved to California and my brother-in-law left the car to me.
Admittedly there was a low bonging in the bearings of that long crankshaft but nothing
that a couple of cans of STP couldn't disguise. STP was like pouring cold honey into
the motor and it had great gap filling qualities. Dad was trying to make a go of a
Royalite service station in Mission and I drove out after school to help out.
This Pontiac was a real looker. Two tone, wine with silver fenders. Indian head
hood ornament, and that straight eight hood was long. Inside still had the fuzzy seats
and head liner.
     Since the engine needed a rebuild, I hung a "For Sale" sign in the
window and it wasn't long before a couple of guys stopped to have a look. They wanted
that General Motors straight eight but did not have any money. What they did have,
though, was a 1956 black and white Dodge four door hard top so we did a swap.
The Dodge had a flat head V-8 which was a relatively low revving motor that
didn't have the get up and go that the Pontiac did. It also had that automatic
transmission of the time with push button shifting. The four door hardtops had these
weird, two part windows in the rear doors that slid down towards the centre of the door
as two semi-circles. I was still hoping to make some cash so the sign went up on this
car too. It didn't take very long before a farm hand drove up in a 1955 green Plymouth
sedan.

     The farm boy was instantly in love with that four door hard top. Sadly he didn't

have money either so once again we swapped. This green Plymouth had a flat head six
that was slow revving as well but what it lacked in instant power it made up for in
longevity. I drove that car for many miles. The floor boards started to rot away but that
six cylinder just continued to tick. I can't remember how many miles were on the clock
but when I advertised it for $150, there was a lineup of people wanting to look. One guy
paid the lady in front of him $10 to change places with him and he bought the car.
    
     Buying or selling a car for $150 sounds funny today but I made $2.00 per hour at
my unionized summer job on the railroad. So 150 bucks was about two weeks' takehome
pay for a unionized worker. Plenty of people were making half of that. Gas was 15
or 20 cents a gallon (an imperial gallon = 4.5 litres) and beer was just 10 cents a glass.
For 2 bucks you could fill up a beer parlour table with beer.

     I finished high school with a 1956 Consul. Dad had picked that up for me for
helping at the service station. It was cream coloured with a red interior. Although it was
no match for Al's chopped and lowered '38 Merc, with flames, or Paul's '61 Chevy with a
409, it got me and friends around, a lot. I started university at SFU with the Consul but
the British transmission was no match for going to the top of the mountain with me, my
friends Dennis and Jim, my sister Satu and her friend Fran. Quite a load. Instead of
larger, my car got smaller.

     For a while, I drove an Austin Mini panel delivery. This car was your standard

mini, which was the first type of car into North America with a transverse engine and
front wheel drive. Now, of course, most cars are like that but in 1965, that was pretty
novel. This panel delivery had no side windows or seats in the back. Just a flat deck
with double doors at the very back. The major drawback with the mini was that it only
had 12 inch wheels so in the coastal snow it was easy to get high centred. I had gone
to SFU on a football scholarship so would pick up fellow players from the side of the
road. There were no seat belts for the boys in the back, in fact, no seats. Whenever
that mini got high centred, some beefy boys would bail out of the back, pick the mini up
and move it over to where we could continue and dive back in through the rear doors.

Nostalgia

Nostalgia. I woke up in a fit of nostalgia this morning and lay in bed drilling back into my past. I was at the railway station on  Brunette Avenue in New Westminster where I worked in the summers of late high school and early university. Growing up years. Rubbing elbows with real work years. Dennis Dixon's dad Don was freight Station Agent in Vancouver and both of us kids needed summer work so introductions were made.

            Harold MacDonald was the Chief Clerk at that time and he had a magnificent belly. He had played professional football in his time but now the muscle had continued to grow until it entered the room before Harold did. "Sorry boys", Harold said, "I don't have any jobs open right now but tell me what you can do".  I looked around the office and saw men at desks typing and just as an afterthought as we were being escorted to the door, I said that I can type. "Well why didn't you say so right off, you can start on Monday to cover off for holidays".

            Nostalgia is a funny thing. It brings back all the sights, sounds and smells. That station in New West had an unforgettable smell that I can only get a hint of now, walking on tracks on a hot day. The station smell started as you walked across the platform towards the tracks. Creosote from the ties, ballast rock, oil from leaky journals before they all changed to ball bearings. The smell of box car steel and wood and the thousands of things that had leaked into the switching yard. And the dunnage on the rip track and all the pieces of dunnage that the switch men used to jamb under a wheel to keep a car in place with no air in the brake tanks.

            When you stepped into the station itself, the smell was kind of dusty. It wasn't actually dusty inside but it smelled dusty, I suppose, from the thousands of people that moved through there from everywhere. It was hot in the summer and cold in the winter and the one constant was the rumble of the diesel switch engine that was never turned off. If it was working, the thrum of the diesel would drown out the rumble of the cars and when the throttle was backed off, the whine of the blower still continued after until it too wound down.

            Do you notice that when you start drilling back with nostalgia, it indiscriminately takes you back from place to place or time to time? I first remembered that station in New Westminster from the back seat of a 1929 wine coloured Hudson sedan in 1952 or 1953. Now this time was twenty years after the dirty thirties depression but there was still a hobo jungle across the tracks from the station. People were still hopping freight trains from place to place. By the time I worked there, the jungle was gone, bulldozed to "clean up" the city. They bulldozed the nearby dump one day too and hundreds of rats came across the tracks heading for better pickings in town.

            Nostalgia isn't just about bringing back the good stuff, it brings back embarrassing stuff too. The really bad stuff probably wouldn't be classified as nostalgia, though. High school kids working in a man's world, we were put in positions of directing the work of the switch crew. I would type up where loaded box cars, flat cars, gondola cars and tank cars were to go and which industries needed empty cars to load with their goods.  The switch crew would then shuffle the cars into the proper order and make up a train. Sometimes cars would need to be given to the CP, CN or BC Hydro Railways. I made a mistake with a car of goods and put it in a train destined for the CP. The switch foreman of course recognized this car as having been moved to us, loaded, previously, probably from the CP, and came in to ask about it. The whole crew was in for coffee anyway and were standing around listening. Stupid me wouldn't back down when I had the chance and just insisted that the car was destined correctly. I can still picture the foreman's face, about six inches from mine, with this small you-stupid-kid-you grin. To his credit, he didn't get angry but knew that I could learn the hard way and that car went where I had sent it. After the crew left, I started the paperwork to bring that car back on someone else's shift. It made it to Saskatoon before it was turned around.

            We had these big, black Olivetti typewriters and because everything had to be done in triplicate or even quadruplicate with carbons, you really had to pound the keys. The carbon papers would wear out so a really hard touch on the keys was necessary. Computerization was just starting then and at the Vancouver freight station, punch cards were being used to identify freight cars. The computer itself was a big Univac located in St. Paul, Minnesota. The men that were used to pounding the typewriter keys were having a hard time converting to the lighter touch of the key punch machine. And when the IBM electric typewriters came in, that became even harder. Just look at our keyboards today.

            Travel by train was still fairly common place in the 1960's and both Canadian National and Great Northern trains came through the station. The station actually belonged to the Great Northern Railway as did the tracks from the railway bridge at New Westminster all the way to Vancouver. Great Northern had beat the Canadian Pacific to British Columbia in the late 1800's so they owned that right-of-way.

            As it became closer to passenger train time, people would begin to drift in, waiting for someone or waiting to get on. I would have to get up from my typing and go and check baggage that was to be put on the train. Baggage and express was loaded onto four, large steel-spoked wheeled hand carts with high end rails. They literally were hand carts in days gone by but were now pulled by a grey Fordson tractor.  Usually, one cart and sometimes two carts, were piled high with baggage and sometimes a coffin, that needed to be loaded into the baggage car. The baggage car was close behind the locomotive or second unit, depending on the train, so I would know approximately where the car would stop and be waiting when the train came. The baggage handler on the train was always grouchy and in a hurry because he didn't want a train delay because of him.

            When the train started to move, the platform was clearing of people and the Fordson with empty carts would be moving, in the opposite direction to the train,  back to the station. By the time the last car cleared the station it would be going at a good clip. One soft, summer evening George, another summer student, was distracted by the mini-skirted crowd and allowed the tractor to wander into the accelerating train.  In an instant the tractor was lifted back onto the platform, George's eyes became the size of dinner plates and the poor old Fordson wheezed its last. The last days of passenger traffic at that station was served by a John Deere lawn tractor.

            True nostalgia, for guys anyway, brings back cars of the past. In those days, I drove a '56 Chevy station wagon, lime green. Hardly a babe magnet, although I tried. The usual comeback for an attempted pick-up was, "Do you know where the gas is? Then step on it". George, however, or rather George's mom had a 1961 Cadillac convertible, racing green, white leather seats, long, wide, with fins. Man, when George got the Caddy for the night, possibilities became endless. Cruise Granville Street or Stanley Park or go to the university or go to the dance at Boundary Bay. Whooee.