At that time the trendy male thing was to have a streak of blond hair at the front, done with peroxide. I got up to give my speech with my peroxide streak, wearing green corduroy strides, which were twenty-six inches at the knee and six inches at the ankle. I had picked up a pair of saddle shoes in Vancouver and wore them. I got up in front of the Mennonites, looking like some stranger from space, and lost by four votes to Dave MacCaulay. Who went on to become superintendent of schools in Chilliwack. Dressed properly. Never got out of Chilliwack. Big mistake.
I didn’t have enough money to go to university, so I took Senior Matric, which was the equivalent of grade thirteen. The fee was $112, which I didn’t have to pay until after Christmas. I had no way of getting the $112 before then, so I figured I’d play basketball until Christmas and then quit.
Before that could happen, one day we noticed the principal standing with several men watching us as we changed classes. They hung around most of the day. I was doing the usual dumb things — punching the guys and goosing the girls as we walked down the halls. It turned out the men were from the National Film Board and were making a film called Breakdown. They were going to film it in Chilliwack, as a typical small Canadian town, and at Essondale, a mental hospital (as it was referred to in those days), which was fifty miles away.
They were looking for a typical young Canadian boy to play the younger brother to the professional actress playing the main part of someone having a nervous breakdown. So they called me in and said they had selected me, and I got the $112 for my final year in secondary school. University, here I come! Little did I know this brief encounter would be a precursor to my career.
The NFB paid me by the day, and it took several hours for shooting. At one stage I was to pull up to a gas station in a car. There was only one problem. I didn’t know how to drive. My parents didn’t have a car, and all of my buddies never stopped laughing because I was such a dolt in this regard. We had several runs at this shot because I only had to move the car about ten feet. I got it right for most of the shots except one. I let out the clutch too fast, and the car jumped in the air.
The “world premiere” of the film was at Chilliwack’s only movie house and, of course, practically the whole school was there. And, of course, when it came to the shot at the gas station, they ran the one in which I goofed. The entire audience, including all my buddies, burst out laughing and continued for some five minutes.
3
Campus Chaff
While at high school I won both the 100-yard and 880-yard races. I didn’t enter the 220 or the 440 because I was so lazy and had to develop stamina for those extended sprints. In the 880 I just trailed the field and then, because I was a sprinter, I made a mad dash the last fifty yards.
At the Fraser Valley annual track championships I won both the 100 and 880. I came home with two first-place red ribbons, but no one in my house paid any attention. I had to hitchhike from Chilliwack sixty-five miles to Vancouver to track meets, then hitchhike home. And through all of my many track meets, my parents never once attended. My mother was too busy running the Carman United Church choir, and my stepfather was the secretary-treasurer of the church — they being more interested in saving the natives in Africa. I resent that to this day.
Russ Dyer, our physical education teacher, arranged for me to get a track scholarship at the University of Washington in Seattle, which had a journalism school. An unfortunate visit to an illegal basketball tournament and a wrecked knee put an end to that. At Easter our basketball team was invited to a tournament in Trail, British Columbia, which pitted some of the best schools in British Columbia against some of the best in Alberta.
I approached Barry Harford, the principal, with the idea of participating. He was a wimp. I never did like him, and I don’t think he liked me. He said, “Look, Allan, you took fourth, the highest outside-Vancouver school in the B.C. championships, and it was a great finish to the season. Why don’t you quit while you’re ahead?” The wrong thing to say to a stubborn seventeen-year-old. And he wouldn’t give his permission.
Well, as captain, I figured, we would be on Easter holidays for ten days and no school could tell me what to do. One of the guys on the team, Bob Henderson, had a father who owned the town’s only funeral home. We could get a hearse and could all pile into it one on top of the other. In those days there wasn’t even a road from Chilliwack to Trail, which is almost in the Rocky Mountains. We had to drive down through the United States on a trip that almost took a day.
On the second day of the tournament, after I scored fourteen points in the first half of a game and was headed for the highest total I’d ever had, I wrecked my knee and spent the rest of the tournament hobbling around on crutches. We then had to take the day-long trip back home and piled on top of one another again, which didn’t do the untreated knee any good. So it was almost a week before I finally got to a doctor, who put the entire leg into a cast.
Some months later, the day I was to have the cast cut off, the team played a noon-hour softball game against the teachers to raise money for my doctor’s bills. I walked back to the school from the doctor’s office, and grateful for what they were doing, I offered to go up to bat and hit some fly balls before the game. Stupid. I took one swing — crunch! There went the knee again. Typical show-off. The principal shook his head — the “I told you so” reaction.
With my leg up I managed to get through Senior Matric. A chap called Owen Nelmes (who later became my brother-in-law) went to orientation at the University of British Columbia and saw on the notice board something called “University Co-operative Society.” It was a house run by a revolving group of students — twelve in all — and presided over by a fat English lady who cooked and cleaned. You paid your monthly rent until graduation to be replaced by another flood of freshmen. Owen was a year ahead of me at Chilliwack and had gone to the University of Washington, hoping to get into medical school. Once there he realized he would never be able to afford it and returned to pharmacy school at UBC. The two of us wound up at the co-op.
Teachers at Chilliwack Senior High had been urging me to go to university because they could see that I could write. The UBC campus newspaper, The Ubyssey (the UBC initials being a bad play on The Odyssey), was famous for turning out people such as Pierre Berton, Eric Nicol, Lister Sinclair, and dozens of other top Canadian journalists. On the first day of university I went down to the paper’s office in the basement of Brock Hall and was sent out on an assignment. I had never been told before what to write. The next day I went in again and was sent out on another assignment. After writing it and handing it in, I said to myself: To hell with this. I went home to the co-op, sat down, and wrote in longhand a column attacking the UBC engineers as a bunch of weaklings and morons who couldn’t even attract a girlfriend.
I went to The Ubyssey office and threw the article into the basket on the desk. The following day I picked up the paper, and my column was on the front page where it stayed for my short three years at The Ubyssey.
My knee having now recovered, I tried out for the junior varsity basketball squad, the JVs. One afternoon, after practice, I was walking out of the gym when a gang of husky engineering students, led by Paul White, grabbed me, threw me into a car, and drove me downtown. The number one meeting place and the busiest intersection in Vancouver was at Granville and Georgia in front of the Birks Jewellers clock. The engineers chained me to the towering clock and locked me in with large padlocks, then fled. Everybody in Vancouver coming out of work at 5:00 p.m. looked at me as if I were nuts. Somebody finally phoned the fire station, and some firemen came and cut me loose with bolt cutters.
With my brother, Jack, at my high school graduation in 1950. That’s me on the left. How did I afford that suit?
So my column, which was called “Campus Chaff,” stepped up the attacks on the engineers. When The Ubyssey had its term end, it had a dinner at a restaurant in Stanley Park where I took Pat Arnold, my girlfriend. Just as the dinner was beginning, a waiter came over