If you’d asked him what his worst defeat was, he’d tell you that it was the way he retired from business. That’s a complicated story that didn’t involve luck in the smallest way. It was something that started a long way from who and what he was, but it ended up as close to his hard heart as anything ever got.
In the early 1960s, the big manufacturing and consumer corporations began to descend on northern British Columbia, targeting the local businesses that had been operating for years and were now becoming prosperous. Businesses like his.
It had begun in the lumber industry, kicked off by the government’s announcement that pulp mills were on the way, and that forest tenure, which until then was held on a near-hereditary basis, would be taken to competitive bidding. Few saw this as anything less than a positive development: more competition meant more profits, more jobs, a spur to population growth—the standard bullshit slung by business boosters and the Chamber of Commerce.
But competition for the seemingly limitless supply of timber quickly turned vicious, touching off a melee amongst the local mill owners trying to sequester the best stands of timber for the cutting of structure wood—the 2 x 4–inch studs universally used for building that had long been the local industrial bread and butter—or to sell it off to the pulp mills when they arrived. And so the multinationals came, companies that wanted the wood for the spaghetti-mills they would build, or pulp fibre, or log exports: whatever else sweetened their bottom line.
In 1956, there were 600 mills in the area, all independently owned and operated, many of them one- to four-man gypo mills portable enough to be moved from cut block to cut block. The 50 or 60 larger mills pretty much held proprietary rights to whichever area they’d located in, and with the generally held belief that the forests would last forever, they’d done little to protect their tenure and less to protect the health of the forests or perpetuate the supply of trees.
Now they found themselves having to make bids on each timber block the Forest Service partitioned for cutting, and there was, at first, not a little poaching going on between the more aggressive locals. Once the poaching took hold, the multinationals moved in, licking their chops like coyotes that had discovered an unguarded bunny hutch. They’d been the ones who’d bullied the government into the timber-rights bidding system, using the public argument that it would improve government revenues—and deploying the equally alluring backroom argument that it was good capitalism and, no doubt hinting that it would result in generous campaign donations. By the time the smoke cleared in 1972, all but a few of the gypos were gone, 8 supermills had replaced the 60 bigger independents, and there were 2 pulp mills stinking up the town and spewing chemicals into the rivers. Only one of this whole bunch was locally owned.
Something similar happened within the city limits. A&W was the first consumer franchise to arrive, followed soon after by Dairy Queen, McDonald’s, and a raft of others. The local eateries soon began to falter and die off. The same currents moved through the entire local economy: owners replaced by branch managers, and the profits vacuumed out of town to Vancouver and beyond.
I don’t think my father saw the axe head heading his way, too. He’d held his Orange Crush, Pepsi, and Canada Dry soft drink franchises for years, and the franchisers were more than happy with his market shares. When his competition in the ice cream business, owned by a Vancouver-based lumber baron who’d already lost most of his timber-cutting rights along with the rest of the locals, was bought out by a big Alberta-based dairy company, my father sneered that it was just rich outsiders buying out other rich outsiders, and that if he could beat the old one he could beat the new ones—although he did hedge his bet by running ads on the local radio station about the virtues of supporting local industry. He still had plenty of fire in his belly, and he had two sons coming up behind him to take over. What could go wrong?
One fall afternoon in 1965, a couple of business-suited executives from the biggest dairy consortium in B.C.’s lower mainland walked into his office and announced that if he didn’t sell his ice cream operation to them, they’d dump product into his marketplace below his cost until he was bankrupt.
He threw them out. But two weeks later, he got a letter from the B.C. Milk Board informing him that using the best raw milk supply in the area for something as non-essential as ice cream was a violation of board policy and Not in the Public Interest, and my father found himself faced with the prospect of making his ice cream, of which he was justly proud, from more costly and inferior powdered-milk stock and coconut oil.
He reconsidered—or as he put it, Faced Up to Reality. “You Can’t Fight Progress,” he said, spinning the bad news into the core of his philosophy for everything else. “This is all Predestined: the Big Fish eat the Small Fish. Capitalism is no different from the Forces of Nature.”
He took the dairy consortium’s offer, and was out of the business inside six months. But he’d been running two businesses in the same operation, and his soft drink operation, less complicated logistically and more lucrative, was expanding. He’d recently acquired the franchise for 7Up, and now had four of the five most popular brands coming off his trucks—and he held a loan chit on the local Coca-Cola bottler, who was a former employee he’d bankrolled when the hapless previous owner gave up and wanted out.
My father was closing in on his 60th birthday, and he’d been on a 15-year winning streak. He assumed that with two grown sons working under him, he could start another, greater streak. What he didn’t see coming at him was a piece of biology.
My father, you see, was the purest strain of alpha male, and that meant he wasn’t capable of allowing any other dog around him with its tail up, not even for a moment. The problem was that Ron and I had bred true: each of us born with a bushy tail that naturally stood straight up even though we were fundamentally different from one another. Ron had gladly worked for my father since he was 14 or 15 years old, was quick to learn from him, eager to follow his footsteps and habits, most eager of all to gain his acceptance and praise—provided that it involved respect that could be earned by hard work, and some autonomy.
I was five years younger, more willful but with less aptitude and poorer focus. But I was much more curious about the world beyond my father’s business, and completely cantankerous whenever anyone tried to put a thumb on me. I liked the work well enough, but in high school I was more often truant at the after-school jobs he set up for me than I was for my school classes.
The job I liked the best was typing his business letters, which, until I arrived, were being typed by a secretary whose native language was Dutch. She typed the letters exactly as he wrote them, which was a problem because my father used a punctuation system all his own: he capitalized any word that he thought was important, and rarely used periods, commas, or question marks. My father wrote a lot of letters, some the predictable ones to customers demanding payment, but others to his distributors and franchisers, sometimes to complain about something specific, but more often to explain why he was right about everything under the sun, and they weren’t. The more philosophical he waxed, the longer the letters got, and the more capital letters he used. By the time I was in Grade 10, I’d decided that he was making a fool of himself, and pretty much took over as his personal typist. His secretary was happy to let me type the letters, since she had no idea what he was saying and was a peck-and-poke typist who found his wordiness heavy going. My father didn’t seem to mind me typing them until I started deleting his ideas and adding ideas of my own, most of which launched from pretty well the opposite of what he had in mind. After that, I’d find some of the letters I’d been fiddling with waiting for me in the basket when I arrived after school, with my stuff crossed out and even more capitalized words scribbled in the margins than I’d replaced. A couple of times he lost his temper and demanded that I type exactly what he’d written. I’d tone it down for a week or two, then start messing around again. Through high school, it was the one forum in which we could