Somewhat ironically, I owe my career in radio to that old farmer. It was wartime and he wanted to know daily what was happening to the Canadian boys overseas. Every day at the noon hour he would tune in to our local station—CHAB, Moose Jaw—to hear the news. He was hard of hearing and had to cup his ear with one hand while listening to the news. In the other hand was his trusty pipe. Newscasts included the names of local boys who had either been killed or were missing in action, plus the names of those wounded. It was a dreadful daily toll.
Even at that tender age, the thought of being “in” that radio never left me. I wanted to be an announcer, and I took my first audition at age fifteen at CHAB in Moose Jaw. Of course I was told, “You’re too young, kid. Try again when you’re older.” Throughout my life, I have always found a way to overcome obstacles to get what I want. I began hanging around CHAB, standing at the studio window and looking beyond that into the control room where I longed to be. I did little favours for announcers such as getting them coffee or carrying their broadcast equipment to remotes. At age seventeen, I was told by a friendly guy at CHAB, announcer Bruce McInnes, that he knew the chief announcer at CJNB, North Battleford, in northwestern Saskatchewan, four hundred kilometres from Moose Jaw, and there might be a job there. With no appointment and no money for bus fare, I hitchhiked to North Battleford. The chief announcer I had been told of, Jack McClung, said he had no authority to hire anyone, and he sent me to program director Tommy Nelson. I was given an audition, and to my great surprise and delight, I was hired. Nelson, a kindly man who wore his hair in a brush-cut style, told me later that he hadn’t hired me because of my voice but rather for my initiative in hitchhiking. He knew I really wanted the job. It was the first of many breaks for me in a long and satisfying career.
To say the least, I came from humble beginnings. I was born on November 16, 1934, in the little town of Mortlach, Saskatchewan, delivered by a midwife. My mother, Ruth, was a beautiful young schoolteacher when she met my dad, Peter Garrett, known throughout his life as “Pete” and “Irish” to some of his workmates. I was the third of six children. My brother Donnie died just short of his second birthday, apparently from the effects of sunstroke. Donnie’s death hit my dad pretty hard, and it may explain why he was gentle with me. Some would say I was spoiled, or Dad’s pet.
But there was one exception to Dad’s gentleness. At about age four or five, I banged at the kitchen door, trying to get into the house with a box that was too big for me to handle. I kept banging and yelling, “Open the door—let me in.” My dad lost his temper and helped me through the door—with the toe of his boot! It was completely out of character for him. All his life he was a softie who would do anything for his family.
Our family life was not easy. My mother had a nervous breakdown after the birth of her second child, my older brother, Bob. The details are not clear, but I believe she spent some time in a psychiatric institution in Brandon, Manitoba. On one occasion I remember Mom threatening to commit suicide by swallowing gopher poison. Dad intervened to stop her, and I think it was about that time Mom went home to her parents in Manitoba, taking my sister, Muriel, and my brother, Bob, with her.
Dad would not let her take me. Thus we had a hired woman for a while, Helen Mackie, who later married and raised a family. Occasionally I visited her in the small town of Chaplin, Saskatchewan, and we would share a few laughs. After Mom returned home, three more children were born—Donnie, Elinor and Jim.
Life in the “dirty thirties” was difficult for everyone. Dad worked on the farm we lived on, south of Valjean, but he did not own it. Like so many families during the Depression, we were on relief, the term used at the time for welfare. I can remember someone coming to the farm with groceries. Even the necessities of life were hard to come by. The farmhouse was heated by a coal and wood stove but we were not always able to buy coal. As many farmers did, we burned “cow chips”—dried cattle manure. Not a nice odour, but it kept the stove burning on cold winter nights. The farm had no electricity. We used coal-oil lamps for years until that magic night when Dad brought home a Coleman mantle lantern. He would light the gauze mantles and pump the little gas tank, and it gave a brilliant light. Muriel, Bob and I were so excited we ran outside to see what the light would look like reflected in the snow. We had no shades or curtains on the windows so we got the full effect. It was a sight that has stuck in my mind after some seventy years!
While we struggled like virtually all Prairie families in the thirties, life on the farm was a lot of fun. I remember my first day at a small country school named Knowleside. It was a one-room school with one teacher covering all grades. Before I was old enough to attend, my older brother and sister would let me walk as far as the woodpecker telephone pole partway along the two kilometres to school. On those outings, I would run back home while they carried on to school. Sometimes I would see Dad with a team of horses pulling a plough or some other piece of equipment in the field, and I would jump on and go for a ride. Mom recalled me always helping Dad put the harness on the horses in the barnyard, running under the horses to connect the belly band. Why I didn’t get kicked in the head I’ll never know. I knew how to hitch up the four horses in the team and knew exactly where each horse should be. I never missed the chance to go with Dad, whether it was to take a wagonload of grain to the elevator at Valjean, about thirteen kilometres from the farm, or later when we moved to nearby Chaplin to go to the farm with a borrowed team of horses and a hayrack to get a load of hay for our milk cow. Those were great times for a kid growing up on a farm.
A year or so before we left the farm, Dad had some problems with his cows. Sometimes they would get out of the pasture and into the crops of our neighbour to the east, Bill Douglas. Bill was a bachelor then and the woman of the house was his old mother, who chewed tobacco. One day when Dad went to retrieve his cows he drove into the Douglas farmyard with a team of horses and a hayrack. Bill Douglas was so incensed about the cows that he and Dad got into a fistfight. Old Mrs. Douglas was so angry she grabbed a piece of firewood and threw it at Dad on the hayrack, saying, “Here, take this home, you poverty-stricken son of a bitch.” Dad laughed about it years later, recalling the story.
Our water, from a deep well on the farm where we lived, was ice cold, a shock to the system. It was something I never got used to, especially so since it was on my bare bottom. My brother Bob manned the pump and our housekeeper held me under the stream of cold water while I screamed blue murder. The last desperate act of our housekeeper, Helen Mackie, was to teach a precocious five-year-old once and for all that you don’t mess your pants, and I guess it worked. The problem was solved, but not without a few choice words from a mouthy kid. As Helen told me fifty years later, she’d tried to bribe me with a quarter. She recalled me saying, “I don’t want your goddamn quarter.”
Poverty and the Garrett family went hand in hand for many years. Dad was always an honest, hard-working man, but working on a farm owned by a very frugal man, known to me as Mr. McKibbon became too much for him. The last straw, I believe, was the fact that the barn burned down. Dad decided he had to move his family to the nearby town of Chaplin, a small farm community about a hundred kilometres west of Moose Jaw.
Town life was a new experience. Fresh off the farm, I was probably not welcome in town. I had a fight with the first kid I met, Lloyd Mason. But Lloyd and I became the best of friends, helping to hand-pump gas at one of the two gas stations in town or using a flashlight to pick up beer bottles when people drank in cars and trucks outside the dance hall on Saturday nights. We would shine the flashlight right into the vehicle. We would hear, “Hey, kid—put that light out.” “Okay,” we’d say, “but give us your beer bottles.” We did quite well. Another money-making scheme involved trapping rabbits, skinning them and selling their skins to the local barber, Andy Hardy, then stealing a few of them from the barber and reselling them to the local GM dealer, George Burroughs.
Legitimate small change was earned by helping cattle buyer and grocery store owner Steve Fedorenko pick up junk with his truck. It was the same cattle truck Steve used to go from farm to farm buying cattle at “today’s prices.” The gimmick was that Steve would use an old newspaper clipping with a lower price, holding his thumb over the date. Once he acquired enough cattle he