Chapter 3
The Hustler
Money was always hard to come by. My dad was a hard worker and generous to a fault, but there was always a grocery bill at Koshman’s Store, the one with the big Coca-Cola sign, four long blocks from our house at the edge of Moose Jaw. After he was paid, Dad had a weekly habit of going for a few beers with the boys from work, and sometimes the pay envelope was pretty thin when he got home at night, often by taxi. My mom was a teetotaller and did not approve of him drinking, but there wasn’t much she could do about it except go downtown and meet him to rescue most of the money on payday. Our family always seemed broke, and if I wanted spending money I had to earn it. I used to hang out at the local stockyards and offer to clean manure out of farmers’ trucks. That meant I would not only get fifty cents for the work but I could also drive their trucks from the loading chute to the manure pile and then to a wash rack. A three-tonne cattle truck was a pretty big deal to a fifteen-year-old kid. However, competition from older boys at the major stockyards forced me to move my operations up the hill to the much smaller facility at Canada Packers. There were fewer trucks but I was the only kid so I did all right.
Around the same time, I was befriended by a gruff old steam plant engineer named Clint Smith. I offered to wash his big Chrysler for a small fee. I can still remember him saying, “You want me to pay you for washing my car—with my water and my beef shroud?” (Used for wrapping sides of beef, the shroud makes an ideal wash rag.) Clint not only paid me to wash his car but helped me line up similar jobs with the plant manager, Wally Gentiles, produce manager, George Smallwood, and sales manager, Cliff Steele. In fact, Clint Smith was so kind to me that he took me in his Chrysler to get my first driver’s licence at age sixteen. Those thoughts came back to me when my sixteen-year-old grandson, Trevor Watt, phoned me to say, “Papa, I just passed my driver’s test.” Believe me, Trevor, I know how important that is!
I supplemented my manure cleaning and car-washing income by setting pins at the Moose Jaw Bowling Alley, long before there were automatic pinsetters. Most of the time it was five pins but occasionally we set ten pins. They are much heavier and they tend to fly through the air like a missile. There were lots of bumps and bruises but we had fun, sometimes yelling back at the bowlers when they threw a ball while we were still cleaning downed pins from the alley. We were paid for every game we set and could make pretty good spending money from league bowling. Much of the money was spent on chocolate bars and pop, but I did manage to save enough money to buy my own CCM balloon-tired bike. It was a beauty. A bike was an essential means of transportation in all but the cold winter months. I rode my bike to high school in the morning, home for lunch (which we called dinner) and back to school in the afternoon. After school and on weekends I would explore every area of the city from River Park to the Natatorium, a pool with mineral water in the middle of the city. I paid attention to everything—how many taxicabs each company had, what kind of cars they were, how many delivery trucks each firm had, what was playing at the movie theatres, where to buy the best milkshake. I knew everything about the town (or so I thought) and just loved growing up in Moose Jaw. I was reminded of my hometown nearly fifty years later when I retired from radio. My boss, Warren Barker, prefaced his remarks about my career with “the kid from Moose Jaw.” I loved it.
I enjoyed high school a lot. I would easily have passed Grade 11 had it not been for my sudden interest in girls. School work suffered as I began phoning girls and carrying their books. What a romantic I was! As a result, I did not pass all my Grade 11 subjects and I did not go on to Grade 12 because my commercial courses had ended. In later life I always regretted not completing school and going on to university.
Getting a job was relatively easy in the early 1950s. Because of my contacts at Canada Packers, I was able to pick up some odd jobs. A not-so-nice one was grasping turkeys by the leg, pulling them out of wooden crates and hanging them on a killing chain. Turkey legs are rough and I did not have gloves. Ouch!
Another interesting job was shaking animal hides to remove excess salt. Once again no gloves, just sore hands with salt rubbed into the wounds. A third job was a little more dangerous—chipping ice off the pipes in the giant cooler where butchers worked about thirty feet below me. Later I got a job on the shipping floor carrying fronts and hinds of beef from the cooler to trucks for delivery to meat markets. I was just a scrawny kid and those hinds and fronts were heavy. One day I was told to take the freight elevator to a second-storey freezer where I was to spend most of the day piling frozen halibut—chicken halibut and jumbo halibut—small and large. I was not told that the only exit from the freezer was the elevator and if it was being used for other products, I just had to wait and shiver! Eventually, thanks to my typing and shorthand skills, I got a job in the office at Canada Packers taking orders over the phone from our salesmen all over southwestern Saskatchewan and in person from customers who came to the plant. I can still recall one customer who smoked. He would let the ashes accumulate on his cigarette until they tumbled down onto my typewriter and desk. Smoking was so common then that no one complained, especially about second-hand smoke. In fact, we had never heard of it.
My brother Bob owned an old 1929 Pontiac. I was itching to drive it, especially when he left it at home and went away on a holiday. He gave strict instructions to our mother and grandmother not to give me the keys. It took only about a day before I was able to con them out of the keys. One of my friends was babysitting so we decided the house where he was babysitting would be a good place to have a party. We did not have alcohol, just a record player and lots of fun. After a day or two we were hungry, but we had no money for food, although the baby was well looked after. It dawned on me that my mother had two chickens. I took one of them. We chopped its head off, put it in hot water so we could pluck the feathers, then cleaned and cooked it. It was a very old chicken and the toughest meat I had ever chewed. For weeks and months later my poor mother would say, “Whatever happened to my chicken?”
We had great fun in Bob’s old ’29 Pontiac. Its brakes were not very good so I learned how to slow by gearing down. (Of course, it was a gear-shift car, long before automatic transmissions were invented.) One day, coming down a steep grade on North Hill, the gearing down was not effective, so I had to jam the car into reverse to stop. It was a wonder the transmission didn’t explode!
Eventually my buddy Willie Flahr and I bought Bob’s car. We used it to pick up girls, but they always had to be home before dark. Willie had a beautiful girlfriend named Delores, whom he later married. My date one night was a girl named Jeanette Olynik—whose nickname was Jelly Bean. Willie and Delores would be cuddling in the front seat while I tried to get close to Jelly Bean. No such luck! Because Willie’s gal Delores had to be home before dark we utilized the built-in curtains in the old Pontiac to darken the interior as we sat parked in River Park. I had no need for curtains, though—Jelly Bean wanted nothing to do with me!
Owning a car was one thing but trying to buy gas for