When the North is on Fire

Being Public Communications Officer for forest fire emergency operations in Northern Ontario was my favourite job of all time.

In 1978, I’d only been with the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources for a few months when I got my first fire experience. They sent me to the Regional Fire Centre in Dryden. People there soon learned that was a mistake. I was clueless. Any former reporter from southern Ontario with no knowledge about the North would be. Lucky for me, the Regional Director was Ray Fortner, the former District Manager in Chatham. He knew me from my reporter days where I had met him and had written about Rondeau Park and about Conservation Officers patrolling for fish poachers on the Thames River. So, he turned my few days in Dryden into an orientation. He even took me in a scout plane to view the huge fire from the air.

A fire that is a couple of miles wide and perhaps ten miles long will push streams of hot air miles into the sky. A small plane will hit an updraft and be carried skyward, then plummet when it flies into the cooler downdraft. I tossed my cookies, using my jacket for a barf bag.

A couple of years later, near the end of May of 1980, I was at a meeting with naturalists in Murphy’s Point Provincial Park at Big Rideau Lake. It was about a two-hour drive from both my office in Kemptville and my home in Nepean. I was told to leave the government car I was using at the airport in Ottawa where a ticket was waiting. I was to go straight to the Ontario Fire Centre (OFC) in Sault Ste. Marie. If I missed the flight, the back-up was early the next morning.

I thought to myself that I needed to pack and to tell Joan that I would be away, and there were people I needed to inform from my office, so I chose to go to the office and take the morning flight. When my boss, Roy Taylor, saw me in the hallway, he called me into his office. “You missed a flight to go on fire duty,” he said. “If you ever miss another, you will never get chance to miss a third.”

I’d never seen Mr. Taylor so serious.

The fire flap that spring was huge with 100 fires not under control across the North. At the OFC, my job was to collect the fire reports sent by teletype from the regional centres and write a daily round-up of the fire situation province-wide. My report was checked by the provincial fire boss then sent to news services. Teletype – basically typing through phone lines -- was the most efficient way to send information at the time. Compared to today’s electronic communications, teletype was slow and limited.

My news experience, that orientation up in Dryden, plus my stint at OFC, made me the candidate for communications officer for the provincial fire team. During two weeks in winter, I went to the OMNR professional development centre in Dorset, near Algonquin Park, to attend fire management training. Foresters, biologists, resource technicians and others from offices across the province were handpicked for the team: fire boss, personnel manager, supplies manager, aircraft manager, and others. The public communications manager (me) reported to and got information from the maps and records officer. I learned not to bother anyone else. Fighting fire was like a military operation.

In 1982, twice I got a call for fire and went straight to the Ottawa airport. I knew somebody else would tell Joan. I knew I could get toiletries and extra clothes from the supply manager in Red Lake when I got there. I flew to Toronto, changed plans to a Nordair flight that landed in Sault Ste. Marie and Thunder Bay before I got off in Dryden. In Dryden, I got on a plane that held less than a dozen people that put down in Kenora and Sioux Lookout before landing in Red Lake. At Red Lake, a truck took me to the district fire centre where the team I had met during the winter in Dorset were doing their jobs – tracking aircraft, marking jump fires on a wall-size topographic map, ordering equipment, planning personnel allocations -- it was intense and just like a military operation.

I went right to work, collecting statistics – size and location of the fire, type of fuel (forest type), threat to habitation, threat to private property, weather conditions and forecast, number of fire crews* on the ground, number of water bombers and helicopters. My job was to write public dispatches and to speak to any media who called. I was at the fire centre for two weeks from before 6 a.m. to after 10 p.m. daily and loved every minute.

The fire was threatening a Native community. My daily dispatch said an evacuation plan was set to go. I got a call from CBC in Toronto, they were sending a reporter and videographer to cover the fire. The reporter told me they would be renting a helicopter to get aerial shots.

“No you won’t,” I said. “Our first priority is to protect lives. We have air traffic control of the region. Besides, there are no helicopters available because we are using them all. Come and get your footage and information, buy I will take you in a helicopter, make sure you get the best footage of the fire that can be taken safely, and also arrange for us to land at the base camp where you can interview the firefighters.”

They arrived and it went as planned. They got great footage and we got the coverage we needed to inform the province about our efforts.

The camp was set up in a location that had already burned. It was the most surreal thing I have ever seen. Imagine a sunny day after a snow storm in a forest where everything is blanketed in white snow. Now, change that white snow to black ash. The stumps and skeletons of trees were black. When a forest fire consumes all the oxygen in a location, some trees actually bake from the heat but do not catch fire. So, small clusters of unburned evergreens were completely black. The rocks faces and the earth were black. The only things not black were the lake and the sky, and brown tents, firefighters in orange jumpsuits, and the yellow float planes.

Toward the end of my years with OMNR, I was Communications Planner and Projects Manager for Forest Resources Group at Queen’s Park. By then, the forest fire management centre in Sault Ste. Marie had hired a full-time communications person. That ended fire duty for me, but I was always glad to have had to the opportunity to be part of the team.

*A fire crew is five people armed with chain saws, axes, hose, a pump and a radio. Never six, never four. If the fire changes and they have to get out of their positions, a helicopter will land in a clearing or shore. There is no time to ask how many people are getting on. The pilot counts one, two, three, four, five guys and takes off. Each crew has a leader. Every five crews has a group leader. Every five groups … and so on.

I was never on a crew -- battling in the heat, the smoke, the ash, the mud, the rugged terrain and their own exhaustion. They fought the fire, I told the story. They had their job. I had mine.

Penny Candy at the End of an Era

When we were kids, we had corner stores that sold penny candy.

People who have only known 7-11s and Mac’s Milk stores can hardly imagine what our corner grocery stores were like.

Every neighbourhood in the old inner city of Windsor had a store. When I lived at 1115 Bruce Ave., I could walk 20 minutes north to Wyandotte or the same distance south to Tecumseh Road, and never be more than two or three blocks from a little store. People called them “corner stores,” although they weren’t always on a corner. Prier’s Market, at Erie and Church, and an IGA on Bruce by St. Clare School, were actually built to be stores. Most were just the converted living room of a basic house, but they all had penny candy.

Today they are all back to being just houses again.

I worked Grades 9, 10 and 11 at Clark’s Market, which was the front room of a little house on Grove between Dougall and Church. A few times every day, a couple of little kids would come in all by themselves. Some would hardly be tall enough to reach up and put their few pennies on the counter. Perhaps they had found three or four pop bottles, which they could turn in for the deposit: 2¢ each for 10 oz. bottles, 5¢ for a large bottle. Either I or Mr. Clark would open a small paper bag and the ritual would begin.

The kids would point at their choices through the glass side of a cabinet with four or five shelves. On the shelves were open boxes of various candy. As I put each selection in the bag I would tell the kids what it cost and how much money they had left. It would go like this: Black balls (3 for a penny), four green leaves (gumdrops, 2 for a penny), jube jubes (3 for a penny), a licorice (2¢), a caramel (1¢), a straw of powdered sugar(1¢), a necklace of hard candies on a string (3¢) and so on until all the pennies were spent. And out they would go with their bag of treasure.

Older kids would come in for a pop (10¢) or a pop to “drink in” so they didn’t pay the deposit. They could have a red licorice with their pop as they sat drinking it on the ice cream freezer. The chrome freezer had thick rubberized lids on top. It was sturdy and it was where I’d sit when we weren’t busy.

In the freezer were cylinders of ice cream wrapped in paper. We had vanilla, chocolate or strawberry. I would make an ice cream cone by pealing the paper off and pressing the cylinder of ice cream into a cone (6¢). Also, we had Popsicles (cherry, banana, grape, orange, chocolate, maybe pineapple) and Icycles, which were flavoured ice, like Popsicles in a plastic tube (all 5¢), plus two sizes of bricks of ice cream.

The pop cooler by the window beside the front door was a rectangular tub about as high as desk. It was painted with a brand, Coca Cola probably. The whole top of pop cooler was a chrome centre-hinged lid so you would open one side or the other to look down to see what kind of pop it held. The bottles stood half submerged in water that kept them cold. A towel sat on the lid so kids could wipe their wet bottles. We had Coke, Pepsi, Double Cola, Hires Root Beer, Orange Crush, 7 Up, Vernors, Grape, Cream Soda, Lemon Lime – what am I forgetting? All 8¢ plus 2¢ deposit.

Often kids who had been playing a game like scrub at Mitchell Park would go to Clark’s, just a block from the park, and hang out on the steps with their cold pop, then come in to trade the bottle deposit for a licorice or some gum. Double Bubble and Buzooka Joe both had comics under the wrapper.

Part of my job was to keep the pop cooler filled and to take the empties to the basement. In the basement, I would sort the bottles in their wooden crates that held four sets of six bottles.

George Clark and his sister, Mrs. Thompson, lived in the back. They worked very hard to get by. Clark’s had a butcher’s meat cooler with a glass front. He sold steaks, pork chops, stewing beef and hamburger, which he would grind fresh when the customer asked. What I am saying, it wasn’t hamburger yet when a customer said “a pound and a half of hamburger.” Mr. Clark would put on his apron, weigh the chunks of beef, then grind it and weigh it again, wrap it in red paper and write the price with a grease pencil.

The market sold cigarettes by the pack (32¢) or by the carton. Players, Export, Chesterfield and Palm Mall were not filtered, Cameo and DuMaurier were. Clark’s sold nickel and dime chocolate bars – Crispy Crunch, Coffee Crisp, O Henry, Aero, Cadbury. Clark’s carried a few fresh vegetables and they had canned goods, detergents, cooking oil… not a lot of choice but if you needed it, they had it. And for some regulars, they kept a book of credit, which the customers paid on payday.

People with credit would run in for a few items, it would be recorded and they would pay at the end of the week. Once, Mr. Clark saw some people who lived nearby arrive home with a trunk full of groceries. They hadn’t paid their bill to Mr. Clark yet, so he phoned them to say they should pay him. He sent me down to their house to collect.

Until the early 60s, the big grocery stores were on the main street downtown. People walked to these stores – Dominion, A&P, Loblaw’s -- and carried armfuls of groceries home two or three times a week. In those days, most mothers did not have jobs outside the home. Then suburban plazas opened with larger grocery stores with lots of parking so people could drive to get their groceries once a week. The current Value Village at Dorwin Plaza was the site of the first of these drive-to grocery stores that I saw. When we moved to South Windsor in 1965, we had four large stores a few minutes by car to buy our groceries.

I worked 4 to 6 p.m. on Thursdays and Fridays and 10 to 6 p.m. on Saturdays. I kept shelves stocked. I delivered groceries to homes when someone phoned in an order or were not able to carry it all. I waited on the kids sometimes. I went to the wholesaler on Janette near Caron first thing Saturday morning to stock up on cigarettes and a few other items that would fit in my big carrier on the front of my bike.

After Mr. Clark had sawed some perfect y-bone steaks off a hind quarter of beef, he was tired. He’d hang up his apron and say, “I can’t sing and I can’t dance.”

Working at Clark’s Market was always interesting. Potatoes were murphys or spuds. Eggs were cackle berries. Every customer was important, whether a family buying steaks or a child buying a licorice with a dirty pop bottle. At 6 p.m. every Saturday, when all the empties were sorted in the basement, the store was swept and the counter was wiped clean, Mr. Clark gave me a $5 bill.

Rest in peace, Mr. Clark and Mrs. Thompson. Thanks for showing me the honour of a good day’s work. Now I’m the age that you were then, and guess what. I can’t sing and I can’t dance.

Going on the Record about Music

Once in a while somebody makes a remark along the lines of -- imagine the young Bob Dylan trying out for one of those singer competition shows on TV. He’d be gone in a minute – this guy who has generated an album every year for 50 years. Same for Mick Jagger, Diana Ross, James Brown, Chris Montez, Domingo Samudio – the Sam of Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs. (Woolly Bully was the top selling song of 1965.)

That always gets me thinking about my love for music and the music I especially love.

In 1964, Mom handed me a glossy insert from the Reader’s Digest. Opened up, it became one big poster with pictures of record albums. It said they would send me six for free if I joined the Columbia Record Club.

It was pretty enticing, because finding and buying the music you wanted wasn’t easy back then.

There were no music stores. Records were sold in a back corner of the same stores that sold Davy Crocket underwear, Royal Family t-towels, Flash Gordon pyjamas, moosehead knickknacks, cartoon-cat wall clocks, cone bras and hair spray for beehive hairdos. Those five and dime stores – S. S. Kresge, Woolworth and Metropolitan – also had long counters with stools where men could eat a hot breakfast or lunch while making crude remarks to the waitress. Music wasn’t the specialty at those stores.

At least two other record clubs were similar, but I went with the Columbia Club because it had The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night and all three of Bob Dylan’s albums. The deal was: you selected six records to buy, then picked six more that they would send to you free. You only had to buy six more over the next year.

Six records at about $3.50 each plus shipping was about $25. I only made $5 a week at my after-school job. It was a hard decision but I went for it.

Bobby Vinton’s Blue Velvet, a Jan and Dean and The New Christy Minstrels were part of my free choices. Not my style, but they were free, so what the hay. A Peter Paul and Mary album that had Blowin’ in the Wind on it turned out to be a great choice. And, of course, I got the first three Dylan albums and A Hard Day’s Night.

Things turned sour from there. The club only offered albums from the Columbia record label. Columbia did not produce other Beatle albums, just that one movie track. So, no more Beatles choices. And the price of the monthly album was higher than the price in stores. Worse yet, Columbia was an established label with older artists and hadn’t signed many rock and rollers. Columbia would send an album that I didn’t want with a big poster full of more lame choices. If I didn’t want that month’s album, I had to figure out how to send it back quickly at my cost. If I missed the deadline, I had to buy the album. I think that’s how I got stuck with Andy Williams’ Days of Wine and Roses.

Every month, some junky album would come in the mail and I would have to pay to send it back. I also had to buy something until I made the six-more quota. Another Side of Bob Dylan came out later that year. I grabbed that one. I think I got the Tim Rose album with Morning Dew because the year was up and I had to buy something. Luckily, that turned out to be a good one.

Here in my old age, music is everywhere. My computer came with at least two ways to listen to music, not counting hundreds of iTunes stations. In the USA they also have Pandora. My car has satellite radio with over a hundred stations. People have music in their phones. My iPod has 5,000 songs, which I can just shuffle without choosing.

I know there are popular artists these days. The skinny blond on talk shows who just moved from Nashville to New York, Taylor Swift. A lot of people with made up names like Drake and 50 Cent. Maroon 5 or 6. The Perry woman who did half-time at the last superbowl. So, maybe some young people today have a special bond with their favourite music. I don’t know. Music seems so transitory today, the downloading and freeloading, but where is it, where’s the music? In the anti-tactile cloud.

I sound like my parents’ generation. “I can’t understand the words in that rock and roll music,” they’d say. I guess old is old, but then again, maybe old is as old does.

One thing for sure, my music is part of who I am. It’s me as much as my accent or the way I walk or my big rosy nose.

Over the years I have lent and lost some of my records, and my brothers have some of the records that we played in our basement in the 60s, but I still have three milk crates of old albums and about a dozen 45s.

My records are a reflection of me. I like being able to look at them, read their liner notes; it’s like looking in a retro-mirror at myself. I’ve got a couple of Dan Hicks and his Hot Licks; Thunderclap Newman; the David Bromberg with the King Kong cover; three Siegal Schwall Blues Band; High Tide and Green Grass and Let Your Ya-Yas Out; Time Has Come by the Chambers Brothers; Tauhid by Pharoah Sanders; Mothermania; Asylum Choir; Doug Sahm and Band; a couple of Aretha albums; collections of obscure blues; The Kinks’ Soap Opera; Grant Smith and the Power; a John Mayall reunion with some great songs with Eric and Sugarcane Harris; plus sundry other reflections of my eclectic taste.

Of course, I have most of the mandatory records appropriate to my age. All the Beatles. The Stones from Beggar’s Banquet through Goat’s Head Soup; Frampton Comes Alive. All Dylan’s up to the motorcycle accident plus a bunch after the come back. Bob Seger’s first live album plus Night Moves. Hendrix first. Traffic’s first. Velvet Underground’s too. Live at Leeds. Big Brother and the Holding Company. Tapestry. The list, if not the beat, goes on.

Sam, the dog at Beaver

(This is the second post about working at the Beaver station. The first was posted last week.)

A noisy group of guys got out of a car with Michigan plates one hot night after 2 a.m. when I was on midnights at the Beaver Gas Station on Dougal.

I was alone because the other guy on midnights was out with the truck to change a flat tire. At that time of night, the flat was likely in the parking lot of The Riviera, the topless bar down the street that stayed open until about that time of night. Most likely, this rowdy group had also come from the Riv.

One asked me for change for the pop machine. I took his bill and opened the till. They could see I was alone. I could tell they were thinking it would be easy to overpower me and take whatever they wanted. Then the grins dropped off their faces. I did not have to turn to look. I knew Sam had come out from where ever he was sleeping and was standing right behind me.

Sam was a large Alsatian that lived at the Beaver station. At 2 a.m., Sam was on the job.

The rowdy boys got their pop and left.

In those summers of 1967 and 68, I enjoyed working the 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. shift. The big Beaver station was a couple of blocks from the end of Highway 401, and the only station open at night between the 401 and Detroit, so we had all kinds of travellers stop for gas, a washroom break or just a stretch and some conversation. A few became regulars.

Two or three times, the band Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels came in about 4 o’clock in the morning after playing in Toronto or Buffalo.

The band rode in a stretch Cadillac, one of the early 60s models with the long sleek fins. It had a front, middle and back seat and pulled an equipment trailer that looked like a mini camper.

I recognized the car and trailer when I went out to the pumps. The band remembered something too. As they got out to head to the washroom, one said to me with a trace of concern, “Hey Man, that dog around?”

Sam roamed the lot freely. We had no leash or rope. Sam would greet the guys wagging his tail and crying like a puppy at the beginning of each shift – especially the guys who fed him and gave him special attention. He’d be so enthusiastic he’d nearly knock people over.

His biggest greeting was reserved for Don Plumb, the station owner. If we heard the crying and carrying on from Sam in the middle of a shift, the guys knew the big boss might be on site.

A few times a day, Sam would disappear, through the traffic of the busy plaza parking lot that surrounded the station, and between the stores to a field out back. It occurs to me now, thinking about all the bags I use to pick up after my dog, that we never even thought about needing to pick up after Sam.

With a bed behind the oil cans beneath the work bench in the bay, he must have been the dirtiest dog in the city. Once each summer, the Plumbs took him to Lake Erie for a swim. That was his annual bath. For a week or more after the swim, his white and brown fur showed against his black. Most of the year, his colours were covered in grime. Sam was fed cans of sloppy cheap dog food from a can. His teeth had large black spots, probably because he never got kibble or dog cookies to keep his teeth clean.

My beautiful red MGB was a convertible with leather seats. Once in a while, when I had left the top down, some of the guys would let Sam get in the passenger seat just as my shift ended. Sam was so big sitting in that seat, he could look over the top of the windshield. I would be heading to the car and then see Sam sitting there, big grin, so excited. There was no way Sam would get out of the car until after I had driven him around the local streets with the top down.

After that incident with rowdy Americans, I never begrudged Sam the occasional joy ride at the end of a shift. Even after I left Beaver, when I would stop by for gas, Sam seemed to recognize the sound of my MG or would hear my voice, and he’d come out to give me a great greeting, whining and crying like a puppy.

Beaver Stations are a little piece of Windsor history that everyone my age remembers fondly. The Beaver station on Dougal was sold and eventually torn down to be replaced by a generic Shell station where people pump their own gas and try to clean their own windows. How cool would it be to have one of my old Beaver uniform shirts and show up wearing it to the A&W on classic car cruise night in Windsor!

Oh, wait. I was 130 pounds in high school. Oh well. I’ve got the memories.