A Chequered Career

Dad’s War

My 89 year old widowed father was studying organ at the Royal Conservatory in Toronto when the war broke out. He enlisted as soon as he could. He was 6 feet 4 inches tall and weighed 130 pounds, scarcely the stuff of either bomber crew or front line infantry. Nonetheless, all were welcome, and off he went.

The train trip to the Prairies to train, and Halifax to board the transport overseas were the first times he had seen Canada. He wrote long eloquent letters home to his mother describing the people and scenery. He spent a year recently transcribing and printing those letters and I have a bound copy.

In England, he was seconded to the Army Bureau of Current Affairs (ABCA), as the assistant to their Canadian liaison, Capt. Bob MacKenzie. In this role, he lectured servicemen nd war brides on current affairs, life in Canada and the progress of the war. He organized and led meetings of Colonels and Majors on communications and publications. And he did all this as a staff sergeant.

He worked hard to avoid being promoted. He was well-educated, eloquent and clearly not Other Ranks material, but smart officers got sent to the front and died, and he was enjoying his war.

The Archbishop of Canterbury was a friend. He played the organ at Westminster Abbey. He hung out with artists, musicians and reporters. He sampled the bohemian underground of wartime London. He went to country houses for weekend house parties. He got gastritis in Ireland on furlough from eating too many fresh eggs, which were strictly rationed in England. This was his only wartime injury.

Not that the work he was doing at ABCA wasn’t important. Winston Churchill hated the group, though it was a nest of communists and a waste of money. Bob MacKenzie was a staunch socialist, as were all the instructors. They taught impressionable young servicemen about collectives, and nationalization, and owning the means of production. Political scientists agree ABCA was instrumental in defeating Churchill and electing Labour’s Clement Atlee in the election immediately after the war.

I recently asked my dad if would talk to a rapporteur for The Memory Project, a group that is recording the memories of WWII veterans. “Oh, hell, no. I don’t want to talk about it. I had a cushy war”.

I’m glad he wasn’t promoted to Lieutenant and killed at Ortona. Enough were.

My Father, The Carny

My widowed father, now 89, has returned to his roots, in a way. He now lives at Serenity Towers, a luxurious assisted living place in Niagara, just blocks from the old Lakeside Amusement Park in Port Dalhousie.

He got his start there as a carny after the war. He ran the bingo game. It was owned by Conklin Shows, the company founded by the legendary showman Paddy Conklin.

Dad discovered that he could sell twice as many bingo cards by increasing the prizes slightly, with no effect on earnings. It was a neat trick, and word of it got to Paddy

Soon, Dad was Paddy’s driver, chauffeuring him around in a brand-new post war Chrysler. Paddy put Dad to work on some other math problems.

Soon Dad was working the winter midway in Brantford, Paddy’s home town. He was an enforcer. He figured out the rate at which the carnies in the game booths should be giving out the sawdust filled crap toys you win, and if they were giving out fewer than that, they were screwing the house.

He was respected and feared and called “The Professor”, because he wore glasses and could add. Carnies are tough, but they’re not that bright, not even Paddy, and this was the carnival industry’s first experience of forensic accounting.

By the summer of 1947, dad was working the Midway at the Ex, still counting the stuffed bears and going over the receipts at night. He was making $1500 a week in 1947, the equiivalent of about $15,000 today. Paddy valued him, obviously.

What goes around comes around. A client of mine is the CNE. I happened to mention to a senior executive that my dad once drove for Paddy Conklin. His eyes lit up. “You’re dad KNEW Paddy? He drove for him?” This was like meeting someone who had met god to him, and his staff were equally enthralled. When I told them about dad’s role as “The Professor”, they exchanged looks. Apparently those accounting rules are still used on the Midway to this day.

Dad didn’t stay a carny long, just two or three exciting, lucrative years. It allowed him to get married and get set up doing what he was born to do, sell pipe organs. But, for a while, Dad was “The Professor”, feared on the Midway by the toughest guys on the road.

A Chequered Career

My widowed father, now 89 and living in an assisted living facility in Niagara, has had an interesting life, right from the start.

First of all, his mother was probably not his mother. She was a grand Toronto lady to whom the concept of giving birth was as remote as climbing a mountain. No, his mother was probably a loyal family retainer known as Auntie.

In the depression, his father, an insurance adjuster, lost his job and went to work on the docks at the bottom of Yonge Street as a stevedore. His grand mother came down several notches and worked as a telephone operator at the King Edward Hotel, where she wore white gloves because she thought the equipment was dirty..

Later, after his father died, dad quit high school to work as an organist to support his mother and brother. He met (and played for) Fats Waller once, and Fats played some Barrelhouse Blues for him.

Never religious, but always a friend of the clergy, dad was to later count Archbishops and Cardinals among his friends. An interested bishop helped get him into the Royal Conservatory despite his lack of a high school diploma. His natural gift for the keyboard, powered by his long slender fingers, became even more accomplished.

He went to war as soon as he could, six feet four inches tall and one hundred and thirty pounds. Unfit for the front, he was posted to the Army Bureau of Current Affairs in London, where he lectured war brides on what to expect when they arrived in Canada. The Archbishop of Canterbury was a friend, and he played the organ at Westminster Abbey.

He attended Weekends at country houses with Smart People and generally had a ‘good war’. His only casualty was a case of gastritis brought on in Ireland on leave from eating too many fresh eggs (then rationed in Britain).

After the war, he went to work for Paddy Conklin, the famous showman, as his driver, This made him an honourary “Carny” and he was also Paddy’s “strategy man”, cruising the Midway to settle disputes between the carnies.

Later, he worked for a man who made inflatable garages and boats. I remember an inflatable hut in our front yard. The man offered him 10% commission and 90% salary, or 20% commission and 80% salary. Dad asked for 100% commission, no salary, and promptly sold the government all the inflatable liferafts for the new aircraft carrier Bonaventure.

Soon, he was doing what he was born to do, selling pipe organs. He traveled North America, and later the world, entertaining Bishops and Monsignors and other clerics. He knew what whisky they liked, where they got their cigars, how risqué the jokes could be. He fit in with these princes of the church. And he was a complete nonbeliever.

He worked for all the leading pipe organ manufacturers, ending up with the best, a company in Quebec, where I grew up. He was a meticulous model maker, cutting facades for miniature organs from Bristol board in complicated patterns that could all come apart and fit in his briefcase.

I slept in his dressing room. I’d hear him in the morning, whistling under his breath as he brushed his hair and tied his tie and shined his shoes. I do that today. He owned cars that were bizarre for the day, Corvairs (2), Peugeots (3) Citroens (2). He once owned a used Mercedes that cost him more to keep than his five children.

He bought a sailing dinghy he never learned to sail. He bought an island in a cottage lake for back taxes, and surprised all the old-timers by building a cottage in the middle of their lake.

He always had the latest camera, tape recorder, hi fi, binoculars. He took trays and trays of Kodachrome slides of us growing up. He sent us to interesting educational summer camps run by socialists. He and my mother worked to elect, in order, Adlai Stevenson, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Gene McCarthy, George McGovern, and then moved back to Canada.

He retired and moved to England, then Vermont, then the Maritimes. Each place they went, he and my mother made new firm friends, usually much younger, and always eccentric. Wherever he went, he’d sidle into the local Anglican church and ask if he could try the organ. He’d cut loose with an impromptu recital and the existing organist, usually a little old lady, would quietly go home and kill herself. He was the local organist and choirmaster everywhere he lived until he was 87.

He doesn’t do much now. Sleeps. Complains. Won’t eat. Can’t hear. But, boy oh boy, I hope I have memories like that when I’m his age.