Opportunity is missed by most people
because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.
— Thomas Edison, American inventor and
businessman, 1847–1931
As I completed the ninth grade, the home front was in turmoil. My parents would separate, for good, a year or so later. I decided to skip town. I made a clean getaway, sleeping that first night on the lam curled up on a concrete dock, the lights of my hometown reflecting across the water.
Screams in the night; hangover in the morning
I was awakened by an early-morning freight train headed east. As it slowed to navigate the turn near the dock, I hopped aboard and clung precariously to a boxcar ladder until we came upon a horrible train wreck I’d learned about just before skipping town. Hiding in the bushes and under the cover of pre-dawn, I watched as rescuers tried to extricate from the wreckage a man in excruciating agony. His blood-curdling screams I shall never forget. I was to hear that same scream, from that same man, five years later in very different circumstances.
My father was among the rescuers. Whenever there was a train wreck, and there were several each year, Billy Simmons was seconded from his regular job as a carpenter to cook for the crew.
Morbid curiosity satisfied, I caught the morning passenger train west, first to Corner Brook, where I landed a three-day fencing job, and then on to North Sydney, Nova Scotia, after an unforgettable ordeal at the Port aux Basques ferry terminal. The town, in later years one of my favourite haunts for quite different reasons, can be bleak, foggy, and cold, even in June month. This night, the town lived up to its billing!
Lousy weather was, however, just a small part of my nightmare. On the train from Corner Brook, I had hooked up with six guys in their late teens, all headed to Toronto35 to make their fortunes, and one, to my fifteen-year-old eyes, stunningly beautiful female in her mid-twenties, returning to her job in Ontario after a trip home to reconnect with family.
The eight of us bonded over poker, and I had my first serious introduction to booze. On arriving in Port aux Basques, the woman proposed we all go to a local bar, which we did, in the process missing the boat to Nova Scotia and spending twenty-four hours waiting for the next one.
Now, as I reflect on those days, a couplet from the World War I ditty “Hinky-dinky parlez-Vous” comes to mind:
You didn’t have to know her long,
To know the reason men go wrong!
With apologies to Dickens, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. I was finally hanging out with the guys—and a gorgeous chick. All too soon, though, I had other preoccupations. The booze kicked in. Boy, did it kick in. When I regained some semblance of sobriety and rational thinking, I chewed myself out royally. And I made myself a promise: I would never, ever again surrender my thinking capacity to a bottle of booze.
Idyllic interlude
As I leaned against the rail of the passenger ferry SS Cabot Strait on its approach to North Sydney, I chatted with two teenaged girls, identical twins coming home from a Newfoundland holiday. When asked where I was going, I wasn’t about to admit to my latest heartthrobs that I was vagabonding. Instead, I responded, “Sydney. 148 Vulcan Avenue.” I knew there was such an address, having seen it umpteen times on the fat envelopes my older brother received almost daily from Ruth, an old flame who wouldn’t let go. “Our house is right across the street. We’ll give you a ride,” gushed a twin. With that exchange, I killed not one, not two, but three birds. I solved my immediate accommodation problem. I got free transportation to my destination. And my embryonic love life had just hit the jackpot. Two attractive females would be my groupies, guides, and, if I played my cards right, girlfriends!
The good folks at 148 Vulcan Avenue treated me as the returning prodigal son, although I was a complete stranger to the parents. My foot in the door was Ruth, who jumped at this chance to vicariously connect with the guy back in Bishop’s Falls who wasn’t answering her letters.
I spent my days that summer mowing lawns, washing cars, anything that eased my tight cash flow situation. Ruth and I had a weekly routine. She, my senior by seven years, liked to frequent the local bars and clubs. I, as her surrogate, underaged date, tagged along, thanks to doorkeepers who turned a blind eye or couldn’t see well. Ruth became my first and only dance instructor, trying with minimal success to teach me the finer points of waltzing. The only tangible results were my bruised ego and her bruised feet as the floor evaded my clumsy missteps. Perhaps I was preoccupied pondering what my mother’s scathing assessment would be if she knew her saintly son had surrendered to the Devil’s wiles, dancing being at that time a Salvation Army taboo.
Most evenings, though, I spent with the twins. They took turns being my date, going to movies, biking, walking. At least, I was told they were taking turns. I couldn’t tell them apart, so I nicknamed them Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum. They got their kicks out of confusing me on the subject. At fifteen, I was madly in love with a girl. But which one? Or was it both?
After two months largely freeloading off Ruth’s family, it was time to move on. I bid a teary farewell to my summer flings, T-dee and T-dum, and was back in Bishop’s Falls in good time for the start of the new school year.
Premature graduation
A daily newspaper route had been my main source of income since I was eleven. I got to wondering how it could be cost-effective for the St. John’s publisher to ship my newspapers by rail right past my front yard to a circulation guy in the next town and then pay him to drive twenty miles a day to deliver them to me. If the newspaper’s owners had money for a middleman, I set out to become that middleman. Having pumped the paper’s sales from thirty to over 200 during my tenure, I put in writing the case for a separate circulation manager in my town, namely me. The ploy worked, and at fourteen years old I had seven of my buddies each peddling thirty papers under my paid supervision. The administrative load was not onerous: Count out seven piles of papers each day, collect from my carriers each week, and remit the proceeds by postal money order to St. John’s.
Meanwhile, my school attendance, particularly at French class, became increasingly more erratic, earning me a summons to the principal’s office. Ray Wight, with the entire teaching staff looking on, threw down the gauntlet: Take French or quit school! For a brash, know-it-all fifteen-year-old, the choice was crystal clear. Without a word, I headed for the door, regretting my move before my hand grasped the doorknob, but not about to show weakness in front of judge and jury. So, with one month in the tenth grade behind me, I was free to pursue my burgeoning business ventures full-time.
Door-to-door marketing
With my newspaper delivery business on a secure franchise footing and my formal education apparently behind me, I soon discovered the potential of moonlighting, both as a way to kill time and as a supplementary income source. My Uncle Roger, a travelling salesman, frequently passed through town, often staying a few days with us while he worked the immediate territory. I became his door-to-door surrogate, hawking cosmetics and ladies’ dresses.
Norris Arm North was a tiny village fifteen miles down the railway tracks from my hometown plus a short boat ride. The ladies of this isolated outpost depended exclusively on Eaton’s and Simpson’s mail order empires for the latest fashions. But today, standing right outside on their doorstep was a fast-talking teenager with a whole suitcase full of the prettiest dresses imaginable, and in all sizes.
Sales were brisk. I was fast running out of product. The latest delirious customer had just taken off my hands an ill-fitting number with an outrageous floral pattern and was strutting about her kitchen modelling her new prized possession for me and her brood, all the while assuring us but mainly herself that, once she “took it in” here and there, it would “fit like a glove.” I blanched at the thought of how much “taking in” she would have to do but kept my mouth shut, opening it only later to ask her advice. You see, I had a problem. I had just one dress left, extra, extra large, and ugly as sin. Who, I asked her, might be interested in this exquisite garment? Pointing through the window, she said, “See that big purple house with the chimney? That’s my aunt’s. She’ll love it. Just her size, too.”
And so I made my final sale. But I wasn’t quite out of the woods yet. The word had gone ’round the harbour that my dress selling was in full swing, and it seemed every last female was determined to contribute to my bottom line. As I headed for the boat ride and home turf, I had to run a gauntlet of crestfallen would-be customers who had emerged from their houses to extract a promise I would return with more dresses.
The promise was made, but never kept, partly because I had soon moved on to other get-rich-quick ventures and, just maybe, also partly because of an oft-recurring thought: Once my buyers, so titillated that day, had to endure their husbands’ scathing appraisals of the new wardrobes, should I risk life and limb by returning to the scene of the crime? Discretion and love of life won the day.
Early-morning retailing
I had another well-paying gig. Because of it, my business day started early and finished late, seven days a week. It began at 5:15 a.m. That’s when the westbound trans-island passenger train, affectionately dubbed the “Newfie Bullet”36, rolled into the railway station near my house. I was already at the station, my custom-built, bike-mounted larder stuffed with egg sandwiches, chocolate bars, chewing gum, and soft drinks, eager to slake the thirst and feed the sweet tooth of my captive clientele, at premium prices, of course. The routine was repeated at ten twenty each night when the eastbound train came through.
Tycoon with itchy feet
At the ripe old age of fifteen, I was sitting pretty, economically speaking. Three regular jobs, one in management, two in sales, all turning a tidy profit. But the days were long and lonely. All the guys my age were in school. I needed a new challenge. So, I signed on as a logger. This was clearly my big break! No more hawking women’s apparel and sachet powder. My ship had come in!
Chainsaws and tree harvesters had not made their debut. So, I had to settle for a bucksaw and an axe, both company issue. And I had to pile the logs. The work was back-breaking and solitary.
My career as a professional logger lasted four days. Math being one of my better subjects, it took no time at all to compute that the value of the logs I’d cut minus what I owed the employer for food and equipment left a difference of $27, in whose favour I can’t recall. The one thing I know for certain is that there couldn’t have been any income tax implications, a matter that would trip me up later in life.
Fortunately, my core enterprises were going concerns. Newspapering, door-to-door marketing, and confectionery sales were each making a buck. Family-wise, things were not quite that rosy. The impending parental break-up was in its final stages, so I decided to take a sabbatical from my well-oiled entrepreneurial operations and hit the road. For the second time in less than a year, I became a vagabond, my true calling.
35 Even before Newfoundland’s confederation with Canada, many thousands of young Newfoundlanders, mainly males, trekked off to Toronto each year to find employment, many never to return except for periodic junkets back to see family, gorge on Newfie cuisine, and revisit pastimes of days gone by, fishing, hunting, camping, partying, and swapping stories with friends and strangers alike.
36 The Newfoundland Railway, after 1949 Canadian National Railways (CNR), ran its trains at a snail’s pace because of the antiquated, narrow-gauge tracks.