All right, let’s start with something of significance. Approximately 1 billion, 850 million years ago, a large comet struck North America a mighty blow in what is now the province of Ontario, and, along with scattering masses of valuable industrial minerals as far away as Minnesota, left what is now called the Sudbury Basin, Earth’s second-largest crater, eighty-one miles in diameter.
The large impact filled up with magma containing nickel, platinum, copper, gold, and other metals, making the area one of the world’s major mining sites. My hometown of Sudbury lies just outside the southern rim and for many years was known as the Nickel Capital of the World.
My father, George Edward Terebeychuk, was this little Ukrainian immigrant who had earned his passage money to Canada mainly by playing violin at weddings and parties in his hometown of Nuyno. He arrived from Ukraine in the late 1920s. He was on a train bound for Manitoba to be a farm laborer, but when he got to Ottawa, he decided he didn’t want to work on a farm, and he jumped off. He had a cousin, my uncle Mike, who lived in Toronto, and he touched base with him. Once Dad mastered the fundamentals of basic English and changed his last name to match his cousin’s, Mike got him a starting job in the kitchen at the King Edward Hotel, which was one of the two large first-class hotels in Toronto.
The exterior of the Nickel Range Hotel, where I spent so much of my youth.
The rotunda of the Nickel Range Hotel.
Dad knew nothing about cooking, but he got to like it, got good at it, and eventually, after a long apprenticeship, worked his way up to pastry chef. Then in the late thirties, he moved to the booming mining town of Sudbury. Ten years later, he was offered the job as cohead chef at the Nickel Range Hotel in Sudbury, and that brought about major changes in my life.
As I grew up, the kitchen became a second home to me, where I learned the value of the little things in life: the importance of punctuality; the rewards for hard, honest work; the pride of properly arranging tables and chairs; the camaraderie of a staff of waitresses and food preparers working together in harmony—although there was a time one of the meatcutters, obviously not happy with the way the waitress was placing her order, heaved a meat cleaver at her.
The hotel hosted all the main service clubs—Rotary, Lions, Kiwanis, Knights of Columbus—for luncheons and dinners and, because of the size of its ballrooms, many large receptions. I had two specific self-appointed duties at those events. When not portioning out the side dishes, I was in charge of slicing the large sheet cake for dessert.
Weddings—that’s where I got to enjoy watching artistry in motion. Quite often Dad had to create and make the wedding cakes, and I never ceased to be amazed at his artistic talent: the delicacy of the flowers and leaves, the fronds, the architectural touches, all in a pure-white soft icing. I helped also. My job was to find as many empty Kodak Brownie film spools that would be iced and used as supports for the cakes’ upper layers. Look at me, already a sous-chef at the age of eight.
Dad demonstrated his artistry and creativity in another way also. He and his co-chef, Jerry DeVilliers, used to prepare a special holiday treat for their friends. During the year they would accumulate all of the potato peelings and create a mash that would ferment for months in large bins in a basement storage room. Then, just before Christmas, they would set up a distillery. The first year was almost a disaster because the hotel’s head of maintenance couldn’t understand why the ice-making machines were always empty. He started to raise a fuss, but a bottle of the homemade vodka pacified him and he never complained again.
Oh, by the way, the meatcutter missed by a wide margin. But message sent and understood.
At that time, Sudbury had a population of around forty thousand. It has always amazed me that the entire city could fit inside the current Dodger Stadium. Why that stuck with me I’ve never known.
People would come into town to do business with the refineries or the mining operations. The Nickel Range Hotel was the prime quality hotel in the city, five stories high with a large lobby for public gathering and socializing. It was built in 1914, and by 1939 its reputation had grown considerably. Even though there were other contenders with worthy hotel names, Nickel Range seemed to truly reflect the spirit of the area, and it was there that the royal couple King George VI and Queen Elizabeth spent a night on their 1939 North American tour.
The hotel was very centrally located. It was a block and a half from the police station. Often the police officers on their morning patrol would stop at the hotel kitchen and ask George for a cup of coffee. In addition, they were arresting so many Eastern European mine workers, and nobody at the police station could speak Polish or Ukrainian or Russian, so they’d drag Dad—who spoke them all—out of the kitchen and over to the police station to translate so they could file proper papers on whoever it was they had arrested.
Dad would go to work at six thirty in the morning, do the breakfast until nine, then start preparing lunch. Lunch was from noon to one thirty. Then he had nothing to do from one thirty until the supper hours. So he’d come home and take a nap, and then go back to work around four thirty. He would get his work done pretty fast and would wind up going into the hotel tavern and having a beer. I’m not sure how he met my French Canadian mother, Lucille Lagace, but most likely it was because her brothers used to drink at the hotel and introduced them. Dad didn’t speak a word of French but got along well with Mom’s brothers and sisters, because they all drank beer.
Mom didn’t drink or smoke. She was looking after her mother, who was not doing all that well. Mom was the baby of the family. There were originally fifteen children, but by the time she was born it was down to ten. I think her taking up with Dad might’ve been a way to rebel a little, and to try to get herself out of the house and out on her own. And Dad was happy because he had found a family. They cared deeply for each other.
They had to get married because Mom got pregnant. They married in December 1939, and I was born in July—July 22, 1940, in a little shack of a house just behind my grandparents’ home. There was no doctor. My aunt Eunice was the midwife. My mother went through thirty-six hours of labor before delivering me. She lived to be ninety-five and reminded me of this many times.