HARTLEY FAWCETT had a fruitful relationship with Lady Luck. His most serious scrape, in 1947, involved the car he was driving and a bull moose. The car was totalled and the moose died, but he walked away with nothing more than a few bruises and a good story to tell his customers.
It wasn’t that he was manic about risk avoidance, either. He just didn’t volunteer himself or his money when the odds were against him, and he possessed a mental and physical agility that was as much instinctual as learned. He was a frugal man, he worked hard without ever putting his head down or cutting corners, and he never made a show of whatever cards he held. When he saw an opportunity, he thought it through and if he decided it was a good one, he lunged, with coordination and absolute concentration.
He was also physically tough, and as I’ve noted, he had the courage of a man with strong convictions. He didn’t start fights unless it was with Ron and me and when he was in one he kept his wits about him, counterpunched, and when he did, he hit as hard as he could.
When I was 11 years old I was with him when a logger in a pickup truck rear-ended us. My father asked me if I was okay, then got out of the car, looked at the slight damage to his car, and shrugged. From inside the car, I watched the logger stagger out of his truck and lurch toward my father, who pointed to the back of our car and said something, probably about the logger’s lousy driving skills or his state of sobriety. The logger, a man at least 10 centimetres taller, instantly launched a haymaker. My father easily dodged the punch, and as the logger wound up for another, my father hit him with two short punches, a right and a left, bang, bang. The logger went sprawling, unconscious, across the sidewalk.
My father got back into the car, muttered “stupid bastard,” and drove off. He was scowling, but he wasn’t even breathing hard. I don’t think he was cursing out the logger as much as he was criticizing his dumb tactics.
Lucky? I guess so. But steely nerves and an ability to think on your feet have ways of creating luck, and so does a dislike of losing. My father was cool under fire, and his hatred of losing was passionate, whether it was an argument, a fist fight, a customer account gone delinquent, or a long-term contest of will. He found ways to win what he could, but he wasn’t a fool, either. He’d vacate the field if he saw the odds were against him.
If you’d asked him what his worst defeat was, he’d tell you that it was the way he retired from business. That’s a complicated story that didn’t involve luck in the smallest way. It was something that started a long way from who and what he was, but it ended up as close to his hard heart as anything ever got.
In the early 1960s, the big manufacturing and consumer corporations began to descend on northern British Columbia, targeting the local businesses that had been operating for years and were now becoming prosperous. Businesses like his.
It had begun in the lumber industry, kicked off by the government’s announcement that pulp mills were on the way, and that forest tenure, which until then was held on a near-hereditary basis, would be taken to competitive bidding. Few saw this as anything less than a positive development: more competition meant more profits, more jobs, a spur to population growth—the standard bullshit slung by business boosters and the Chamber of Commerce.
But competition for the seemingly limitless supply of timber quickly turned vicious, touching off a melee amongst the local mill owners trying to sequester the best stands of timber for the cutting of structure wood—the 2 x 4–inch studs universally used for building that had long been the local industrial bread and butter—or to sell it off to the pulp mills when they arrived. And so the multinationals came, companies that wanted the wood for the spaghetti-mills they would build, or pulp fibre, or log exports: whatever else sweetened their bottom line.
In 1956, there were 600 mills in the area, all independently owned and operated, many of them one- to four-man gypo mills portable enough to be moved from cut block to cut block. The 50 or 60 larger mills pretty much held proprietary rights to whichever area they’d located in, and with the generally held belief that the forests would last forever, they’d done little to protect their tenure and less to protect the health of the forests or perpetuate the supply of trees.
Now they found themselves having to make bids on each timber block the Forest Service partitioned for cutting, and there was, at first, not a little poaching going on between the more aggressive locals. Once the poaching took hold, the multinationals moved in, licking their chops like coyotes that had discovered an unguarded bunny hutch. They’d been the ones who’d bullied the government into the timber-rights bidding system, using the public argument that it would improve government revenues—and deploying the equally alluring backroom argument that it was good capitalism and, no doubt hinting that it would result in generous campaign donations. By the time the smoke cleared in 1972, all but a few of the gypos were gone, 8 supermills had replaced the 60 bigger independents, and there were 2 pulp mills stinking up the town and spewing chemicals into the rivers. Only one of this whole bunch was locally owned.
Something similar happened within the city limits. A&W was the first consumer franchise to arrive, followed soon after by Dairy Queen, McDonald’s, and a raft of others. The local eateries soon began to falter and die off. The same currents moved through the entire local economy: owners replaced by branch managers, and the profits vacuumed out of town to Vancouver and beyond.
I don’t think my father saw the axe head heading his way, too. He’d held his Orange Crush, Pepsi, and Canada Dry soft drink franchises for years, and the franchisers were more than happy with his market shares. When his competition in the ice cream business, owned by a Vancouver-based lumber baron who’d already lost most of his timber-cutting rights along with the rest of the locals, was bought out by a big Alberta-based dairy company, my father sneered that it was just rich outsiders buying out other rich outsiders, and that if he could beat the old one he could beat the new ones—although he did hedge his bet by running ads on the local radio station about the virtues of supporting local industry. He still had plenty of fire in his belly, and he had two sons coming up behind him to take over. What could go wrong?
One fall afternoon in 1965, a couple of business-suited executives from the biggest dairy consortium in B.C.’s lower mainland walked into his office and announced that if he didn’t sell his ice cream operation to them, they’d dump product into his marketplace below his cost until he was bankrupt.
He threw them out. But two weeks later, he got a letter from the B.C. Milk Board informing him that using the best raw milk supply in the area for something as non-essential as ice cream was a violation of board policy and Not in the Public Interest, and my father found himself faced with the prospect of making his ice cream, of which he was justly proud, from more costly and inferior powdered-milk stock and coconut oil.
He reconsidered—or as he put it, Faced Up to Reality. “You Can’t Fight Progress,” he said, spinning the bad news into the core of his philosophy for everything else. “This is all Predestined: the Big Fish eat the Small Fish. Capitalism is no different from the Forces of Nature.”
He took the dairy consortium’s offer, and was out of the business inside six months. But he’d been running two businesses in the same operation, and his soft drink operation, less complicated logistically and more lucrative, was expanding. He’d recently acquired the franchise for 7Up, and now had four of the five most popular brands coming off his trucks—and he held a loan chit on the local Coca-Cola bottler, who was a former employee he’d bankrolled when the hapless previous owner gave up and wanted out.
My father was closing in on his 60th birthday, and he’d been on a 15-year winning streak. He assumed that with two grown sons working under him, he could start another, greater streak. What he didn’t see coming at him was a piece of biology.
My father, you see, was the purest strain of alpha male, and that meant he wasn’t capable of allowing any other dog around him with its tail up, not even for a moment. The problem was that Ron and I had bred true: each of us born with a bushy tail that naturally stood straight up even though we were fundamentally different from one another. Ron had gladly worked for my father since he was 14 or 15 years old, was quick to learn from him, eager to follow his footsteps and habits, most eager of all to gain his acceptance and praise—provided that it involved respect that could be earned by hard work, and some autonomy.
I was five years younger, more willful but with less aptitude and poorer focus. But I was much more curious about the world beyond my father’s business, and completely cantankerous whenever anyone tried to put a thumb on me. I liked the work well enough, but in high school I was more often truant at the after-school jobs he set up for me than I was for my school classes.
The job I liked the best was typing his business letters, which, until I arrived, were being typed by a secretary whose native language was Dutch. She typed the letters exactly as he wrote them, which was a problem because my father used a punctuation system all his own: he capitalized any word that he thought was important, and rarely used periods, commas, or question marks. My father wrote a lot of letters, some the predictable ones to customers demanding payment, but others to his distributors and franchisers, sometimes to complain about something specific, but more often to explain why he was right about everything under the sun, and they weren’t. The more philosophical he waxed, the longer the letters got, and the more capital letters he used. By the time I was in Grade 10, I’d decided that he was making a fool of himself, and pretty much took over as his personal typist. His secretary was happy to let me type the letters, since she had no idea what he was saying and was a peck-and-poke typist who found his wordiness heavy going. My father didn’t seem to mind me typing them until I started deleting his ideas and adding ideas of my own, most of which launched from pretty well the opposite of what he had in mind. After that, I’d find some of the letters I’d been fiddling with waiting for me in the basket when I arrived after school, with my stuff crossed out and even more capitalized words scribbled in the margins than I’d replaced. A couple of times he lost his temper and demanded that I type exactly what he’d written. I’d tone it down for a week or two, then start messing around again. Through high school, it was the one forum in which we could argue and I had the advantage.
When my brother finished high school he bought a car and went to work for my father, ready to work his way up what he knew would be a very short ladder. I spent the year after I graduated in Europe, and when I got home, my father expected I’d do the same. He’d bailed me out of the trouble I got into overseas, remember, and in his mind, my wild oats were sown, I owed him, and it was time to pony up.
Instead, I joined the Forest Service after one of our scraps, then worked in a local menswear store and lived in a two-room shack across town that had no running water or toilet but was a fine place to party and stay up all night. The shack had been provided for me rent free by one of my father’s many enemies, all of whom seemed to find me pretty entertaining. And why wouldn’t they? I was a weird kid who enjoyed reading, wanted an education, and planned to write books of his own. But I was my mother’s son, too, so I also kept coming back home regularly, and my father kept baiting the hook, not always patiently and almost never cheerfully, for me to settle down and do what my brother had done.
I worked for him on and off, enjoying the physical labour and the camaraderie with his employees even though I wasn’t particularly good with the trucks or the business side of it, and bemused that my father didn’t seem to notice. But my tail kept springing to high alert around him, and this was something he always noticed. We had one dust-up after another, and whenever we did, I walked away and did something else, enjoying it most when I could see it pissed him off.
I took off to university in January 1966, the first in the family to do this, but when I came home that summer, I again worked on the trucks for him. Oblivious as ever, I barely noticed his agitation at losing the ice cream side of the business. He’d made my brother his sales supervisor, and Ron made it part of his duties to stay between my father and me. Ron was, I think, trying to protect me, although that, like the rest, I barely registered. I worked long hours, got paid generously, banked every cent of it, and made plans for all the things I was going to do when I returned to the coast in September.
Ten days before I was to return to Vancouver for my second semester of university, my father called Ron and me into his office. I sat down, wondering what I’d screwed up, and idly stoked my testosterone for the coming fight. But my father had an odd gleam in his eye, and he didn’t seem, as he normally was, angry or even exasperated with me. I sprawled into the inside chair, and as I did, registered the tactical datum that if things got nasty, I’d have to crawl over Ron to get out.
“Oh, damn,” I said. “I need a Pepsi. Let me out, eh?”
I clambered across Ron’s lap, found a half-full case beside the rear entrance to the general office, picked up two bottles and used one to crack open the second. I took a couple of glugs, in no hurry to return to what I expected would turn out to be another lecture about my incompetence or my father’s upper case Business Philosophy.
“Shove over,” I said to Ron when I returned. He gave me a barely raised eyebrow, and moved to the inner chair. I sat down and looked at my father. He was sitting upright behind his desk with his hands folded together, smiling mirthlessly at our exchange. He tapped his right index finger on a sheaf of foolscap in front of him, and cleared his throat. Now what?
“I want,” he said, in his best capital-letter voice, “to present to you my Grand Plan For The Future.”
I glanced across at Ron. He was staring intently at my father as if this were a long-expected moment.
“Whose future?” I asked, chancing a quick argument in the hope it might change the tone, which already felt oppressive.
“Your Future,” my father said. He turned his gaze to Ron. “And yours. And mine. Most of all, the Future of This Company, and all the Thousands of Dollars it can put in Your Pockets.”
He swept his hands wide. “Not to mention the Joys of Accomplishment.”
I turned in my chair so I could gauge how Ron was taking this. He was still staring at my father, but now I detected a wariness. I cleared my throat, hoping it would control the nervous giggle I could feel rising in the pit of my stomach.
“I have the Grand Plan, all of it, Up Here.” He pointed to his head with one finger. “I’ve been thinking this over for six months. We have to Move Ahead, and here’s how I propose to do it. Ron, you’re going to Take Over at Grande Prairie.”
Two years ago, my father had bought out another bottler in northern Alberta, built a new building, added a couple of franchises so that the product list was identical to the operation in Prince George, improved the production equipment, and moved his best driver-salesman up to run it.
“You,” he said, nodding his head at me, “will Take Over here. Under my Guidance, naturally.”
Then, as if he was stuck for something philosophical with which to seal the deal, he said, “The Future is Limitless. All We Have to Do is Work Together.”
The small office slowly filled with a poisonous silence. What I’d heard was that I’d been chosen over my brother to run the big operation. Since I was going back to university, this was stupid as well as unfair. Ron was being sent away from my father, the only place he’d ever wanted to be. And being under my father’s thumb was the last place I wanted to be. How could he have gotten this so wrong?
In Ron’s eyes, I saw hurt and then something that looked like anger. My father stared at each of us in turn for a longer-than-comfortable moment, clearly bewildered by our less-than-enthusiastic response.
“Listen,” he said to me. “I’ll have you Sitting on a Sandy Beach in Hawaii with a Redhead by the time you’re thirty. You’ll be a Millionaire.”
“I don’t want to go to Hawaii,” I said, without thinking. “And I don’t like redheads.” The part of my brain that was cowed and confused was thinking, “He doesn’t know who you are or what you want.” But the larger part, the one that was sucking up the endorphins of outrage, won out.
“No,” I said, as much to myself as to him. “This isn’t fair to Ron. He should run this operation, whether or not I go back to university. And I’m going back there in September whether you like it or not.”
My brother cleared his voice. “I don’t like this either,” he said, quietly. “What happens to Gerry?”
Gerry was the current manager, and Ron’s close friend.
“We’ll have to let Gerry go,” my father said, beginning to flush with displeasure. “I’ve decided that he Doesn’t Have What It Takes. And Now’s the Time to Move Forward.”
“No,” Ron said. His voice had a flat resolve I hadn’t heard before, ever.
I could see my father trying to compose himself. There was something in his eyes I hadn’t seen before, something that wasn’t the anger I was expecting. Fear? No, not that, but akin to it. Anger I could deal with, because that’s what I was used to. I was as afraid of him as I’d always been, but I forced myself to go into the automatic pilot I’d learned, confronting his anger with aggression and letting the two spin into yelling and threats. This would permit me to walk away, as I had before, secure in the knowledge that my mother would intercede, pull me back in.
“I’m going back to university,” I said, and got to my feet.
My father did the same, but we didn’t make eye contact. Ron stayed in his chair. He didn’t look any happier than my father did. “You boys Think About What I’ve Said, and Give Me Your Thoughts,” he said. I was halfway down the hall when he added, in distinctly lower case tones, “These are just proposals, you know.”
I went back to Vancouver ten days later to start my university classes. I didn’t give my father my thoughts before I left. The truth was that I didn’t have any particular thoughts about his Grand Plan, and I was pretty sure he wasn’t interested in my thoughts about The Plan or about anything else even if I’d had them. Two months after that, Ron walked into his office and told him he was quitting. He moved to Kamloops, got a job there, and tried to get on with his life. A month after that, my father started negotiations to sell the business. Within a year he’d moved himself and my mother to the Okanagan Valley, and was living on the shores of Skaha Lake, retired.
I didn’t talk to my father about his Grand Plan for almost 20 years. When I did, we were in his big Cadillac, driving to Edmonton on the one road trip we ever made together. I think I was trying to offer a backhanded apology for hurting him all those years ago, but it came out wrong. I asked him what he’d been thinking when he wanted to put me in charge of the big operation and send my brother away.
“I was trying to give you a world,” he said, without looking at me. “But you thought you knew everything, and you didn’t want it.”
“I wanted my own world,” I said, and left it at that. Another 17 years went by before the subject hit the table again. When it did, I heard the same bitter anger and disappointment in his voice: I’d thrown away his world.
And this could be the end of it, another story of miscommunication between fathers and true-bred sons. I could accuse him of not being able to bear having his sons around him with their bushy tails up, of not seeing our need for autonomy, of not letting us live on our own terms. And that would all be true. But it isn’t the whole story. There are two more parts to this story, and they’re quite different.
One is about my brother. My father, you see, hoped Ron would come back, and he waited very patiently. And slowly, gradually, my brother came back. It wasn’t easy for either of them, and it didn’t always go well, but eventually, they rebuilt the Grand Plan so that it was their plan. Given that every independent soft drink bottler in British Columbia was gone by 1980—absorbed by the corporations—their Revised Grand Plan is almost certainly better and grander than the original could have turned out. It’s also better because in the Revised Grand Plan, Ron’s two sons work for him, and as far as I can see, with their tails straight up.
The other chapter is mine, and it is an after-the-fact admission of debt. I did go back to university that fall, just as I intended, and I did it without regrets and without looking back. I made a very different life than the one my father tried to plan for me: no Hawaii, no Redheads on a Sandy Beach. My father never quite understood why I did the things I did, and I’d be kidding myself if I said I thought he believed that what I pursued in life was worthwhile: “Book-learned nonsense,” he’d grumble, “not worth the powder to blow it to hell.”
But—and this is what matters—he went along with it anyway, and he sent me money so I could stay at university without very much hardship. He was grudging and ungracious about it, and he always tried to attach strings. But now I see that he ignored it when I snipped the strings, and he didn’t really demand that I be directly grateful for his help. I don’t know if he was proud of the books I’ve written. But I do know he read them all, and occasionally, he’d correct errors of fact I’d made, nearly always with an “aha!” that made the windows vibrate.
I owe him for all of it, and it’s my shame that this half-assed posthumous acknowledgment is the only one he ever got.