Pettis said, “We have never had anyone make that proposal before. I guess that if you want to work for nothing, we could put you on the soap aisle.”
And so, unknown to anyone else, I worked for nothing for a week: Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, 4: 00 p.m. to midnight, and on Saturday and Sunday from 8: 00 a.m. to midnight. I worked like a dog and sweated my heart out. The next week Mr. Pettis called and told my mother that I had a job and I could come to work on Wednesday. Wow—was I proud—forty-five cents an hour!
Late Sunday evening, before we went home, the workers would pick up their cheques at the office. Mr. Pettis called out to me while I was mopping up the floor.
“Come to the office, Brian.” He passed me an envelope. “Open it,” he said.
I tore open the envelope and looked at the cheque. “Mr. Pettis, you have made a mistake—this looks like it is too much,” I exclaimed.
“My boy,” said Pettis, “you sure can work, and we have decided to break our deal. We want to pay you for last week.”
I was shocked—it had never entered my mind, I was so consumed with trying to get that job.
“Thank you, Mr. Pettis,” I said.
“Back to the floor,” Pettis responded.
In four weeks I was the highest-paid temporary worker in the store. And my countryman was still at the bottom of the pay scale.
Much later, when I became a teacher, I would tell this story to my students many, many times. And it remains one of my most precious memories. There is no replacement for hard work.
Of course, this lower area of Parliament Street had its own problems, like many inner-city areas. I experienced this first-hand. I almost lost one of my first paycheques.
Walking home on Parliament Street after twelve one night, I encountered a surprise attack from three boys around my own age. Two of them jumped out from an alleyway and threw me to the ground, savagely kicking me in the groin. Somehow I got to my feet and struck one of them to the ground and began to hit the second one. A third boy sprang from the alleyway, and I caught him leaping and struck at him. He staggered backwards—the first boy was still on the ground, being helped by the second—and as quick as the incident started, the boys fled. They were good with their feet, and as I stumbled home I felt the pain from my waist to my knees. I was at home a few days to recuperate, but I was content that the scoundrels did not get my cheque.
The months passed, the family adjusted as best it could, Father was doing well, my older brother was relatively happy at his work and night school, the younger siblings were happy, and Mother shouldered her responsibilities with stoic determination. But I think we were all relieved when the time came to return home. I had to stay on a little while longer to do my school exams.
So I was back in Lewisporte, Newfoundland, for the summer of 1960. I needed a job before school began in the fall, but few were available. I managed to get a few weeks at the new vocational school that had just been constructed. Some students were needed to check inventory on the new equipment that was arriving. But this only got me to the end of July. I then parked myself at a plumbing and heating store that was also involved in subcontracting, installing plumbing and heating in new buildings. I would get up early in the morning and go to the premises before it opened so that I would create the right impression—that I had no problem getting up in the morning and that I was really serious about getting a job. The first few mornings the answer was no, we have no opportunities right now. I kept going each morning. I knew the owner of the business; his son was a friend of mine. A few mornings later, the company won a contract to install the plumbing in a new school that was being constructed in a nearby town. I was there early in the morning when the chief plumber was talking to the owner about the contract. He suggested to the owner that he would need a helper for the job. Given that I was the only person who had presented himself each morning, and here I was again, the job was mine. The days were sunny and warm that August, and my boss (Mr. Val Tucker) was an excellent worker and teacher. I learned a lot from him in just thirty days. It’s funny that I clearly remember this brief thirty-day job forty-nine years later. I remember mentioning this man’s name at a political rally in Lewisporte over twenty-five years later—I was quickly told from the floor that he was in the audience.
The school system in Toronto went to grade thirteen. In Newfoundland it went to grade eleven. So there were many courses that I took in Toronto that did not qualify for high school graduation (junior matriculation) in Newfoundland. Hence, I was back in school in the fall. That year spun by and I tried hard to concentrate and pursue my studies, which were made more enjoyable by our main teacher, Mr. Paddock.
One of the courses, taught by another teacher, was Algebra. During these years mathematics was split among the three components of Algebra, Trigonometry, and Geometry. The class was having great difficulty understanding this subject and following the teacher’s lessons. At Christmas, I think only three out of forty-two passed the exam. After the break at Christmas, a number of students approached the teacher and explained the dilemma, which of course should have been clear to him, yet he seemed oblivious to our plight and was just soldiering on as if all was well with the Algebra world. Things still did not improve, and given that he was also the principal of the school, there was little else we thought we could do. Luckily for me, my parents had just completed a room “upstairs” in our one-storey house. This became my place for study, and I would spend hours there pouring over the Algebra book trying to understand the material. I still remember the names of the authors written on the cover of that infamous book—Hall and Knight—and they were not my favourite people. Sometime during that period from January to June, I figured it out and understood enough to pass the province-wide exams. I passed the other subjects and now had to decide—where do I go from here?
I remember that my father had mentioned university, and Mr. Paddock had also mentioned it. There were not many from my class interested, and I didn’t know how interested I really was. The thing was, I really was not mechanical at all, and just getting involved in the jobs like I had in the summertime would be low-paying and uninteresting as careers. And I still remembered Mr. Paddock’s question—what are you going to do with the rest of your life? And of course I had heard that a brand new campus was about to open and that there was money available if you were studying to be a teacher.
Well, I applied and was accepted. Off to St. John’s and a boarding house.
Mr. Paddock passed away a few years ago. When his family informed me of this, I wrote his son the following:
Thank you for calling me and informing me of the passing of your father. I was unaware of his illness and, of course, like you, the news came as a shock.
I feel obligated to write this note to you because your father was a very special person in my life.
In everyone’s life there are many people who influence you. And in my case that is also true. But two people tower over the rest. One is my father and the other is your father.
Your father taught me in high school in Lewisporte in the early sixties. He instilled in us the necessity to think and to think logically and more importantly to think critically—and to assemble the facts before forming an opinion. These lessons were the most important I have ever learned and were and are of immeasurable value to me. There was another great idea that I learned from him that has guided almost everything I do and that is fairness. I saw this in how he treated others and in how he taught. It was wonderful to behold. In one subtle move on his part when I was in grade 11 (I told him about this later and he said he didn’t remember—I doubt that) he changed the course of my life, forcing me to reflect on who I was and what, if anything, I should be doing with my life.
You may know that I had cause to call on him when I was premier. And his help and counsel were invaluable to me—from fisheries matters to the Constitution. It was so good to know that I could call on someone like him at that time.
Shelley said of Wordsworth an
d I say of Brose Paddock:
“Thou hast like to a rock-built refuge stood
Above the blind and battling multitude.”
CHAPTER 2: A “HIGHER” EDUCATION
“A university should be a place of light, of liberty and of learning.”
— Benjamin Disraeli
IT WAS ALL A new experience. Exciting and sometimes puzzling. Everyone was swept up in the new campus celebrations. The opening of the new modern Memorial University campus, replacing an old and worn-out campus on Parade Street, took place in October, 1961.
Mr. Smallwood, the premier, had all these famous people visit, and I remember being part of the parade celebration, marching with hundreds of others along Elizabeth Avenue parallel to the new campus. There were bands and marching groups, schools and various organizations, and people representing electoral districts from all over the province. There was the prime minister of Canada, Mr. Diefenbaker, the new Chancellor Lord Thomson, and the distinguished American, Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It was a glorious time for the province, and it launched me and many others on our educational and life careers.
There was lots to learn and courses to choose from and my first exposure to lineups. Just registering at the university meant a lineup, and choosing subjects and books all involved lineups. Being a bayman, this did not come easy. We quickly became aware that this new place was very much a townie place, and we baymen were the outsiders. It was changing with the large influx of baymen registered in the Education faculty, but there was still a big swagger to those townies that did not sit well with many of us. This became even more grating when one of our own numbers tried to act like a townie.
However, perhaps the most surprising early experience of the bayman’s place was a particular policy at the university. We were informed that we would all have to take a speech test. And if we did not speak “properly,” we would have to take special speech lessons. Wow! This was a bit of a shocker. And so we were all given times when we would have to appear before two professors in a room and read a prose passage, the reading of which would determine whether we would have to take the special speech course or be exempted. This was perhaps the first time since my experiences in high school in Toronto that I felt I was being hard done by, as we say.
So I was ready with my own approach to the situation. On entering the room I was asked to sit, which I refused, interrupting the two professors to propose that I remain standing and recite a piece of work that I had chosen. Somewhat taken aback, the professors agreed, and I proceeded to recite from Tennyson’s Ulysses: “It little profits that an idle king, by this still hearth, among these barren crags, match’d with an aged wife . . .”
I don’t remember the exact number of lines I recited, but it was not many before I was interrupted by one of the professors and told that that was just fine—there would be no need to recite more, and I could go.
There was no speech class for me.
But the whole thing was disgraceful. This procedure did not last for many years, thankfully. Ironically, it wasn’t long before there was a Folklore Department and valiant efforts made to preserve the many dialects (that we were encouraged to “eliminate”) throughout the province. There was this attitude throughout the land that we had to modernize, as exemplified by the new campus, and that meant for some strange reason that our language and customs would have to undergo major surgery. I was later to realize that this was largely the Smallwood prescription for a “better” province.
Perhaps equally memorable was the initiative by the Smallwood government to provide generous assistance to us students in the form of grants and salaries. This was announced with great fanfare by Premier Smallwood with his full Cabinet in tow at a special assembly held in the Physical Education Building. There was great jubilation among the students and it seemed to be received positively by the population at large. However, a number of us thought that these measures were going too far. Personally, I felt that the present $600 per year grant to Education students, which would be forgiven with two years teaching in the province, was adequate and that we needed to get more qualified teachers in the classroom as quickly as possible. And even this should have a sunset provision at some point. Further, I felt that loans rather than grants would be the better approach to take and that salaries were just too much of a good thing. I began to recognize the politics of it all and was somewhat affronted as I watched the premier and his Cabinet so lavishly dispense with money that I was sure could be used for more worthy things.
These were negative experiences that have stayed with me, but there were many more numerous positive experiences.
I took to the university right away, notwithstanding the long walks to and from my boarding houses in rain and snow. It was exhilarating rubbing shoulders with all these bright people and listening to the more senior students discuss and debate the great ideas of the world. I was captured by it all and spent an inordinate amount of time in the Arts Building common room engaged in debate that seemed at the time more important than classes, or anything else that was happening around me.
The university faculty and administration were conservative and still maintained some sort of dress code. I remember being called to the dean’s office one day to be questioned about an alleged infraction, from some days before, of the dress rules. It was all news to me and I said so to the Dean. He was a little taken back by my mildly aggressive response and confessed to me that someone connected with the Education Society had reported me and that he didn’t know the facts of the matter. This was one of my first encounters with raw politics and ego-dominated organizations. At the time a number of us Education students were agitating for a more open and aggressive Education Society. The leaders were well-entrenched and seemed to want a closed shop and maintenance of the status quo. Being one of the ringleaders of the dissenting group, I guess, I was singled out to be reported to the administration.
This new, more aggressive temperament among the Education students was really a new phenomenon, as they had been known in the past as a passive lot who did not rock the establishment boat. But a new day was beginning to dawn, and even this stodgy bunch was awakening from a long slumber. Perhaps this best manifested itself in a major undertaking by a number of us concerning teacher salaries. Looking to our eventual graduation, we began to investigate the level of remuneration that we would receive on becoming a teacher. We were astounded to find that the wages of teachers then were much lower than what graduates from other faculties would receive in their chosen fields.
So we began to make noise about this—appearing on the local TV newscast evening news (with Don Jamieson, who would later be my adversary in my first election as premier) and finally presenting a brief to the government. This proved to be a little difficult at the time, so a number of us went to the premier’s office at the Confederation Building to give our brief to the premier’s parliamentary assistant, Mr. Edward Roberts, who would be an Opposition Member/Leader in the legislature during my time and, later, become an effective lieutenant-governor.
The university introduced me to ideas and the necessity to think analytically. It introduced me to poetry, history, and philosophy—and most importantly I was introduced to Wordsworth and Shakespeare, Milton, Donne, and Tennyson, and a real library. I remember one day Professor Pitt revealing that if he had to live on a desolate island for the rest of his life and could take only one book with him, it would be Wordsworth’s Prelude.
The breadth and depth of Shakespeare’s understanding of human nature was so remarkable that it was difficult to credit that all the plays and sonnets were all composed by the same person. While the early comedies delight, the later ones had real characters like Malvolio and Shylock, and the histories brought into focus power and intrigue and introduced that over-the-top fellow, Falstaff. The tragedies are explorations of man’s highs and lows. One can often hear the echo of Wordsworth’s phrase “the still sad music of humanity” as one reads them. No oth
er English writer surpasses Shakespeare. I was later to be introduced to American literature: Whitman, Frost, Hawthorne, Faulkner, Wolf, and America’s greatest poet, Emily Dickinson.
I remember Professor Schwartz in History class making the case for the large part economics played in man’s development. I had never thought about this before, so used to viewing history as an isolated list of events and personages was I. The broad sweep of discoveries and inventions through the Renaissance and Reformation—art and music opened up a world for a lifetime of reading and appreciation. I still have the wonderful book Religion and the Rise of Capitalism by R. H. Tawney and David Thomson’s Europe Since Napoleon. I remember Professor Bruce and his review of Greek and Roman history. He urged me to do a paper on the influence of the Athenian navy upon the success of the Athenian state, which I did. Professor David Freemen led us through the metaphysical poets of Donne, Herrick, Herbert, and Marvell, and who can forget Milton? Sister Nolasco gave the course in Philosophy for Education students, and this was my first brush with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, with St. Augustine, Aquinas, Bacon, Voltaire, and Chardin. Unfortunately, it was the only stimulating course offered by the Faculty of Education.
In my third or fourth year I got involved in running for student council. I am unsure, now, how this came about, but I think it had to do with my continuous debates and discussions in the common room and my involvement in the Debating Society and a fraternity called Mu Upsilon Nu. However, I was not well-known outside of these groups, and hence seeking a seat on the council was really a bit of a long shot. Well, a small group of students—probably fired up more by the high risks and my bayman roots than anything else—swept into action to assist me and, from posters to candidate debates, we made a positive impression. To our surprise, I polled third in the balloting and took a position on the council for that year. I was responsible to council for overseeing the various clubs and societies on campus. Rex Murphy headed the polls and became president. I remember one of the first speeches he gave to some organization in the city. He contacted me for assistance, and I remember one night sweating with him over the text of the speech he should give. The council was a real debating society then, with all of the members taking many a long while to say very little. It was the nature of young, naive politicians to be so wordy, I suppose, yet I have learned that even more mature politicians don’t seem to be much better.
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