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| Worked hard but enjoyed every moment. |
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| I was born on a farm near Muenster, Saskatchewan
in 1930, when there was no such thing as a telephone, electric lights, radio, TV, cars or computers.
It was the day of the horse and buggy, and all farm equipment was pulled by horses. My older brother and I soon
learned to drive as many as ten horses pulling a piece of farm equipment. |
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| Relaxation in the evening consisted of reading a
book or the comics. If it was dark and there were no clouds in the sky, we could go outside and watch the beauty of
the Northern Lights. |
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| Those were the days when there still were a lot
of wild animals and birds. It was not unusual to see deer in the pastures and fields, and huge flocks of ducks flying
overhead. |
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| This soon changed and first we got the steam engine,
telephones, mantel battery radios, then electricity and the gas autombiles and tractors. It was not long before these
new gasoline tractors took the place of horses pulling equipment, and the horses were sold to the the mink farm. Dad
taught my brother and I how to drive the tractor and car. |
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| Dad was a farmer and a blacksmith, and made a lot
of his own machinery. The farm was a grain farm, growing wheat, oats and barley, but Dad also raised cattle, pigs and
chickens, for extra income and meat for the family. |
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| With the introduction of the powerful tractors,
the trees soon disappeared, and so did the wild animals and birds. |
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| At age 17 I left home and for a short while worked
on another farm a few towns away, and then worked in a farm equipment shop. From there, I went with a friend to Sudbury,
Ontario and worked underground in the nickel mines, that Sudbury is so famous for. Most of the time there I worked as
a torch cutter with oxygen and acetylene, cutting metal plates up to six inches thick, for underground construction. As
we changed shifts every week, I never saw daylight for a whole week, when I worked on the graveyard shift. |
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| About two years later I moved to Toronto, Ontario
where I took an automotive course, but eventually because employers only wanted workers with several years experience, I ended
up working for CIL Paints in north Toronto, working in their paint lab. This was a very interesting job where there
was very little room for error, or you could ruin a 1,000 gallon batch of paint. |
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| On November 18, 1955 Herb married Rose Edgington
and in July 1956, we moved to Vancouver and after a few small jobs, I got hired onto the Vancouver Post Office on November
1st. I started as a mail sorter, but soon I got to learn all the different specialized jobs, and from then on I was
often called upon to fill in anywhere. |
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| Eventually, most jobs were taken over by the new
mechanical sorting machines, and with it went the job of knowledge sortation, which had turned into simplified sortation.
Most workers that did know anything about the different specialized jobs, soon lost that knowledge. I was able
to keep my P.O. knowledge and in the last five or so years, before my retirement, I was put in charge of a whole floor, because
no supervisor knew how to do it. |
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| I would not accept any special pay for this, because
I did not want to be a part of management. I was a union person and refused to become a supervisor. |
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| I retired on December 30, 1989. |
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