Alan Pickersgill - The View From Here

My July 21 column, which was written on July 17, spoke of my father's health and how the years are catching up on him. Sadly, he passed away at about 5:00 am on Friday July 24. Instead of a July 28 column, I offer the following obituary which speaks quite inadequately of 90 years worth of interesting living.

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PICKERSGILL, Charles James on 24 July, 2009, peacefully at Stratford General Hospital in his 91st year.

Charles was born in the London borough of Shoreditch, U.K. on May 4, 1919, the son of Charles and Annie (Chizlett) Pickersgill.

At the age of 14 he began training as a restaurant waiter and worked in the merchant marine as a steward on the Cunard Line and the White Line.

He joined the Royal Navy in 1939. During the war years he served as a telegrapher on HMS Hood from May 1940 until December 1940. He also served on HMS La Capricieuse and HMS Mermaid.

Following the war he worked as a radio mechanic and a radar technician. He moved to Canada with his family in 1957. His work took him through Canadian and American air bases in France, Germany and northern Canada where he helped install the Distant Early Warning System (DEW Line). For a time he maintained the radar system from the depths of the NORAD "bunker" in North Bay.

After retiring from ITT Canada in Guelph he volunteered with L'Arche Stratford, the CNIB, and at Woodland Towers in Stratford where he lived since 2002.

Charles was a member of Immaculate Conception Roman Catholic Church, Stratford, the Royal Canadian Naval Association and New Democratic Party.

He enjoyed travelling extensively with his wife, Marjorie, whom he married on June 9, 1943 in Scotland.

He was an avid Scrabble player and a strong advocate for peace and social justice.

Dear father of Edward Pickersgill of Guelph, Alan Pickersgill and spouse Lynne Hulley of Guelph, Ronald Pickersgill of London, Ont., and James Pickersgill and spouse Jane Ashmore of Cobourg.

He is also survived by 16 grandchildren; five great-grandchildren; one sister, Joan Sanderson of London, U.K.; and several nephews, nieces and friends throughout England, Scotland and Canada. He touched many lives during his journey on our planet.

Predeceased by his sister, Daisy Thompson on September 23, 1972; his grandson, Ruairi Ashmore on April 27, 1997; and his wife, Marjorie Mary (Brennan) on December 2, 2002.

Sincere thanks are owed to the dedicated support staff at Woodland Towers, the nursing staff in the palliative care ward of Stratford General, Dr. Wayne Parsons and several other doctors at the hospital.

Relatives and friends will be received at the Heinbuck Funeral Home, 156 Albert St, Stratford on Sunday from 2-4 and 7-9 p.m.

The funeral mass will be celebrated at Immaculate Conception Church, Stratford, on Monday, July 27, 2009 at 10 a.m. followed by interment at Avondale Cemetery, Stratford. Rev. Father Dick Bester will officiate. Parish prayers will be said at the funeral home on Sunday at 6:45 p.m.

Memorial donations may be made through the funeral home to the charity of your choice.

(July 21) - It’s always good to keep things. On a big picture, think about the Mitchell farm house. It used to be on Paisley Street. Now it’s gone. Armel knocked it over. The best we can do now is describe it to future generations.

They won’t ever see for themselves what it looked like, or the place it held in the development of our community. It was John Lennon who wrote that you’ll never know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’re coming from.

Heritage is more than bricks and mortar. It isn’t just abstract history. It is personal. It is important that we preserve and marvel at the pieces of history we uncover. Some take us by complete surprise. Let me backtrack here and explain what I’m thinking about.

My dad recently had his 90th birthday. It was on May 4, the day after Pete Seeger had his 90th. In the couple of months since then, he started to feel his age. Things happen to your body and mind after they’ve worked for nine decades. There’s not much you can do to stop it. He’s still on the green side of the ground, and that alone is worthy of celebration.

My younger brother and I are getting ready to exercise powers of attorney and make sure things flow smoothly when they start flowing. As part of this, I went through his boxes and drawers and briefcases last Friday. I was sorting out the financial bits and pieces of his life in 2009. It was an endeavour tailor-made for running off on tangents. While looking for something else, you find photos of events you had forgotten to remember. You get lost, for a while, in the memories. Then you get back to separating Bell bills from Visa statements, prescription receipts from rent receipts.

Suddenly you get blind-sided by a treasure trove of things you didn’t think could be kept this long: a document holder with priceless links to youth and a journey from the east end of London to the heart of Ontario.

On April 2, 1933, a month before his 14th birthday, he was enrolled in the London County Council Trade Scholarships for Boys. His father had to sign an agreement that if the apprenticeship was unsuccessful he would pay “an amount equivalent to the sum expended by the Council in connection with the maintenance, education and training of my son … or the sum of (five pounds), whichever be the less.”

The documents track his progress through the Westminster Technical Institute School of Cookery and Waiting, through his navy years and his work contracts. A record of active naval service shows him on HMS Hood from May 15 until Dec. 22, 1940. Hood went down in May 1941 with three survivors from a crew of 1,415.

I found his employment offer for the job that brought us to Canada in 1957. While working for BOAC at London airport, he successfully applied for a job posting with Aircraft Industries of Canada Ltd. The employment contract was for $1.75 per hour and benefits as covered by the collective agreement with Local 4575 of the United Steelworkers of America. He signed it in England in February 1957 and sailed for Canada in March. We followed in August.

Serendipity is the accidental discovery of something that brings new meaning to completely unrelated events.

It is what makes searches fun. I was looking for bank statements and found my father’s youth.

Heritage isn’t only bricks and mortar. It’s also flesh and blood. We don’t just remember it, we breathe it.

(July 14) - It looks as though we will soon have a trial run of late night pissoirs. That’s a good thing. We’ll never know how well they work unless we give them a good go.

If the thousands of revellers spilling out of the big box bars behave themselves, everything will flow smoothly. It isn’t too big of an if, is it? Those gentlemen are world famous all over town for their behaviour. When all the open air stalls are in use, they will politely line up and wait their turn.

This discussion of places to go has had its benefits. It got us all thinking outside the box. Every problem can have several different solutions. The most obvious ones got ruled out first. This would start with the bar stool tax. A set charge for every licensed spot. The bar owners are not thrilled with this idea. They have a notion they already pay enough property tax. So we keep on looking.

Another idea was to put public washrooms in an empty store. This would have the added advantage of being relatively gender neutral. When some can stand while others sit, no one’s human rights are threatened. But the police don’t much like this idea. You never know what’s going on behind the closed doors of a public washroom. So we keep on looking.

If the pissoirs fail, there is still at least one more way. Most of the bar washrooms have coin vending machines. They dispense various personal items that might be of use for those who, as we used to say when I was a lot younger, hope to get lucky at closing time. Things like combs and colognes and other items.

Some enterprising entrepreneur could add new machines. Drop in a couple of toonies and out pops a pair of Depends. Problem solved.

They might even become the trendy fashion statement for responsible revellers.

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Tim Hortons is telling us lately that they can recycle their used coffee cups and lids. They say they’ll be gathering them up in Guelph before the end of the year. They send them to Turtle Island Recycling just north of Toronto. The people in Guelph who are frustrated by the three-stream sorting system are always happy to hear anything that questions its integrity.

The city says the cups can’t be recycled. They have a layer of a thin plastic film that keeps the paper from going soggy when the hot coffee is poured in.

If Tim says it can, and the city says it can’t, a lot of people quickly believe Tim. No further questions asked. Or answered.

The city’s website doesn’t help clear up the confusion. It contains a detailed sorting list for the wet-dry-plus program that says paper coffee cups go in the blue bag and plastic cup lids go into the clear bag.

It is hard to picture Tim Hortons as environmental leaders. If they were, they would give away their used coffee grinds for use in back yard compost bins. Or they would stop double cupping hot drinks and start using paper sleeves like everyone else. Or they would abandon their roll up the rim litter creation project.

These days, everyone wants to project a clean green image. In a world where perception always trumps reality, a good marketing campaign will create this image for anyone willing to pay the bill. They give us carbon neutral cellphones, environmentally friendly sports utility vehicles, litter free coffee shops.

If reality was anything like the public relations image, the world would be in great shape. We wouldn’t be grinding our way down the slope to the infamous tipping point.

(July 07) - I can feel the next Guelph municipal election shaping up just over the horizon. We still can’t see everyone, but we are starting to hear them. We have just six more months until nominations open and serious campaigning begins. Ten months after that we’ll be voting.

The Guelph Civic League recently released its annual council report card for 2008. It contained some surprises, and no politician did better than 86.7 per cent.

Ian Findlay of Ward 2 and Leanne Piper of Ward 5 tied for this first-place score.

Gloria Kovach wasn’t paying attention in class. She was concentrating on getting a job in Ottawa and ended the year with 35.7 per cent. All things considered, she might be proud of this result. It will solidify her support among the folk in town who want to bring back the old council.

Christine Billings was neither here nor there with a lackluster 42.9.

Watch out for a lot of strident, hysterical rhetoric coming your way in the next 18 months. It has started already.

The Farbridge opponents pretended to be outraged when city council delegated authority over some infrastructure projects to the city’s CAO. They want special council meetings every time a decision needs making.

What they don’t say is that Hans Loewig can deal only with projects already approved by council and is bound by standard tendering practices. Everything is above board. He must still work with other senior staff members who must countersign all decisions.

There will be a lot of building going on over the next year or two as the Conservatives steal a page from the socialist hymn book and spend their way out of the recession.

City council will take the money and fix up the transit terminal, the fire station and a load of roads.

Their opponents will spend their time building mountains out of molehills.

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I did a bit of thinking last week.

I was getting ready for Canada Day and my mind brought me back to our centennial year. Two of our most skilled politicians had top jobs in Parliament at the same time. Lester Pearson led the Liberal Party and Tommy Douglas headed up the NDP. A few years ago, when CBC listeners chose Douglas as the greatest Canadian, Pearson was a close runner-up.

Pearson and our current Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, have one thing in common: they are the only two in our history to have led two consecutive minority governments without ever winning a majority. The difference is that Pearson knew how to make minority government work.

During his tenure, with Douglas holding the balance of power, we got Unemployment Insurance, the Canada Pension Plan, The Medical Care Act, a national student loan service, the 40-hour workweek, legislated vacation time and a national minimum wage.

Harper’s minority governments have been marked by contempt for other leaders and a bullying, confrontational style that has accomplished nothing of lasting value. He gets away with it because he serves without an effective Official Opposition.

Pearson had one other distinction. He is the only Canadian individual to win the Nobel Peace Prize. He got it in 1957 for developing United Nations Peacekeeping Forces in the Middle East.

How times have changed in half a decade.

Back then, we were known around the world as mediators, a country willing to stand between warring armies and keep them apart. We knew how to settle differences peacefully. Now, we are participants in a futile war halfway around the world. We have sent brave young men and women to kill and to be killed.

Too many come back wounded, emotionally scarred or psychologically damaged.

Pearson and Douglas would roll over in their graves if they saw where Jean Chretien, Paul Martin and Stephen Harper have taken the country.

(July 03) - Like many others in this wonderful city, I came from a distant land. I am Canadian by choice, not by birth. All my children and my granddaughter are Canadian by birth. All but my oldest son were born in Guelph General Hospital.

Whether we were born here or traveled here, our diversity defines us. It makes us interesting. In school I was taught that Canada had two founding nations, the English and the French. It was a lie. There was a third, if you lump all the aboriginal nations into one.

Be that as it may, the original people and the European invaders have since been joined by families from every country in the world. Whether we have been here for ten years or ten thousand years, we celebrated our 142nd birthday on Wednesday.

Canada had its 100th birthday 10 years after my family stepped off a ship and onto a Quebec City dock. In the centennial year we were excited young people in an exciting young country. We were entranced by Expo 67, mesmerized by the music, galvanized by the politics. Then, we marched for peace in Vietnam. Today it’s Iraq and Afghanistan.

Then, we organized food co-ops and worker co-ops. Today I belong to, shop in, or work at, some of the co-ops in Guelph: Meridian Credit Union, Co-operator’s Insurance, Cole Road Housing Co-op, Planet Bean, the Natural Burial Co-operative. There are lots more available: five other housing co-ops, a couple of other credit unions, a bunch of child care co-ops, Guelph Campus Co-op, Gay-Lea Dairy, Fire Fly Energy, Genex and many more.

I had never heard of Guelph 42 years ago. It entered my consciousness in 1968 when ITT, the company my father worked for, abandoned Montreal to come here. I followed in 1971 with a wife and a 14-month old baby.

I had heard of Lester Pearson, the centennial Prime Minister. He has a little known connection to Guelph. He is the only Canadian politician to ever play semi-pro baseball for the Guelph Maple Leafs, a forerunner of the Guelph Royals in the old Canadian League. The Royals Wikipedia entry doesn’t mention Pearson’s time with the team, but he was here for at least the 1917 season. He’s in the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame, but not the Guelph Sports Hall. Are our standards higher, or is our Hall overdue for a correction?

When I made my way down the 401 to Guelph, it was a bustling city of 60,000. An early memory is trying to catch a bus to campus. I walked to the Square, sat on a bench and waited. And waited. It was a cold February Sunday morning and it was long time before someone came along to tell me I’m not in Montreal any more. You want to know how long ago that was? The public library had so much space there were two community meeting rooms in the basement.

Guelph was a good place to live in 1971 and a better place today. What makes it so? The people, the history, the public institutions, the community involvement. There were always three legs to our economic stool: public sector, manufacturing and co-operatives. The public sector has been eroded by too many acts of privatization. Manufacturing has been hammered by free trade and globalization.

The co-operatives continue to thrive. They have done for a long time.

Samuel Carter, the mayor of Guelph in 1913 – 14 was president of the Workingman's Co-operative Association of Guelph. He was also the first president of the Canadian Co-operative Association.

We have come full circle with our present mayor who also has strong community roots and brings a co-operative style of governance to city hall.

What makes Guelph a better place? We all do.