Remembering Joe Wolfond

I'm not talking about little Joe. I'm talking about old Joe.

Not that little Joe was a bad guy. I had many an entertaining conversation with him in his basement office at the Willow West Mall.

Little Joe was a good guy.

But old Joe made the wheels go round.

Old Joe was a Russian Jew who landed in the new world with what most old world Jews landed here with.

Nothing.

Old Joe took it from there. By the time I first heard the Wolfond name, back in the '60's, it was a well established "fact" that Joe Wolfond got rich by being the first guy at the city dump every morning.

By the sixties there was a well-established Jewish community in Guelph, and there was a well-established Jew-hating community right alongside of it.

By the time I got to know old Joe he was pretty much the fall guy in every anti-semitic joke in town.

That was in the early '70's. I was a gas pumper and then the manager of John's Supertest. At John's Supertest, we prided ourselves on matching the lowest gas prices in town.

It was a strategy that worked. Match the lowest price in town, plus clean the windshield real good, by God they'd be coming back again and again.

And they did.

So I got to meet old Joe on a regular basis. And a lot of other stalwarts of the community as well. After all, who doesn't want to save two cents on a gallon of gas?

Old Joe was always a decent guy. He wouldn't leave the place without dropping one of his maxims.

His voice wasn't that far removed from that croak Marlon Brando had in the Godfather. In that Godfatherly croak he'd intone:

They say money talks. All my money ever says is goodbye Joe.

So you can see why I fell in love with the guy right there and then.

But that's not why I'm remembering Joe Wolfond.

I'm remembering old Joe because of a conversation I had tonight with the farm manager. Both of us recall friends who started out small and then morphed into big people.

Suddenly their two thousand square foot homes weren't good enough anymore.

You couldn't have people over because after all, those others have six thousand square feet and a serious art collection.

Old Joe would have none of that. A few years after that Supertest experience he would come into the K-mart where I then worked, and pick over the hammers and saws at our 88 cent sale.

By then old Joe's net worth was well into the tens of millions. He wore a rumpled suit that suggested nothing more or less than having slept in the ditch for the last three weeks.

I'm 100% sure he never gave a shit about what people thought of him.

Today his progeny are big deals in the Toronto Jewish community.

I hope they remember where they came from.