We fooled everybody... except the health inspector

In my teen years I had a gas-pumper job at John's Supertest, out Waterloo Ave just past Silvercreek. It was a two-storey structure with a couple of apartments upstairs, and public washrooms, an office, and an auto repair shop on the main floor.

My job included keeping the public washrooms clean. Over time, there seemed to me to be more and more plumbing malfunctions, to the point I was spending more time mopping up toilet overflow as pumping gas.

We brought the situation to the attention of the absentee owner, who had bought the place as a real estate investment. Eventually a backhoe and a couple of guys with clipboards showed up. 

Bad news! The city sanitary sewer didn't run that far out Waterloo Ave at the time, and the septic system needed replaced.

The owner wasn't the kind of guy to throw around money on capital improvements if they could be somehow delayed, avoided, or simply forgotten. His solution? The backhoe had partially exposed the rotten septic tank, so there was an open sewage pit in the side-yard. He spent fifty bucks on a sump pump and fifty feet of plastic pipe to pump the shit and piss into the ditch.

That solved the problem of the toilets not flushing, but it created a new problem.

The scent of raw sewage permeated the air.

People would comment on it when they pulled up for gas. I blamed it on the City of Guelph sewage treatment plant, just down the road.

"Ya, I know! When the wind blows the wrong way, they stink up the whole neighbourhood. Ain't it disgusting!"

That worked pretty good for about six months. Then one day, the health department guy who does septic tank inspections stopped in for gas. Unbeknownst to me, his office was at the sewage treatment plant, so he knew what it smelled like down there, which was nothing like the smell at John's Supertest.

As I'm filling up his car and washing his windshield, he's walking around sniffing the air. His sniffer takes him towards the ditch. He bends over and puts a finger in the muck and lifts it to his nose...

I knew we were screwed right there.

He spots the plastic pipe and follows it back to our sewage pond. We're shut down on the spot.

Overnight, the owner found the money for the new septic system, and we were open for business by the next afternoon!

Alas, John's Supertest was eventually bulldozed to make way for the mother of all highway interchanges, where Waterloo Ave crosses the Hanlon. That monstrosity wiped out everything in a one mile radius except for a strip joint and the Guelph Bible Chapel, but I'll leave those for the next history lesson.

Why I'm more comfortable in old houses

Because I'm old?.. ha ha...

This will be a little self indulgent, but it's my blog. If you're hoping for some insights into global geo-politics, might as well skip this one.

When my folks arrived on these shores in '56 we started at the bottom. My father's first job in Canada was shovelling coal at the Kloepfer Coal Company. With a hand shovel.

That was when coal was still the number one home heating fuel, not yet eclipsed by furnace oil. Just to frame it for you, the milkman still came by in a horse-drawn chariot in those days.

After the coal-shovelling gig Dad got on delivering lumber for Stewart Lumber. That's another iconic Guelph brand that has gone the way of Kloepfer Coal and so many others.

There used to be an outfit called J.P. Hammill and Sons, which made denim jeans. They made them right there in Guelph back in the day.

That was the pre-free-trade era, obviously.

After a brief spell in the lumber truck, Dad got on at a factory. Omark. They made saw-chains for chain-saws.

In the overall scheme of things Omark was a rung below the top-tier industrial plants in Guelph at the time, but several rungs above J.P. Hammill and the like. Back in the day, every immigrant (and everybody else too) understood the concept of rungs.

Dad held that Omark job for ten years. I know that because I recall he got a watch from the company for ten years of service. A half-decent watch, I might add. Couple of rungs above a Timex, for sure.

During those years we lived in a succession of old fixer-uppers, on Neeve Street, Derry Street, and eventually in Elora, first house on the wrong side of the tracks as you're going into town, except the tracks aren't there anymore.

Those were all houses that had challenges, but they were also houses where I felt safe, comfortable, and happy. Life was simple, and simple comforts were all you needed.

The experts who get paid to study this stuff say that your personality is pretty much fixed during the first five years of your life. What you became then is what you're always gonna be.

Till I was eleven or twelve years old Dad went to work in a factory. It never occurred to me to aspire to anything other than one of the top-rung jobs in the factory.

Then Dad, not long after he got that watch, got a real estate license, and that sort of kicked the entire rung system off its moorings.


Elora was the greatest place. In a winter storm we'd get snow-drifts in the kitchen. One Sunday Mom accidentally killed a mouse that happened to be scurrying by the door as we got home from church. Got squished between the floor and the bottom of the door.

But I was happy there.

That's why I'm more comfortable in old houses.