Harjim Machinery Works

One day in 1979 I was out for a bicycle ride and happened to pass the new Edmonton International Airport. I thought, hey, I'll check this out. Locked my bike to a no parking sign and went for a ramble through the terminal. As I was strolling about the p.a. announced some flight number leaving for Victoria, final call. I was just passing by the desk for said airline so I popped over and asked if there were any seats. Five minutes later I was on my way to Victoria.

I'd been there a few times on my cross-country jaunts. Beautiful place. So I settled into my room at the Hotel Douglas and proceeded to make a weekend of it. Every bar I dropped in I'd strike up a conversation with the locals. How's the work situation? Any work about? Where can a guy find work around here? Nothing. Zip. Nada. Ain't no work around here, brother. I really liked Victoria. Come Sunday I hatched a plan. I'd call in sick to my job in Edmonton and spend a day or two just getting the up-close-and-personal view of the local job market first hand.

I got a city map and wrote down a list of welding shops out of the yellow pages. Headed out bright and early Monday morning on my job hunt. Nothing. Nothing. Oh, the NDP has really screwed this province son, good luck to you, but if you got a job in Edmonton I'd be heading back there. Times are tough all over. So the fourth or fifth place I get to is Harjim Machinery Works. It's a little shop just sort of where Victoria proper turns into Esquimault. I walk into the office. I talk to a guy named Bill, who turns out to be the owner. Bill asks me, can I weld? Turns out one of his lads got locked up on the weekend. I've got a days' work if I want it. But just a day.

I hustle down to the Army & Navy surplus store, grab a pair of steel-toe boots, and by ten o'clock in the morning I've got the helmet down and I'm eatin' smoke. No jobs in BC? Look at me!  Day one ended with, well, Buddy's still in jail, do you want to come back tomorrow? Tuesday ended with we think Buddy is gonna be back tomorrow but why don't you come in anyway. Friday comes around, I fly back to Edmonton, pedal my bike back to my apartment, load all my worldly possessions into my 77 Chevy Impala (with the 350 four barrel that had been the base engine in the Corvette that year), left a note for the landlord (sorry to leave so abruptly but please accept these empties in lieu of 30 days notice) and headed off to my new life in Victoria.

Bill was originally from Seattle. He'd come into some money somewhere along the line and bought this little machine/welding shop in Victoria. That may have been during the Viet Nam draft era. Anyway, Bill was a Jehova Witness, not that he would ever get in your face about it. But he liked to hire his own kind as much as he could. So this little shop had basically two kinds of people, plus two or three outliers. He had his JW folks, who were nice people but pretty much useless in terms of their technical skills. Then there was the hard core welding shop guys who you're going to meet in any welding shop in the country to this day. Kind of a rough crowd, if I can put it that way. Then there were a couple of older european guys who pretty much kept to themselves but really knew their stuff.

Harjim got a lot of its business doing maintenance work at the various mills in the area at the time. The mills were all IWA shops, so our little place was also covered by the IWA contract. Those were still golden days for the International Woodworkers of America. And the work was great. If you weren't out at a mill you'd be doing the little walk-in jobs that show up at a welding shop. I remember doing an emergency exhaust system patch-up on a Porsche 911 for a guy who was visiting from California. Then there was the trucker from Montreal who got pulled off the road at an inspection station and needed some quick and dirty repair welding on the frame rails under his Freightliner. Lots of variety. Never two days the same.

The dynamics on the shop floor were somewhat polarized. The JW's thought the tatooed boozing reefer-smoking madmen were hellbound losers. We thought they were a bunch of wankers. Yet we all had to work together. Didn't always work out that well. I recall one of the lads setting a rag-pail on fire to mask the smell of the weed he was smoking in the shop. One of the JW guys figured out what was going on and ratted him out. His life was hell after that. He'd be welding away, helmet down, on a wire-feed machine, and somebody would cut the wire. There's enough wire left in the whip to weld for another thirty seconds or so, so by the time he ran out of wire and welded the end of his mig gun to itself everybody was back to work. This must have happened to the poor bastard three or four times a day. I don't remember the guy's name, but his initials were MT. I've still got a pair of MT visegrips out in the shed to this day.

There was a strip joint down the way where we used to go for lunch. One day we (the "we" being about half the shop) thought we'd just stay for another round and catch the next show. So we did. Then it was, what the hell, maybe we'll just catch the next show and then we'll go back to work. One thing leads to another, and before we know it, the lead hand, one of the JW's, is there to drag us back to the shop. We strike a deal with him; he stays for the next show and then we all go back to work. A half hour later, the shop foreman shows up.

You're probably getting the drift of where things are heading here, so I'll make a longish and somewhat hazy story short. Bill sent a couple more emissaries over from the engineering office in the course of the afternoon, to no avail. By five o'clock even the JW's were half in the bag, having the time of their lives. At that point I think MT was the only employee still in the shop, but at least he could get some welding done. The scene in Bill's office the next morning was a little upleasant, but at the end of the day he proved himself a real mensch. He didn't fire a one of us.

I'll never forget Jack. Decent welder. Had a very hot and very young girlfriend, as well as some serious substance abuse issues. His girlfriend was from California. He was always asking us if we thought he could get her on the benefit program. We couldn't figure why he was so wound up about it. Sure Jack, doesn't matter if yer old lady's from California - just give Bill her paperwork and it'll go through. One day one of the lads comes out of Bill's office, gets a few of us in a corner away from Jack, and says, you gotta go in the office and see what's on Bill's desk. So we did. It was Jacks' girlfriends' California birth certificate. She was fourteen years old.

At the time I worked there I was still young enough that I was convinced I knew everything. Bill assigned me a job building an offal separator for a chicken abottoir. It was basically a big steel drum with screen all around the outside. Everything stainless steel. As I was working away on this the old Norweigian guy, one of the outliers, kept trying to make suggestions. I'd give him a dismissive wave, hey, I know what I'm doing pops, leave me alone. So after a couple of weeks we truck the offal separator out to the chicken killers and hook it up. Terrible place, by the way. Chicken guts and egg yolks up to your ankles. How people work in that every day is beyond me. We hook everything up and turn on the machine. My offal drum is wobbling like a one-legged drunken balerina. Bill completely loses it; THAT'S FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS OF STAINLESS STEEL YOU FUCKING IDIOT!!!

It was a very humbling moment. No way you're going to bullshit your way out of that corner. I would have fired me on the spot. Not Bill. I worked really hard tearing that drum down and doing it right, with lots of help from the Norweigian. Didn't even bother to book my overtime hours.

Thanks for the break, Bill.