Canada sees the rise of mall cities

That's the headline for a story in the real estate section of today's Globe & Mail. Apparently mall owners are developing the space over their malls for condos. What a concept! In the mid-80's I used to have occassional meetings with Joey Wolfond at his office in the basement of the Willow West Mall. That was Guelph's first enclosed shopping mall, and it had been developed by Joey's grampa, Joe Wolfond. Joey and I were close to the same age, and he was an amicable converstionalist. We ostensibly met to discuss the sale of a nearby strip mall his family owned, but our conversations veered all over the map, from caribbean cruises to fast cars to his grampa, who I had the pleasure of knowing ever since my gas jockey days at John's Supertest in my teens. Occasionally the discussion turned to real estate, and I remember debating the pros and cons of adding apartments in the space above the mall. The Willow West Mall had a huge parking lot, that never came near full capacity except for the week before Christmas. Why couldn't you put twelve stories of rentals overtop the mall? You already own the mall, so it's basically a free building site. Joey told me why they couldn't. Zoning. Bylaws. Rules. Regulations. That was forty years ago. Today it's newsworthy that mall owners are building out residential over their properties.

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.

Chrysler 300

I first met Kipling when he was bleeding all over the interior of a 1969 Chrysler 300. The guy who owned the Chrysler says to me, "he's bleeding all over my fucking upholstery!"

Me and Mr. Chrysler were standing on the side of what is now officially "Line 86," but was at the time known as the Elmira Road. Kipling was out giving a demo ride to a couple of guys who were interested in buying his Chevy II.

I'd almost bought it before Kipling bought it. It had been owned by one of the Leader boys. The Leader boys worked at a gas station on the corner of Silvercreek and Waterloo Avenue. I walked by it every day after school on my way to my job at John's Supertest.

On the lot they had a couple of cars for sale. A 66 Chevelle with a 327 for $1,500, and a 64 Chevy II with a 283 4bbl and four speed, for a thousand bucks.

I worked crazy hours at John's Supertest, and was salting away a bit of cash from my dollar an hour job. That Chevy II called my name every time I walked by. My sixteenth birthday was coming up, the day I would have a driver's licence... and a 64 Chevy II!

Unfortunately, somebody bought it out from under me before that happy birthday.

Kipling.

A few years later, I'm talking to Buddy beside the road that night. There's two other guys still in the Chevy II, either dead or comatose, and Mr. Chrysler doesn't seem that interested in pulling them out and having them bleed over what's left of his upholstery.

That test drive had gone awry. Kipling had downshifted and stood on the gas to pass that Chrysler 300. A rookie mistake.

The road was a little damp due to the first snowflakes of the season.

The Chevy II spun out, left the road, and hit a tree head-on right across the road from the Brubacher Sales Arena.

That was quite a deal in its time too, the Brubacher Sales Arena. Some sharpie from the States comes up, buys a farm just down the road, calls it a "Sales Arena," and before you know it, they're in the news for selling a dairy cow for a hundred thousand bucks!

But I digress.

Kipling fully recovered from his injuries, as did the comatose guys in the Chevy II. In fact, they recovered so well that they sued Kipling's ass nine ways from Sunday. He's still paying the price today.


I don't know if Mr. Chrysler ever got over his bloodied upholstery.

A minor footnote in the history of Guelph

You know how it goes...

You have a couple beers, maybe you burn one...

Or two.

And before you know it you're meandering down Memory Lane.

That's what happened to me tonight.

Memory Lane.

One of the lessons I learned early from the Guelph Old Boys was if you didn't stand up for yourself you were finished.

Finito.

Fucked.

I remember the day Mr. Brown from B&R Motors came down to John's Supertest where I worked to fill up his Lincoln Mk III.

Came to $14. I remember it like it happened yesterday.

B&R was the Lincoln-Mercury and Ford Truck franchise in Guelph at the time, and Mr. Brown was the big dog in that establishment.

Comes down to John's Supertest, where I'm the pimply-faced teen afternoon shift boss. Fills up his Lincoln and hands me an envelope. Hops in his Lincoln and heads back to B&R.

In the envelope is a note; please deduct gas from Crawford's bill at B&R.

Crawford was the day shift boss. Used to work for Mr. Brown down at B&R Motors. Guess they had some unresolved issues.

Unfortunately, I was responsible for the till on my shift. That 14 bucks was coming out of my pocket.

Crawford Vollet was kind of a hard luck guy. His wife Jean used to show me the pictures of the life they once had; big house, new Cadillac, thriving aggregates business.

Then it all went for a shit, which is a great story for another time, and Crawford was reduced to becoming a truck salesman for Mr. Brown, and when that went off the rails, a shift manager at John's Supertest.

The same place where I was the zit-faced teenage know-it-all afternoon shift manager.

So I have a problem.

Mr. Brown, who is sort of a big deal in town, just stiffed me for 14 bucks. He thought he was getting it out of Crawford's hide, but no. It was coming out of mine.

So a couple of days later when the tank was near empty, I drive my '67 Chev Bel Air wagon down to B&R Motors. Pull up to the pumps.

Filler up!

$16.50. I give the pimply teen who pumped the gas a two dollar bill, two quarters, and an envelope.

Next day Mr. Brown shows up at John's Supertest.

There ensued a heated debate between him and Crawford, a debate that involved a lot of shouting and arm-waving on both sides.

But neither of them ever brought the matter up with me.

We're all niggers now

Back in the day, when I was a gas-pumper at John's Supertest on Wellington Road in Guelph, there was this guy who drove in a couple of times a week in a new Lincoln Mark III. Actually, there was a couple of guys who came in regularly with their new Mark III's. There was Harold Knight, who owned a local lumber yard, and there was Buddy who was a crane operator in the Operating Engineers, a construction union.

The construction unions are one of the few labour groups who have managed to more or less hold up the standard of living for their membership. The others are the cops, the teachers, and the nurses. What do they have in common?

What they have in common is that their work can't be out-sourced to Mexico or China.

You can't send a classroom of local kids to Mexico for the year to learn the three R's from dollar-a-day peons.

You can't out-source policing to Mexico or China either. And it goes without saying that your local health care providers are going to stay local. You might be able to medi-vac the local trauma patients to the nearest regional hospital by helicopter, but those helicopters won't make it to Shanghai.

Till now, the construction trades were safe too, but Big Steve's got a plan that's gonna change that.

One of the big "wins" for Canadian businesses under the pending CETA "free trade" agreement with the EU is enhanced labour mobility. Note that this is a "win" for Canadian business; not for Canadian workers. Buddy and his new Lincoln would never happen if Canada's construction work was thrown wide open to crane operators from Poland and Hungary and Estonia.

But it gets even better; at least for business owners, not workers. That hush-hush TPP trade agreement that Big Steve has been busy with is gonna throw open the door to crane operators from India and Bangladesh!

That's really gonna piss off the guys from Poland who just moved here to take away Canadian jobs that used to pay $50/hr by doing them for $20/hr. By the time the Bangladeshis settle in, a tower crane operator in Toronto is going to be working for five bucks an hour!

Around the time Buddy was pulling into John's Supertest, Pierre Vallieres was sitting in a cell in New York State penning a book called White Niggers of America.

Pierre was a bit ahead of his time. His provocative use of the "N" word was meant to draw attention to how Quebecois workers were exploited. Sadly, time has passed Pierre by...

We're all niggers now.

Crawford and me

Crawford was a hard luck guy who almost made it in the world of road construction. Coulda been up there with Cox and that obnoxious guy who ran Atlantic Paving.

By the way, that obnoxious guy who ran Atlantic Paving still owes me a steak dinner, on account of a bet we made way back in the 80's. He'd bought a farm way out the country end of Paisley Road, thinking he'd be growing subdivisions within a year or two.

I knew enough about the business that I knew he was full of shit, so I told him he was full of shit.

So he gets all huffy and says to me, "Neumann, mark my words, I'll bet you a steak dinner that in two years we couldn't stand here because the cars will be running us over."

At the time, we were standing in a corn field at the corner of Paisley Road and County Rd. 32.

It's still a corn field 35 years later, so where's my steak dinner?

Real estate speculation isn't always the slam dunk you think it's gonna be.

But back to Crawford.

Way before he and me crossed paths he had a major gravel operation going on up Durham way. Used to supply gravel to road-building projects all over south Ontario. Then one day disaster struck.

According to Crawford, and he told me this story many times, the very day that his insurance agent had come round and assured him he was insured for everything, one of his drivers backed into the support pillar for one of his gravel hoppers, causing a chain reaction that took out about a million dollars worth of equipment.

This would have been back in the 1950's, when a million dollars was a million dollars.

I saw enough family photos from Crawford's wife Jean that I knew they'd been real close to grabbing the brass ring before that happened. Had the nice house and the new Cadillac and the whole nine yards.

Long story short, Crawford turned up in my world twenty years later. My dear daddy had bought a Supertest gas station on the edge of Guelph, purportedly so that I could get a part-time job, as I was in high school at the time.

Obviously his thinking at the time was that I was too retarded to find my own part-time job.

In hindsight, he was right.

So Pop buys this Supertest station from this old Polish guy, hires Crawford to run it, but makes him hire me as his gas-pump guy. At least after school and weekends.

Crawford had by then midwifed several unsuccessful careers in the lee of the great gravel pit tragedy. The irony of that episode was that the one calamity that neither Crawford or his insurance agent had foreseen was one of Crawford's own trucks taking out his own operation on his own property.

He was covered for everything, but he wasn't covered for that.

By the time me and Crawford worked together he was pretty much a hard-core alcoholic. One day I was up on the roof of John's Supertest, fixing up the waterproofing on a skylight, when I saw a hand reach up over the eve...

It waved around a bit, and then started running up and down the eve trough. I was transfixed... and then the hand miraculously pulled a pint of whiskey out of the eve!

That's where Crawford stashed his fix!

In hindsight, I think I should have showed the man a bit more respect. As it was, I made a game of hiding the booze he was hiding. Find his fix, take a snort, and replace it five feet down the eve...

Old Crawford would go into a panic...

I'm about the age now that Crawford was then, and I can finally appreciate how unfunny that funny stuff was.

Revelstoke fantasies

I was but a youngster when I first thumbed my way through that neck of the woods.

But the beauty of that neck of the woods has stuck with me ever since.

There was a Shell station just off the Trans Canada Highway at the time. I'd had some experience managing John's Supertest well before that. I knew how to pump gas.

Any fucking idiot knows how to pump gas, which is why self-serve destroyed jobs for millions of teens across North America.

But there's ways to make sure the customer stops at your place instead of the next place.

Competitive price.

Clean every windshield every time.

Act like you care even when you couldn't possibly care less.

That's the magic formula that made John's Supertest the second most productive gas station by volume in the entire city.

So when I passed through Revelstoke it briefly occurred to me that I could make a go of that Shell station just off the Trans Canada.

But I thought I had places to go and things to do.

Wheelies then and now

My old pal Barney had a 1969 Nova SS with a 375 horse 396 four speed and 456 gears out back. While I have to admit I never personally witnessed this, rumor around the Guelph street racing circuit back in the day was that this car would lift the front wheels on a 7000 rpm launch.

That Reinhart fellow with the '68 Mustang side-oiler used to lift the front wheels at launch. That's something I saw. Right there on the 86 Dragway.

But for the most part, wheelie land belonged to the gravel pit crowd. I know I used to be able to keep the front wheel of my Honda ATC in the air for miles. Used to be a master of the "side-wheelie" too. I could go from here to kingdom come with one back wheel in the air.

Mind you, with 90 cubic centimeters of pep, that wasn't nearly as exciting as Wild Willie Borsch keeping the left front off the pavement throughout a 160 mph run.

But back to the gravel pit. While I was tooling around back there with that ATC, there were some heavy-duty moto-cross guys sharing the dirt. The Honda three-wheeler was a bit of a novelty so quite often I'd have the opportunity to take the latest two-stroke moto-cross technology for a rip while the moto-cross guys tested out my ATC.

I remember when those bikes hit the power band you were doing a wheelie whether you wanted to or not. On one occasion I traded off for a ride on a 250 Honda Elsinore. We were racing around in the pits behind John's Supertest when one of the local land-owners came out to complain about the noise.

She was an elderly woman and I certainly wasn't interested in picking a fight with her, but as I pulled away I unexpectedly hit the power-band. Suddenly the front wheel is reaching for the sky and the back wheel is showering the old bat with gravel. That was enough to cause her son, who had been watching from a distance, to call the police with a bizarre complaint about drug-crazed bikers spraying his dear momma with dirt.

That was an afternoon that didn't end well, at least not right away. Turned out that the son was a bit of a super-car afficianado in his own right, and used to race stock cars down at the Flanboro Speedway. I  talked this incident over with him years later and by God, had we known then what we knew now, my evening at the police station could have been avoided entirely.

But back to wheelies. My buddy Jim Lippert, may he rest in peace, was one of those old-school hot-rodders who could shoe-horn any motor into any vehicle and make it work. His last project before he passed on was putting a Cummins diesel from a Greyhound bus into a GMC pick-up truck.

Personally, I didn't see the point, but by God there were certain things that 600 foot/pounds of torque could do that your average GMC pick-up couldn't.

Like wheelies.

But Lippert had an even richer wheelie legacy. He used to run the auto shop at one of the local high schools. A few of the shop teachers around the area were getting into bragging about the race cars their students were building. They'd source an old muscle car, canvas the community for donations, and eventually sink twenty or thirty thousand dollars into some piece of crap that might turn a low 14.

They were like those would be street-racers who couldn't figure out why their 350 Nova was actually slower after they bolted on that 950 Holley three barrel. They'd mount a set of wheelie bars just in case that 14 second Nova, which for a couple of thousand dollars they'd just turned into a fifteen second car, was going to go over backwards at launch.

So Lippert gets this old Oldsmobile station wagon. Has his students spend a week mixing cement by hand and pouring it into the back. The old girl must have had two tons worth of concrete behind the back seat.

He takes it to the back parking lot at his school, puts the hydramatic 350 in neutral, sticks the pedal to the metal and dumps it into "drive".

The old girl lurches forward, front wheels about three feet off the ground, and she expires right there.

But he had the students record every second of this launch. What you saw in the pictures distributed around the School Board was this 1980 Oldsmobile station wagon doing a wheelie, and the caption that said "shop teacher builds nine-second racer from junkyard parts."

Sorry to let the cat out of the bag Jimmie!

Jack's Auto Repair

In my teen years I worked at a place called "John's Supertest" on Waterloo Avenue in Guelph. It was the last gas station on the way out of town, just up the road from the "Manor", the last strip joint on the way out of town.

I got to remembering this when I was researching the post about Jimmie Johnson's green racer.

I remember "Mountain Green". In fact, a couple of times I came close to buying a car in Mountain Green.

There was a place in town called Howes and Reeves. They were by that time the "American Motors" dealer. American Motors was the flailing entity run by Mitt Romney's dad at the time, and they flailed until Chrysler bought them out, mainly to get their paws on the Jeep brand, a few years later.

But for a few months back in the late 60's Howes and Reeves had a couple of used cars on the lot that caught my eye. Both were Mountain Green in color.

Both were Chevy Bel Air 2-door post coupes. One was a 327 four speed. The other was a 427 four speed.

I spent a lot of time figuring out how to stretch my $1.20 an hour pay packet to get one of those cars, preferably the 427.

Eventually I figured out I wasn't going to get there from here, which probably marked the onset of my first serious bout of clinical depression.

A year later I was eye-balling a 69 Nova 396/375 at Barry Cullen Chev-Olds. Brand new. Mountain Green with a black vinyl roof. Bench seat, radio delete, 4:11's in the back.

By then I was working full time at John's Supertest. The Nova priced out at just under four grand. Alas, I still couldn't make it work.

Back to the depression. Back to pumping gas 60 hours a week and driving  a 67 Bel Air wagon with a 283 powerglide.

Those were bleak times.

But around the back of John's Supertest we rented out the service bays to Jack, proprietor of Jack's Auto Repair.

When I got hired on at John's the proprietor (John) took me on a tour of Jacks Auto Repair. Jack wasn't in at the time, and since that was the middle of the afternoon and this was a car repair shop I suppose at some level that should have been a tip-off.

Nevertheless John gave me a major spiel about how Jack was the best mechanic in town and I should refer business to Jack whenever possible. He reverently opened the drawers of Jack's tool box to reveal the neatly-ordered wrenches and sockets.

"You can tell a good mechanic by how he takes care of his tools" John solemnly intoned.

So I was pre-disposed to think Jack was some kind of mechanical miracle worker.

And the cars he had for sale seemed to bear that out. A 64 Ford Galaxy with a 406 four speed, an ultra-rare combo that would be worth a fortune today. Had the engine block tied off to the frame with a length of chain.

A 390 four speed Mustang. Asking only $1800.

Over the next six months or so I figured out a couple of things.

Jack was rarely in his shop. He was more often in court fighting small claims cases over cars he hadn't fixed.

When he was in the shop I never saw him working on a car. He and his sidekick "Rubber" would while away the hours drinking beer, which they kept in the toilet tank to keep cold.

I would see cars coming in on the back of tow-trucks, sit in Jack's shop for three months, and leave on the end of tow-trucks, after much ill will had transpired between Jack and the car owner.

Only years later did it occur to me that John was getting kick-backs on the money Jack was wheedling out of customers while not fixing their cars.

That was really depressing...

Imperial fireball

Can't remember the exact nature of the dispute.

But there was a dispute. Between me and one of the other guys who worked at the gas station. I was a mere 16 or 17 years of age. The other disputant was a little older, but he'd brought his much older buddy Marquardt into it as the heavy hitter.

I remember a heated debate by the pop cooler at the gas station, just after closing time. Things went sour. I kicked Marquardt in the crotch and almost had him in the pop cooler, but then other buddy was all over me. Had to run for it. Made it to my car and took off. They were right behind me.

Marquardt had an old Chrysler Imperial, late 50's vintage. Nice enough car in the day. All leather upholstery. Blue leather. Pretty sweet. Had the 392 hemi in it.

Led them on a wild goose chase through the suburbs and the downtown and the uptown and then out of town. Couldn't shake them. Down Victoria Road at 120 miles an hour. I was losing them, but I could still see their lights.

Hung a left onto the Arkell Road. Half a mile up there I knew there was a railway crossing. Over the hundred  years since the Grand Trunk had put the rails in, the road had gone down or the tracks had come up, I'm not sure which. In any case, there was about a three foot berm at the tracks, which anyone who knew the road would know about, and anybody else wouldn't. I was counting on Marquardt not knowing the road.

I saw the lights of the Imperial follow me onto the Arkell Road. Took it up to about ninety and then let it coast down. Didn't want Marquardt to see brake lights coming on. That would tip him off. Coasted over the berm and hit the gas. Those lights were gaining on me fast. He's going to hit that berm any second....

KABLOOEY!

There's a giant fireball in my rear-view mirror. Holy shit! I just lured buddy and his buddy into a death trap! Oh my God! What do I do now?

I was petrified. Do I go back? No, they're probably burned to a crisp. What good am I gonna be?

Had a sleepless night. Went to work the next morning.

Holy shit, there's buddy!

Alive!

"Holy shit man, we thought we had ya, and then, holy shit, we're like fucking flying through the air, and then we come down and the gas tank falls off, and kablooey, the fucking gas tank explodes, and we're coasting down the road with this huge fucking fireball behind us. The cops and the firetrucks were there in five minutes.  Marquardt got charged with drunk driving.

Is he ever pissed with you man!"