outsiders, and that if he could beat the old one he could beat the new ones—although he did hedge his bet by running ads on the local radio station about the virtues of supporting local industry. He still had plenty of fire in his belly, and he had two sons coming up behind him to take over. What could go wrong?
One fall afternoon in 1965, a couple of business-suited executives from the biggest dairy consortium in B.C.’s lower mainland walked into his office and announced that if he didn’t sell his ice cream operation to them, they’d dump product into his marketplace below his cost until he was bankrupt.
He threw them out. But two weeks later, he got a letter from the B.C. Milk Board informing him that using the best raw milk supply in the area for something as non-essential as ice cream was a violation of board policy and Not in the Public Interest, and my father found himself faced with the prospect of making his ice cream, of which he was justly proud, from more costly and inferior powdered-milk stock and coconut oil.
He reconsidered—or as he put it, Faced Up to Reality. “You Can’t Fight Progress,” he said, spinning the bad news into the core of his philosophy for everything else. “This is all Predestined: the Big Fish eat the Small Fish. Capitalism is no different from the Forces of Nature.”
He took the dairy consortium’s offer, and was out of the business inside six months. But he’d been running two businesses in the same operation, and his soft drink operation, less complicated logistically and more lucrative, was expanding. He’d recently acquired the franchise for 7Up, and now had four of the five most popular brands coming off his trucks—and he held a loan chit on the local Coca-Cola bottler, who was a former employee he’d bankrolled when the hapless previous owner gave up and wanted out.
My father was closing in on his 60th birthday, and he’d been on a 15-year winning streak. He assumed that with two grown sons working under him, he could start another, greater streak. What he didn’t see coming at him was a piece of biology.
My father, you see, was the purest strain of alpha male, and that meant he wasn’t capable of allowing any other dog around him with its tail up, not even for a moment. The problem was that Ron and I had bred true: each of us born with a bushy tail that naturally stood straight up even though we were fundamentally different from one another. Ron had gladly worked for my father since he was 14 or 15 years old, was quick to learn from him, eager to follow his footsteps and habits, most eager of all to gain his acceptance and praise—provided that it involved respect that could be earned by hard work, and some autonomy.
I was five years younger, more willful but with less aptitude and poorer focus. But I was much more curious about the world beyond my father’s business, and completely cantankerous whenever anyone tried to put a thumb on me. I liked the work well enough, but in high school I was more often truant at the after-school jobs he set up for me than I was for my school classes.
The job I liked the best was typing his business letters, which, until I arrived, were being typed by a secretary whose native language was Dutch. She typed the letters exactly as he wrote them, which was a problem because my father used a punctuation system all his own: he capitalized any word that he thought was important, and rarely used periods, commas, or question marks. My father wrote a lot of letters, some the predictable ones to customers demanding payment, but others to his distributors and franchisers, sometimes to complain about something specific, but more often to explain why he was right about everything under the sun, and they weren’t. The more philosophical he waxed, the longer the letters got, and the more capital letters he used. By the time I was in Grade 10, I’d decided that he was making a fool of himself, and pretty much took over as his personal typist. His secretary was happy to let me type the letters, since she had no idea what he was saying and was a peck-and-poke typist who found his wordiness heavy going. My father didn’t seem to mind me typing them until I started deleting his ideas and adding ideas of my own, most of which launched from pretty well the opposite of what he had in mind. After that, I’d find some of the letters I’d been fiddling with waiting for me in the basket when I arrived after school, with my stuff crossed out and even more capitalized words scribbled in the margins than I’d replaced. A couple of times he lost his temper and demanded that I type exactly what he’d written. I’d tone it down for a week or two, then start messing around again. Through high school, it was the one forum in which we could argue and I had the advantage.
When my brother finished high school he bought a car and went to work for my father, ready to work his way up what he knew would be a very short ladder. I spent the year after I graduated in Europe, and when I got home, my father expected I’d do the same. He’d bailed me out of the trouble I got into overseas, remember, and in his mind, my wild oats were sown, I owed him, and it was time to pony up.
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