where I kind of developed
a feel for shapes and lines
and the feelings they create.
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was super embarrassing to me, especially when he talked
about religion. It embarrassed me that my parents were
religious. I didn’t want to be religious. I wanted to fit in.
And people who were religious were weird, right?
Our house was a non-stop train station, always full of
teenagers and prayer meetings. And music! Dad played
piano, and music was a big deal in our house. He’d make
us sit around the piano at night and sing in three-part
harmony. My two sisters were both good at the piano,
too. I never learned how to play it. I was in choir, though.
In fact, I was the leader of the junior choir. Crazy, huh?
Even though I wasn’t very good in school, I did like
band class, and my teacher took a shine to me. I played
trumpet. I wasn’t good at reading notes because of my
dyslexia, but I was good at playing. I played my trumpet
at events, weddings and church services. I’d wail away on
it and people loved it. Who’d a thunk? I always say it’s a
good thing I wasn’t good at playing the guitar because I
would have been in a rock ’n’ roll band and it would have
all been downhill from there.
There was lots of music around the Luxury Freeze, too.
Buddy Holly. The Everly Brothers. Little Richard. I remem-
ber hearing Elvis Presley sing “Don’t step on my blue
suede shoes” in 1956 and being really blown away by that.
Maybe that’s what drew me to shoes in the first place.
Then, in 1958, there was a fire at the Luxury Freeze.
Even though my dad got plenty of insurance money to
rebuild, the energy just went out of him. Two years later,
he sold it, and my family moved out to the suburbs,
to South Burnaby. At the same time, he went through
something of a religious awakening. It was good, and
not all that good.
Around 1961, my dad went to Bible school. And then
things kind of went sideways for him. He got sick with
rheumatoid arthritis and ended up on a disability pension
for the rest of his life, which made him bitter, especially
having railed his whole life against low-lifers on the
government dole. Meanwhile, he was determined to
become a minister and thought I should be one, too. It
was the 1960s, though, and that wasn’t going to happen.
Instead, right around then, in my teens, I decided I was
going to be bad. I wasn’t super bad. Mostly, I had this
dual life of being Mr. Cool and Mr. Christian Kid. I wasn’t
good in school—I couldn’t add two and two and get four.
My grades weren’t good. I raised a ruckus in class. I was
the class clown. Disruptive. A tough kid. Sometimes I’d
even pick on kids on the way home from school, but I
wondered even then why I did it. Like I said before, a lot
of my life was me not thinking I was good at things, then
finding out later that I actually was. I didn’t do sports.
Sigurd sells the Luxury Freeze
and the family moves to South
Burnaby.
In high school, John discovers
that he’s a terrible student, but
a snappy dresser who was into
cars and good at band. Later he
realizes that he has a sort of
dyslexia that makes classroom
learning a challenge.
Fire devastates the Luxury
Freeze; his father rebuilds, but
loses his passion for it.
1958 19621960
Sigurd goes to Bible school;
John decides to become a
troublemaker.
1961
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I was terrible at them anyway. I took things apart and
customized them. Even when I was little, I’d change the
shape of all my Dinky cars—I’d flatten them, shorten
them, take off the doors, cut off the roofs, anything to
make them different.
Back then, no one really knew about things like
dyslexia. I never even heard about it until I was in my
twenties, and now I think maybe that was a factor when
I
