PREFACE

December 20, 1963 was the day I left a childhood paradise. Surrounded with living history, adventure, exploration and fantasy, my life at 34 Cherrywood Drive, Stoney Creek, was filled with joy and excitement. Our family was getting too large though and we needed a bigger home. Mom used to say “we were evicted by the stork”. So my parents packed up their seven kids and transported us to a modern suburb within a suburban city called Burlington. When we arrived at 5102 Bromley Road, my brother Kirk and I immediately began exploring the neighbourhood. In Stoney Creek we lived at the end of a mature sleepy cul-de-sac with a mountain beside us and a ravine and a creek behind us. We went exploring every day after school and moving to a new city didn’t change that habit. The one end of Bromley Road tapered off into a forest, which you could traverse in about two minutes before it opened up to the back of Skyway Plaza. At the other end there was a park that was largely overgrown and contained an abandoned one-story home near the far end and harbored a creek that emptied into Lake Ontario just beyond.  So my brother and I were satisfied that we could make a go of it in this modern neighbourhood, especially since there was new construction going on in the area, which was a whole new dimension of fun and adventure we had not known up until then. The move was especially difficult for me because six months earlier our sleepy village celebrated the 150^th anniversary of the Battle of Stoney Creek, an event that etched in me a passion for history that has never diminished over the years.

Amidst all the bedlam of the move, we never noticed that dad had gone out and bought a Christmas tree. Less than five days later, my dad and my mom, who, by the way was almost eight months pregnant, performed their roles as Santa Claus without missing a beat. Looking back, I don’t know how they did it. But it was a pattern of behavior I witnessed over and over again through the coming years. Despite the fact that dad’s livelihood was selling real estate, no matter what was going on in the general economy, our life pattern did not change. We ate the same in good times and bad, we were always dressed to perfection when we went out, and we always participated in girl/boy scouts. I witnessed many real estate companies go bankrupt during the 1975 recession, but we continued to consume two large platters of steak every Sunday night, regardless of the economy.

MY FATHER – THE BEGINNING

Donald Manley Jackson was born on May 11, 1921 in Gananoque, Ontario. He was the third of eight children, from a long line of large families on both sides of his family tree. His great great paternal grandfather emigrated from Chaddesten, Derbyshire, England, to Pittsburgh Landing, Frontenac County, Ontario sometime between 1795-1830. His maternal ancestor, Henry Cross, was part of Rogers Rangers, operating in Vermont and New York during the American Revolution, which he fought in from 1776-1785. (40) As a reward for his service to the Crown, and the role he played in the capture of General Johnston at Coos, New Hampshire, he was allotted land outside of Lansdowne and Gananoque, Ontario. (34) The Cross Cemetery is located at Halstead Bay, outside Gananoque, and contains the graves of his descendants. Henry Cross, along with six other men, formed the first Masonic Lodge in New Oswegatchee, now Maitland, Ontario. (41)

Dad attended MacDonald Public School in Kingston from 1928-1935. Just 2 weeks after turning nine, his mother died giving birth to his sister Florence. In the 1970’s dad wrote out a list of his life’s accomplishments and the first item he listed was how he helped out his mom on the farm and that he was her favourite. (1) He stuttered terribly as a child but managed to cure himself, and later helped an air force buddy, Fred Coulter, cure his stuttering as well. His first business transaction occurred when he was twelve years old when, with the help of a brother and cousin, he was able to turn $2 into $4. Unfortunately, his father Cedric was an alcoholic and would take what little money he and his brothers earned and spend it on liquor. I am told from several sources that Cedric used to regularly beat dad’s brother William, for no apparent reason.

Kids sometimes have special names between good friends. Dads was “Doc”, his other two friends were “Zeke” Spencer and “Foo”.

Dad attended Kingston Collegiate Vocational Institute (the only high school in Kingston before 1955) from 1936-1937, where he completed 1 year. Leaving home at 16 he made his way to Timmins, Ontario where he landed a job as an usher in Hansen Theatre. He would recall how on Saturday nights the Italian and French men in the area would line up on either side of the street and fight each other. Turning down a job offer to work in a mine in Timmins, he decided to return home to Kingston instead, where he took up residence at 290 Frontenac St., almost next door to his high school. He got a job with Famous Players Theatre and was promoted to Head Usher. After eight months he landed a job as a machine operator at the Aluminum Company of Canada in Kingston; a job he held until joining the RCAF on September 3, 1942. He was 21 years old. The references he used when he applied to enlist was his high school principal, and the managers at Hansen Theatre, Famous Players Theatre and the Aluminum Company of Canada.

THE WAR YEARS

When dad enlisted with the RCAF, his stated preference was to be a “Metal Inspector”. His official title was Leading Aircraftman …. which was a sort of “jack-of-all trades” for anything relating to an airplane on the ground. Trained as an Air Frame Mechanic, he performed well in training and was picked for a precision drill squad in Debert, Nova Scotia. He was shipped off to England in time to meet his brother Bob who was a bombadier with the 420^th bomber squadron. Recalling how he travelled over the English Channel on a barge, he witnessed a fellow soldier suffer a nervous breakdown when he studied a map of the territory controlled by Nazi Germany and the beachhead held by the Allies.

Dad landed in France four days after D-day and what followed for the next year was the greatest adventure of his life. Listening to his stories and remembering movies like Stalag 17, Kelly’s Heroes, The Dirty Dozen and the like, I imagine him having the nickname “Scrounger”. He made his own living space at the end of the runway, constructed out of empty ammunition crates and tarps. There he raised chickens and gave his superior officer an egg every morning. This earned him certain privileges which he maxed out. He told of how he was looting at one end of Caen, France while some of the fiercest fighting of the war was taking place at the other end. With pride he would tell of how he both bought and sold a bottle of coke for $100. One of his favourite stories was how, in early May 1945, he and a fellow mechanic (who remained friends after the war and known to us as Uncle Buzz) somehow managed to get their hands on an automobile, which they then painted to make it look like an official staff car. Dawning their uniforms, they saluted their way through the Allied lines and made their way north to Denmark. They crossed the border in time to greet the surrendering German army, whereupon dad bartered with a German colonel and acquired his stamp album. When they entered the town where the Germans had been billeted, they met the advance scouts for the British army who were preparing for the arrival of the main British occupation force. When asked where they could spend a couple nights, the scout pointed to the hotel that had housed the German officers. When they entered, they found leftover breakfast that the Germans had eaten that morning. Exploring the hotel, they found a locked door and broke it down. Inside was the small arms arsenal for the officers. Loading as much as they could carry into duffel bags they drove back to camp outside of Hamburg, Germany. When I asked him what he did with the guns, dad said he sold them “to guys with less courage than myself”. That rare stamp album that dad bartered off of the German colonel never made it home to Canada when he posted it from Germany. The Canadian post office was where you wanted to work at the end of the war as a lot of packages ended up in the hands of postal workers. Realizing this, dad disassembled four German lugers and posted each part separately. When he got home, he reassembled them and then sold them.

Another story was how when he was scrounging around the German countryside, with the war still going on, he stumbled upon an old British Aerial motorcycle hidden under a haystack inside a barn. He bandaged the front tire, got it running and eventually drove through seven border crossings in a single day. Before he left that German home he had a hot meal, while he held a sten gun on his hosts.

In early May, 1945, as the war ended, there was a strict curfew as sporadic fighting still continued. Dad was partying one night with some locals…….as well as a German soldier still under arms. They ran of out of schnapps and the German said he knew where he could get some more. So, dad dressed him up in a Canadian military uniform, he hopped on the back of dad’s motorcycle, and off they went. Returning with the bottles, they were fired at by Allied sentries when ordered to stop but were able to escape back to the party, unhurt. I cannot imagine how the authorities would have dealt with dad had he been caught. Dressing a German soldier in a Canadian military uniform……running a curfew? I’m sure there was nothing in the manual on how to deal with this scenario. I would have loved to hear the explanation had he been caught.

One moment that stands out is when dad, Uncle Buzz and Uncle Cliff all got together in our basement. All three served in the same unit. Uncle Cliff had seen Belsen at the end of the war and all three recounted the first time they saw an ME262 in flight. While conventional airplane engines had the familiar drone sound, the new jet engine made a “swoosh” sound. They had heard that Hitler was creating superweapons so they were all nervous. They recalled the surprise Luftwaffe attack on their base at Brussels-Evere, during Operation Bodenplatte. This operation was so secretive that roughly 1/3 of the attacking aircraft were shot down by German anti-aircraft guns. Their airfield was targeted by JG-26 and JG-54, which were able to destroy 34 aircraft and damage another 29. As it took place on January 1, 1945, many in dad’s unit were hungover from the party the night before. Dad has  photos of the aftermath of the attack.

His time in the Air Force was something he referred to a lot. He told me how he had witnessed German aristocracy feeding out of garbage cans because they had no survival skills. This observation was the driving force behind his goal that each of his sons be able to make a living with their bare hands if need be. He taught all of his sons to paint. In addition, Kirk learned how to wallpaper and Craig became a jack of all trades. We learned our skills by apprenticing on a low-income small apartment building in Dundas that dad owned along with other rental properties that needed “sprucing up” as he called it.

Dad loved sharing with us his exploits during the war, and he would tell the same stories over and over. He would begin each story by asking “Have I ever told you about the time……”. Of course, we had heard each of them a hundred times but ever respectful we always said no, and then his demeanor would change ever so slightly as he drifted back in time. His time in Europe during WW2 were some of the best years of his life. Later in life his favourite TV series was 12 O’clock High.

He often used military metaphors. We planted cedar trees in the backyard when we first moved into Burlington. Rather than buy them at a nursery, dad took his sons and a bunch of shovels and a tarp, packed everything up in the trunk of his Lincoln Continental and drove out to swamp country north of Burlington. Making a pass around a concession he stopped the car, we all jumped out, grabbed a shovel and started digging, with the youngest one acting as a look-out to warn us if another vehicle was approaching. Dad would drive around making sure the landowner was nowhere to be seen. (How we would know if anyone approaching was the landowner or not was anyone’s guess). When he stopped to pick us up, we would jump out of our hiding spots and quickly load the trees and shovels into the trunk and off we went. When we arrived home mom was nervous and stressed and asked dad “what are you teaching your sons? You are teaching them to steal”. Dad responded with a slight grin “we didn’t steal those trees………we liberated them”.

POST-WAR

Mom and dad first met in Toronto in 1942 before he left overseas. She kept all of the love letters he sent her from England and Belgium. They married in 1946.  One year later she  gave birth to a daughter, Roberta, or “Bobby,” in memory of dad’s brother Bob. He was a bomber in the RCAF and died in an 863  plane bomber raid on Stuttgart, Germany on March 16, 1944.  Only one Halifax was shot down that night and it was Uncle Bob’s.  He was dad’s favurite brother, even before they entered the service. His death came five weeks after the death of their grandfather on February 12, 1944.

Bobby died of croup exactly three months after she was born.  A second child, a son, died from Placenta Previa complications at birth in 1948.  Shortly after this,  the doctors informed mom that she would never have any more children.  They had eight children after that (including one set of twins).  They are, in chronological order: Rhonda (1949), Cameron (1951), Kevin (1954), Kirk (1956), Donald (1958), Craig (1960), Clark (1960) and Trisha (1964).  All told: six boys and two girls.  The eldest and the youngest are girls.

After the war dad, like many veterans, had a hard time finding work. The psychological and emotional impact of this on a man who had bought and sold a bottle of coke during the war for $100, but now struggled to find a job for $15 a week, must have been daunting. They were so poor that when mom was pregnant with her first born, dad could not afford to satisfy her cravings for pickled herring and ice cream, so he went to the local Loblaws and stole what he could.

There was an ad in the newspaper for a dishwasher. He told mom he did not fight in a war to come home and wash dishes. Not finding an alternative, he responded to the ad, only to learn that the job had been filled. He approached a farmer one day looking for work, for which the farmer had nothing available. When he learned that dad was a veteran, he let him take any of the peaches that were on the ground. Dad brought them home and mom sorted out the good ones for sale and she canned the bruised ones and sold them. There was an article about this in the newspaper. Dad sold Wearever pots door to door, painted houses and other odd jobs. For a short period of time he worked in a supermarket. He made a point of carrying an empty box with him at all times. The management noticed and were impressed with his apparent work ethic. They didn’t know dad was usually off somewhere having a smoke.

In 1949 dad was working as a painter at the Studebaker automobile factory on Victoria Street North in Hamilton. Established in 1947, it was housed in the former WWII Otis-Fenson anti-aircraft gun plant, built in 1907. His job was to do any touch-up paint job work required on a car at the end of the assembly line. This was one of the better jobs at the plant. With the phasing out of the line that dad was assigned to, his supervisor offered him a job sanding the car body in preparation for painting. This was one of the worst jobs in the factory, requiring the constant wearing of a mask. Dad was highly regarded by the people he worked with and his boss pleaded with him to not quit, until finally he told dad if he ever wanted to come back the door would always be open. As dad got up to leave his boss finally added “if there is anything I can ever do for you please let me know”. As dad opened the door to leave, he looked back and said “there is one thing you can do for me…………you can shut that goddamn door”. He had $25 in the bank and a pregnant wife, yet he walked off the job rather than demean himself. I remember as a kid being amazed at that courage. Of all my siblings, my life has taken me the furthest away from my comfort zone, yet I don’t believe I would have had the courage to do what he did.

Eventually dad ended up working for Monarch Life Insurance. Selling came natural to him and in his first year he was runner-up for Rookie of the Year for all Canada. He then won the coveted Hartley D McNairn Cup for two years in a row. Later he decided to go into Real Estate. His office was on the second floor at the corner of Main and Sherman in the east end of Hamilton.

In 1947 my parents were living at 266 Victoria St. N. in Hamilton. On June 6 dad bought a plot at Woodland Cemetery. In 1952 they were living at 172 Charlotte St. in Hamilton.  Around 1957 the family moved to 34 Cherrywood Drive in Stoney Creek.

STONEY CREEK

Dad learned that there was a mistake in the deed to the property at our new home and was able to negotiate a small patch of land adjacent to us to be added to the deed. He contracted to have a wonderful patio built at the back of the house and every winter, no matter how busy he was at work, he converted the back yard into a skating rink for his kids. I still remember him filling garbage cans with water and dumping them over the snow night after night, to build up the requisite layers of ice.  All that hard work and the only skaters in the family were my older sister and brother, the later playing on a hockey team.  That didn’t deter dad though.

When the twins were born in 1960 mom and dad shoe horned their cribs into the bedroom used by Kirk and Donald. Cam and I shared a bedroom and Rhonda had her own room in the basement. The home was a split level so there was a crawl space which we loved to play in because we kept finding WW2 German coins lying around.

In November 1963 my Uncle Mike from Niagara Falls called dad to see if he could borrow $20 from him. They agreed to meet halfway on Highway 403 around Welland, Ontario. During the drive the announcement came over the radio that President Kennedy had been assassinated. Dad recalled that everyone driving on the highway pulled over to the side of the highway to listen to the news.

Growing up on a farm installed a love of gardening in dad. At the back of the house, he grew vegetables and along the side of the house he planted petunias. When he wasn’t working, he would generally be tending his garden. Later in life he would often refer to the actor Eddie Albert for his insights into environmentalism and in particular his call that homeowners should be converting their front lawns into gardens.

Dad loved teasing and playing mind games with his kids. The Millionaire drive-in restaurant was quite popular in the fifties and there was one located outside Stoney Creek on the way up to Hamilton Mountain. One day he was driving us down that mountain road and we all got excited when we saw the Millionaire in the distance. We begged him to go there and he commented “You kids have got to learn the lesson that you can’t have everything you want……” As we fell into silence and sadness dad pulled into the Millionaire at the last-minute saying “……. but you don’t have to learn that lesson today”. In an instant our silent disappointment morphed into screams of joy.

On another occasion the whole family was out for a Sunday drive. In the middle of nowhere, Dad shifted the car in neutral and turned the car off. When it came to a complete stop he said “we’ve run out of gas and will have to live here in the car from now on”. Immediately I jumped in, checking the glove box for any candies, stating that we could use the cigarette lighter as a source of heat, asking everyone to check their pockets for anything we could eat and pool it and take stock. Dad just watched me. Later he commented to mom: “look after Kevin because he is the one who is going to look after us in our old age.” Whenever he could he would put us in situations where we were out of our comfort zone, just to teach us how to cope with adversity.

Buying presents for kids in a large family is more difficult than one might think because they have to be shared. I loved history as a child and was fascinated by dinosaurs. Dad brought home a very expensive book titled Primitive Man. My siblings and I stood there as dad explained that we had to share this and it was for all of us. But I shrieked with excitement. I still have that book in my library.

One Sunday morning we wandered into our parent’s bedroom and begged dad to take us fishing in the creek behind us. Not wanting to disappoint us but at the same time wanting to stay in bed with mom, he told us that if we saw a fish and that if it remained in the area and did not move on so that it would be there for him to see, then we should come back and tell him and he would fish with us. Clearly this was impossible as the creek was very small so any fish coming downstream would be gone in an instant. Dad knew this of course and that it would occupy us and he would be able to remain in bed with mom. Well, we found a dead sucker lying at the bottom of the creek. We rushed back up to the house and informed dad that we met his criteria for taking us fishing. He had no choice, so he got out of bed and got the fishing poles.

When we did anything that made dad proud, he would make us an ice cream cone, regardless of the time of day. He did this after my very first fight with the neighbourhood bully. We were living in Stoney Creek so I was probably 5-7 years old. Mom was mortified that dad was rewarding me for fighting, while dad, on the other hand, felt pride that his son had stood his ground.

Whenever we had visitors, mom would call everyone to attention, give us our orders and we all went about making the home as presentable as possible. I remember one time when I was about five years old dad and I were preparing the yard and I turned and said to him, “when the people come, they are going to say “Pat, I don’t know how you do it””. I have never seen before or since dad laughing so hard and for so long. I was too young to realize what was so funny, but I cannot forget the look on mom’s face when dad told her. I don’t remember her ever being caught speechless except that one time and I can still see the look on her face.

Two doors down from us in Stoney Creek lived the Boulanger’s, a catholic family that mirrored the opposite of ours at the time. Six girls and one boy. We lived in a parallel universe except that Mr. Boulanger eventually had a mental breakdown and had to be hospitalized. We saw little of dad in those early days as he worked into the evenings and on weekends, so when I heard that Mr. Boulanger was in a straight jacket, I remember thinking that it should be the moms that went crazy and not the dads, because we constantly pushed mom to the edge, but we rarely saw dad and he rarely acted strange or angry. The strangest dad ever got was that he would get quiet for periods of time. We coined this behaviour a “mood”, as in “dads in a mood”. None of us ever understood what triggered this or why it even existed, until I read the book “Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus”. In it the author describes that the male psyche is such that from time-to-time men need to metaphorically retreat into a cave, alone. They don’t want anyone in there with them, they don’t want to talk about it, they don’t want to share anything. The author tells women not to be threatened by this behaviour, to let the man be, to know with confidence he will come out eventually and be his old self and to not take it personally. Looking back, I think poor Mr. Boulanger was not able to go into his cave and be alone. Dad did and mom let him, although she would always take it very personal when he did, despite the fact that he treated the whole family the same when he was in a mood. I believe that this was the means by which dad was able to shoulder the weight of his burden which he and he alone (and poor Mr. Boulanger) could only know. They say that behind every successful man you will find a woman, but I believe a more accurate description is that BESIDE every successful man you will find a woman. In the fifties, there was nobody that the man of the house could pass the baton to. He was it. Behind him there was only the abyss. I never judged dads’ moods. His mother died when he was very young so he really grew up without knowing a mother’s love, and, as my wife Tanju says, if you don’t get love from your mother, it is almost impossible to find it anywhere else. I never judged mom’s reaction to those moods either because she had lived a very traumatic childhood.

UNCLE CLARE……DADS BEST FRIEND

Dad would take an annual golf vacation to Nassau with his friend, Uncle Clare. One time they cooked up a scheme where they presented themselves as a couple of advance scouts looking for a suitable hotel to host a convention of insurance agents. They pulled it off and got their food, golfing and accommodation all at no charge, then left the island. Mom and dad had many friends but I think Uncle Clare was his best friend. Both of them were natural born salesmen and as hard as this is to believe, their families were transpositions of each other: Uncle Clare had two sons and six daughters, dad had six sons and two daughters. His daughter Diane recalled how when our fathers would be at a social event together and they were asked about their families the conversation would go something like this:

Are you married men?
Dad: Yes.
Uncle Clare: Yes.
Any children at home?
Dad: Yes.
Uncle Clare: Yes.

How many for you?
Dad: 8.
How many for you?
Uncle Clare: 8.

Oh ya…..  well how many of each?

Dad: 6 boys and 2 girls.
And for you?
Uncle Clare: 6 girls and 2 boys.

Get out of here.

When I asked mom if she thought this was fair that she did not go to Nassau with dad, she explained that the first-time dad did this, he looked so relaxed when he returned home that she felt it was important for his health that he get away once a year.  I understood but was still confused as to why she did not go along.  Mom explained ‘I don’t really like flying in the first place and while your father is gone, I can get more work done’.

When in high school I got into trouble with the law for conspiring to traffic in marijuana, it was Uncle Clare who sat with my parents in court to show moral support.

After I completed my Master’s degree, I told dad I was taking a break and would be going to Europe for a couple months. He was so excited about this he called Uncle Clare and the three of us went out for lunch. The two of them couldn’t stop reminiscing about their time in England and France during the war. I wish I had a tape recorder for all the stories they shared. Uncle Clare’s job was hunting U-boats from the air. He was flying in an area where he had orders not to attack anything. However, a surfaced U-boat started firing at him and he turned to me and said “orders or not, if someone is shooting at me, I’m going to shoot back”, which he did. I believe he sank the submarine and he recalled flying over and a German was shaking his fist at him.  Afterwards, back at the office, dad pulled out his little black book of contacts he had made during the war and showed me a few pages, stating “if you come across anyone that looks like you just steer away.”

Dad passed away before Uncle Clare. His son Ron stated “dad had a survival mode of getting through tough times but I can tell you without hesitation that when he lost his GREAT Friend Don Jackson, it truly affected him for the rest of his life. Some people are irreplaceable, Don Jackson was one of those people.”

Years after dad passed, I called Uncle Clare to have lunch together. We went to the Swiss Chalet, the restaurant of choice whenever dad would invite me to lunch. I could see his eyes become red and moist when he talked about dad. Afterward we went to Woodlawn Cemetery and stood in front of dad’s grave together. There was a moment of silence before he began talking about how proud dad would be of me for the man I had become. I wanted to hug him for dear life at that moment. When mom told me he was in the hospital I made a point of spending some time with him. That was the last time I saw him. We continued to stay in touch by mail when I moved to Europe and I always enjoyed how he would inject humor into the correspondence. I still have his letters.

BURLINGTON

We moved to Burlington on December 20, 1963. It was five days before Christmas, which seven kids were quite excited about, and mom was eight months pregnant. How she made Christmas morning seamless will forever remain a mystery to me. It was a modern neighbourhood and seemed boring at first compared to the life we had in Stoney Creek. It provided us with a constant source of adventure and mystery and constant trips to the doctor to get stitches. The only real adventure our natural surroundings in Burlington provided us with was a forest at one end of the street and an unkept piece of land and creek that eventually became Bromley Park at the other end.

Raising eight kids, and being a product of the Great Depression, mom and dad kept just about anything that might have a future use. This included those pint-sized green plastic baskets that contained berries at the supermarket. One day I was exploring the park and noticed bushes of wild raspberries. As I was filling my face, I remembered those green baskets so I started harvesting the berries, brought them home, filled five baskets worth and went door-to-door, selling them for 25 cents a pint. I quickly sold out all five and returned home and showed dad the $1.25 I made. Well, out came the ice cream cones. I was 10 years old. Dad declared to mom, “well, we can start thinking about our retirement now”. I am sure mom was equally proud but her expression of pride for any of her kids was always diluted, in an effort to maintain a perceived need to balance everything and avoid the appearance of favoritism. She might have said something like “I am equally proud of all my children”. Whatever she said, I can’t remember, but I do remember dad’s reaction. Whenever anyone of us performed above the norm he had no reservations about praising you for it.

Despite the high cost of moving to our new life, dad and mom felt strongly that investing in a set of World Book encyclopedias would be a good investment in their kids education. They also bought a set of Childcraft encyclopedias for the younger kids. I would spend hours absorbed in reading, completely forgetting what exactly I was looking for. Craig devoured the Childcraft encyclopedias, learning how to make gunpowder from ingredients he found at Skyway Drugs. (Note: I will never forget when the cashier at Skyway Drugs kept repeating “I know what you’re doing….I know what you’re doing” when Craig was paying him).

Dad used to occasionally take me with him to the office on Saturday’s and spend the entire day with him. While in the office I would draw on his chalkboard, we would go to lunch together and I would sit in the car while he was meeting with a client or showing a house. We would talk in the car and it was during those discussions that he shared with me important lessons. When we crossed the Burlington bridge, he would look out over the steel factories ringing the bay and tell me that he hoped I never had to work in a factory. He told me on more than one occasion to “stay out of the computer for as long as you can”. This was quite prophetic for the time because I was still in public school and computer science did not enter the academic curriculum in high schools until 1970. But dad knew that Revenue Canada were using computers and he was aware, even then, of their effect on privacy and government control. I cherished those one-on-one moments and his advice shaped my outlook on a range of issues.

At times I thought dad was clairvoyant. When he worked at Monarch Life Insurance, he took out policies on himself, mom and Donald, in May 1958. Dad had four other kids at the time but he only insured Donald, who, strangely enough, was the first sibling to die. (6) Dad also told mom when I was a child, “look after Kevin because he is the one who is going to look after us in our old age”. In the sixties dad would tell people that the day will come when  a decent suit will cost a thousand dollars and the average home will cost $100,000. People thought he was crazy.

As kids we used to customize our toys to turn them into something more deadly than what the manufacturer had in mind. A baseball bat became a spiked mace; by using pins, Johnny 7 bullets became darts, and so on. Nature was a natural playground. We gave garter snakes whiplash and stuffed firecrackers up frog’s butts, and so on. Horrified at these conversions and the combining of animate with inanimate objects to form new toys, mom asked dad to intervene and talk to us. He listened to her and with a faint smile and commented that when he was a kid the family was so poor that he had to make his own toys. He never intervened.

Mornings on a school day were a bee hive of activity. Mom had to focus on the jobs at hand and decided that to make her life easier, it was better to keep dad away from the din and serve him breakfast in bed. He’d have his coffee and toast, get dressed, come downstairs while we were eating, sometimes bite one of our ears to hear us giggle and off to work he would go. On weekends dad reversed this dynamic so that mom could sleep in and get some rest. Every Sunday I remember getting up and coming downstairs, seeing dad wearing a tea towel for an apron, making us pancakes or crepes, which he sometimes poured in the shape of animals. He even made his own maple syrup. He would also have three or four Dutch ovens on the go. With pride he would lift each lid to show me what he was cooking……. spaghetti, chili, soup, chicken stew and dumplings………. all designed to help lighten mom’s burden during the week. When finished, very often he would have to go to work either to show a house to a client, take his sons handing out flyer’s door-to-door or cleaning up at his apartment in Dundas. Dad did what he could to help carry some of the weight that was mom’s daily routine.

Sunday evenings in our home were something of a ritual. It was the one day a week that we always came together for. Dad would buy cheaper cuts of meat which he would marinate for 24 hours and then, with beer in hand, barbecue on the back porch. What we got in the end were two extra large platters of what tasted like fillet mignon. At the table dad was flanked by his youngest daughter and eldest son, facing mom at the opposite end. The rest of us were wedged in between. Friends would come over and the spillover crowd occupied makeshift dining tables. Dad lived for family and was happiest when we were all together. He helped make the weekend home environment one where we wanted to bring our friends over, rather than go out.

Dad was partial to his daughters, maybe because he had so many sons, or because his first born “Bobby” died so young. He used to say he would give up three of his sons for one more Trish.

I had a Chinese university friend, Nelson, who used to accompany me home for those Sunday dinners. He writes “my first impression of Mr. Jackson as a kind, traditional, not too old good-looking man. My first dinner and subsequent dinners at your home, impressed me, both your parents were great cooks.   Mr.  Jackson always gave me the best pieces that even his younger kids were jealous of; I love the grilled roasts he made.   I love the cabbage rolls made by Mrs.  Jackson. Mr.  Jackson liked beer if I remembered well and I drank with him.  I think Mr. Jackson liked me, I still remembered he said once that feeding another son (me) was more expensive for him now. I am sure he was not complaining.”

I went to Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo for my undergraduate degree and McMaster University in Hamilton for my Master’s Degree, both within a 1–2-hour drive from Burlington. I used to come home almost every weekend and when it came time to go back on Sunday dad always prepared what he called a CARE package (borrowed from the United Nations program to address hunger in the Third World). Leftovers, cabbage rolls, containers of soup or chili, sandwiches……. whatever he could scrounge). Food figured prominently in dad’s psyche as he often went hungry as a child.

Our neighbours, the Simmons, were our family antagonist. Mrs. Simmons was something of a snob. Dad was on a ladder painting our house and she came over and said “my (husband) Bob could never do this”. Without missing a beat dad responded with “You’re right Kay, if I had to paint all the houses I own I couldn’t do it either”. She huffed and left without saying a word.

Dad wanted to build a concrete pad in the backyard to replace the angel stones that were unsightly and a pain to maintain. My friend Kurt Fiege offered to do the job for free if dad paid for the materials. Dad was so impressed that Kurt did this for no compensation that he enabled Kurt to purchase two homes through “creative financing”. By creative financing I mean securing a second mortgage (Kurt had no money) to make up the down payment. Dad knew a number of people willing to hold second mortgages and they trusted his judgement when it came to assessing credit worthiness of borrowers. Some time later Kurt began to default on his payments. I will never forget when dad told me that he felt bad enough about it that he was considering making up the losses to the mortgage lenders, out of his own pocket. That degree of integrity affected me and has guided me all these years. It’s important to do the right thing, even if it takes courage to do so.

Dad was known in the real estate business as an honest broker and a man of integrity. He taught my brother Clark that your word of honor is your most important asset and that if you are not honest then all the contracts in the world are meaningless. Clark went on to be the most respected house painter on Canda’s west coast, serving movie stars, business moguls, supreme court justices and the like…..all without ever having to sign a contract or advertise his services.

Dad had a strict view of the dynamics of a large famly: you protect your sisters and never ever hit them, and the older ones have a responsibility to look after the younger ones. This was etched into all his sons. And this did not end when we left home to begin our new life. My brother Clark was complaining to me of how much rent he was paying in BC but had no money or bank credibility to buy a home. So I called his real estate buddy Jake Muldowan and made a plan. I would lend Clark the down payment and then sign a note with the bank so that I held the mortgage. For his part, Jake agreed to waive his commission. This is how Clark got on the real estate ladder. I did more or less the same thing for my sister Trish for the first two homes she bought. Years later, Clark suffered from addiction and was on the verge of losing his home and his business. I stepped in again so that he could clean himself up and have a home and business to return to. I did it gladly, because this is the way we had been taught and I knew that if the shoe were on the other foot they would do the same.

When it came to buying a car, dad was the master. Car dealers had a love/hate relationship with him because they knew he was going to buy but that the profit margin would be slimmer than usual. He made a point of taking me along whenever he was car shopping. One time Cam had picked out the car he wanted to buy, a Gran Torino, and brought dad in for the final coup de grace. Dad looked at the spec sheet of the car and felt he could squeeze more out of it. He asked for floor mats to be thrown into the deal. The salesman came back after meeting with his boss and regretted that he could not give the mats away for free. After pointing out that the mats were not free, dad began to make for the door. At this point the owner called him back in to try to rescue the deal. I’ll never forget the scene: dad with his two eldest sons and the suntanned owner with his salesman. It was a battle of titans. I knew that once we were called back that dad was going to get those floor mats thrown in, but not without a fight from the owner. He led off by pointing out that the mats could not be given for free; dad countered that they were not free. He then switched tactics and started massaging dad’s ego, pointing out that he was a successful businessman and that his time was valuable……too valuable to be quibbling over $25. Dad agreed, but pointed out that he had his sons present and that the owner’s salesman was present and that he and the owner had an obligation to teach us younger ones how to sell. That was it. The owner asked to be alone with his salesman and after a few minutes the later came out and agreed to the “free” floor mats.

Later on, dad took me with him when he wanted to change his car. We ended up on a car lot with a young, flashy, all talk salesman looking for an easy sell. Dad pointed out a car that he liked and wanted to look inside. The salesman bluntly replied “that’s sold” and kept walking. He looked back to see dad and I leaving the area and getting into our car and got irate. Leaving the car lot dad lowered his window and informed the owner that he had bought three cars from him in the past but would not be buying another. That was a powerful lesson for everyone, especially me. Active listening to a client is the foundation of successful selling.

Appleby United was our local church. The minister was a young man who drove a Corvette Stingray, which I thought at the time was pretty secular for a man of the cloth. When it came time for the congregation to vote on extending his contract, we noticed the only person asking questions was a man sitting amongst us who had a machine that was recording everything. He was asking questions such as “if the minister leaves us part way through his contract is he able to keep the furniture in the manse”. Noticing the machine and the strange questions, a church elder asked the man why he was taping the conversation and asked him to delete it. He was clearly acting for the minister, despite the fact that this was a closed-door meeting. After that we stopped going to church. A couple months later some church elders came by the house to convince dad to rejoin Appleby United. After he recounted the events above, he told them “Now that may not be a good reason to not go to church……but it is a good reason not to go to THAT church”. The elders could not argue with this logic and spent the rest of their time picking dads brain about real estate.

Uncle Frank was an old family friend who decided, in the summer of 1969 to dip his toe in the world of entrepreneurship. He struck a deal with the City of Hamilton to run a small boat rental operation on an inlet of Hamilton Bay. Dad asked me if I wanted to work for him for the summer. I was 15 at the time and was cutting lawns for the summer so I said yes. It turns out he only paid me when he felt he could afford to. After about 4 weekends I came home one night, exhausted, and dad asked me how much I made that day. I told him I didn’t make anything. He leapt to his feet and called Uncle Frank and told him I wouldn’t be working for him as I had other work lined up. Dad was visibly agitated and could get quite angry if he felt one of his kids was being exploited.

Century 21 was a new concept in selling real estate that caught on in the seventies. It was simple franchising whereby a realtor could join and pay a one-time flat fee, a monthly fee thereafter and an advertising fee. When I asked dad what he thought, his response was “if you need them, you can’t afford them and if you can afford them, you don’t need them”.

With eight kids in the family one can imagine the weekly food consumption, which is why we had two freezers that were always well stocked. Dad told us he always kept a spare $100 in his wallet to take advantage of any great food bargain he unexpectedly came across.

After-dinner snacks were a constant staple in our home. I asked dad once if it bothered him all the snacks we were eating at night and he commented that it never bothered him because he frequently went to bed hungry when he was a child. In fact, rather than develop a complex over food, dad joked about it. When asked what his favourite food was growing up, he mentioned. Potato and Point. Confused, I asked what that was. He said his father would hang a small piece of meat from the kitchen ceiling. He and his siblings would then point at the meat while they ate potatoes. It was a joke of course, but that was dad.

We had credit with the breadman and milkman. Once a month or so they would ask to be paid. I would go up upstairs and tell dad that the breadman wants $100. He would ask me to get his wallet and while getting the money would comment, “there’s something wrong when you have spent a hundred dollars and you haven’t gotten out of bed yet”.

Dad used to follow the 5BX exercise regimen at home. One evening I asked him how many push-ups he could do. He said he could manage seven. Being a smart ass, I got down on the floor and did seventy. Without saying a word, he got down on the floor and did seventy one. When I demanded we continue and that I could do more he replied with “whether you can or not, I still beat you.” It was a much-needed lesson in humility.

One time I was caught cheating on a physical education exam in high school which resulted in an “F” grade one semester. I was quite nervous when it came time to show dad my report card to get his signature. Before handing him it to him I explained the “F”. He looked at the card, saw the high marks everywhere else, signed it and when he handed it back to me, with a slight grin, commented “F phys ed”.

Dad’s moral compass was crystal clear and straight. One time in the basement my brother Kirk and I were daring each other to smoke our first cigarette. We each waited for the other to light up first. After much negotiating, Kirk went first. As he did, I bolted upstairs to report him to dad. He could care less that Kirk was smoking but he was quite disappointed in me that I ratted out my brother. It was an important lesson. If I was ever going to go against a family member it had to be to protect that person from himself and not for personal gain, physical or otherwise.

For mom and dads 25^th wedding anniversary we had a big party at home. I was not feeling well and retired early to my bedroom, which I shared with Kirk. Eventually I came downstairs, drank too much and went to bed and closed the door, too tired to make it to the bathroom when I felt sick to my stomach. I woke up in the morning seeing Kirks slippers stuck in my puke on the floor. When I eventually made it down to the kitchen, hungover, dad was cooking and mom came in, livid, stating “I’ll never forget that I had to clean my son’s puke on my 25^th wedding anniversary”. I just sat there quiet, holding my head in my heads. Dad commented “can’t you see the boy feels bad enough.”

It was Pa Shoko’s 80^th birthday so the family packed into dads Lincoln and we went to Toronto to celebrate. I had just turned 18 and drank so much vodka that I threw up in the Lincoln on the way home. There were five of us in the back, but in the moment I hurled, the other four managed to squeeze into an area a little less than half the width of the seat. Without saying a word, dad lowered all four power windows simultaneously and accelerated to almost 90 miles an hour. Paper was flying in the air; mom covered Trisha’s eyes as she held her in the front seat; Clark, sitting next to me was crying and cursing me as I had thrown up partly on his clothes; and dad didn’t say a word. The next morning when I got up, I went to clean the car but dad had already done it. When I approached him, he said “everyone’s entitled to one of those moments. You’ve now had yours. The next one’s on you”.

Growing up in the 50’s and 60’s, parents hit their kids when they felt it was warranted. Mom knew how to cause pain with the minimum risk to damaging internal organs. The electric kettle cord was her preferred device, as wooden spoons would break under the pressure of impact.  By comparison, dad was a pussycat. With dad, in any dispute between two brothers requiring punishment it was always both brothers that got it, regardless of who was at fault. He would tell us to go to our room and take our pants down and wait. You can imagine Kirk and I (it was always Kirk and I) with our pants down talking to each other and discussing how to respond to the spanking and agree on when to start crying. Dad would come upstairs with a wooden spoon and tap us on the ass twice.  We faked crying and dad would immediately stop, saying “now I hope you’ve learned your lesson”. We would look around the corner to see he was gone and then laugh together.  

Cam had a small bank account as a child back in Stoney Creek. Dad took that money and invested it into a private mortgage for him. Cam’s cub scout troop was raising money for a scouting trip and in the process trying to teach the kids how to save money. When the scout leader asked Cam if he wanted to participate, his response was “oh, yes, I can swing it without collapsing my mortgage”.

Leaving McMaster university after one year, Cam began his career selling menswear at the Burlington Mall.  Dad reached out and in 1972 took him into the business. My brother was a natural salesman and in 1973 together they sold $1,500,000 worth of real estate. Cam traded his green Plymouth Duster in for a powder blue Gran Torino and was looking every bit the model of success. At the time I remember thinking that he was well on his way to achieving his childhood/adolescent ambition of becoming a millionaire by the time he was 40. After a while Cam wanted to do something else. Dad had a stellar reputation in the real estate business and was a close friend of Jack Steadman, head of the Hamilton Real Estate Board. He got Cam a job as Steadman’s assistant and he naturally moved into top position when Steadman retired.

When Kirk finished high school, he didn’t know what to do so dad took him into the business. After a while he wanted to do something else, so dad called a friend of his who ran Nordair and asked if he could give Kirk a job, which he did. Kirk claimed he loved his job so much he would work for free and he spent the rest of his career as a “meet and assist” agent in the airlines.

With both Cam and Kirk, dad gave them jobs selling real estate and then got them jobs when they left his employment.  My parents love and support did not diminish when their kids left home. Mom was no exception. While in high shool Rhonda applied twice for a job opening at Skyway Drugs. Finally, mom drove over and confronted the owner with “after all the business our family has given you……” He finally conceded, at which point mom replied with “and there is one more thing you can do for me”. “What’s that”, asked the owner. “You can fire her if she doesn’t live up to your expectations.”

When my younger brother Clark finished high school, he got a job cleaning carpets for the father of a friend of his, Rob Reynolds. One night dad, Clark and I were sitting together and dad began asking questions about the carpet cleaning business. I could see that he was scoping out the possibility of setting Clark up in his own business. He was attempting to do for Clark what he had done for Cam and Kirk. Dad asked Clark, “so what does Mr. Reynolds do?”. Clark replied, “he goes to the bank”. I will never forget that moment as dad turned his head and looked at me in silence.

I paid my way through university by painting houses. One day dad drove his accountant Walter Gutherie and I to a West Hamlton apartment building that was up for sale. It had a storefront and about eight apartments. His vision was that I would open a paint store there, he and Gutherie would move their office there and the rent from the remaining apartments would pay for the mortgage. My fate lied elsewhere so the idea died, but I realized years later that dad was trying to give me a career in the same way that he did for Kirk and Cam and wanted to do for Clark.

Dad wrote later in life that he was proud that he got Rhonda and her husband a start in life. Rhonda got pregnant during her second year at York, so she and Lou eloped. Lou’s parents were were strict catholics who refused to acknowledge the marriage, so my sister and her husband were cut off from his side of the family. Mom and dad worked day and night refurbishing furniture for their new life in Owen Sound. Later on, dad helped them buy their home in Burlington.

Dad used to comment on how proud he was that young couples would come into his office looking for a place to rent and then he was able instead to get them on the first rung of the home ownership ladder. He ingrained in me the notion at a very early age that banks existed not so much as a place to store money, but as a source to borrow money from. This may seem a subtle difference to most but it had a profound effect on me……. the notion of using money to make money.

When I was 16 years old dad called me into the den and asked me how much money I had saved up. I told him $300. He then pulled out a survey map of a strip of land in Port Carling in Muskoka and pointed to an area on the map and said if I wanted that I could buy one of the lots for $1100. I would put the $300 as a down payment and he would co-sign for a mortgage at the bank for the remainder. I jumped at the opportunity in what became the beginning of a string of real estate purchases that culminated in owning six homes simultaneously by the time I completed grad school. This was possible because dad taught me how to utilize an exotic financing instrument called an agreement for sale. It worked as follows. You buy a home for, let’s say, $10,000 and get a 95% CMA mortgage at 10% with a 5% down payment. You then conservatively renovate the place and sell it for $15,000 with the buyer putting up a 10% down payment and you hold a mortgage for the balance at 12%, thus making 2% interest on money you never had. You then use this to finance the next house purchase. I remember in university complaining to my friend John Kendall that I was broke. His comment was “sell a house”.

By dad introducing me to the world of contract law at age 16, and purchasing six properties before I graduated from university, I got the notion that my brother Kirk and I should formalize our joint ownership of the collections of Marvel Comics and Warriors of the World, by Marx. So on November 17, 1991 we signed an agreement to this effect. (21)

Dad lived for his family and his generosity knew no bounds. When Cam got married back in the 1970’s, dad paid down the first year of his mortgage and organized a stag party for him that paid for his honeymoon in Quebec City.

A more loyal and generous friend did not exist. Leanna Anthony recalls:” When I think of Uncle Don, what initially comes to mind is his and Auntie Pat’s long-time friendship with my parents-Auntie Kay and Uncle Buzz.  My Dad and Uncle Don met during WWII and the friendship that they formed held fast throughout their lives. As kids, Uncle Don made Ross and me feel very special with his warm greetings.  He always had a smile and something very kind to say every time he saw us.  When my father retired from the Armed Forces, our family left the air base in Bagotville in Northern Quebec and arrived in Burlington and of course, we stayed with The Jackson’s – Uncle Don and Auntie Pat wouldn’t have it any other way.  Their home was always open to everyone.  It was then that we got to experience Uncle Don’s best special Sunday morning pancake feast…and could he ever create the most interesting pancake shapes on the griddle.  Uncle Don had so much fun with all the kids together at breakfast and there sure were a lot of us around the table!!  This will always be a great memory for me. I also remember Uncle Don as a generous man whose warmth and positive energy filled the room.  He always encouraged us to have a great time at whatever event we attended.  Paul and I recall the amazing surprise Jack and Jill shower Uncle Don and Auntie Pat threw for us on Valentine’s Day 1976.  What a party filled with memories that we still fondly recall 45 years later! We will always remember Uncle Don lovingly as a dedicated family man.”

Dad had a cynical view of people on Welfare. To feed our family within a budget dad used to buy second quality turkeys. They might have a wing missing or a bit of freezer burn but they were perfectly edible. The Burlington Fire Department used to donate these to local Welfare recipients until one year the head of the local Welfare organization stated they no longer wanted the turkeys because they were not second-class citizens. So, there is dad, working hard and paying enough in taxes to support three families on Welfare, buying turkeys for his family to eat that people on Welfare felt were not good enough for them. Dad had a simple solution for people on Welfare. If a man cannot work then he should get three doctors to certify as such and then society should look after him. But if a man was able to work but chose not to, then he should forfeit his right to vote so that the politicians don’t have to be beholden to him.

Despite the huge cost of running our home and all that it entailed, dad decided that purchasing an expensive set of World Book Encyclopedia would be money well spent. It sure was. Every time I opened the encyclopedia to search for a specific subject for a school project I was working on it would be hours before I found what I was originally looking for. I would get lost learning about an array of subjects.

When a clients house became vacant or a renter had moved out, dad would mobilize his sons to clean the place out. People often left interesting things, which we would then keep for ourselves. This fostered a culture of “collecting” among the boys, which some of us actually turned into a business.

Dad grew up on a farm and I think it was his dream to return to one. One day, in the 70’s, he piled the family into the car and drove us to a home on the mountain that, if memory serves, sat on a 4-acre piece of land. He asked us how we felt about moving there. You could have heard a pin drop in the car. He gave up on that dream. But he never gave up on gardening. He often quoted Eddie Albert who encouraged people to convert their yards into gardens, warning that pesticides were dangerous and that food shortages would appear in the future.

Dad always helped neighbours with real estate advice. My best friends in the neighbourhood were the Radnotis. One evening Mr. Radnoti asked dad over to get advice as to whether he should sell his home and buy a farm or not. They owned a double corner lot on Hampton Heath Road. Mr. Radnoti was shocked when dad advised against it, saying that his lot would be worth $500,000 one day. It’s worth well over a million today.

Ever the salesman, dad decided to put an ad in the Hamilton Spectator and sell some things around the house. I remember him beaming when he came inside to tell mom that he just sold a portable TV that didn’t work, for $10.

Whenever we were at an arcade, dad was a bigger kid than any of us. He’d go through dimes and quarters like a hot knife through butter. I remember at the time feeling a sense of sadness because it was clear that dad had missed this in his childhood.

After a day of working on one of dads properties we would come home exhausted. Once mom asked us to do some chores and dad intervened, stating that we had worked hard all day and did not want us doing any housework.

One of the great lessons dad taught me was that when considering an investment but you are afraid or nervous, assume the worst possible outcome and if it still makes sense then ignore your fear and just do it.

Jack Linkert (Uncle Jack) was an old friend of my parents. He asked dad if he could borrow $200 and dad agreed. Months later dad sent him a letter stating “how about paying me back the $200 and keeping you credit with me in good standing”. Uncle Jack never spoke to dad after that. In telling me this story dad taught me to never lend money that you cannot afford to lose.

The real estate business is one of the most volatile sectors of the economy, influenced as it is by government monetary policy and the business cycle. I saw many reputable realtors go out of business in the 70’s because they were not prepared for the market’s downside. Our family, on the other hand, never experienced any of this. My bell weather for any effect of the economy on our home life was how well we ate. No matter what was going on in the macro economy, we still ate two platters of steak every Sunday and took family vacations each summer in the Thousand Islands. This, even when overnight interest rates reached an all-time high of 9% in August, 1974, followed later that year and next by the first recession in Canada in 15 years.  It was a particularly bad recession because it was accompanied by high inflation, giving the federal government little choice except to raise rates to a painful level at a time when they should have been lowering them, thus compounding the recession. I asked dad what his secret was. Why he was faring so well, when other realtors with larger staffs and brand awareness were not? He told me that in good times he would buy an investment and then sell it in bad times. His example taught me to always live below my means, that when creating a business drive your fixed cost as close to zero as possible so that you can ride out a bad economy, that stability in business was the preferred state to strive for and to never let your perceived wealth go to your head. The niche that dad occupied in the real estate market was lower valued homes and not the high end of the market, where the competition naturally strived to be. That always amazed me and seemed counter intuitive. Raising eight kids, the cash flow demands in his life were far above the people he competed against. He was the turtle in Aesop’s fable. Whenever I came to the office, I would always study the chalk board where he had his listings and sales posted and always marvelled at the modest prices in the market he served. It was difficult for me to connect that gentle stream of income to the huge cash demands he was responsible for. But somehow it worked (yes, mom could stretch a dollar unlike anyone, but nevertheless the demands were mega). This riddle affected me when I began my career. In the process I learned that the shortest path to financial success is to do the opposite of what everyone else is doing.

While in grad school I bought a house in Hamilton that dad recommended. It was one block way from Henderson hospital on the escarpment. It was a two-story war time home with ground floor consisting of two bedrooms, a salon, a bath and kitchen and a back room. The upstairs consisted of four bedrooms and a bathroom and, most importantly, a separate entrance. In assessing the desirability of the home as an investment dad pointed out the income potential of renting out the four bedrooms.

Dad used to say he had two dreams in life. One was to own a Lincoln Continental and the other was to have sex with Hedi Lamar. When he finally bought his Lincoln Continental he said “now bring on Hedi Lamar”. In his fifties dads comment on his sex life was “I’m not as good as I once was but I’m as good once as I ever was”. When he had to deal with a poor performing motorized device such as an automobile or a lawn mower he used to say “this thing couldn’t pull a sick whore off a piss pot”. He had a great sense of humor and could laugh at himself.

In the 1960’s and 70’s the term “brain drain” came into fashion. One day dad said to me “do you ever notice that politicians never leave the country”. Dad found politicians, in the main, a source of entertainment. One time we were watching a politician making a speech on TV. He turned to me and said “he’s overwhelmed with the exuberance of his own verbocity” (which is a bastardization of Disraelis 1878 speech about Gladstone).

Dad used to comment how there are laws on the books that are over 100 years old, but marvelled at how the government changes tax laws every six months.

In the late 1960’s we had a pet hamster named Herman, which developed cancer and required an operation. The tumor was about half the size of poor Herman. When mom told dad that the operation at the University of Guelph would cost $40 (which was a lot of money then), dad’s response was (in spite of the high probability Herman would die and that $40 could buy a lot of hamsters), “well I guess if I want to live here, I better say yes”. Herman survived the operation but died soon after.

Uncle Cliff (another war buddy) was the son of famed Canadian author Wallace Havelock Robb (1888-1976). In the summer of 1971, while at the cottage, dad drove my two brothers and I to visit the poet. I still remember the cluttered salon, with books and Indian artifacts everywhere. We left after great conversation and my purchasing one of his books “Thunderbird”. It was my first introduction to a poet.

In high school fellow student Mike Kelly got a summer job at Ford in Oakville paying $4.50 an hour. It was an impressive wage back then and when I told dad his comment was “it’s not what you earn that is important, its what you save.” I never forgot that.

One of dad’s favorite sayings was that you can justify anything. The example he always gave was “I didn’t steal those chickens your honor, they followed me home”.

Dad was practical almost to a fault. My cab driver friend Bruce Purnell used to have coffee with him at the Big Top on Main Street in Hamilton and his view of dad was that there were no flies on him and that he knew exactly what was going on. We were at home one night with dad and after spending a day working on one of his properties on Bristol Street, Kirk commented that strange things were happening in the home, such as the sound of someone walking up the stairs but nobody was there. Dad blurted out that the house was haunted and that tenants had moved out in the past because of it. It then occurred to me that dad would have inspected hundreds and hundreds of homes during his career. I had such respect for dad, yet so surprised by his belief, that I believed him.

The back end of the basement was a cluttered area full of stuff we needed as well as stuff we could not bring ourselves to throw out. Every month or so I would clean it up and sort everything and then in the evening invite dad downstairs for an inspection.  I always identified a few things I thought we could throw out and I would ask dad for his permission. His response was always the same….”it doesn’t eat anything”.

Dad loved listening to the crooners of the fifties…. Andy Williams, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett……but his favourite was Nat King Cole. He could sit for hours in the living room staring off into the distance, shelling peanuts and rubbing his feet together. At six years of age, I asked mom what’s wrong with dad. She replied, “he’s fine, just leave him be”. Dad always used to ask me “do you ever recognize they never refer to him as the LATE Nat King Cole?” Of course, the issue or the question never came across my mind but for dad Nat King Cole was still very much alive.

When we were listening to pop music and dad entered the room he would say “put on some of that other stuff”. This became part of the popular culture of our home and when listening to music my brothers and I would say to each other “some of that other stuff is better than some of that other stuff.”

Mom and dad usually rummaged through the discount section in a department store. One day dad was looking through a bin of 8-tracks on sale and he found one by a group called The Cunning Stunts. He called mom over and the two of them couldn’t stop laughing.

When I started painting houses in the summer, I began placing ads in the local newspaper. Dads advice was “when placing an add, choose the best one you see and then improve on it.”

Thanks to dad, my brother Kirk became an excellent house painter and wall paper hanger, and he was very methodical when he worked. Watching him paint, dad commented “you may not be the best painter in the world but you sure are the slowest”.

Dad had great respect for education, mainly because he had to drop out of school at such a young age. He used to say if he had made it to grade 10, he could have been a lawyer. Years later when I graduated with my undergraduate degree, he threw a party in the basement. It was the only time in my life I had seen him drunk.

Every year around tax time dad was stressed. Being self-employed there were no deductions on a pay cheque so he had to save throughout the year. He used every trick in the book but never crossed the line to the point that he had to worry about being audited. I had been living away from home throughout university and for most of that time I never filed a tax return because I was a student and mostly paid in cash during the summer holidays. This enabled dad to declare me as a dependent on his tax return, which in turn made me ineligible for a student loan. This forced me to live within my means and to this day I have never paid a cent for credit card interest.

When dad was ready to go to work and we were all eating at the counter he would usually bite one our ears to get a reaction or sneak up behind mom. On more than one occasion he would give mom a backrub while we were all watching tv and suddenly mom would scream. We all looked and saw dad holding one of mom’s falsies in his hand with a big grin on his face.

Dad never backed down from a challenge. Coming home one Saturday from a day of work on his apartment we came to a stop light. He was driving a Delmont 88 Oldsmobile with a powerful 455cc engine. Next to us was French Canadian driving a Ford. He put his car in neutral and stepped on the gas, signalling he wanted to “drag”. Without saying a word dad accepted the challenge. He beat him and at the next light the driver lowered his window and shouted in a thick Quebecois accent “what kind engine you got in that thing?”

Ron Watson was an old family friend whom dad helped purchase a low-income apartment building on Cannon Street in Hamilton. He was a bit shy when it came to tenants overdue on their rent, so dad took Ron and I along for an education. It was a slippery slope as the relevant laws in Ontario favored the tenant, so dad had to use “moral suasion”. After one dressing down the tenant asked dad “have you ever served in the military sir?” Dad always used moments like this to educate his sons.

Despite the powerful influence that his time in the war had on him (did I ever tell you of the time when…..?), he never hung out at the Legion. For that matter he had no extra curricular activities of any sort, except his annual one-week vacation to Nassau with Uncle Clare. Mom, on the other hand could spend hours in the day talking to friends on the phone, entertain female neighbours who would regularly drop by, or hold “club” once a month with her old friends. She would make up for the lost time by ironing clothes at night sometimes until midnight. Dad was totally absorbed in the responsibilities of his life and as my friend Bruce Purnell pointed out: “your father had no flies on him. He knew exactly what was going on in the world around him”.

When dad was in a discussion about someone needing money, he usually referred to “the destitute prostitute who asked for $10 so she could get back on her back”. Self-reliant almost to a fault, he would often comment “if you are looking for a helping hand, check the end of your right arm”. On the subject of luck, he would say “the strange thing is that the harder I work the luckier I get”.

Dad learned that Clark had developed a gambling habit while in high school. To deal with this he invited Clark to a game of pool in the basement and gave him a 50-point spot and bet him $10 he could beat him. Clark accepted the challenge and by the end of the evening Clark owed dad something in the neighbourhood of $100. Dad then explained the evil of gambling and that he hoped he learned his lesson. He did.

Clark and dad spent a lot of time playing pool in the basement, often drinking beer together. When mom would call Clark upstairs for something dad would give Clark a mint to hide the smell of alcohol.

When mentoring us on new skills he would start with the hardest case first, thus giving us confidence that we could do anything. For example, when teaching Clark how to paint, he started him on a four-inch paint brush……the largest brush available on the market. When Clark mastered its use dad commented “now you can paint with any size brush”. Similarly, when teaching Clark to drive a car his first lesson was during a snow storm. Again, once Clark felt confident, dad commented “if you can drive in these conditions you can drive in any condition”.

We loved our summers at Charleston Lake. Dad had a small motor boat that was almost in constant use and Clark used it more than any of us. Buying gas on credit, at the end of the summer when the bills came due dad called Clark into the “den”. Being called into the den was never a good thing so Clark was nervous. When dad mentioned that he was going through the bills he said to Clark “I have just one question”. Thinking it was going to be something like are you going to contribute to this at all, or, was it necessary to be using the boat that much, I can imagine how relieved Clark was when the question was…….” did you enjoy yourself”?  Dad was always playing with us like that.

When I reached an age where I understood that dad’s income was derived from commissions it made me respect him more seeing the way he made sincere efforts to balance the need of family time with customer demands which were most pressing after 6pm and on weekends.  At the time I remember that we never seemed to get enough of him, but I came to realize we got a lot more of him than his fate in life could have given us.

THE END

Mom and dad used to love going on drives together. Once they passed an old age home and mom asked him if he thought they would end up there. Dad’s response was “not unless I own it”.

Every night dad came home from work he would fry himself a T-bone steak. No doubt a contributing factor to his heart attack at age 58. I used to wonder how dad managed to get through his day without medication but I remember one morning he had taken valium and was slumped over on Craigs stool at the kitchen counter. He was slurring his words. It shocked me to see dad in such a weak state.

He used to say that when he was dead and gone if anyone said “he should have slowed down”, he’d come back and haunt them from the grave. One of his favorite death jokes was about the man who died and left his wife $1,000,000. One day she was missing him more than usual and she commented “I’d give $100,000 to have him back”.

The last time I saw dad he was in a semi-private hospital room with one other patient. He was recovering from a heart attack. When I asked him if he needed anything he said, “no, Joe here is getting the women and I’m providing the cards and liquor……if you want to stick around and keep score that’s okay but don’t cramp my style.” Seeing dad in such great spirits it came as a shock to learn the next day that he died overnight. My brother Clark was the last of my siblings to see him alive. Fading in and out of consciousness, dad told Clark he can go ahead and borrow his car. Clark broke down in tears because here was his father, dying, and still looking out for his kids.

Dads latest will specified that his business, DM Jackson Real Estate, should be taken over by Cam. If Cam declined, mom was then free to sell it, which she was loathe to do because dad had such a stellar reputation that she feared a less scrupulous realtor would purchase the name and then run it into the ground. This, despite the fact that there was a mortgage on the home, a modest insurance policy, no cash in the bank and no income to speak of. But, first and last my  mother was a survivor. Looking back, I guess both my parents were.