What's your father's occupation?

Why I dreaded the first day of school, until I didn't

After his first year of Engineering School, my father couldn’t continue at Queens and become a bridge builder or a rocket scientist. His place had to be given up in favour of returning war vets. Dad had to return West to reboot and restart. He graduated from the University of Alberta and became a pharmacist. Sometimes he worked in drug stores, sometimes he managed them and sometimes he owned them, but most of the time he was thinking about what he would rather do than count pills, mix medicines and listen to people talk about their aches and illnesses. He was an excellent listener, even when the customer spoke little English. He was a patient man, even when the customers told the same story every week when they picked up their prescriptions. He was a helpful servant, delivering prescriptions on his way home from work to those that lacked mobility or memory to come to the drug store and pick them up. By example, he taught me more about guest service than all of the corporate courses I have attended since. The only problem was, he didn’t want to be a pharmacist. As often as he could, he wasn’t.

At the start of every school year, all the kids had to fill out a form listing parents’ names, occupations and contact numbers, presumably so they could be contacted in case of emergency, but perhaps used just as often to call the parents to come and pick up a mischievous offspring that was waiting in the principal’s office. (Not that I would know anything about that… I’m just guessing.)

Nowadays, many kids probably have to fill in different names and numbers from year to year, but in my day most kids had the same parents and they in turn had the same occupations and contact numbers year in and year out. Not us. If you were to go back and look at all the contact cards I filled in, there would be a lot of variety: pharmacist, self-employed travel consultant, pharmacist, substitute teacher, pharmacist, unemployed, pharmacist, newspaper mogul…. Yes, newspaper mogul.

As usual, my father wasn’t enjoying his work. His boss wasn’t enjoying him either.

“I think we see things differently.” His boss said.

“I agree”, was my father’s reply.

“I don’t think you like working here.”

“I don’t”.

“Maybe you should stop working here.”

“When do you want me to stop?”

“It’s almost lunchtime, no need to come back this afternoon.”

My Dad went home for lunch, and when my mom asked him if he didn’t need to get back to work soon, he said. “Nope, I don’t work there anymore.”

Not too long thereafter, he had some good news for the family.

“I bought two newspapers!”

“You don’t know anything about newspapers!” my shocked mom said.

“I know, but these run on advertising, not subscriptions.” was my dad’s attempt at clarification.

“But you don’t know anything about advertising!” my unconvinced mom said.

“I know, but I followed the current owner around for a couple of days. He only went to places that had bought ads from him before. When I asked why we walked past the other places, he said he had tried, but they never bought anything. I will go to every place, every week. If I can get just a few of those who don’t buy today, to buy tomorrow, we’ll be really successful.”

As far as my pre-teen recollection reaches, he was right. Now, these weren’t massive publications by any means. We lived in a relatively small city, and the two newspapers were weekly “advertisers” delivered to all the households in two separate suburbs. (If that’s what you call the small, unincorporated municipalities that bordered the city in those days and that have long since been swallowed by it.)

One was a 16 – 20 page paper in tabloid size and the printing was contracted out to a weekly city paper. The other was an 8 – 12 page paper for a smaller suburb. We printed it at home in the basement every Wednesday evening and then hand-folded our production. In today’s world there would probably be some discussion about child labour or how healthy inhaling all those ink fumes was for us, but the papers were a success and soon enough printing and distribution of both papers was contracted out and we could breath freely in the basement again. The office moved to a larger facility, there were two Fiat 128 company cars and all seemed to be going very well. Then my grandmother called.

As explained in the prologue, my widowed grandmother already had one son when my grandfather met and married her. My father’s half-brother’s father had been killed in an accident while out repairing downed power lines during a storm. My uncle grew up to become a successful doctor and in 1973 he decided to take his family on a European holiday and they invited my grandmother to come along. My grandmother thought it would be wonderful if we joined them.

“We can’t afford it” my mother said.

“We’d love to!” My father’s answer trumped my mother’s. That ended any chance I had of becoming the next Randolph Hearst, Conrad Black or Rupert Murdoch. The newspaper era was over for our family. The papers were sold, the cars were sold and, since we had moved up in the world and had a camping trailer rather than a tent for summer holidays, it was sold too. Off we went to Europe.

Although I usually dreaded the first day of school and filling out the contact cards every year, in 1973, I actually looked forward to it. Although I wouldn’t be able to write “Newspaper mogul” and had to put down something like “pharmacist doing temporary relief work wherever he can get it”, I was slowly but surely learning that my parents were giving us experiences that would teach us tolerance and giving us an understanding that people are always more important than money or career. In my case, they were probably and unwittingly giving me just enough guts that would help me make a life-changing decision four years later.

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Thanks for reading 87 Stories - Lessons from the University of Life!

I’m Paul, and I like to say that my post-high school gap year in Europe, included a 30-year, basement-to-boardroom career at a company that didn’t want to hire me.

Written with the clarity of hindsight, the accuracy of a faded memory and countless creative liberties, 87 Stories is a journal of how my gap year lasted four decades, made me an emigrant, an immigrant and a gave me a life I never dreamed of.

Stay safe, Always Care