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This is our land, these are our stories

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wm pasz	Posted: Sat Oct 11, 2008 6:21 pm
Joined: 29 Jan 2006 Posts: 1219 Location: Toronto	In a thread called Labor Vanishes a conversation that began with an article about the seemingly disappearance of workers' organizations from the public sphere evolved quickly into a wider-ranging exploration of our values and identities and how understanding ourselves - individually and collectively - can help us alter the way we live and work. When I first tripped over J. Edward Chamberlain's 2004 book If this is your land, where are your stories?, I felt a strong connection with his message - Quote: “We need to understand our stories because our lives depend upon it.” -- Ted Chamberlin The stories we tell each other reflect and shape our deepest feelings. Stories help us live our lives -- and are at the heart of our current conflicts. We love and hate because of them; we make homes for ourselves and drive others out on the basis of ancient tales. As Ted Chamberlin vividly reveals, we are both connected by them and separated by their different truths. Whether Jew or Arab, black or white, Muslim or Christian, Catholic or Protestant, man or woman, our stories hold us in thrall and hold others at bay. Having been called out to tell my own story by another contributor, I thought that I would set up this thread so that I can do that without interrupting the conversation in the other thread and in the hope of encouraging others to join in and share their own stories as well. Since we all have quite long and interesting stories and busy lives, it's going to be pretty much impossible to write everything in one shot. Better to write a bit and then get back to it later when you have time than trying to do the whole thing all at once. If you're going to do your story a bit at a time, I'm going to suggest that you start a new post in this thread each time you write a part of your story (rather than adding stuff to your initial post) add "TBC" (to be continued) at the end of each post and then put "Your Name - continued" at the beginning of any subsequent posts. I'm thinking that having a number of people's stories intertwined this way in one thread may be interesting and highlight some of those connections and common threads that Chamberlain refers to. Ready? Go. _________________ Time is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. Truth is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. You don't need anything else. - Malcolm X Last edited by wm pasz on Sat Oct 11, 2008 7:09 pm; edited 1 time in total
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wm pasz	Posted: Sat Oct 11, 2008 7:08 pm
Joined: 29 Jan 2006 Posts: 1219 Location: Toronto	wanda marie pasz - my story If you bring up google earth and fly to "Central Patricia Ontario Canada" you will be transported to a remote area in northwestern Ontario where vast expanses of dark forest are broken by a patchwork of small dark lakes, meandering rivers, clear cut logging tracks and the occasional small town beside a railroad track or on one of a very few roadways. Zoom in on Central Pat and you'll find a tiny community at the end of Ontario Hwy 599. Just to the south is a slightly larger town called Pickle Lake, it's handful of criss-crossing streets looking like a small spider web on the shore of the lake from which it takes its name. If you are able to get a fairly good resolution, you will see running to the northeast of Pickle Lake the faint outline of a road that dips a bit to the south, then veers northeast and runs into a patchy white area that looks like a circle with a claw underneath it. This is the site of a small mining town called Pickle Crow that vanished from the face of the Earth - deserted by its small population and subsequently burned to the ground by the Ontario government - in the mid 1960's. It was here that I made my entrance into this life in the fall of 1959, the first of three children of an immigrant couple who had found there way to this remote corner of the world after enduring the horrors of Nazi-occupied Europe. The remoteness and primitiveness of this place seems sort of stunning to me now, as I sit here in North America's 5th largest city writing stuff on the Internet. I can hardly believe I came from there although I sense a strong connection to it and, upon reflection, I think that its frontier quality - out there on the edge of something - had an impact on my early perceptions of the world and my place in it. To this day, its citizens pride themselves on living on the Last Frontier - where the pavement ends and ... things begin. TBC _________________ Time is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. Truth is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. You don't need anything else. - Malcolm X
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atuuschaaw	Posted: Sat Oct 11, 2008 7:29 pm
Joined: 29 Jan 2006 Posts: 780 Location: an ahwangan	Not to change directions, but I just wanted to share a project by photographer Yann Arthus Bertrand. This caught my attention the other day. It deals with people...people from all over the world and their thoughts. The project is called 6 Billion Others, and you can read on the project and follow the testimonials of people from all over the planet on subjects from money, liberty, discrimination, anger, the meaning of life, fears, dreams, and more. Now, I'll start...I grew up on dozens of sharecropper farms in mid-western Tennessee back in the 50s and early 60s. Left the farm when I was 12 and have been trying to cope with civilization ever since! (continued...) _________________ "Speaking the truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." George Orwell
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Pearson	Posted: Mon Oct 13, 2008 3:42 pm
Joined: 03 Feb 2006 Posts: 1416 Location: Sun City AZ	Just a thought on this thread Wanda: Writing for most people is akin to going to the dentist, something to be avoided. I've toyed with how to approach this and for some strange reason all i keep hearing is Billy Joel's We Didn't Start The Fire. Our lives flash by about as fast as the lyrics from that song; one word soliloquies each defining a space and time that are all but forgotten. As i began thinking about my life, i found it was a challenge to talk about the roller coaster ride that got me where i am today. I need to think more about this... TBC _________________ If we don't do it, who will?
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SFway	Posted: Thu Oct 16, 2008 7:43 pm
Joined: 26 May 2006 Posts: 573	To begin with, I am a native of San Francisco, born-and-raised, dyed-in-the-wool. The family has been here for several generations and, literally, worked to build this city and to rebuild it after 1906. It is a place filled with life and lives, an endless fascination. Geography imposes its own ethical demands or, at least, its own questions for humans. Given that this city lies pretty much smack-dab on top of the occasionally energetic San Andreas Fault, it occasionally comes to our attention that "nature" really doesn't give a tinker's damn if human beings are here or not, whether we survive or not. We carve out our own lives, individually and with each other, together. This leads to another aspect of the geography-ethics relationship. The whole city could come tumbling down in any minute or any day - 1989 was a reminder. But this is the ethical question geography poses, for me at least. If I find myself inextricably buried under the rubble of my house or workplace, will I care whether the hand that reaches to pull me out is black-white-yellow-red-gay-straight-etc-etc. If I can honestly say that it makes no difference who that hand belongs to in that situation, then I should live my life, day in-day out, by the same standard.
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John Briley	Posted: Thu Oct 16, 2008 10:30 pm
Joined: 21 Nov 2007 Posts: 616	john franklin briley - my story I must begin my story from Dhahran, Saudi Arabia on March 20, 1952 when I came into this world. My dad worked for the Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO) for thirteen years. Our family (dad,mom,pat,mike) left Dhahran when I was nine (9) years old. For those of you who may be unfamiliar with Dhahran, Saudi Arabia here is some information for you to review. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhahran After leaving Saudi Arabia our family moved to Salinas, California. We arrived in Salinas in 1961 and have been here ever since. For those of you who may be unfamiliar with Salinas, California here is some information for you to review. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salinas,_California Wanda... this has been fun.... TBC
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Scott Schroeder	Posted: Fri Oct 17, 2008 3:43 am
Joined: 20 Dec 2007 Posts: 383 Location: Some where on the mountain	Scott James Schroeder- My story I was born into a blue collar family in 1960 in the beautiful smoggy city of Van Nuys, Ca. My parents were of the rougher crowd of the 1950's, motorcycles, hot rods, and not much respect for the local law enforcement. Both my parents being of a Irish & German decent I came from a long line of alcoholics which later in my life would raise it's ugly head and bite me right in the ass! Some of my youngest memories are riding on the back of an old Harley-Davidson or sitting in mom’s 57 Chevy Bel-Air at a Bob’s Big Boy on a hot summer night in the San Fernando valley. Those good memories were short lived being that my parents divorced when I was 4 or 5 and mom was left to raise me and my younger sister alone, not a easy task for a divorced mother of two in the early 1960's. TBC _________________ I will believe corporations are people when Texas executes one!
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wm pasz	Posted: Sat Oct 25, 2008 2:02 am
Joined: 29 Jan 2006 Posts: 1219 Location: Toronto	wm pasz - continued I have very vivid memories of my early childhood in the north. Looking back now it seems that three distinct but interwoven threads defined my world: A sense that the world of humans was a big place with a lot of menacing things lurking about, a countervailing sense of wildness and freedom of nature and that work both defined and enslaved people in tricky ways. My dad was from a rural area of what is now Belarus. In the early 1940's he was one of thousands of teenage boys conscripted into the Red Army and shipped off to the western front. Captured in 1941, he spent the ensuring 4 years in the Dachau concentration camp in Hitler's slave labour program. Liberated in 1945, he was one of a small number of Russian inmates to survive their ordeal (according to some published accounts that I've read, about 2.5 million went in and only about 10,000 came out). After a displaced persons' camps (refugee camps set up throughout Germany for millions of dislocated and homeless Europeans) he set out for the US in 1948. A last minute change in plans brought him to Toronto Canada instead. After a brief stint in Toronto's stockyard district, he headed north where young immigrants were in hot demand in the booming natural resource industries. Within ten years he had achieved a measure of success - having worked his way up from underground labour to a hoistman's position (a mining trade the requires an operating engineer's ticket). He also had a Harley Davidson and a large black and white Pontiac with enormous tail fins. In 1958 he met my mother, a Polish woman in her early 30's who had left a thriving tailoring business to join her brother and his family who had arrived in Canada with my dad and headed north together. Mother expected that the train trip from Montreal, where her plane landed, to my uncle Joe's house would be something akin to the train rides between the Polish towns where she'd grown up - short, maybe an hour or two. She was looking forward to life somewhere outside of Montreal (then Canada's largest and most cosmopolitan city). I can only imagine what must have gone through her mind when she arrived 17 hours later, exhausted and bewildered, at a bleek northern whistlestop called Savant Lake where she was met by her brother and my dad. Quite likely, the 100 or so miles that they would then have traveled north on a winding gravel road didn't make her feel any better. My mom hated the north, right from the beginning but there was no going back. A few weeks after her arrival, she married my dad and the two settled into one of the small cottage-like miners' houses scattered along the sides of Pickle Crow's main (and only) street. I was born a few months later. Everything in our small community revolved around the mine and work. I remember very early on, my dad going to work - picking up his lunch box and piling into the huge car with fins and then returning many hours later with all kinds of stories to tell about what had gone on at work. I was quite a big fan of dad - a big affable man who doted on me, enjoyed the camaradeie of his co-workers and could talk at length about the various technical detals and engineering marvels of northern hardrock mining. Our house was within walking distance from the mine and you could actually see part of the mine property from our living room window. When dad was on the afternoon shift, I would often stay up and wait for him to return - I recall sitting on the sofa and looking out the living room window waiting to see the headlights of his car go on and then following them in the pitch darkness down the road until they disappeared around a bend to reappear a few minutes later in front of our house. He would then sit up wiht me talking at length about mining stuff, how much ore had been milled on his shift and other things like that. I didn't understand any of it but it sounded fascinating and was pleased that he would tell me about it. When dad wasn't working, he would put me in the large car and we'd drive around to Pickle Lake where he would take me to the general store to buy treats and down to the dock to watch the float planes take off and land. I would ask him where they were going and he would talk about the other remote towns in the area and why the planes went there and what they brought back. Dad seemed to know everyone in the town and would often stop to chatwith the guys getting off the planes and in the garage and the store, mostly about mining stuff from what I recall. I would stare up at them - especially the pilots (whom I found quite fascinating because they could make the planes fly) - and try to get their attention which I was usually successful in doing. There was an easy sort of camaraderie and confident energy among these people and I enjoyed being around them. The harshness of the environment didn't seem to put most the citizens of this remote place off at all and most seemed to sort of revel in its extremes. Temperatures would sink to -30 a couple of months each year. The summers were surprisingly hot and dry and insect-ridden (kids were rarely let out of the house without being soaked in fly repelant and a common sight on summer evenings was a jeep-like truck that sprayed a white cloud of bug killer up and down the street - possibly DDT). The landscape was unremarkable. This far north the rolling hills and tall trees of the Canadian Shield give way to a flatter, more mundane landscape covered in short skinny spruce trees and swampy lagoons. Yet, at night you could got outside and watch brilliant curtains of northern lights dance across the sky or see blankets of glimmery snow stretch as far as you could see. The place had a certian rugged beauty I guess. Dad loved the Canadian north and in hindsight I guess I can understand why. It was about as far away from his ravaged homeland as you could get - both geographically, economically and politically. He would say that here a guy could live in peace and relative prosperity far away from the "ists" and the "isms" which he believed were the stepping stone to wrack and ruin. My mother on the other hand was not at all happy with life in the north. I remember her as a fretful woman who tried to make the most of her new life but who could never shake the ghosts of her past. She was terrified of thunderstorms and would hide in her bedroom when they happened. The sounds of blasting at the mine had a similar effect. She probably had post traumatic stress disorder but back then nobody knew about these things and even if they did, health care was pretty primitive in the north. To keep busy, she would sew (lovely fashionable clothing for herself and me and later my younger sister) and write letters to her family back home. She would read the letters she received from her family and friends to me and tell me about these people. At times we would look through a box of old photographs from before "the war". They all looked happy these people but in a distant kind of way. Many of them were dead now she would explain, killed by the "s men". I once made the mistake of asking who the s-men were and she described them and what they would do in somewhat graphic detail. On one occasion she showed me a picture in an ethnic paper that she would receive in the mail, of some people hanging. This is what the s-men did, she explained getting quite emotional. It seems to me sort of odd that someone would tell their 3 year old such things but I guess she really didn't have anyone else to talk to and I was handy. I became quite concerned about the s-men and wondered if they might come to our town to do these awful things. One time when I was at the dock with dad I asked him if there were any s-men where the planes were going. He asked me where I had heard of s-men and I said that mama had told me about them. Dad told me that there were no more s-men. The Americans had killed them all. This made me feel better although I didn't have a clue who or what Americans were. When we got home dad told mama to quit filing my head with these stories. Yet, the stories were in my head already and wouldn't leave. I became conscious that there were bad things around. The woman who lived across the road from us with a brood of children and would often come by to borrow food - why did she often have bruises on her face? The pretty young blond lady who did my mom's hair, she often had black eyes and cried a lot. Her husband - a little round troll of a man - was always beating their young son. Once when mom and I and my young sister came over for a hair dressing appointment we caught him rubbing the poor kid's face in shit - apparently he'd had a toilet training accident and Jashi thought this might be a cure. Then there was the Native reserve in Central Pat - a dreadful place filled with dilapidated houses and unhappy looking people. My school was across the road from the reserve but there were never any Native kids in our school. I once asked our teach why that was and she said that they would get sent away to special schools where they would learn to be white. The treatment of the Native population was the one thing that dad felt uncomfortable with in the new land - I recall him saying many years later that it was too close to what happened to the Jews of Europe. Alcoholism was a pretty big problem in our town - dad moonlighted at the local hotel beverage room as a bartender and bouncer and I recall him coming home quite often with his shirt torn up and his knuckles bloodied. Tragedy found our family when I was about 5 years old. My younger sister died - victim of misdiagnosed appendicitis and my favourite uncle was killed in an awful late night car accident that claimed something like five lives. I myself had been flown by float plane to a hospital in another northern town for some emergency surgery. By the time I came home, my sister was dead and my mother was devastated. I don't think she ever recovered from her loss. She spent most of her time sitting in a chair by the window staring out into space and weeping. When she wasn't doing that she was often angry, sometimes hysterical. Dad spent most of his time at work or at the local hotel. Left to my own devices, I discovered an interesting new toy - a radio record player console that was probably the most expensive and high tech piece of furniture in our small house. It was one of those models that had a nice wood cabinet and two doors. Behind one was a shelf for record albums and behind the other was a radio that had an AM and short wave band and a record player which played 78 rmp records. I recall standing in front of the radio and staring with much interest at the large lighted rectangular dial and its rows of numbers and a red needle that would move across the dial when you turned the tuning knob - one of four gold coloured plastic knobs in a row under the dial. Before my sister's death, my parents often listened to short wave radio broadcasts from Europe. I didn't find the broadcasts all that interesting- didn't even understand what these people were talking about - but what fascinated me to no end was the sound of the static between the stations and, especially, that staticky choppy sound that you would hear as you turned the dial. Now that the radio had become my best friend, I would turn it one frequently and travel up and down the bands listening for stuff. There wasn't much in the way of radio reception up north at this time, but I wasn't really looking for music (I had found out how to make that happen by using the turntable and the records in the cardboard-sleeved "albums" behind the other door - Johnny Cash was my fave). What fascinated me was the static and particularly the strange voices that could sometimes be heard through the static. At times I could hear the sound of people talking through the static and, occasionally, there was the sound of a monotone mechanical type voice - usually a woman's voice - repeating what sounded like a long list of monosyllables. This I found especially fascinating and kind of scary. I was draw to these sounds and recall now quite vividly wanting to know what they were talking about because it sounded shadowy and mysterious - like they were up to something that I wasn't supposed to know about or like there was some kind of secret world behind the static. I wondered if this was where the s-men lived or if this was where my sister and my uncle had gone. I had the feeling that I had stumbled over something secret that I wasn't supposed to know about. I recall that this feeling of knowing something secret had a strange effect on how I perceived the world around me. Now when I went walking with my mother to the church or the store, I would look around me in a wary but worldy sort of way - half expecting to see s-men coming around the bend in the road or my uncle driving up in his big burgundy car or my sister running out from behind the trees because I knew there was a lot more going on than met the eye and this gave me something of an empowered feeling but at the same time a sense that I was one wierd kid. To escape the dreariness of our house, I would sometimes walk over to the mine to visit with dad when he was on afternoon shift. Security was pretty primitive and so a 5 or 6 year old kid could walk up to the mine property and into the hoist room without anybody giving a shit. I remember walking out behind our house, past some trees and across a yellow tailings plain (tailings are what's left of ore once it's milled and all the valuable minerals are extracted - they make a fine powder that is usually dumped somewhere near the mine site and form a flat hardpacked muddy surface), up a rocky embankment and to small building where the hoist room was located. Often I would bring dad a snack or a newspaper and we would hang out in the hoist room together. I was fascinated by all the dials and levers and the long arm thing that dad would raise to sound the town siren at specific times in the day. When it was time to go, he would send me off and I'd head home, back across the tailings plain to spin some Johnny and check out the static people. I felt quite good about these walks and often looked around me at the deserted expanse of mud and rock around me. It was a good thing it was deserted because I'm sure that anyone looking on would have thought that there was something kind of odd about the sight of this small blond curly haired kid trooping off to the mine site like it was the thing to do and coming home to get the goods on the strange people with metallic voices. Yeah, I was definitely once weird kid - and things would get weirder still. TBC _________________ Time is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. Truth is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. You don't need anything else. - Malcolm X
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SFway	Posted: Sat Oct 25, 2008 2:47 am
Joined: 26 May 2006 Posts: 573	Wanda, I visited Dachau in 1968...an ugly and terrible memorial to those brutal times. I have never forgotten it. Your Dad got lucky on several counts: surviving the camps and not being forcibly repatriated by the Brits and Americans at the end of the war, which would have landed him in another, Soviet, camp if not worse. We have alot in common, perhaps one generation removed. My Dad's parents were from Poland, as well, with my grandfather serving the mandatory 10 or 12 years as a draftee in the Russian cavalry. Being a Pole in the Russian Imperial army was, in all probability, not necessarily the most warm, comfortable, fuzzy place in the world. Regardless, according to Dad, the man had a knack for geniality and, one would suspect, a certain degree of toughness which probably stood him in good stead in Brooklyn after his emigration. One hilarious multi-cultural tale: he had a great voice and loved to sing (as did Dad) and lived in a prediminantly Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn (Pops spoke fluent Yiddish as well as Polish, Russian and several other languages until literally his dying day); apparently, one day, knowing of this quality for song, a delegation came from one of the local temples to request that my grandad become the cantor there...and got the surprise of their lives when to door opened to reveal the religious paraphenalia common to Polish Catholic households hanging on the walls. I'd like to think that they all had a good laugh about it. more soon...
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wm pasz	Posted: Mon Oct 27, 2008 12:26 am
Joined: 29 Jan 2006 Posts: 1219 Location: Toronto	How about that sfway, we're from the same tribe. It's interesting your story about your grandfather. I've heard similar accounts from some of the "stary" (old timers) that I met in our extended family both here in North America and in Eastern Europe. There was a sort of gregarious warmth about them, and an indefatigable courage as well. These guys had had such tough lives, yet never lost the capacity for joy and good humor. As for my dad's post war experiences as a displaced person, from what I have read it seems that there were literally hundreds of thousands of DP's from what would become the Soviet Bloc who were never repatriated. Rumours of Stalin's plans for returning Red Army soldiers were apparently sweeping through the DP camps early on and many decided they weren't going to take the Allies up on the free ticket home. Many simply refused to go, others misrepresented their origins (my dad and his brother passed themselves off as Poles which was easy for them to do as at least part of their family were ethnic Poles and they could speak and write in both Polish and Russian). From what I've read, it seems like this became a pretty big problem for the repatriation program and eventually it was just accepted as a given that a lot of these people were not going to go back to where they came from. The labour-based immigration programs that started in many western countries in the late 1940's provided a much-needed fix for this problem. From what I recall hearing from my dad about this period, it seems that a lot of the DP's, especially the younger unmarried men, wandered from camp to camp looking for family members and friends. In the 3 years following the war he managed to hook up with a brother, a cousin and my mom's brother (who had married my aunt in a DP camp and their first child was born there also). The whole lot of them immigrated to Canada together, settling first in Toronto and then heading north. More story coming soon. _________________ Time is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. Truth is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. You don't need anything else. - Malcolm X
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Scott Schroeder	Posted: Mon Oct 27, 2008 5:40 pm
Joined: 20 Dec 2007 Posts: 383 Location: Some where on the mountain	Scott Schroeder-continued My mother was born in Austin, Minnesota and raised on a farm until they moved to Southern California some time in the early 50's. My mother never new her real father, from what I’m told he was a mean, angry, alcoholic Irishmen that was very abusive to my grandmother. The original story was that he was killed in a “car accident” but as I got older I found the real story was he died by suicide while my grandmother(a hardy German woman) was pregnant with my mother. Back in the 40's a widowed women with a new born must have been a real struggle! In the early years of my mother’s life my grandmother had to find work in Chicago while leaving my mother with an American Indian family to care for her while she worked during the week. At some point in the 40's my grandmother remarried another Irish man and had two more children, my mother was about seven then. Not long after they moved to Southern California, the San Fernando valley to be exact and finally settled in a small railroad town called Newhall, California. My father was born in Newark, New Jersey and while I don’t know a whole lot about his life as a kid(because he refuses to talk about it). What I have found out his life was no bowl of cherries either. For years anytime I asked my dad about his father all he would tell me is ... “He was a fucking asshole and that’s all you need to know!” My dad being one of the old hard ass biker type that emerged out of the late 50's & 60's isn’t much into talking about feelings or rehashing old wounds. The one story I got about my real grandfather is he to was an angry German drinker that like to punch around my little Irish grandmother. When my dad was around thirteen he had seen his father slap around his mother(my grandmother) one two many times and decided he had seen enough! My dad picked up a chair and busted it over his father’s head splitting open his head! He told his father that if he ever laid another had on his mother again he would “kill him!” My dad’s father must have gotten the point apparently he left my grandmother, my father and his sister high and dry and my father never saw him again. My dad pretty much raised himself from that point. When and where my dad and his family moved from New Jersey to California I’m not clear but they ended up in North Hollywood, California were dad attended North Hollywood High school. Dad has some great stories about rumbles, street fights and just all around shit disturbing back in his day so I’m assuming North Hollywood was even a tough neighborhood back in the 50's. After high school dad ended up in the military where he was shipped off to Korea during the Korean war. He doesn’t talk a whole lot about that so I’m not quite sure what his experience was but I can bet it wasn’t a good one. Soon after dad got home from Korea he met my mother, around 1957 or 58 I think. They were married soon after. I asked my dad how they got together and he told me while he was working at a gas station he noticed her and noticed that she had a nice butt! So he told her so! Soon after they were married, June or July 1959(Damn! Pops was a smooth talker! Romance biker style I guess?) Shortly after I came along, I was born on my mom’s 19th birthday, February, 1960(yup me and mom had the same birthday) The story my dad tells me is that my mom was scared to death to touch me, afraid I was going to break or something I guess. Dad says he use to just through me over his shoulder(where I would sleep) while he cooked, did dishes or what ever. Apparently as a baby he must have been the one I bonded with the most in my early days of life. My mother, having depression run in her family already started showing signs at this young age of being a depressed person herself. My dad tells me that much of her time she was withdrawn, sitting on the couch, smoking cigarettes with a drink and her nose in a book closing out the world. Dad said it was impossible to communicate with her when she was like this and I know that dad was dead on because this was to become my life for the next twelve years up until her death in 1972. TBC... _________________ I will believe corporations are people when Texas executes one!
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wm pasz	Posted: Mon Oct 27, 2008 10:18 pm
Joined: 29 Jan 2006 Posts: 1219 Location: Toronto	pasz - continued In 1966 the Pickle Crow gold mine closed and the town's 200 or so inhabitants scattered. We moved to a considerably bigger small town just off the Trans Canada highway north of Lake Superior. Manitouwadge (the name means "Cave of the Great Spirit" in Ojibway) was a much more modern and tidy community of about 3000 people. A large mining operation (much more sophisticated than the one at at PC - no more walking into the hoistroom for me) had opened there in the mid-50's and its operators had resolved to create a decent community environment for workers and their families. After the grueling car ride of about 10 hours with my mother car sick and my new brother squawking most of the way, I could hardly believe what a cool place this was. The streets were paved and had names, the neat rows of houses had numbers, phones, nice yards and everything looked sort of new. I had high hopes that this would be a better place than the one we'd left. In some ways it was in others not so much. My mother spiraled into what was most likely some form of mental illness. When she wasn't violent and abusive, she would sit withdrawn staring out of her bedroom window. She was hugely reclusive and rarely spoke to anyone in the 20 years of so that she lived there. Dad was at work a lot. The busy mining operation offered up all the overtime a guy could ever want and he took as much as he could get. I resented that he left us with our mother and didn't seem interested in her increasingly miserable behaviour. At times I would plead my case with him to do something about it but he didn't seem to understand what was happening and wrote it off as her having bad nerves. This pissed me off to no end. We got our first TV shortly after we settled in (there was no TV reception in PC so nobody had a set). There were only two channels and one didn't come in all the time. I would watch cartoons on one and newsy stuff on the other. I spent a good deal of time watching reports from Vietnam (which fed my sense of there being a lot of bad things in the world) and the riots and protests of the late 1960's (from which I first gleaned the concept of rebellion. The anti-war movement fascinated me as did the whole counter culture thing. I admired the hippies and looked forward to being one myself when I was a bit older. TV and my continuing interest in radio introduced me to rock music and an odd sense of liberation that came from listening to powerful chords and rebellious, abstract or otherwise pushing-the-envelope lyrics. I totally loved The Doors, Steppenwolf, Dylan, Hendrix and progressed into heavier metal (Sabbath, Alice Cooper, Deep Purple - to name just a few) by the time I was finishing up elementary school. My parents were horrified by this stuff and the junior hippie persona that I was busy developing - and that suited me fine as I truly disliked living with them and was eager to explore various escapes. By the time I was well into my teens, I was a prodigeous drinker (I wasn't really big on drugs - although I sampled here and there - always wanting to stay cool and in control) and hung out in the usual hangouts that a small town had to offer. Most of the time I felt like a huge misfit. I didn't really share my friends' goals or interests (dating, settling down, going to work, raising kids and that kind of stuff). I was eager to escape from the north and do something bigger. I didn't really have a clue what that was though. I figured that it might involve rock music or journalism or something rebellious. I was a voluminous reader (I did really well in school although school bored the crap out of me) and so when I didn't have my head in a case of beer or whatever. I was especially captivated by Hunter Thompson but also really got into Dalton Trumbo (Johnny Got His Gun), Betty Friedan (best damned feminist writing ever) and the biographies of late great rock musicians (whose deaths bothered me, coming as they did just as I was old enough to really get into their shit). Janice Joplin's bio, Buried Alive, was way, way cool. I felt that there was hope for misfits (which she had been as a teenager) after all - in fact, we tended to really go far! I also read a lot about oppression too, particularly the events of the Holocaust and Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago (all 3 volumes). My early fascination with work continued and I was struck by the strange juxtaposition of work in my parents' early lives: The macabre Arbeit Macht Frei on the gates of Dachau (and other concentration camps) and my mother's own narrow escape from deportation to the camps - she was the local seamstress in her town and was kept around as the wives of the occupying Nazis wanted to be outfitted in style. Yet, here in our town work seemed like a good thing. As in the previous town everything revolved around the mine (there were actually two mines at one time) and unions. Not long after we moved there, an intense organizing campaign began between two unions for the mine workers. The dueling campaigns went on for several months and became quite heated. It was my first exposure to anything about unions and I was really interested in that it seemed like these people were fighting for something - like the hippies and protesters even though they didn't look or dress like them. In the end the more militant of the two unions (an independent that was allied with a Quebec-based labour federation called the Confederation of National Trade Unions or CNTU - the other union was the Steelworkers) won the campaign. A couple of lengthy strikes followed in the ensuring years. The strikes were sort of a community thing and worked out well for the workers. My dad was a big supporter of his union, although his interest extended to what went on in the community - he had no time for the isms and ists that sometimes came up in conversations with the union reps who came in from out of town and neither did most of the other members. He took me to a picket line when I was about 10 years old and I recall being struck by what seemed like a real sense of solidarity among the workers. They were very sure of themselves and eventually won a good deal out of it. From this perspective it seemed that work could be rewarding and enriching - giving a people a sense of pride, community, belonging, engagement. I became a big unionist. As I drifted towards the end of high school, I began to think about my next move. I wanted to go somewhere big. University was an easy way to leave town and go somewhere big. So I moved to Toronto (pretty much because it was the biggest city I could get to without immigration hassles - I would have preferred Chicago or New York) and enrolled in a big school, taking courses that I thought might help me become - are you ready for this - a union lawyer. But things didn't turn out that way, thankfully. TBC _________________ Time is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. Truth is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. You don't need anything else. - Malcolm X
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Scott Schroeder	Posted: Sat Nov 01, 2008 3:38 am
Joined: 20 Dec 2007 Posts: 383 Location: Some where on the mountain	S Schroeder-continued Somehow my parents managed to stay married until my sister was born in 1963 but soon after that they split and then were divorced. By 1965 my parents were divorced and mom, myself and my younger sister were on our own. Mom landed a job in one of the local Forest Service offices in Newhall. Being that dad was good at working on cars and also a top rate welder he was working at place in Van Nuys called “Magic Mufflers”. Dad was/is a true artist with an acetylene torch and metal, in fact until this day dad does the most awesome metal art you would ever see! Mom, myself and my sister moved to a small 2 bedroom duplex in town and dad had moved back out to the Van Nuys area were his work was. Not long after my parents divorce my dad met and moved in with a divorced woman(who actually went to high school with my mom) with two young girls, one of which was my exact same age and the other a year older. Mom struggled to make ends meet(though my sister and I never went without) until about 1966 when she met this right wing, redneck, evangelical, drunken mother fucker who worked at one of the local fire department stations. Soon after mom married this asshole, I believe it was more out of financial desperation than anything else because this guy was definitely not my moms type! Her marriage to this man would start a long line of frequent school changes and physical abuse for both me and my sister for the next nine years. By the time mom had married the “redneck asshole” dad was already living with his new Irish Catholic girl friend in Van Nuys. In those days for Catholics, living together without being married was quite taboo and on top of it all dad was a biker hanging out with a pretty rough crowd. Apparently this went over like a fart in a space suit with dad’s new girl friend parents. Their new life together took off with a pretty rocky start due to all the outside family pressure. Dad would get me and my sister a few times a month and I remember it was quite common to see twenty or thirty Harley’s sitting out in front of their house in Van Nuys. Being that dad was such a good welder many of the bike clubs at the time, mostly the “Hells Angels” and “Satan’s Slaves” would bring their bikes over to have dad work on them. Dad would make custom pipes for the bikes, he also fabricated some of the first “sissy bars” to be put on bikes back in the early 60's. Dad had another specialty!(I won’t get into details) but being he was so good at the welding thing he developed a skill that made him very popular with the bike clubs that were involved with.......shall we say not so legal activity. I still remember my first ride on an old Harley! It was and old Harley-Davidson knuckle head trike. The bike had a custom wood box built in the back for caring things. They would sit us kids in the custom box while screaming the bike up and down the street! Part of me was scared shitless thinking I would fly off the bike, while the other part of me loved the adrenaline rush! At six or seven years old I was in complete awe of these giant men with their dirty jackets, loud bikes and patches on their backs. On the flip side of all this excitement dad’s new life with his new girl and family when we came to visit seemed quite normal. I don’t know why but his new girl friend treated me and my sister like we were one of her own. It could have been that she had known my mom from high school or maybe she just liked us as kids? Either way her kindness to us as kids will never be forgotten! I guess I should mention that this woman became my step mother some thirty years later.(that will come later in the story). Life back at home with my mother and the “redneck asshole” wasn’t so exciting. In the first year or so of their marriage things seemed somewhat normal and ok but by the time I was in second grade we had moved a few times so between kindergarten and second grade I had already attended three different schools. I was already developing the pattern of being the “new kid in school”. Along with that came a big sense of insecurity, never quite new where to fit in. It was around second grade when the asshole(my step father) moved in one of his three daughters that he had from a previous marriage. His daughter was about five years older than me and was full on into the hippie movement of the 60's. She was a very troubled and rebellious girl already heavy into drugs, alcohol and sex. Her and my mother never got along but me and my new older step sister seemed to hit it off well. I would tag along with her and her hippie friends while they were off doing their drug thing. Hell by the time I was eight I already new how to make a hash pipe from a piece of garden hose and tin foil. After a few months of her living with us I knew why she was so fucked up, it also was my first insight of what an abusive asshole my new step father was. If you weren’t the person he wanted you to be he would try and beat you into submission! And on occasions he even tried to mold my mother into the woman he wanted with these same tactics. Over the next few years I would watch this step sister be repeatedly beaten by her father(the red neck asshole), over dose on drugs, mostly “reds”( barbiturates), run away from home, be put in foster homes and halfway houses only to run away from those. On top of all this insanity mom was in and out of her deep depressions, most of the time never coming out of her dark room and if she did she would sit at the end of the couch with her nose in a book, a drink in her hand and a ash tray flowing over with cigarette butts. The local drug dealers(I mean doctors) had already introduced mom to the little yellow pill known as “mothers little helper”(valium). Between the depression, valium and alcohol mom was spiraling into a black hole! Between 1967 and 1969 we watched with the rest of the world as Robert Kennedy was assassinated, then Martin Luther King. We watched the civil rights protest, which for some reason sparked some life into my mother! She had very strong feelings over this issue and made sure both me and my sister knew what those feelings were. Mom hated prejudice and bigotry and made sure that us kids would never treat anyone different just for the color of their skin!(little did I know that it would be a black man that would save my life in years to come.). As a kid I always wondered why mom would get so emotional over the issue, it was later in my life that I found out how close she had become with the American Indian family that had cared for her as a kid, they adored her as she did them. During those years we were hit with another blow to the family. My mother’s brother(my favorite uncle) was shipped off to Vietnam. Much of the time my uncle was mom’s saving grace, they were as tight as a brother and sister could be. My uncle would come back from Vietnam a few years later a changed man, full of metal in his body and a broken heart and spirit from witnessing the death of his best friend that he had grown up with since he was a young boy. I believe this was the beginning of the end for my moms side of the family, my uncle has never been the same since he returned from Vietnam. Now that the older step sister was gone out on the streets doing the hippie thing and I was the oldest kid in the house it now became my turn to be the main target for the asshole step father’s beatings. His idea of discipline was a leather strap, the back of his hand or forcing the bible and religion down your throat! What a contrast from what my mother tried to teach us. While she wasn’t so bad herself in the whooping department she never forced any religion on me or my sister. My mother was raised Irish Catholic but never baptized me or my sister she always told us if we wanted to choose a faith/religion that would be our choice no one else’s. Needless to say our life from 1967 through 1971 was a roller coaster to say the least, moms on again-off again relationship with the “redneck asshole” led to many moves and frequent school changes for me and my sister and led to a couple of failed suicided attempts by my mother. As a kid much of the time I felt it was my responsibility to keep my mom ok and alive but for the most part this was an impossible job for a kid that was eleven years old. The darkness of our home life was so overwhelming that the only place I could find peace was out on the streets with the few friends I had or at my grandmother’s house. People could find me at my grandmother’s this is why the streets became my new sanctuary. TBC... _________________ I will believe corporations are people when Texas executes one! Last edited by Scott Schroeder on Wed Nov 19, 2008 10:17 pm; edited 1 time in total
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wm pasz	Posted: Wed Nov 19, 2008 4:22 am
Joined: 29 Jan 2006 Posts: 1219 Location: Toronto	pasz- continued I arrived in Toronto in the fall of 1978 to attend university. I quickly discovered that I wasn't really cut out for the post secondary ed scene. What I wanted to study didn't seem to exist. My interest was in the connections between people, work and community. The "labor studies" program had little to do with any of these - there was some watered down history and a whole lot of cheerleading for various union presidents. WTF was that all about? I didn't fit in with the first year kids who occuppied the oncampus housing. I checked out some leftie organizaitons but found only country clubs for affluent kids - mostly guys looking to get laid or mouthy ideologues looking for an audience. Where the f--k were all the shitdisturbers? The place was huge - bigger than my home town - teaming with people who were looking forward to getting reallly good jobs and living comfortable lives. That wasn't me. I didn't really know what I wanted to do but as the days passed I had a feeling that it wasn't going to involve living a normal life. I didn't aspire to getting a "good well-paying secure job". I hated the idea of having to suck up to people and pretend I was interested in stuff that bored me. To hell with the money - there were more interesting ways of making a buck. I began to gravitate towards rebellious anti-establishment people. By the time first year was finished, I had cultivated a circle of friends that was sort of united nations of misfits that included bikers, punk rockers, computer nerds (who spent most of their time on some kind of weird electronic bulletin board where you could send messages to people in far off places - unknown to me this was an early stage of what would become the Internet). I especially liked the bikers whose anti-establishment culture I found fascinating - I liked their bikes and that heavy metal thunder sound they made. I especially enjoyed watching how freaked out the normal people were at the mere presence of these guys. But I wasn't naive about them either. Their views about the role of women didn't sit well with me so I sort of hung out on the periphery of their scene with guys who were no affiliated with any of the known clubs but kept loose associations with some of their members. There was something about getting close but not too close to these guys that was intriguing and well, even fun. Flirting with danger would become a recurring theme for me in years ahead. Equally fascinating were the punks. The punk rock scene was exploding in Toronto around this time and on any night of the week you could find local as well as North American bands playing gigs in grungey hole in the wall type drinking holes downtown. (I was even briefly in a band at one point.) Although I wasn't that keen about the face piercing and public vomiting, I loved the music - the power and energy and the sheer in-yer-face nature of it all. God save the queen, the fascist regime, that made you a moron, potential h-bomb...Shit, these guys had balls. There were no cows too sacred. What wasn't to like? I cultivated a tough, cool persona borrowed mostly from the bikers. To make ends meet I worked a succession of crappy low wage jobs including one in a bindery full of exploited immigrant women. A group of us decided to try to organize the place but couldn't find a union that wanted us. Out of the half dozen big industrial unions we contacted, none expressed interest in helping us. One "organizer" candidly told me that his union wasn't interested in going after plants with a lot of East Asian women (well, he called them "paki women") because their husbands didn't allow them to join unions and even if they did, they wouldn't go on strike. "F--k you very much," I told the guy and hung up. Shit! Where was my old man's union? (I would later find out that it was shunned by the big unions for being too radical.) Norma Rae had just been released and there I was thinking it was a good thing Norma worked in the American south and not north Toronto. She could hold up a "union" sign here until she got old and expired and not attract any union guys. Although I had a busy social life I was pretty much a loner. The one and only close personal friend from this time was a young woman named Anne whom I'd befriended while in first year at university. Although Anne did not share my interest in rebellious living, my association with her put me on a rebel track more dangerous, exciting and just plain bizarre than anything I could ever have imagined. Like myself, Anne was the first generation child of European immigrants whose dreams of finding a better life were cut short by tragedy. Her experiences made mine look pretty tame. When Anne was about 12, her mother - an office cleaner - was killed when a bomb went off in the building in which she was working (work made her free too I remember thinking, sadly, when I first heard this story). During the 1970's Toronto went through a period of mafia violence as rival mobsters vied for control of the city's booming construction industry. Maybe because of Canada's tough gun control laws, Toronto gangsters developed a fondness for blowing each other up. Things got so bad that a commission of enquiry was appointed to look into the problem (the commission concluded diplomatically that certain bad elements had indeed got their hooks into the industry - through local construction unions). Although construction related violence was the most high profile, all sorts of other mob related crime flourished in the city as well. The gasoline bomb that levelled the building where Anne's mother worked was planted by four low level thugs doing an insurance scam. Her death devasted Anne's family. Her father became deeply depressed and was never able to work again. A disabled younger sibling died shortly after. The family scraped by on a small disability pension, often doing without. They were shocked at the senseless act that took their mother away but as if that wasn't bad enough, the aftermath of her death left many troubling questions. Local police displayed a callous lack of interest in the case. Only one of the four thugs was ever apprehended and only because he was badly injured in the blast. The others escaped to Italy and were never apprehended. Worse, the family feared that some local coppers may have had a part to play in the blast itself - a troubling theory circulated in the neighborhood that a local beat cop was supposed to ensure that the building was empty of people before the blast went off, but didn't. (I couldn't help but think, when I first heard this story, how sad it was that this woman's work In the years that followed, Anne and her family tried hard to get answers to their questions. They chased after local politicians, government agencies, and even some social justice advocates hoping that someone would help them understand what happened and bring the remaining crooks to justice, but they didn't get very far. The experience made Anne a strong advocate for social justice and this became the common ground that sort of cemented our friendship. When I wasn't out roaring around with my fringe buddies, I could be found hanging around Anne's father's house talking about social justice. The old man took a liking to me and treated me like part of his family (which suited me fine because I was by now completely estranged from my own). Although he did little except sit and think and smoke, he was a great cook and would always invite me to stay for food and some philosophical chatting. The modest home in the middle of Toronto's second Little Italy would become a refuge of sorts for me in the years ahead. Towards the end of 1980, I was living a gonzo lifestyle and enjoying it. I still hadn't figured out what I was going to do with myself. I would have loved to be in a band but I had not illusions about my lack of talent. Fringe journalism interested me but while I tried to figure out how to get that ball rolling, the wolf was getting close to the door and I decided that I needed to get some gainful employment. Anne had just started working as a secretary at a company in the food business and told me that some other department was looking for a secretary. I scoffed at the idea (having no interest in office work and no office attire to speak of) but she talked me into going for an interview the next day and to my surprise I was offered the job which turned out to be in the labor relations department. I worked for a guy whom I would go on to call Al the Dirtbag. The story was that he’d just been hired by the President of the company to look after relations with a union that had just organized most of the workers in its popular restaurant chain. As this was a very important job, Al was given free reign to do as he pleased. He answered to no one but the Pres and could do whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted, to whomever he wanted. And he did too. The guy was a real piece of work - straight out of a movie. He smoked and drank like there was no tomorrow, spoke in a language that sounded like profanity punctuated with regular words, dressed in expensive but garish suits and generally made it his mission to piss people off. He was the kind of guy who 10 minutes after you met him, you wanted to kick him in the balls. The other executives kept away from him – which suited him fine. His only friend seemed to be a big shot labor lawyer with political connections that went right up to the Prime Minister's office. Frank (we'll call him) was a silent partner in a side business the Dirtbag ran while working at the Onario labour board (the job he'd held for many years prior to landing his cushy labor relations gig at the food co.) – setting up bogus unions for companies who feared getting real ones. The Dirtbag really admired Frank. He dressed like him, drank like him, chased women like him. The Dirtbag took a liking to me too and I soon found out why. He had a thing for young working class women whom, he explained during a drunken outing (there were many) were easy to impress and didn't get all bent out of shape about his shady occupation. I had been pretty accustomed to deflecting these kinds of advances in past workplace gigs but this shithead was really persistent. I fixed that problem though when one day I had a couple of my biker pals join us for lunch. The Dirtbag was eager to meet them considering himself an underworld sort of guy. After a few rounds of brew, I excused myself to take a leak and one of the guys had a chat with him. No accusations or anything like that – just a warning to whatever sonofabitch at the office was trying to intrude on his turf. So he backed off and started treating me like I was the daughter he never had (which was even more bizarre). There wasn’t really a lot to do in the LR Department at the time and so DB would spend hours talking to me about his adventures in labor relations (he was a former union rep with the old Rubberworkers’ Union but spent most of his life working for the Ontario Labour Relations Board and then, more recently, Labour Canada as a federal mediator), sharing his vast knowledge and dropping hints about what was really going on in this, his latest gig. Eventually he decided that he would make me his protégé – of all the f__ked up things! After a few months I was starting to wonder what was really going on at this place. A few things weren’t really adding up. The union that had organized the restaurant workers was an independent outfit run by an ex-copper. X seemed a nice enough guy but there were a couple of things that I couldn’t quite figure out. Nice guy that he appeared, he didn’t act much like a union leader. He didn’t seem to know much about unions and the Dirtbag was always telling him what to do about grievances and members who were giving him a hard time. A couple of times I heard him say off-handedly that he didn’t like unions. One day when the Dirtbag was sharing more of his wisdom with me, I asked him how X's union got started. He sort of smirked and told me it was all very innocent and legit: Back a few years ago, the company was going through a major expansion. Unfortunately, there were a lot of new managers whose people skills weren’t all that great and so the workers started getting agitated. A few of them got together and decided to start their own union. Not really knowing how to go about this, they decided to look for somebody who could help them. X just happened to be thinking about leaving his job at the cop shop and hanging out his shingle as a labor consultant and as fate would have it they found each other. X did a good job for them, showed them how to set up a union, organize everybody and do the paperwork. Their union was certified all across the province and later on they hired him to be their business manager and everybody lived happily ever after. None of this really added up. I thought something wierd was going on but didn't have a clue what it was. Things didn't get any clearer either, the day when X showed up at the office and ran into Anne. They exchanged surprised pleasantries. He freaked out and ran into Dirtbag's office where he closed the door and didn't reappear for a good hour or so. He departed quickly, making sure the coast was clear of Anne. Later on the bus going home, I asked Anne what was up with X the Union Leader and she told me that back when her mother was killed, he was the cop who came to her house to tell the family what had happened. Apparently he had a patrol in the neighborhood and was one of the first cops on the scene when the bomb went off. Well, it was one helluva coincidence we both agreed but why did he freak out when he saw Anne? Things were about to get a whole lot stranger. TBC _________________ Time is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. Truth is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. You don't need anything else. - Malcolm X
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yankeebythewater	Posted: Wed Nov 19, 2008 9:52 pm
Joined: 04 Feb 2006 Posts: 128	I believe it to be important in ones life to express where they came from, the beliefs that were held close, the beliefs that were let go and the beliefs now. _________________ A Working Class Hero Is Something To Be ~ John Lennon
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