The Handy Man Book

Dad was brought up in the first quarter of the 20th century in a small town in the outback of Australia. Born into a family of seven children, my father was raised by two loving parents. My grandfather, worked as a plasterer to support his large family and the local bookie.

My grandmother was the daughter of a woolen mill manager who had educated his daughter to a level of gentry not commonly found in those parts of the country. She was a full head taller than her husband, what drew them together must only have been my grandfather’s wry sense of humour. My grandmother was an avid reader and would spend what few hours she could garner to herself sitting by her woodstove lost in a novel with a good strong cup of tea in her china cup and saucer at her side. As parents they had a relaxed and amused attitude to child rearing as each of their children grew up with a highly developed sense of humour and a creative bent.

My father spent most of his youth swimming in the local pool and supplying his siblings and friends with sling shots. He found a source of elastic that made his weapons famous and the choice of ammunition was what was immediately at hand. Rocks and pebbles were favoured but one day when the local nob drove by in his brand new open roadster, Dad took the chunk of roast beef from his lunch sandwich, loaded it into the business end of the sling shot and nailed the toff on the side of his head. That was the day he learned to run. Track and field became almost as important as swimming until he discovered field hockey. He went on to play in the interstate championships for NSW.

No one ever told my dad that something couldn't be done, and failure never crossed his mind. He was certain that with enough will, glue, string and strength that he couldn't fail.

He brought that attitude to Canada and a few years after the war he and my mother moved to Calgary to live. Dad decided to build our first house and since his job at the hardware store offered him discounts on supplies, he thought that only the excavation and heavy lifting would need to be hired. I was only one year old when we arrived and we stayed with my mother’s parents who lived 13 blocks up hill from the building site.
We didn’t have a car in those days and everything we used to build the house, except the large pieces of lumber that were delivered, was brought home on the bus every night after work. Huge bags of cement, packages of nails, rolls of linoleum, bundles of shingles, the kitchen sink. Everything was carried home on the bus, one load at a time. My mother and I would meet Dad at the bus stop and load up the baby carriage. Then, with me buried in the middle of the load they would walk those 13 blocks and work until it was too dark to see.
Gradually the house took shape and one day it was finished enough for us to move into. Mind you, it was missing a few things like doors and some plumbing fixtures, but those would come over time until it was completed.
A lot of the special features of the home were created by my dad and my mother’s father, a very handy one armed WW1 veteran. They had both discovered the Popular Mechanics magazine. This magazine was the precursor to home improvement DIY television shows and way back then inspired the insatiable desire for homeowners to do things by themselves. This magazine promised life to projects that most often were beyond homeowner talents.
After the tremendous accomplishment of building a house almost by themselves except thank God, for the help of electricians, plumbers, excavators, roofers and inspectors, my parents took that heady success and began to apply it to other projects.

The first one was for me.

The newest 1955 edition of Popular Mechanics magazine had a domestic project for making papier mache and directions on how to create Halloween costumes made of this stuff. My parents went right to the largest project. A huge elephant head. Complete with curved trunk and massive ears.
They began with chicken wire formed into the basic shape of an elephant head and wrapped numerous layers of newspaper soaked in flour glue over the form until it resembled an elephant with gigantic painted cartoon eyes. Two holes for me to breathe through were cleverly disguised under the elephant’s trunk. The eye slits were not much further above the nose holes and hidden in a fold of elephant skin.
My mother sewed a clown costume to wear over my snow suit that tucked under the elephant head. Dumbo was nearly ready by the time Halloween rolled around. It had been artfully painted grey with charcoaled shadows and eyelashes. The many layers of paint had slowed the drying process somewhat but not enough to prevent me from putting the thing on and trotting off to my grade two classroom on Halloween morning. I ran proudly down the street for the first block, but the thing was beginning to get a bit heavy by the second block. The early winter wind and swirling ice crystal snow was creating a vapour lock inside the warm and somewhat heavier and soggy giant head. By the time I rounded the corner and spied the school another full block away I had to hold the thing up with both hands. With each step the head would shift and I had lost the eye slits to guide my way. I fell several times tearing the knee in the clown costume that fitted over my snow suit.
I struggled to open the heavy school doors because the head would not allow me to get close enough to get a good grip on the door handle. Perspiration was running down my face inside the close chamber causing an itch that I was desperate to scratch. The smell of paint and vapour from my breath made seeing difficult and negotiating through the halls nearly impossible.
Finally I arrived at the classroom door feeling dizzy and slightly sick and clunking my long nose and ears on the door frame I felt my way to the cloakroom. I desperately needed to go to the bathroom.
The one thing I know and remember about grade Two is: rules are meant to be followed no matter what. The rules of the class were; boots off and placed on the shelf and coats hung up on our assigned hooks with mittens on a string on top of that before you could enter the classroom. I couldn’t even manage the mittens. When I pulled them over my head the string became caught up on the ears and I could only see saw my arms from side to side. No one would hear my muffled calls for help. How to bend over and take off my boots without passing out or tipping over from the weight of the now damp and slick head became a matter of urgency. The paint fumes mixing with the steam of drying woolen mittens and rubber boots were making me even more nauseous and I was getting that pre-vomit saliva in the mouth feeling. I started to cry, the tears were mixing with the sodden newspaper mache and my nose was running. I couldn’t blow it. I kept hitting my head on the cloak room walls, everywhere I turned I knocked my nose and hit my ears.
I had set off for school wanting everyone in the classroom to admire my wonderful costume, but now I just wanted to be rid of the miserable thing, I wanted to just throw it in the garbage and pretend I was just a clown.
Finally, my teacher came back to the cloak room and rescued me. I was soon free of the snow suit. She helped me put my clown costume back over my clothes, lifted up my head and let me blow my nose. She told me how wonderful I looked and how creative my parents were. She said they must be professional artists and this was the best Halloween costume she had ever seen.
I felt so much better after that and when the principal announced that there would be an assembly in the auditorium and a prize presented to the best Halloween costume I nearly floated to the gymnasium. I marched up onto the stage with the rest of my class feeling sorry for them with their dime store costumes. They looked like pathetic losers.
It was a slam dunk. I won. I knew I would. I was so proud to be an elephant. Not that I was aware all the time that I was an elephant. Most of the time I was a large, smelly, dark, damp and heavy mass of wet newspaper and flour glue and only occasionally reminded that I was an elephant when people came up to congratulate me.
The bell rang and we gathered in the cloak room to put on our snow suits to go home for lunch. The room was nearly empty by the time I struggled into my snow suit and boots, putting them on seemed a lot easier that taking them off. I was giddy with the success of my win and I was eager to get home to tell my mother.
I was accosted at the chain link gate at the edge of the school yard by two boys in my class who hadn’t bothered to dress up for the school Halloween party. They were the Matchitt boys, they didn’t even wear jackets to school and they put Brill cream in their hair. They were tough. So tough in fact, that when their house burned down, I was sure it was because they were playing with matches and set it alight on purpose.
They teased me at the gate, they pulled on my nose and pushed me from side to side. They knocked and pounded on my head creating echos like hammers on my skull. They pushed me over and laughed like hyenahs when I fell to the ground, my head spun around backwards, snow clogging my nose and eye holes and scratching my face inside my chicken wire cage. Finally, I kicked myself loose and turning towards freedom I whacked my nose on a post and pushed it so far to one side that the papier mache cracked right down to the chicken wire. The gush of cold air pouring in gave me enough oxygen to get home.
The tears were freezing on my cheeks when I staggered up the back steps and through the doorway to the kitchen. I sobbed my story to my mother in gasps. I was sick with worry that my parents would be angry with me for ruining their beautiful sculpted masterpiece. My mother removed the head and wiped the blood and tears from my cheeks. She told me how proud they were of me because without a real actress to wear the papier mache head it was only that, a papier mache head. She said I won because I wore it like a true elephant.
The next year I was Mickey Mouse, and I wore my Mickey head like a true mouse and I won again that year as well. The record still stands. I don’t think anyone has ever won two years in a row since then, unless their parents subscribed to Popular Mechanics.

The second major project my parents tackled was the car top tent. This was a contraption drawn up by the inventors at Popular Mechanics and designed to fit on top of the family sedan. The tent was held up by aluminum rods and easily erected by two people. Roomy inside, it could generously sleep four. The weight of the box would be braced up by 4 corner telescoping poles so that the car roof wouldn’t dent. The tent could then be folded up, bedding and all, covered by a tightly tucked canvas tarp and driven off to the next camping site. No need for ground sheets or tent pegs. No fear of animals crawling into the tent, up off the ground and safe as houses…or so the theory went.
My grandmother had given my mother her old treadle sewing machine when she and my grandfather retired to White Rock, British Columbia and everything we wore after that was sewn on the treadle machine. My mother made our play clothes and dresses and quilts, she stitched my father’s shirts, all of our sheets and pillow cases and when my father came to her with the plan to build the car top tent she willingly agreed to sew the tarpaulin tent that attached to the box.
Dad cut the wood and dovetailed the joints and fitted the aluminium frame to the box, he painted it exactly the same deep royal blue colour as our 1949 Chrysler sedan. My mother spent endless nights painstakingly stitching the difficult material until her fingers bled. She overstitched every seam being careful not to break the waterproof barrier.
Together my mother and I held the canvass tent tight to the inside of the box as Dad nailed the tent in place. At last it was ready just before the May long weekend. We always went away on the 24th of May weekend, the Queen’s birthday, or as it was known then as Victoria Day. This year we would be camping in our snug little tent.
My little sister and I had waited all day for Dad to come home from work, and by the time he did, there was only enough time to eat dinner, pack the car and hoist the car top tent box onto the Chrysler’s roof. We clamped it down tight and off we went.
Cautiously at first but Dad gained confidence driving the contraption as we went along. It was dark by the time we got to the edge of town, but we were only going to Banff which was about and hour and half away, once we found a campsite and settled in there would still be time to have a campfire sing a few camp songs and roast marshmallows.
Tunnel Mountain campground was full when we got there. It was pitch black in the mountains, there was no moon that night and the tall spruce trees soon enveloped our car. We drove around a little bit until Dad said that since this was a car top tent we were going to sleep in that it didn’t matter if we were in a camp ground or not. He pulled off to the side of the road to a place where the ground was level and we could build a camp fire. We set up our little tent house lifting the tent box up off the car roof and tightening the wing nuts on the telescoping poles. We lit the campfire and Dad recited his favourite poems, we roasted wieners and marshmallows and then one by one stumbling over stones and logs we snuck off to the bushes and returned with toothpaste smears on our pajamas. Mum tucked some hot rocks wrapped in newspaper into the corners of the tent box and we all crawled in for the night.
We woke in the morning to the sound of trucks whooshing by. In the dark, Dad had pulled off the highway onto a tiny triangular patch of grass where two busy highways intersected. When we peeked out of the door flap we found ourselves in a foot of snow, completely surrounded by traffic. Our little tent home was so cozy that we hadn’t noticed the blizzard that had blown in during the night. Dad slid down the side of the car. Still in his pajamas he crawled into the driver’s seat. Slowly and ever so carefully he drove down the highway. After several miles he finally found a safe place to pull off the highway. He edged the car onto a nice flat spot and got out. Looking up, he was horrified to discover that there was nothing on top of the car. No tent, no box, nothing. We were gone. We had vanished! He turned the car around and sped back frantically searching in the ditches along the way. He found us back at the intersection where we had spent the night, we hadn't moved. The telescoping poles that held us up so safely the night before still perched us up off the ground. In the morning Dad had driven out from under the car top tent, forgetting about the bracing poles. What an amusing sight it must have been for the people driving through that intersection that morning to see us there, our little faces peeking out of the door flap way up off the ground, in our little snow covered tent box screaming for Dad to come back.