QB Sunrise Scuttlebutt

Scuttlebutt is a weekly newsletter highlighting the activities of the

Rotary Club of Qualicum Beach Sunrise

January 16th Edition

January 23rd, 2018

Duty Roster

Greeter.………. Ken Zuehlke Invocation……. Deanna Brenneman Sign In………... Allen Ball Rotary Minute... Deb Martin-Cox

“Be The Inspiration”

RI President-elect Barry Rassin’s theme for 2018-19, Be the Inspiration, asks Rotarians to inspire change in the world and in each other. “I ask all of you to Be the Inspiration to help Rotary move from reaction to action — to take a hard look at the environmental issues that affect health and welfare around the world and do what we can to help.”

“Inspiration exists, but it has to find us working.”

January 16th Meeting

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Four guests this morning, Ron’s High River friends, Hugh and Mel and Arlene’s guests and prospective members, Marion Hicklin and JoAnn Dunderdale.

Welcome Hugh, Mel, Marion, and JoAnn!

Invocation

For friends, good fun and fellowship, especially the fellowship of Rotary we give our sincere thanks. May those tokens of your bounty nourish our physical bodies in preparation for the challenges that are ours in Rotary. Keep us always mindful of the needs of others and keep us always atuned to our calling in Rotary. We ask these things in the Name of your eternal truth.

“It always seems impossible until it’s done.” – Nelson Mandella

Announcements

Ro

tary

Mo

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nt Jim’s theme this morning was sharing the ideas of Rotary with

others. A responsibility of membership, Jim suggests, is to share and acknowledge the vision and the accomplishments of Rotary with your friends and acquaintances.

Arlene’s Strategy on Voting for Emily Godfrey: Ø Log on to sossafetymagazine.com. Ø There is a link to “vote2018” scroll down to Emily Godfrey (

there are two Emily’s so get the right last name). Ø It will ask you to confirm yourself on Facebook Ø Touch on “ vote yes”. Ø You can vote daily until January 31. Ø Lets vote; we want Emily to win this $5000 Scholarship. Ø Read her video to get a bit of understanding of her personal

plight with bullying!

“The only thing wrong with immortality is that it tends to go on for ever.” – Herb Caen

Program

I was born in High River in 1946 and managed to survive childhood without burning anything down or doing serious injury to myself. I was kicked out of kindergarten in 1951, because of chronic lateness, an inherited genetic flaw and became the happiest five-year old in town. The first day of Grade One, I was accused of being a dwarf by the other kids. When I went home for lunch, I confronted W. O. and said, “Dad, am I or am I not a dwarth?” Dad looked at me for a few seconds and said, “Son, you are not a dwarf… but you might be an elf.” My small stature and consequent dwarf status at school helped me become a victim of bullying throughout my school career, usually by kids at least three years younger than me. Later, I learned that there were dividends for being small. My parents, W.O. and Merna, sent me to the University of Alberta in Edmonton in 1964 at 18, even though I only looked 12 and being away from home helped me develop some confidence and independence. I had a lot of fun at university, but still managed to graduate with a Bachelor of Arts in English (who would have guessed). W.O. convinced me to do a year of Education at the University of Calgary in 1968 where he had just started as Writer in Residence. During my student teaching practicum, I became hooked on teaching. At the same time, W. O. was working on his latest novel, The Vanishing Point. He was given an office in the Student Union building and we would meet for lunch every day. It was during this time that dad explained his writing technique to me would ask for my daily impressions as the novel progressed. I eventually received a B.Ed from U. of C. and taught junior high school in the Calgary Public School system for 34 years, retiring in 2002. My wife and I moved to Qualicum Beach in 2005.

Throughout my life, I have been involved in many sports, including badminton, basketball, hockey, volleyball, Slo-Pitch, golf and various water-sports. I continue to stay active and still participate in many activities. Most people will remember W. O. Mitchell for his writing. I will remember him for his writing as well, but more for the values that he has left me personally; the values that uniquely a parent leaves a child. Some of those values have to do with writing, but most of them have to do with simply being a good human and leading a worthwhile life.

Hugh Mitchell Biography - W. O. Mitchell Nostalgia

I found Hugh’s presentation so interesting that I asked him to forward me the text so I could include his presentation in Scuttlebutt. My comment to him was that as a result of his presentation this morning I for one am going to re-visit my WO Mitchell Library. Thank you Hugh!

We were a very close family and my brother, Orm, my sister, Willa, and I were always encouraged to express our feelings and opinions. It was a very liberal household. My friends couldn’t believe how I spoke to my dad. It would never have been allowed in their homes. Consequently, there was a lot of yelling in our household. I wouldn’t doubt that Ron Stothert could hear the yelling from his house, even though he was three blocks away. W. O. was quick to anger, but just as quick to calm down. Someone who knew our family well once said, ”If there was a rock opera based on the life of W. O. Mitchell, it would be called ‘Jesus Christ Merna’”. Early in my life when I was fairly young, dad told me that he "didn't suffer fools gladly." At first, I didn't really understand what he meant - until I acted like an idiot one day. I think it was the day that I banked a toy shovel off the side of my brother's face and almost put an eye out. I learned that day how intolerant my dad was of fools. Of course, my brother had already learned that lesson when he pushed me out the car window a couple of years earlier. Fortunately, the car wasn't moving. This relates to another valuable lesson that W. O. Mitchell taught me: try to "see the pattern forming." Dad used to lecture my brother, Orm, and I constantly about, "seeing the pattern forming", when we got into trouble, broke something or did something stupid. A lot of the stupid things I did as a kid had to do with fire – accidentally of course, not intentionally. I guess he was trying to make us see the consequences of our behavior before we got in too deep or beyond the point of no return. I didn't realize until later in my life, how ironic this was on his part, because my dad never saw the pattern forming. Things were always happening to him. The most important thing that my dad taught me though, was that life should be full of humour. To my dad, the only worse person than a fool, was a humourless fool – think Donald Trump. Of course, his writing is full of humour. Actually, his whole life was full of humour. There was always laughing around our house. He loved to tell funny stories and he always told them well. He has passed that quality on to me and I can't thank him enough for leaving me that legacy. He also taught me, although probably not intentionally, not to be afraid to laugh at myself. I think he was disappointed that too many people in the world didn't have the ability to laugh at themselves when they screwed up. Anyone who knew my dad, is well aware of the fact that he had plenty of opportunities in his lifetime to laugh at himself. His best stories were the ones he told about himself. In one way, his story-telling and humour were kind of a gift and a curse, because while he was telling a story or while he had a story in his head, he couldn't focus on what he was really suppose to be doing physically at the time, whether it was hammering a nail or fishing or driving the car. Anyone who has had the pleasure of fishing with him or driving with him or working with him can appreciate what I mean. When we were adding an addition to our house in High River, dad once removed a ladder and left my mom stranded on the roof, forgetting that she was still on the roof putting on shingles. He then headed off to go fishing. Ever since I can remember, my dad always used to say, "Son, never settle for less than your best." He always felt that life was too short for a person to go through it being mediocre. This was a very important philosophy to him in his writing, but ironically not in other things such as painting or finish carpentry. We were constantly reminded of it around the house and with respect to our schoolwork. Essays had to be written and rewritten until they were perfect. We were always expected to speak properly and our grammar was immediately corrected if it did not follow proper convention. Ironically of course, swearing was okay - as long as it was grammatically correct.

Quality was another very important concept to my dad. He did have an interesting and somewhat different interpretation than most people of what quality was and he liked to impress upon us that quality didn’t necessarily have to be expensive. Most of the things that dad considered to have great quality were usually broken or at least dinted, were missing knobs, had non-functioning parts, and had been purchased as a bargain. To wit, we always had a houseful of appliances, mattresses, furniture and lamps from unclaimed and damaged freight auctions. And if a couch was missing a leg, that was okay - he’d make one for it. He loved making things and fixing things, hopefully without hurting himself.

For quite a while, we had a crystal chandelier bought at one of the CPR Unclaimed or Damaged freight Auctions that my dad always attended. It had a broken crystal arm, but dad reattached it with fiberglass. This chandelier hung from the ceiling over the entryway of the Mitchell home in Calgary for many years, but eventually had to be replaced because, over the years, that one fiberglass-reinforced arm started to droop like a lost erection. When people started to bump their heads on it, my mom had it replaced with a brand new one. The new one didn't have any of the W. O. Mitchell character of the old one.

He even re-sculpted a broken Eskimo soapstone carving that he had purchased from another unclaimed and damaged freight auction. It was originally of an Eskimo crouched over a sea lion thrusting a harpoon into the sea lion’s back, but one of the Eskimo’s arms had been sheared off. When my dad was finished with it, he was very proud of the reconstruction job that he had done. He had managed to reform the broken arm, probably using one of mom's best carving knives and a Stanley Sureform tool, which he considered to be the greatest tool ever invented. He then used black shoe polish to touch it up. You couldn’t even tell that it had been re-sculpted, except for the fact that the Eskimo now looked like he was thrusting something else other than his harpoon into the sea lion.

A few days after dad had passed away, the family went down to High River to make funeral arrangements at the Snodgrass Funeral Home and pick out a casket for him. We were looking at all these beautiful, ornately carved caskets made out of various different exotic woods. I was struck with an idea: what would dad have done, if he were checking out all these caskets? So, I asked Larry Snodgrass if he had any special deals on partially damaged caskets, maybe one with a missing handle or one with a crunched corner or even one with water damage. Larry was hurt, dumbstruck and not amused. He said, “Mr. Mitchell, the Snodgrass Funeral Home only sells top-quality caskets and accessories; we do not have any damaged or inferior caskets.” I knew that dad would have been disappointed. My dad, though not consciously, taught me to accept people at face value, not based on their wealth or their status. He hated posturing and what he called "phonies", because W. O. Mitchell was “every man's man”. My father was not a person to put on airs. Despite the fact that he had received numerous honorary doctorates, including Calgary, Edmonton, Windsor and Toronto, my father never added the attachment, "doctor" to his name. He was not selective of people, because of who they were or how important they were or whether they were politically connected. In fact, he usually had very little time for politicians. But, he had all the time in the world for people. As long as they weren't fools, of course.

Dad was one of the few people I knew who would get into a lengthy conversation with just about anyone - the guy filling up his car with gas, a waitress in a restaurant, the man reading the electrical meter or the plumber replacing the taps that dad had put on backwards. Why? Because they were people.

Likewise, he never thought twice about picking up a hitchhiker. He used to tell me about his experiences riding the rails during the depression of the thirties and how he had to rely on the kindness of people. He rarely ever missed the opportunity to pick up some young person thumbing a ride. Mind you, it was a pretty scary experience for the hitchhiker. My wife told me about a friend in one of her university classes that dad had picked up on the way to U of C. one day. Half an hour later after walking into class, he was still shaking. My mother told me about an incident that happened several months before my father’s death in 1998. There was a knock at the door and when my mom answered it, she was greeted by a man in a paint-spattered white uniform. She recognized him immediately; he had painted their house several years earlier and was checking to see if the Mitchell’s needed any painting done. My mother said no, but invited him in to say hello to dad. She took him into the family room, where dad was lying in bed. He was basically immobile by this time and it was easier to care for him in this room, rather than upstairs. When the painter saw my dad’s deteriorated condition, the tears welled up in his eyes and he started crying. This was not the same person who years earlier had hired him to paint the house, but had also treated him like a member of the family. When I first started out teaching, my dad gave me some invaluable tidbits of advice about writing. He had analogies for everything. How clichés were like using old rotten lumber to build a house. How didactic, preachy writing was like squeezing all the juice out of an orange and giving the useless pulp to someone. Esoteric writing was like giving your audience an orange that was so hard, no juice could be squeezed from it.

The most valuable thing that he taught about writing was that it must come from your own soul and experience. In his own writing he used a technique that he called “rough recall”, where he would simply sit down and let his mind go where-ever and write down whatever came up. It was analogous to dropping an empty bucket into a well and hauling up whatever water was in the filled bucket. This freefall “rough recall” had no formal structure, often no punctuation, but was full of imagery.

On many occasions when we lived in High River, he stayed up all night to write, because once the creative juices started to flow, he didn’t dare stop. It was very difficult to get those creative juices to flow. I remember coming home from school one day - I think I was seven or eight years old – and complaining to dad that the kids were teasing me, saying “your dad doesn’t work, he doesn’t have a job, all he does is just goes hunting or fishing all day.” Dad exploded with anger and said, “You tell those little buggers, if they think writing is so easy, why don’t more people do it?”

This “rough recall” would become the building material for his finished work, but not in the same context that it arrived. The little vignettes of his “rough recall’ would be scattered and blended with other unrelated bits and pieces. A character in a novel or short story would be a composite of bits and pieces taken from people that were in his “rough recall”. The character of Jake in Jake and the Kid was such a composite of all the hired farm hands that he had encountered as a child. People used to come up to my dad all the time and say, “I knew that person in Who Has Seen the Wind or The Kite, but really, they were just composites. It was the same with the events or situations in a finished piece, which were created from blended pieces of “rough recall”. He was often asked, “Did that really happen?” and he would say, “Every single thing is the truth and the whole thing is a lie.” He called it the “creative leap”. It ties in with that line from John Keats poem, Ode on a Grecian Urn, “Beauty is Truth, truth beauty”. His writing always reflected this philosophy; the more real that it was, the more that it reflected life, the more beautiful it was.

In essence then, my dad’s writing was very autobiographical; a part of his life was in every piece he ever wrote. There is one well-known passage from Who Has Seen the Wind that will always be one of my favorites, because it is so much about his life on the prairie and the imagery is incredible. “Here was the least common denominator of nature, the skeleton requirements

simply, of land and sky - Saskatchewan prairie. It Lay wide around the town, stretching tan to the far line of the sky, clumped with low buck brush and wild rose bushes, shimmering under the late June sun and waiting for the unfailing visitation of wind, gentle at first, barely stroking the long grasses and giving them life; later, a long, hot gusting that would lift the black top soil and pile it in barrow pits along the roads or in deep banks against the fences.

But for now, it was as though a magnificent breath were being held; still puffs of cloud were high in the sky, retaining their shapes for hours on end, one of them near the horizon, presenting a profile view of blown cheeks and extended lips like the wind personification upon an old map.”

Polio

As our way of thanking Hugh for this morning’s interesting talk will be to immunize 30 children against Polio.

Thank you Hugh!

“Passion is one great force that unleashes creativity, because if your passionate about something, then your more willing to take the risks.” – Yo-Yo Ma