Electric Vehicles. What You Are Selling, and What I Am Buying, Are Two Different Things. Louis Shalako.

We all know what we want...then again, there is what we actually need, and then there is what we can afford.

Louis Shalako

 

What would I actually need in an electric vehicle.

What I Don’t Need.

Why don’t we begin with what I don’t need.

I don’t need zero to sixty times of one-point-four seconds or less. I don’t need to get to one hundred in one-point-nine seconds. I don’t need eight hundred and fifty horsepower. I don’t need a thousand foot-pounds of torque. I don’t need a top speed exceeding two hundred miles per hour. I don’t need to corner at four and a half gees…I don’t really need five different modes. Economy, and economy, would be just fine.

More than anything, I don’t need to pay seventy thousand fucking dollars for it.

I don’t need gullwing doors, a whale-tail, and a high-speed aero package. It does not need rear-wheel steering. It does not have to be four-wheel drive or even rear-wheel drive, like a sports car. It does not have to make teenage girls cream in their jeans.

I do not need to plunge at high speed through pristine mountain rivers, I do not need to ford three feet of mud or hold my sideways track on a 45–degree slope. I’m not crawling up boulder-strewn ravines. I don’t need hands-free, autonomous driving, at 150-kph on the Highway 401 through rush-hour Toronto traffic. I don’t need any kind of miniature bubble-car, and I don’t need some behemoth that requires three steps up to the cab. I do not need to lift anything onto a truck bed that is getting on near four and a half feet off the ground these days, and I do not need an engine bay that requires a step ladder and a safety harness to check the fluids. I don’t need a million bells and whistles and this thing is fucking talking to me about my extended warranty and don’t I think I might want to get some counseling for issues related to anger and some kind of Oedipus complex…I do not need the internet in my vehicle, or a father-confessor, or some kind of artificial intelligence, which, having achieved the bare bones of self-awareness, which must inevitably become sexual, after a while, ladies and gentlemen. I do not need to binge on Seinfeld on my morning commute.

A little peace and quiet is all I need.

I don’t need to tow ten thousand pounds at eighty-five miles per hour all the way to Florida. I don’t need to push a button and it parks itself, I do not need to send the thing autonomously to the store for a litre of milk and a loaf of bread. I really don’t need seating for seven, ninety-nine-point-nine-nine-nine percent of the time—more likely, never.

It does not have to be plastic, or stainless steel, or carbon fibre.

It doesn’t even have to be aluminum.

An ash frame and hand-beaten steel panels, à la Morgan is going a bit too far.

This is not a three-wheeler, front-wheel drive, motorcycle-engine tourer of the 1920s.

I don’t need freaky styling. 

I don’t need a car only a Cylon’s mother, a little old robot lady from Pasadena, could love. 

I don’t need to impress a bunch of hicks when I go to church on Sunday. 

I don’t need power everything, or a Blaupunkt stereo with 750-watts of 21-speaker theatre sound.

I don’t need fine Connolly leather or burled walnut trim. 

I don’t need screens in the back end or even six hundred miles of range.

If you want my money, for fuck’s sakes, give me something I can actually use—

Cross-country trips to see my agent, get a million-dollar advance. 

Lunch with the client at the Four Seasons. 

Track days at Laguna Seca really don’t enter into the equation.

What I need, is a little more prosaic. What I need is the Volkswagen Kombi of the 21^st Century.

Track day in the Behemoth.

What I don’t want.

I don’t want to have to purchase a high-end phone for a thousand dollars, or worse. I don’t want to have to upgrade to the most expensive phone plan ever—right now, I’m paying $28.25 per month, for phone and text. I don’t want to pay a couple of hundred a month to the service provider, (for seven to nine devices, no less), just for the one extra privilege of plugging in my vehicle.

I live in a three-floor walk-up apartment in the central city. I don’t want the landlord to put in one or two charging stations, and then jack the rent by six hundred a month…I don’t particularly want to charge up in five minutes, and it sure would be nice if I could use coins and bills in the machine—I don’t particularly want you to track my every movement, even though I am sure the data would be extremely valuable to the manufacturer and other service providers.

For crying out loud, give me something I can use.

***

What I Want and What I Need.

Whether I want it or need it, for my present purposes, a low-cost, versatile and efficient minivan is the best option. My Chrysler has stow-and–go seats. I would prefer to simply remove them, better yet, sell me a two-seater with a flat deck for cargo space. Give me a tailgate that clears my head and two sliding doors on the sides. They don’t even have to be powered. We could save a few dollars by leaving some of the powered options off the vehicle. Give me a minivan, for about twenty-thousand dollars, with a range of 150 to 200 miles.

The odds of the landlord putting in charging stations anytime soon are rather slim, but then, at this point in time, there isn’t much demand from low-income, working class folks, senior citizens, foreign students, and guys on disability…they’ve been reading all the horror stories and disinformation coming out of the anti-faxxers and climate change denialists.

Give me two heated seats. One would think that a heater, with good defrosting capability is a must-have. In Canada, air conditioning is a must for most of the country, although how much people use it in northern parts of the country is unknown to me—probably less often than southern Ontario. However, when you do need it, you really need it, as anyone who has been stuck in a major traffic jam on a hot summer’s day will agree. That’s especially true with a diesel bus stuck right beside you and you’re sucking in all those fumes. If nothing else, with a/c, you can recirculate the air and keep the windows closed.

I want good visibility, in all directions and on all sides…

I want good lights, wipers, signals, I want good size wheels and tires without going too sick or indulging pure vanity. This thing is not a show car, it is a rather utilitarian machine. That being said, additional seating, as an option, should be appropriately priced, if I should care to order that second or third row of seating from the dealer or any aftermarket supplier.

A certain level of customizability should be built-in. What I need, is to deliver plastic totes full of frozen pizza dough. A carpet-installer, a locksmith, a taxi company would obviously have different needs, and the vehicle should be easy to configure, whether on the production line, or by a secondary builder. In the latter case, I am thinking of the manufacturers who purchase a chassis and cab combination, and then they put an aluminum box or a flatbed, or some other specialized application on the back end. Think the old fashioned ‘cube’ van and you get the idea. Look underneath, it’s a Ford, a GM, whatever.

My exact same vehicle is good for camping, holidays, or just putting about town with the minimum of excess dead weight—and two rows of rear seating weighs a good four hundred pounds in the Chrysler.

I’m not saying the thing needs to be ugly, (the Chrysler isn’t ugly, for example) it does not have to have big slab sides and flat planes for the hood, front end, windshield. Far from it, the real design challenge is to make it look as good as possible, without going all Flash Gordon on the drawing board.

This is not a space truck, not yet anyways—perhaps that will come.

(For that, we have to invent anti-gravity. – ed.)

Here's something Louis could actually build, ladies and gentlemen...

If you were to produce a rational kit design, it would be intriguing, at the very least, for those with a home shop or other facilities.  I would love to build my own car. Which even I can admit is just crazy—

Not a serious option for serious manufacturers, I get that part.

It should have a mount for a trailer hitch and a reasonable towing capacity. I want a good roof rack. It should be able to carry one or two passengers and a minimum of 1,200 lbs. of load. The spare wheel should be accessible, either from inside, or in a frunk—none of this shit where the spare wheel is under the centre of the vehicle, hung on a cable, and the fucking thing is so rusty by the time you need to pull it out, that you can’t get the damned thing off anyways, and so you need to call the auto club…you’re only going to get so many free tows.

I would prefer manual switches and buttons, in all the right places. I do like a radio, that’s all very well. I don’t particularly need GPS or satellite navigation.

Give me a centre console, a capacious glove box, and a couple of drink holders. I don’t necessarily need electric seat adjustment. Capiche? Just keep it nice, simple and efficient for my needs.

That being said, it would be best if I can just plug it into a 110-V receptacle, the same one many readers use to plug in their hedge trimmer or Christmas lights. I don’t necessarily need to charge that battery in five minutes. Here’s the thing. I could drive it to work, plug it in, and then, living in an apartment isn’t a problem. I’m at work for a minimum of three or four hours at a stretch, and that’s plenty of time to recharge from a commute of about 25-30 kilometres. As far as I’m concerned, that thirty-dollar extension cord from the hardware store shouldn’t even get warm.

I agree, that a battery with greater range is somewhat desirable, because no matter how long or short the trips, you don’t need to charge up quite so often.

As for battery replacement, that really ought to be as easy as undoing a handful of bolts, easily accessible from below, with the vehicle on a lift. Lower the vehicle, unplug a few connectors, and pull the thing out the back end, or the passenger side, or whatever. For that, you could have simple bogie wheels, on retractable arms. Simply wheel the new one in, jack that into position, plug it in. Throw the nuts back on them bolts, retract the bogies, and you’re ready to go. Here’s the thing: a lower capacity battery is simply cheaper to replace, and you also have a vehicle with a potential life-span of fifteen to twenty years. It doesn’t weigh a ton, and it really does not need to be integrated into the load-bearing structure of the vehicle. If the battery was in the frunk, then it’s four to six bolts, a few plug-ins, and you can lift that out with a chain-lift in a job that couldn’t take more than half an hour.

As an option, a simple Briggs & Stratton, one-cylinder engine and a gallon of gas, hidden in an outer compartment, perhaps the right rear fender, would be available for emergency charging. If they can put an electric starter on a model airplane, they can do it in a vehicle fender…put a decent muffler on there and the cutest little catalytic converter and you really got something.

It ain’t exactly sexy, but all of this is doable.

The real question is why in the hell haven’t you done it yet—this is why the Chinese are going to cream this market, all too soon, ladies and gentlemen. They will produce some reasonable battery-electric vehicles at half the price of internal combustion vehicles and that’s when the market really takes off.

In the meantime, you’re still thinking of supercars; and the pickup truck as a status symbol.

Here’s the deal, okay. Maximum price, $20,000.00 brand-new, with a few options and upgrades if folks want to pad that up some. A sensible warranty on the battery, motor and drivetrain.

Make it fucking easy for me, okay.

And the world will beat a path to your door.

 

END

 

The County of Lambton operates fourteen charging stations.

This seems to be confirmed by EVhype.

In Sarnia-Lambton, charging stations have been installed, to great fanfare in local media, only to be taken away some time later, not so much to any great fanfare from local media.

The Volkswagen Buzz is coming to Canada in late 2024.

Here is a question. Is the U.S. 100 % tarriff on Chinese EVs meant to protect the U.S. EV industry...or maybe it's the U.S. internal combustion industry they're protecting, bearing in mind what I said above. What about consequences, intended or otherwise? Will this tend to drive Chinese investment into battery plants, vehicle assembly plants, in the U.S., Mexico and Canada, which might very well fall under the North American Free Trade Act? In which case, they would no longer be subject to such high tarriffs. (Video from the CBC)

Louis Shalako has books, stories and audiobooks available from Google Play.

See his works on ArtPal.

 

Thank you for reading.

What is an Accessible Home. Analysis by Louis Shalako.

Knee room under all surfaces...

 

Louis Shalako

What would an accessible dwelling look like.

What if a person were in a wheelchair, what if they were blind, what if they were deaf.

What if they were just small and frail.

Where I live, it is a three-floor walk-up. Only the ground floor is accessible to a wheelchair user, and only from the back parking lot. A person in a wheelchair could enter the building through the back door, which appears to be wide enough. Individual units, on the ground floor, have relatively wide doors from the hallway. Once you’re in the door, it is a slightly different story.

My own apartment entrance has a little strip to keep out drafts. One side is the carpet of the hallway, and one side is the tile in the apartment. It’s a half an inch high, across the doorway, and one would hope that someone in a wheelchair could surmount this little hurdle, and actually get into their apartment and maybe even close the door behind them.

***

My friend Jerry was deaf. He was able-bodied, he was able to work. He could afford an apartment, the only trouble was, he could not hear…he had a special set-up, and this was back in the 1990s. When the phone rang, a naked light bulb in a small table lamp, set beside the television, would light up. The doorbell was rigged the same way, or friends and family never would have gotten in without a key.

When the landline phone rang, Jerry picked it up and put it in a cradle. He hit a switch.

He pulled a keyboard over, and used the remote to change the channel on the TV. Since he could not hear, a ‘scrambler’ sort of thingy turned the words into text that he could see on screen, and so could I, sitting there in the living room. I watched as he talked to his mother on the phone…

Jerry was quick on the keyboard, although the spelling wasn’t so good. Deaf people have one hell of a time getting any kind of education, and that is just the truth…the black box beside the television did one other thing, it put closed captions on every show, every channel, the code embedded in the signal right from the broadcaster.

This was a big thing at the time—

Jerry spoke fairly well, although a lot of people just assumed he was ‘retarded.’ Deaf people get no audio feedback—they can’t hear themselves talk, and this affects their pronunciation. Jerry did not have an inside voice, or an outside voice. He had one voice for all circumstances. Jerry owned a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, and he rode it to work in the summer months. He was unusual, for the Harley owner. Jerry didn’t pull the baffles from the exhaust system to make it louder. What would have been the point. He was never going to hear it anyways, but as for accessibility, his apartment really didn’t require a lot of expensive modifications, and what little help he needed came from some sort of government program for the deaf. Which is terribly nice of the government, and the taxpayers, when you think about it. A lot of it comes from charitable donations to foundations for the deaf and all of that sort of thing. We have traditionally underfunded all such programs, and you don’t mess lightly with people’s traditions…

***

Jerry was deaf, but he could at least keep a job.

In my science-fiction story, The Mysterious Case of Betty Blue, Mister Scott Nettles is blind. When I was engaged in writing the book, I turned off all the lights, I closed all the curtains. When I closed the bathroom door, it was pretty dark in there, and I had to wonder how a person maneuvers their way around without vision. The fears of falling in the shower, or tripping over the cat—this is why Scott, lonely as he is, doesn’t have one—I suppose we can all empathize with the challenges of daily life, for surely we all have them in our own degree. A blind person might have a big problem with a simple touch-screen, which the rest of us take for granted.

I wondered how a person finds their way around town, how do they shop, how do they find anything in the cupboards. Scott lives in a major city on the eastern seaboard of the United States, in a slightly-dystopian future, and one wonders just how people do it sometimes…

If you want to try the experiment, wait until nightfall, put on a pair of cheap sunglasses, and feel around in the cupboards for the spare bottle of ketchup. Bend over in complete darkness and rummage around in the bottom of the fridge for a couple of carrots, and then the kitchen drawer to find the vegetable peeler. What would it be like to cook your dinner in complete darkness.

A story really ought to have a point, it makes it so much more interesting for the listener. That is right out of Planes, Trains and Automobiles, with Steve Martin and John Candy.

The point is, is that there is a difference between supportive housing, which all the ineffectual do-gooders are talking about these days, and accessible housing, which also includes the ability to pay the rent. Supportive housing is where the social workers knock on the door of your eight by twelve and remind you to take your meds—or maybe to stop taking your other meds…and it’s only another eighteen months before you get into rehab and while we’re at it, can we slap a tourniquet on that terrible boiling abscess on your face where you burned yourself toking meth off a bit of tinfoil and flaming that with a high-end butane lighter…???

Oh, and how is that special ointment we gave you, and is that helping to remove the stigma of mental health. We’d like to put that on the front page of the newspaper. Do you have enough Nalaxone kits on hand? ‘Cause we give them out free, in a clump of bushes, down by the riverbank…

***

Hates his kitchen...

My kitchen is small enough that I have come to hate it. I bitch, and whine, and piss and moan something awful, problem is, I’m too broke for fast food and too lazy to go to the soup kitchen. I just fucking hate it in there, but there’s no alternative. There is no way in hell that a person in a wheelchair could do very much of anything on their own. This ignores the fact that this is a third-floor apartment. The bathroom, if anything, is worse. Never mind bars and grips and handholds, there just isn’t enough room to even get the chair into the room, let alone get out of it, and onto the toilet or into the bath or shower.

Gut instinct says you’d have to triple the floor space of the bathroom, at a minimum, that’s just for the chair, and more likely quadruple the square footage of the kitchen. This at least allows a person to turn the wheelchair around…otherwise, if you think about it, you either have to back up and start again, or go out the other end, circle back around through some other room, presumably, and come back in the door again. People would have to be able to reach things, and bending myself in half to grab an onion out of the bottom of the fridge doesn’t even get close to the physical challenges of sitting in a chair, with armrests and a footrest, and reaching down or up or just plain into, just about any storage space.

Then there’s the whole boiling-water thing, and cooking on a hot surface, or in an oven sort of challenge. This is where simple clearance between the knees and the arms of the chair comes into play, and there has to be an open space below pretty much anything, in order to even get close. Rinsing the peanut butter off of a knife begins to take on a whole new meaning.

The fridge or stove in this apartment, could not have cost $500.00 when new. Appliances for the wheelchair user are far, far more expensive. So is that additional square footage, whether it is additional to the living unit, or whether something designed into a standard footprint has to give something up somewhere else, is a question of decisions—everything has a cost, one way or another.

We are asking a landlord or developer, to build in some appreciable percentage of accessible housing units, in any proposed development, or a major renovation of an existing housing unit. We’re asking them to do it, because someone has to do it.

***

In this building, the first floor is at ground level. A similar building across the street, has the ground floor three feet down below grade. Either way, it represents certain challenges. In this building, the lobby is five feet above street level. The east end also has a porch. In order to get in the front door, one has to navigate a sidewalk, five or six steps up, a small porch, an outer door, and an inner door, and now you are in the lobby. In order to get out of the lobby, you need to go either five feet down, a few steps, (to the ‘ground’ floor), where there is another door, or up one or two flights to the upper floors, each of which has its own door for fire code compliance.

The best place to retrofit an elevator, is in the lobby, which is two stories high. Above that is the one bachelor unit in this building. The elevator would have to have a structure above the roof, in order to install the hoisting gear. Having given up one unit in terms of income, cutting holes and putting in supportive structures, the cost to make above-ground units accessible is likely to be unattractive to for-profit housing providers. That is not to say that it could not be done.

In a recent survey, twenty-seven percent of Canadians identified as having some element of disability. We have to determine what small percentage constitutes blind people, deaf people, people with mobility issues, including wheelchair users, and then there is a whole spectrum of other disabilities which presumably, don’t require so much physical adaptation in the design of affordable housing units. At the far end of that spectrum would be padded cells and bars and cages and all of that sort of thing…that’s a subject for another day.

***

#screenshots

A serious diabetic may not be able to earn a living, without serious supports, and a person with Down’s syndrome may be ‘physically able’, and still require supportive housing, without fitting into any other stereotype or other negative categorization of a self-serving nature, ultimately resulting in some sort of cop-out or other on the part of the taxpayers, who will surely have to invest to some degree or face the consequences, for example tent encampments in parks downtown…by folks you, yourselves, cheerfully admit are kind of disabled by all this mental health and addictions stuff all over the front page.

***

The balcony. In this building, the patio doors all have a six-inch sill. On the ground floor, this keeps water out in high winds and heavy rain. It also means that someone in a wheelchair would either need one hell of a ramp inside, and the balcony is so small that a corresponding ramp is impossible outside, or we have to remove the sills and put the patio door right at deck level—in which case now we have the possibility of rain coming in through the bottom of the door. In the case of fire, the hallways filled with smoke, it might be nice to be able to get out onto the balcony, sit there and wait for rescue.

It’s just one more thing, one more consideration, one more design headache, all of which adds to cost, time and complexity, in any project, whether it’s a new build or a ‘major renovation’. There is a solution, one which requires some flexibility of thinking. What if, in units designated ‘accessible’, the patio or balcony door has a threshold that is as low as possible, and in all other units, the developer can keep the high sill, in order to address questions of wind and rain. It does take something away from standardization, where every unit has the exact same door. Standardization is not the be-all and end-all of good design. You have to give up one thing in order to get another. It’s a compromise.

***

This building was 'renovicted' and all tenants have been out since about the end of May last year. There has been sporadic and intermittent activity. We have not seen contractors here in some time...there are a few lights on in the building, and you can see refrigerators standing through the windows, pulled out from the wall but not disposed of or anything like that. One wonders what the game is...here's a thing. There is a shutdown going on at Suncor. Union members, who might very well moonlight in the off season and between jobs, would prefer to work the union job, for thirty to fifty dollars an hour, rather than twenty or twenty-five dollars an hour for some scab employer. There is a labour shortage by all accounts. There may have been cash-flow or financing problems. We simply don't know. Not too far away, there was a small fire, involving one or two units, and some smoke damage. That landlord is currently appealing fines of $35,000.00 per count, for unlawful practices in locking tenants out.

How in the hell does a guy in a wheelchair get into bed? Do they all order food for delivery, do they live on fast food and twelve-dollar delivery charges? You’d better have money, and a high-end phone with the ability to do that. You have to have the app, right.

Otherwise, you starve.

How do you convince a landlord or developer that there will be sufficient demand, for space devoted to accessible units, and that the tenants will be able to sustain those units, over any measurable period of time, in order to get some return on investment, in a manner which will make that investment worthwhile. When they move out, who moves in, or do you have to renovate again?

This all applies to small bungalows, laneway suites, garage conversions, and granny-type secondary housing units in residential areas. They are either accessible, or they are not.

If a person cannot earn the income, where does the money come from? We find ourselves in the predicament where we’re putting a million dollars of the taxpayers’ money into an apartment, geared-to-income, with a forty-seven year waiting list, and the tenant is paying one-third of their $733.00 welfare payment for the privilege of having an accessible roof over their heads and still lining up at food banks, soup kitchens, and this is what it costs to get them out of a tent down in a park on the waterfront. This is what happens when folks, through no fault of their own, are unable to maintain regular and renumerative employment, to borrow a definition from the Ontario Disability Support Program.

If supportive housing is impossible enough, then accessible housing is even more impossibler.

END

Notes. The building across the street, where dozens of households were renovicted about June 1/23, is still deserted. I haven’t observed contractors on the site in quite some time. One wonders what’s going on there. Then there is the building on Earlscourt. There was a fire which damaged a unit, caused smoke damage in several others, and the owner evicted fifty something households due to ‘safety concerns’. One wonders if this ‘major renoviction’, where the owner is currently appealing a series of $35,000.00 fines, can show any evidence of conforming to Province of Ontario law regarding accessible housing.

Accessible bathrooms in new construction and major renovations: The next time we get a mass renoviction in this town, hit them with this: major renovations must include accessible bathrooms, accessible kitchens, storage, laundry and all other amenities in equal measure.

While pricing shall be commensurate, within affordable guidelines, it will not be predatory or discriminatory.

How to design an accessible bathroom:

Accessible appliances as per the Americans with Disabilities Act:

Accessible housing, Wikipedia entry:

How much to put an elevator in a (new) three-story building:

Nowhere to Go: The Brenchley St. Renoviction, (Sarnia Journal).

Groundbreaking Fines for Locking Out Tenants, (Sarnia Observer).

Here is the free audiobook of The Mysterious Case of Betty Blue.

Planes, Trains and Automobiles. (Wiki)

Thank you for reading.

 

 

Serving the Higher Goddess. Geoff Lane, Radio, Television and Journalism Arts Instructor. Louis Shalako.

Geoff Lane and student Corey McCrindle in the newsroom.

Louis Shalako

 

LANE, Geoffrey Helliar - Peacefully at his residence on Tuesday, August 28, 2012, Geoff Lane passed away at the age of 83. Beloved husband of Ilse Lane (nee Knight). Loving father of Stephen Geoffrey Lane and Marcus Ashley Lane. Cherished grandfather of Morgan Ashley Lane and Zachary Andrew Lane. Geoff was a dedicated family man, journalist, educator and sailor who delighted in taking family, friends and students on his sailboat. He was passionate about world affairs, communications and the world of nature. 

A simple obituary, in twenty-five words or less, can tell you an awful lot, and at the same time, virtually nothing, about a man’s life.

I know so little about him. It seems presumptuous to write about Geoff, and yet he had a huge influence, on my life to some degree, and so many others, but also to my attitudes and my way of looking at things. Facts, in particular.

In a recent column for First Monday, veteran journalist Dan McCaffery mentioned Geoff Lane, Lambton College and the RTJ, (Radio, Television and Journalism Arts) course, where he attended in 1971 according to the story. Lambton College was officially dedicated in 1969, and there is in fact a cornerstone marking that occasion.

It is unclear to me if Geoff created the RTJ program from scratch. If so, he would have had help. In the very first year they would have had teachers for Broadcasting, Graphic Arts, Photography, English 101, and they would have all had to work together in order to have everything ready for that first class.

Geoff came to Sarnia from the Detroit Free Press. He was the editor of the Sarnia Observer for many years. He was very British. Yet I can’t say for sure where he was born. I do not know where he was educated—one can almost assume it was not Oxford or Cambridge, to say that he studied at an industrial college in London or somewhere in the heartlands would only be a set of assumptions. I would like more information than that.

As for why someone would emigrate from the U.K., that is somewhat easier to guess.

After the Second World War, Britain was bankrupt. Unemployment would have been high. A real block to employment for the young and inexperienced would have been created by the demobilization of hundreds of thousands of service men and women. It takes time to switch from tanks and aircraft to consumer goods. It takes time to pay off a huge national debt. It took time to create the modern social welfare state, in the meantime, things were not very good. The motivation would have been there. This was a disciplined young man, and one must also assume that as a young person alive during WW II, Geoff would have been reading the daily papers. He would have listened to the BBC on the radio, sitting around in the front room with the rest of the family…all of this would have been up close, and very, very personal when V-1 buzz bombs are falling down from the sky.

It was not something you could ignore, and we might also consider the likelihood that all the male figures in his life had served. He had a lot to live up to, if you take my meaning.

This is pure speculation on my part. I have no real facts. Memory is a reconstructive process, and it is hardly accurate in that sense.

But. You don’t edit the local daily without some strong element of self-control. Geoff had a story, he probably told it to every first-year class he taught. He had been in the Royal Army. It was 1948, in Palestine, and he was part of a detachment of troops detailed to escort the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem down to a ship in Haifa harbour, which would take him to safety in Cyprus or somewhere. It was a dangerous time. The situation was fraught with danger, what with the creation of an Israeli state, with Arab and Jewish terror gangs, and the U.K. troops slated to withdraw. This kind of experience, military experience, is one of the keys to understanding his character. He was there, it was a part of history, and it was the birth of a nation, for better or worse, one which still dominates the headlines of today.

It was an important story, and that is why he told it.

A modern college or university newsroom...

Did Geoff love his students? Dumb question, but I think he just loved people. You have to have a reason to choose journalism as a career, and that one’s a big plus. It was a kind of service. In December of 1983, knowing that I was having money problems, Geoff went to the Bursar’s office and came back with a cheque for $500.00. My old man was so impressed, he gave me $500.00 for Christmas so that I could stay in school.

That only lasted so long, and at the end of January, Geoff made a couple of phone calls.

A weekly in Dresden was looking for a reporter, and I drove down there, and showed the editor a few samples of my work. All of which came from the Lambton Leader, the student newspaper published by the good old RTJ program. Well, they couldn’t really use me, (I had zero experience), but the gentleman made a couple more phone calls…Ted Cranston, the publisher of Cash Crop Farming Publications, would give me an interview. First thing Monday morning. Located in Delhi, Ontario, they had three weekly papers and two or three small industrial magazines. The rest is history, and this story really isn’t about me. A journalist does not inject himself into the story. It’s not all about me, in other words.

Anyhow, chalk one up for the old boy network.

Trouble is, there’s more. On our class trip, the whole bunch of us boarded a couple of passenger vans and headed for Detroit. Our first stop was to watch a taping of Kelly and Company, a syndicated local production of Channel 7, WDIV as I recall. It was a live audience. At some point, it was giveaway time. We were told to check the number under our seats. Mine was Number 51. And I had won a gift certificate from Hudson’s, a high-end department store, for a Seiko watch, valued at $140.00 U.S., in 1983 dollars no less. So, Geoff takes the whole darned busload to a store in Southfield, Michigan, where I ran in, got my watch, and ran out, and then it was a quick stop at the Renaissance Centre, running around, riding the elevators, and goggling like tourists, (or school kids), and then over the bridge to Windsor, where we toured the Windsor Star among other places. Yeah, when they called my number, the co-host, Marilyn Turner, came over. I stood up and told her I was part of a group from Lambton College…and it was, quite a group, as a ragged cheer rose up through the crowd and kids were chanting ‘Louis…Louis…Louis…yay’.

I guess maybe that’s why Geoff did it—that and a few other reasons, one must suppose.

Where did Geoff meet Ilse? Did they emigrate at the same time, or did they meet in North America. If nothing else, these are good questions. How did they end up in Detroit, how did they decide to come to Sarnia. Why did Geoff leave the Observer? My instinct, rather than my recollection, is that the paper changed hands, in which case a change of management, editorial and otherwise, would be de rigeur for any new owner…

Geoff would have been editor while Lambton College was being built. The whole community college thing was a new initiative, and would have been front-page news when Sarnia had a population of 50,000 people, not counting Point Edward and the old Township of Sarnia. It would be an opportunity, and then there is that sailboat. Teachers have the whole summer off, and he had a young family…the man was nothing if not intelligent.

Journalism is the first draft of history, and Geoff certainly knew that. There is also that work-life balance, and he knew that too.

One of our first assignments was to pick a story from the daily news and write our own version of it. I picked a story of a ship collision in the St. Clair River. I don’t think too many people phoned first-hand sources, no one went around with their camera and got their own head-and-shoulders shots. It was September or October and we were a bunch of first year students. With several local papers and radio stations, the evening news out of Windsor, London, Detroit and Toronto, the basic facts were clear enough…I don’t recall too many of the details, perhaps it was the name of a ship or the captain or whatever, but something struck me, and I wrote it as a humorous story. Geoff hauled me aside the next day, and politely informed me, “We don’t make fun of death and destruction.”

That’s fair enough. I had never seriously considered a career as an anchorman on the evening news. Unlike some of the other males, I wasn’t too interested in being a DJ on the radio—those guys mostly dropped journalism within three weeks, even though writing for the news and having some regard for factuality might have been helpful in the local radio industry. The daily grind of community journalism is more work than play, (I suppose I could have done it), but the truth is, I just wanted someone to teach me how to write a story. I wanted to write books, and the RTJ program was at least something—it was at least relevant, and if nothing else, you get paid a little money to go to school and then you have a reason, to write a story. There is also someone who will read it, and a bit of feedback from someone other than your mother is extremely helpful. Geoff knew that about me—he told me once, “You need to get some criticism from someone who doesn’t love you—”

I grinned and nodded, understanding exactly what he meant. It wasn’t exactly an unspoken message. He wasn’t all that interested in reading my fiction, ladies and gentlemen.

Can’t say as I blame him for that.

He had a saying.

“Check your sources.”

Marc's Facebook page is not very active, but we have reached out and may get more info.

If you are covering a story in a small town, far, far away, you have no idea of what a bridge or culvert, or any other project should cost. We are essentially reporting statements, made by other people, and how in the hell would I know if a bridge is worth six million, or five million, or four and a half million, or whether someone is corrupt and simply lying. On the other hand, some big conspiracy is also kind of unlikely. The point is, we take other people’s word for an awful lot of things in this life, but in journalism, it’s wise to check what we can.

This was amply demonstrated to me one day. I have no idea of whether Geoff was pissed off at me, or whether he simply picked one student in any particular class, and ran a bit of a game on them, and relying on us to talk about it. But. It went a little bit like this. The college was bringing in paid parking. One dollar a day, one can imagine the controversy at the time. I am being facetious, but young people being what they are, students being generally broke as they are, but the school paper had some obligation to cover it. Geoff asked me to go next door—literally, the very next door down the hallway and talk to Tom Neal. A school has a faculty. It has an administration, and it has those people dedicated to plant and property. Simply put, the college president doesn’t necessarily decide who gets the snow-plowing and grass-cutting contracts. Tom Neal was one of my mother’s cousins, (it’s a small town after all), I knew that much, and he worked in that particular department.

So, with trusty pen and notebook in hand, I went next door. There were a few glass-fronted office cubicles at the back of a larger space, there was a male sitting there at his desk, and the sign beside the door said ‘Tom Neal’.

The gentleman had reddish hair, blue eyes and at least something, of a family resemblance. I sort of figured this had to be it. I knocked, introduced myself, and proceeded to talk to him, and read off my half a dozen questions or so…

My little story appeared in the paper. Several days later, in our regular journalism lab, a very hands-on course it was, the phone rings and Geoff interrupts himself to answer it. He says it’s for me. The other students have no idea, of course—but then, neither did I.

I am speaking to Tom Neal. He thanks me for the story, that’s all right I tell him. He says he agrees with everything in it. Huh? Only real problem is, he doesn’t remember speaking to me. He does not recall any such interview. He has no idea of who the hell I am—and what’s up, exactly. All you can do is to apologize. To offer to print a retraction. He says—essentially—what’s the point, and in fact we never did print any sort of retraction, apology, explanation. I have no idea of what really happened there. I have no idea, to this day, of who that other guy really was. Maybe there really was no other guy, and maybe it was just a very hands-on kind of lesson.

This is what I meant when I spoke of facts in the first part of this story.

Ma'at, wearing the Feather of Truth.

What the hell is a fact. A fact is whatever some person says is a fact—a fact is a matter of opinion, on some level. There are no universal truths.

***

Geoff had a thirty foot Grampian sailboat, tied up at the Sarnia Yacht Club. It is true, it was something of a tradition to take out the graduating class, those of us, who were left.

The attrition was something in that course. A first year class, on day one, might number up to thirty or more students. By day two, five or six were already gone. Two weeks later, you were left with a couple of dozen, by the end of the year, less than twenty. The second year class rarely started off with more than a dozen students, but by this time, simple persistence and stick-to-it-iveness had come into play and a good six or seven of us went out on the boat with Geoff. It was a warm, sunny, late spring day, with a light wind out of the northwest and just a nice chop to the water.

A Grampian 30.

I remember Geoff opened up a little panel, pressed a button and the auxiliary motor started up. One or two of us cast off the lines. This is how we backed out of the slip and maneuvered out of the harbour. This is how little I knew about sailboats. It had simply never occurred to me before—well, you learn something new every day, right.

I had, actually sailed a boat before, a thirteen-foot dinghy, and after a while, it was my turn to take over the tiller. I had a couple of the more attractive young women crank on the windlasses, tighten up them sails, and heeling over about as far as she was going to go, we set sail for the Bluewater Bridge and home.

Looking at the speedometer, a large, nautical gauge on the bulkhead where a small door led below, she was reading nine knots, which I reckon was about as fast as that thing ever went.

He gave me a little nod, which is about as good as it ever gets when you think about it…as for people, either you love them or they suck, big-time. The choice is yours, and make of it what you will.

As for Geoff, he served the higher goddess. Her name was not Money, or Power, or Rank or Privilege. Her name is Truth, ladies and gentlemen.

Her name is Truth.

 

END

 

Images: top photo by Louis Shalako, taken in September or October 1983. Students from Getty Images. Grampian 30 by Ahunt. The image of Ma’at, the Egyptian Goddess of Truth and Honesty, is in the public domain.

 

Louis has a free audiobook, A Stranger In Paris, an Inspector Gilles Maintenon Mystery.

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Thank you for reading.

 

 

 

In this email, I refer to Chris Cooke as editor of the Sarnia Observer. This is incorrect, he was editor of the Sarnia Gazette. A little help is important in a news story. Writing fiction, I am entirely on my own.

Notes. The story on the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem states that he escaped to Egypt in 1946. Again, the dangers of relying on memory come into play here...maybe I just got the wrong date.

 

I've been thinking about this story for two or three months. I am writing it one sentence at a time, the subject is important on some personal level, and it's worth doing well. It's non-fiction and some semblance of facts might be helpful...especially as it's a tribute to my old journalism instructor, who passed away in 2012. I had planned to attend the funeral--that's the day my brother called, a bit of an emergency, and I had to go to London to help him move out in something of a hurry. I was a little pissed off, but there was this young woman, and I was sort of wondering if she'd turn up at the funeral. (I might want to leave that part out.)

#writing