by John Demont
I come upon a more recent, colour photo of Marj’s people: her mom and dad with Marj and Murray, along with daughter Janet and son-in-law Steven. The couple have a farm in Gleichen, Alberta, where they maintain a feedlot for fattening calves for market, run 250 cow-calf pairs and grow barley, canola and hay. Steven’s dad is dead. His mom lives nearby on her own land. Janet and Steven also own some grassland that attaches to Marj’s West Place. The couple consequently farm and ranch in conjunction with their family on both sides.
Also in the photo are Janet and Steven’s two boys, the apples of their grandmother’s eye. Tate is eight. He sounds like a chip off the old block: roping and riding in kid rodeos, riding along with Marj as she works, asking the same type of questions she used to ask her daddy. Wyatt, two years younger, is quieter and takes a bit of a back seat to his older brother. He’s more interested in a ranch’s machinery and building things than the livestock. But Marj can see the pair of them with her and Murray’s land when they are done. “Family traditions run deep,” she says, “and there is a lot of pride in keeping those alive.”
Youngsters like that are getting rarer and rarer in this day when most Canadian kids think that milk comes from a carton in a store. Canuck boys and girls don’t put chin in hands, peer at the cereal bowl and reflect that the Cap’n Crunch wouldn’t be there if not for some Saskatchewan grain farmer working his ass off in the blazing sun. Just as their parents probably don’t remember that some time ago among their people existed someone growing something on a country farm.
Marj understands that people don’t necessarily want to live close to the land anymore; she really does. “Young couples today—and I see it with my daughter and her family, who want to go to the show, want to take the kids to hockey games every week—they don’t want to put the time in,” she says. “They work hard. But I don’t think most people have the dedication and the drive to stick to it to get through the rough spots and ride it out.”
She’s at the table in the ranch house kitchen. The kettle is on. Marj, by her own admission, is cash poor but asset rich: they don’t have hundreds of thousands in the bank. But they do have a lot of land that has soared in value in the thirty-two years they’ve owned it. In 1982 they paid fifty-five dollars an acre for the leased grassland and two hundred dollars an acre for the cultivated farmland. Now the leased grassland would easily go for three hundred dollars an acre and the cultivated farmland four-fifty to five hundred dollars an acre. There are areas, in fact, where those prices would qualify as a bargain.
Which goes a long way to explaining why young people no longer dream of getting themselves a ranch. “It isn’t fiscally responsible for a young couple to borrow the kind of money they would have to borrow to buy an outfit that they could make a living off of and raise their family on. They will never on God’s green earth pay the debt off.”
She goes on, “You really have to want to do it. There’s ups and downs, but you’d better figure twenty years. That’s the reality. The best work years of your life—that’s what it is going to take to come out the other end and be sitting where I’m sitting.”
Marj, on the other hand, never really wanted anything else. She had a dream. It’s not a dream that speaks to new starts. Or, even in the early years of the twenty-first century, a dazzling future. Her dream was simple: to have a family. To honour her lineage as an Alberta cattle rancher—and follow the forward-ho example set by her parents and grandparents. To rise every day and ride out into this hard, beautiful land. To endure.
CHAPTER
EIGHT
LIFE OF A SALESMAN
YEARS ago, long before his hair turned a lavish silver and he peered pensively over reading glasses perched on the bridge of his pug nose, Steve Forbes took a Saturday job at Noel Kerr’s men’s and ladies’ clothing store in downtown Ottawa. “I was just fifteen, which is a little young to be working the floor selling shirts, ties and the like,” he says. “I guess I did like talking.” It was 1969. Man walked on the moon; countries waged war in Southeast Asia; terrorists bombed stock exchanges. Kids everywhere were riled up—marching on governments, rioting in the halls of universities. Yet you wouldn’t know that the world was aflame standing inside Noel Kerr’s place.
Picture Steve—white dress shirt, dark slacks, flashy tie and spit-polish penny loafers—as the radiators hummed to dull Ottawa’s bone-snapping cold. Imagine him that first day on the job, standing there as the bank manager, the Parliament Hill functionary or the high school principal walked down the rows of merchandise. At that point Steve had never been kissed, and when he borrowed his dad’s stainless steel razor, it was really only wishful thinking. The man he approached could have survived Juno Beach or the great polio epidemic of ’53. If Steve had thought about it for long enough, he might just have lost his nerve. He might have headed into the backroom and shuffled some boxes around until the customers left. He might have just said, “Aw, the heck with it,” told Mr. Kerr that he wasn’t cut out for this, and then just walked out the door.
Except Steve’s father had met his mom when they worked as models for the venerable Eaton’s catalogue. In the midst of North America’s postwar economic boom, Art Forbes got a job selling Heinz ketchup—“picked, cooked and bottled the same day”—throughout Ontario. A few years later, with five mouths to feed, he took a position with the Biltmore Hat Company, which made the official headgear of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police as well as the hat of choice for the nation’s businessmen. Later he joined the John Forsyth Shirt Company, with its motto that “no one ever regretted buying quality.” There he did well enough that head office moved the whole clan to Ottawa so Art could build the brand throughout the Ottawa Valley.
Steve Forbes isn’t sure if this backstory made it inevitable that his calling would be as a salesman. He just knows that on that 1969 morning, instead of quitting, he walked across the store and, in a voice just starting to break, said, “Good morning, sir. What can I help you with today?” And that forty-two years later he still is, in his low-key way, always closing.
At fifty-six, Steve now has a round face and chesty build to go with his forthright manner. He lives in a straightforward world where people pay their bills, help their neighbours and are loyal to their friends. He calls his wife, Anne, “honey,” and still refers to his late dad as “Father.” Yet the gold bling around Steve’s neck, and his thick wristwatch, let you know that he’s been to the city. That he’s a man who understands the importance of appearances. A man who, for long stretches, made a living by convincing store owners that the shirts, sports jackets and accessories he sold were the best damn shirts, sports jackets and accessories available, because otherwise, well, Steve Forbes wouldn’t touch them with a ten-foot pole, would he.
Once he lived on the road, eating at Formica-topped diner tables, guzzling rank coffee from travel cups, sleeping in motel rooms that stank of cigarettes. Now his workweek consists of a series of day trips that end at home with the people he loves. It’s Monday, which means he will be heading west, along Route 148 in western Quebec, bound for the municipality of Bryson before moving on to Campbell’s Bay, Fort Coulonge, Ladysmith, Quyon and Bristol—a counter-clockwise loop of about 160 kilometres. Tuesday he heads east toward cottage country. Shawville, which is in Quebec but not really of it, gets all of Wednesday. Steve spends Thursday making his deliveries. Friday is cleanup day: he handles any leftover deliveries, gets quotes on special orders and goes out to see any customers who need a little hand-holding.
The township of Pontiac—in some parts so beautiful it makes a person’s breath go short, in other parts just good farmland—is the biggest township in Quebec. But the last time I looked it had only one traffic light, at an intersection where a pair of banks, the town hall and a sandstone building of undetermined use meet, in “downtown” Shawville. The town was founded in 1873 by Tipperary Protestants, mercifully dissuaded from naming the town Daggville after one of the pioneer families. All those years later, this isn’t one o
f those places the federal government points to when it talks about Canada being a multicultural melting pot. The business owners are still named O’Neill, Hodgins, Tracey and Kelly. There’s a Killarney’s Bar and a Mickey McGuire Equipment. The 2006 census shows that 1,070 of Shawville’s 1,490 residents spoke only English and that only ten of the town’s residents called themselves visible minorities. Fully 75 percent of the folks who live here describe themselves as Protestants—high in Roman Catholic Quebec. It’s thus perhaps not too surprising that Shawville has had its run-ins with the province’s Office québécois de la langue française for transgressing the province’s language laws—most notably in 1999, when a posse of militant Shawville English speakers chased a provincial “language police” inspector out of town during a faceoff over French on business signs.
At the corner of Centre and King stands a wooden, white three-storey building with a peaked roof and black shutters. The Shawville Academy Building has been there since the 1850s. The Equity, the “voice of Pontiac” and the area’s sole weekly newspaper, arrived some sixty years later. Steve starts most workdays in the print shop on the ground floor of the building. Newspapering has become one of those troubled industries where only the quick survive. When the Equity’s presses aren’t busy turning out broadsheet papers, they print invoice statements, bill books, wedding invitations, luncheon napkins, health and gun registry cards, address labels, passports and personalized forms. Steve sells those. He will sell you an order of pizza menus, personalized stationery or some school pictures. He also sells classified ads—“ten dollars for fifteen words in advance, fifteen cents for each additional word”—and display ads in the Equity and its annual travel guide.
“The truth is,” he says, “whatever you really want I can get.” The evidence is piled around his desk: garbage bags, toilet paper, paper towels, dishwasher and laundry detergent. Steve, who is paid a salary, will sell you a big bottle of heavy-duty industrial or kitchen cleaner, a tub of disinfectant or a bag of road salt. He will sell you some floor stripper, a bottle of gel to clean a deep fryer and liquids for cleaning a toilet bowl or scrubbing a tub. He peddles printer and photocopier toner and cartridges. He leases dishwashers. He sells books by local authors with titles like Campfire Ghost Stories, Bugs of Ontario, Poems of the Pontiac and Counting Frogs and Eating Crow. If you need a sign—“Ask if it’s Canadian Beef,” “Movies, CDs, PlayStation & Antiques”—he’s your man. Need pens and notepads? Just ask Steve. Want a fax machine or a laser printer? In Pontiac there’s really only one place to look. Relocating and need something to stuff the moving boxes with? Steve’s your boy for that too.
He arrives at the Equity building at around seven every weekday morning, puts on the coffee, checks his emails, then shoots the breeze with Heather Dickson, the statuesque owner, and whoever else has rolled in. At around nine he walks into the parking lot and climbs into his Ford minivan. He makes a couple of dickey turns through town and pulls in behind a hardware store that has been there for more than a century and a half. Steve’s father-in-law, Mick Hodgins, owns the business. All bone and gristle, he still stacks shelves at eighty-one. Mick’s son Ronnie works there, as do his three daughters, including Steve’s wife, Anne.
Steve confers with her for a moment. Then he’s back in the van, turning the ignition. It may be a beautiful summer morning, mid-twenties, in La Belle Province. But it is also 9:22 a.m. and money doesn’t grow on trees for people in his profession. “In the whole world of trade and commerce probably no one has so hard and baffling a job as a traveling salesman,” W. Francis Gates wrote in Tips for the Traveling Salesman, which was published in the Great Depression, before fax machines, the Internet, big-box stores and the other things that now threaten the salesman’s life. Knowing the product line was never enough, Gates felt. A salesman has to know human nature. He has to persuade with logic and sway with hustle and desire. He has to believe in possibility, that he will do just fine. Because when you start each day on the loose, with just open road ahead, you have to believe in something. Steve most of all believes in Steve.
THERE was a time, after the rise of mass manufacturing on this continent, when men like Steve arrived on foot. When they came like David Epstein, who showed up in the coal towns of Cape Breton in 1907, penniless and unable to speak a word of English, and began to “peddle” for his uncle Morris. “I had a seventy-five-pound pack on my back and a fifty-pound pack in front,” he recalled years later. “I walked house to house from [Cape] Smokey to Bay St. Lawrence.” That’s some sixty kilometres through the raw highlands of Cape Breton. The turn-of-the-century peddlers who trudged into Newfoundland’s outports walked even farther. Their bags packed with things unavailable in the local merchant stores—stationery, pencils, combs, ties, handkerchiefs, tobacco, tea, shirts and pocket knives—they sometimes covered more than thirty kilometres a day on foot in search of sales.
In western Canada “Syrian” peddlers were “something of an institution,” wrote Gilbert Johnson. “Sometimes on foot, with a pack on his back and a case of trinkets and small wares in his hand, but more often with a horse and a light wagon in summer, or with a sleigh in winter, he traveled the prairie trails on more or less regular routes.”
In early-twentieth-century Ontario, bells heralded the peddler’s arrival. Then, as Andrew Armitage wrote in the [Owen Sound, Ontario] Sun Times, “up the lane he came, his wagon bristling with rakes, hoes, tin dishes, brooms, needles and thread, iron kettles and milk pans. Spring was the best time to be and out about, peddling. The long winter just passed would have exhausted many a farm wife’s supplies and worn out at least one of her cooking utensils.”
These travelling men came from a long lineage. In England they were known as “hawkers,” “canvassers,” “cheapjacks,” “mongers,” “laniers” or “pushers.” Some were called “rag-and-bone men”—my personal favourite—because they collected old rags for converting into fabric and paper, as well as bones for making glue and other stuff they could trade. Householders knew they were coming because they rang a bell, or called out, in a singsong fashion, something that sounded like “rag and bone.” It was thus only natural that peddlers would become common sights throughout pioneer Canada. Benita Baker wrote in the Beaver that in the early days, many of them, particularly the Jewish rag-and-bone men, were shunned as scavengers and beggars and equated with bogeymen who stole children. Signs were posted stating “No Beggars or Peddlers Allowed.” Former Ontario cabinet minister Allan Grossman’s father was a rag-and-bone man. In his autobiography, Grossman recalled that “it was almost a daily occurrence for father to have stones thrown at him or have his beard pulled by young hoodlums, sometimes encouraged by adults.”
In 1912, Maclean’s magazine described the junk dealer’s pitiful lot:
… the sheeny you can see frequenting the lanes and uttering raucous cries of “rags, bones and bottles. Any rags today lady?” They are usually dressed in clothing that was made for somebody else and are adorned … with whiskers … Little hunch-backed cigarette-smoking men, they are out with their push carts shortly after daylight, and they continue their toil many hours after the union Canadian workman has gone home for the night. The calves of their legs are familiar with dogs’ fangs; other parts of their bodies are acquainted with Christian boots, yet … how joyfully they toil … Most of them have come to us from Russia where their lives were never safe.
In other words, they endured. The early peddler was more than a “department store on wheels” or a “mobile five and dime store,” supplying the needs of everyday life to isolated rural folk. He was also a tinsmith with talents who could fix old teakettles and pans and turn them into something useful. He could do skilled carpentry work. He sold bibles, almanacs full of tips for the farm, school readers, even handbooks on animal doctoring, home hygiene and manners. From the back of his wagon he flogged apple stock, cuttings of mulberry and gooseberry and new strains of fruits and perennials. Going door to door, he sold stoves, ranges and patent m
edicine. He even acted as a kind of travelling bard, Armitage wrote: “The peddler broke the solitude of a lonely farm existence with happy gossip of neighbor just far enough away that the farm-bound wife may not have met them except through the peddler’s patter.”
When the train came to Canada, travellers filled the rail cars. At each whistle stop Steve’s predecessors jumped off to see their customers and then on again when the conductor blew his whistle, signalling impending departure. Come nightfall they took their leisure in hotel restaurants and bars; men in crisp suits, cigarette smoke laying a haze across the room, as they exchanged gossip about who the good customers were and where the new prospects were to be found.
The Great Depression brought more men into the ranks of commercial travellers. Then came the boom following the Second World War. By 1950, Canada’s three commercial travellers associations had roughly one hundred thousand members. Unofficial estimates reach four times as high. That’s a head-spinning number considering that the country’s population was about fifteen million at that time. “They sold everything,” says Terry Carruthers, chief executive officer of the North West Commercial Travellers’ Association of Canada, which today represents all the travelling salesmen in Atlantic Canada and west of Ontario. “You look at any kind of operation—no matter how big or small—and at one point they had a traveller on the road acting as their sales rep.”
It is hard to see the life as glamorous. Carruthers’s outfit was formed in 1882 because so many travelling salesmen were dying in hotel fires that their destitute families needed an insurance policy to cover the cost of getting their bodies home. During the heyday of the travelling salesman most of them spent fifty weeks a year on the road. The average salesman lived in one province and covered the two provinces on either side. Some had even bigger territories—the Maritimes through to Toronto, Vancouver to Thunder Bay. A lot of the travellers would work in tandem. One selling, say, soap for Procter and Gamble would show up in a prairie town and take orders for his own products as well as for a dry goods guy in the employ of Canada Packers—who, at that very moment might have been three hundred miles away returning the favour. When they met up again later on, they would simply swap orders. Everybody would be happy.
