The Beatles sang “Help,” The Four Tops crooned “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch)” and The Beach Boys chimed “Help Me, Rhonda,” but Mom was the one who needed assistance. As an old German aphorism goes, “Little children, little problems. Big children, big problems.” Cinderella and Gilligan’s Island didn’t cut it anymore. Now in grade eight at John Oliver Secondary, Vona begged Mom to let her see a James Bond double bill: Dr. No and From Russia with Love, playing at the Fraser Street cinema. There could be no answer but “No.” Vona went anyway. Tension between Mom and her first-born escalated. By mid-June, Mom shared her parental frustrations with Dad and one day we got a letter addressed to Thing One and Thing Two:
Daughters! Here’s a letter to both of you so you can fight over who reads it first! Please!!! More consideration of your mother! I kid you not!! Remember, you have only one Mommy—there just ain’t anymore to go around. And if you are not kind, thoughtful and helpful to this Mommy and you wear her out, then I shall marry an old witch who will be your stepmother and will beat, starve and make scullery maids out of you! So please—help her through these difficult times until I get home to look after her.
A week after that letter arrived, a local hound bit Mom while she tried to break up a fur-flying, Caesar-initiated, traffic-stopping dogfight in the middle of Main Street. Normally unruffled and obedient, Caesar had an inexplicable hatred for cocker spaniels. One second our shepherd was sleeping in a sunny spot and the next he was torpedoing across Main Street, where he grabbed an unleashed cocker spaniel and dragged the creature into the street. Cars from both directions braked as we joined the whirling mass of teeth and tails, the spaniel’s owner’s shrieks adding to the shouts, growls and barks. Caesar’s jaws were clamped around his archenemy’s throat and he shook him like a dead weasel.
A dogfight is an ugly thing to watch. And more ugly to try and stop. In the Yukon, where no respectable canines were spayed, neutered or leashed, such events were as common as a litter of puppies. I had been taught to step back, walk away and let the dogs finish what they started. But that wasn’t Mom’s approach. She reached into the melee in an attempt to grab Caesar’s collar and met the teeth of the thrashing spaniel. Suddenly, a man stopped his car, and got out.
“Give me that shovel, lady,” he said as he seized the trowel from Mom’s hand and brought it down on Caesar’s noggin, whereupon Caesar released the spaniel and staggered stupidly toward the oncoming traffic. I attached Caesar to a leash while our neighbour Art drove Mom to the hospital for a tetanus shot. When Dad found out he was beside himself, and in his usual hyperbolic style blamed everyone and everything from Caesar to the city to the TV to leaving the Yukon in the first place:
Vona comes home for lunch and that’s all there’s to it! I kid you not! I can hardly wait to get my long, sharp eyeteeth into the back of her neck. Not long now and I’ll straighten her so straight they’ll use her for a ruler at school! Hold out there honey, just a little bit longer… Yup—they are 12 and 13. Hate to see them getting started as teenagers in this town. What they’d have missed if we’d stayed in the Yukon!!
Away with the TV! I can see it is a destructive influence and must be eliminated—especially for Alice’s sake!! And I underestimate her not! Take my hatchet and smash its evil tubes! Take it to the backyard and burn it at the stake—dancing around and chanting “Ho-Ho—The wicked TV is dead!” Or, now that you have my rifles, you could shoot it first and put it out of its misery!
Our lives were not completely wretched, however. Whether out of pity or graciousness or because they simply liked us, many people were good: our immediate neighbours—Art Hawkes to the north and Ed and Alma Romme to the south—our friends the Fawleys and the Nelsons, and especially the two large Mennonite families in Abbotsford, the Klassens and the Willimses, with whom we spent many glorious long summer days. They all treated us with kindness, love and immeasurable generosity. Art took us hiking up Mount Seymour and fishing in Indian Arm; the Rommes took us to the horse races and taught us how to bet (the two-dollar minimum); we had sleepovers and rode horses at the Klassens’; and the eldest Willims daughter, Elly, treated us to a trip across the border to Birch Bay for a whole weekend. Most exhilarating of all, we spent long carefree days at the Pacific National Exhibition (PNE), escorted by cousin Rick (no more Ricky) and the Klassens’ eldest son, Neil.
Meanwhile, with no appeal date set let alone a chance of bail, Dad’s disposition went from feisty to fed up to forlorn. Although he’d have moments of satisfaction too. In August he learned that Al Pike and UKHM assistant general manager Alex MacDonald had left both Elsa and UKHM after the trial.“I really cleared a bunch out, didn’t I!” he crowed.
In truth, UKHM was in disarray for many reasons, including declining ore reserves and a shortage of skilled labour. Nonetheless, Dad and Poncho’s drawn-out criminal saga had played its part. “Several staff members resigned,” Aaro Aho wrote in Hills of Silver, “their last years clouded by controversies, difficulties… and the court case on the mysterious ore shipment.” One incompetency on Pike’s part that came out during the trial was his sweetening of lower-grade ore with the more-valuable Bonanza Stope ore.
Still, Dad’s glee in seeing his primary adversary, Al Pike, get his comeuppance for leaving all of that valuable Bonanza Stope ore lying around, just begging to be taken, was a bittersweet consolation. Christmas approached. He was behind bars. His family was living from one welfare cheque to another. His parents, who had moved again, this time to Williams Lake, were living in a motel until they found rental housing, and were virtually penniless, as was Uncle Ronnie. And he was quickly using up what few friends he had.
In October, he stooped to asking if Mr. Teichroeb, Omi’s husband and our Grandpa, who was retired and owned his home, would consider signing his appeal bail if the need arose. His letter included a confession that “I’m a little sad but brave and optimistic… I’ll come out smelling like a rose yet!!” December, however, was never a season for roses. While Patrick Hogan had promised the appeal would be heard before Christmas, chances at this late date were slim to non-existent. In his last missive of the year, Dad made it clear that he’d resigned himself to his first jailhouse Christmas: “Are you going to Omi’s for Xmas dinner? I believe we’ll have roast seagull here with caterpillar sauce!”
Chapter 18
A Strange Bird Flies the Coop
Some poet chap has labeled man the noblest work of God:I see myself a charlatan, a humbug and a fraud.
One of Judge Parker’s beliefs was that company men on salary ought to be held to higher standards than workers paid hourly. Salaried men like Dad were in positions of authority, had more responsibilities and supervised others. In return for this status they enjoyed many perks: better housing, higher pay and commemorative gifts like gold watches. Consequently, if they abused the trust placed in them, they deserved to be punished. Hard.
That attitude partly explains why Parker sentenced Dad to four years and Poncho to two years and eight months, even though both were found guilty on all counts at the second trial, and Poncho had a previous conviction. If Dad had had a previous criminal record, Parker said he would have sentenced him to five years.
But there was likely a more personal reason why Parker treated Dad more harshly than his co-conspirator. Over the course of two trials, as he watched and listened to Dad testify for days on end, he formed a less than flattering opinion of the man. Indeed, Parker came to dislike Dad intensely.
“Priest is a strange bird,” Parker wrote in a note to the parole board shortly after sentencing him. “He is a clever man but seems to have a grudge against society and… admitted no duty of loyalty to his employer. His general attitude seemed to be that the company had plenty of money and so long as he… performed his assaying duties properly it was up to the company to protect itself against any other activities in which he might engage.” According to Parker, Gerald Priest’s caref
ully worked out scheme treated his employer—and others—“in a shameful fashion.”
Minimum security measures would likely suffice to prevent Priest from escaping, Parker continued. But he predicted that Dad would have no trouble convincing prison authorities to grant him parole. Priest will “pretend to be reformed and penitent with a view to securing early release and I would think that too early a release would only persuade him that he had played the Parole Board for a sucker. He is, in my experience, a very unusual person.”
Less severe, by far, was Judge Parker’s assessment of Anthony Bobcik, which undoubtedly was shaped by Bobcik’s decision not to testify. Parker’s impressions of the man were gleaned from watching Bobcik sit mutely in court. In his note, Parker opined that the twice-convicted thief appeared “relaxed” and that his behaviour in the courtroom was “quite correct.” Meaning, it seems, that at no point did Bobcik utter a word.
“I see Bobcik as an amiable but shrewd fellow who is quite prepared to turn a fast corner to make a dollar. My own guess is that Bobcik would be cooperative as a prisoner.”
After the conviction, Hogan had quickly filed an appeal with the Yukon Court of Appeal, also asking the court to release Dad on bail pending the outcome. The application included a statement from Dad attesting to his good behaviour while on bail on three previous occasions leading up to the preliminary hearing and two trials.
Early on, from behind bars, Dad was defiantly confident of being granted bail in a matter of weeks and winning the appeal in a matter of months. Less than two weeks into his sentence, he wrote Mom:
I’m well aware of the cheering going on in the UKHM, Parker & Wylie camp—but when the appeal court gets a hold of Parker’s summation, I’m sure there’ll be some fireworks! Parker took the prosecution from Wylie when it was failing and turned on us in absolute defiance of any precepts of law… at least I know that the only way we can have anything resembling a fair trial is to get it out of his hands. And that’s been done now. It must go to a higher court. If I don’t get out this week, this is the last letter I can write till next Sunday so stay cheerful, won’t you?
However, as quick as a falling gavel, Parker had denied Dad’s bid for bail. Instead of awaiting yet another trial as a free man, Dad watched a cherry-blossom spring drag into a high-sky summer and a grey autumn give way to a cold, rainy winter through the small window of his concrete cubicle. Discouraged with Hogan, who had repeatedly promised the appeal would be heard before Christmas, Dad no longer believed anything his lawyer said. Facing his first ever Christmas away from his family, he sent me a letter dated December 6 and enclosed a ten-dollar bill. In his flowing, finely crafted script, he wrote the entire dispatch in rhyming couplets:
So now on you I have to call, and beg from you a favour small, a present to come from me, for Mommy ’neath the Christmas tree! Perhaps she’d whisper in your ear, some hints on what her heart holds dear. Ten dollars I will send to you, and trust you know just what to do. A mink coat would be very slick, a Cadillac would do the trick, a diamond bracelet would be fine, and I think Mommy’s eyes would shine, and she would really come alive, with a barrel of Chanel No. Five! But I’m very sad to say, ten dollars won’t go all that way! So I’ll leave it up to you and trust she will not be blue, nor look beneath the Christmas tree, and say—“What, nothing here for me? Does my husband love me not, and my present he forgot?”
I eagerly accepted Dad’s challenge. After much rummaging through the Army and Navy bins, I found a white fake fur collar that Mom could clip onto her black wool coat.
Shortly before the big day—which, in our family, trumped all other celebrations—Dad wrote Mom:
I’ve arranged to have a visit from you on the 23rd, okay? I’m enclosing a form that shows what I can receive in a parcel. Nope—no meat! Though I sure would enjoy some smoked sausage… I’m very optimistic these days, more sure than ever that we’ll win—and it’s a thousand dollars a day for every day I’m in here!! There are much better Xmas’s ahead for us, cross my heart and hope to die!
Dad may have been prepared for his first holiday away from loved ones, but he was not primed for Mom’s Christmas gift to him. Like many men, Dad underestimated the power of a lonely woman. On December 20, Mom phoned Dad’s original lawyer, Angelo Branca, who by then was a BC Supreme Court and BC Court of Appeal judge. The next morning Mom—wearing a red wool dress with double-breasted brass buttons and angled hip pockets, and with her dark hair swept back and high—was ushered into Branca’s office. No record exists of what transpired next, other than a short entry in her tiny coiled notebook observing simply that Branca “was very nice.” Evidently he was, because the following day Hogan told Mom that Dad would be released the next morning, December 23. His surprise homecoming was our best Christmas present, even if it meant Vona and I had to share a bed once more.
Surprisingly, Branca’s get-out-of-jail card turned out to be more than just a Christmas reprieve. It marked the beginning of nearly five months of freedom. How sweet it was. For about two weeks. After the initial euphoria and family fun—this time with cousin Rick’s frequent presence—Dad’s restlessness and agitation resurfaced. Out of work and hating the cramped house and busy city his wife loved, he slumped into the brooding, cranky and unpredictable character we’d glimpsed before. I took the long way home from school each day, fearful of what mood he’d be in. Grey, blue or black, his disposition washed our world.
While Dad had complained about Hogan in his letters to Mom, the truth was that without money there was only so much unpaid work his lawyer could do. With Campbell gone, Dad earning nothing and our family on welfare, it fell to his supporters to fund Hogan so he could get papers filed and prepare for the appeal. Some highly placed people still believed Dad was innocent, and a few were certain he had been falsely tried.
By February 1, 1966, thanks to the largesse of Ray McKamey, Charles Brown, Allan Fawley and someone named A.H. Moisey, a total of $1,149.09 was raised for the Gerald H. Priest Appeal Fund. By then nearly half of that money was eaten up by payments for copies of court transcripts, and Hogan’s time.
The bail conditions imposed on Dad were beyond me, but the terms seemed fairly loose. Easter holidays loomed and Vona and I were anxious to do something exciting and outdoorsy with Dad, who’d been so gone from our lives over the past three and a half years. One evening, out of the blue, he proclaimed he’d found some work staking mineral claims in northwestern BC. This time the mineral was copper. More shocking was his decision to take cousin Rick along. And that he would pay Rick ten dollars a day for his work, almost as much as we’d earn in five days of berry picking! Vona—a year younger than Rick, equally strong and a damn sight more bush smart—had been promised wilderness escapades with Dad since forever. Now, Dad was bound for a land of deep snow, forests and cold with a boy he barely knew and cared for less. Vona’s blue eyes turned green. And wet.
“Don’t fret, Pal,” Dad said, trying to wrap his octopus-like arm around her broad shoulders. “Come summer, it’s you, me and the Rockies! How many horses should we take—three? Four?”
But Vona slipped from under his grasp, went into our room and softly closed the door. All that mattered was that for the next two and a half weeks she’d be left behind while Dad showed off to a city boy in awe of her father as some kind of mountain man.
The British Columbia town of Smithers was their destination. From the town, Dad and Rick helicoptered into a remote wilderness where they were dropped off with supplies. For the next hour, they tramped down a wide circle of snow, then erected a large canvas US Army–issue, Korean War–vintage tent insulated with asbestos to accommodate the use of a wood stove and stovepipe. The next morning and every morning after, Dad and Rick ate a quick fried breakfast before heading out into the winter whiteness.
“We did a good ten hours’ work each day,” Rick recalled decades later. “We trekked around in snowshoes staking claims… It was grea
t fun. It was very, very cold at night, but nice during the day. We saw all kinds of wildlife, wolves and coyotes. It was challenging work, up and down through ravines and crossing creeks. But for a young guy, it was fun.”
Dad taught Rick how to shoot a rifle, start a fire and tell north by which side of a tree moss grows on. In the tent, with the wood stove radiating warmth, they played back-to-back chess games, which Dad won every time for the first several days, until Rick caught on and prevailed in the odd match. One day, Dad and Rick spotted wolverine tracks heading toward camp.
“That was a different era,” says Rick. “We had no radios. We were a long ways in the middle of nowhere. If the wolverine had got our food we would have been in a lot of trouble.” Luckily, as they got closer they saw the creature heading away from the camp, which looked undisturbed.
One night Dad related the story of how he’d landed in jail. “He and his partner were taking ore off their claims, but they had to cross United Keno Hill’s property to do so,” Rick said. “There was some kind of dispute, so they went at night and dragged the stuff out with a snowmobile. His partner took the assay samples that were garbage as far as United Keno Hill was concerned, and added them to the ore. And that’s what they were convicted on. I believed him.”
A Rock Fell on the Moon Page 20
