HOMEPAGE

THE CliffR PROJECT

PART 1 - ‘THE INCESSANT KNOCK OF OPPORTUNITY’

© CliffR Projections, Canada, 1998-2006.

THE INCESSANT KNOCK OF OPPORTUNITY

CHAPTER 4

   The Kellogg Company began shipping corn flakes in the last century. The very first hamburger in the world sold somewhere in Connecticut in the year nineteen hundred.

   In these days of the early new millennium, food companies are so competitive for a piece of the action that it's a constant no holds barred marketing arena, surpassed in frenzy only by the modern Reality dating shows.

   In particular, pithy little buzz words like high fiber, low sodium, and no fat fly everywhere. It wouldn't surprise me some day to see high fiber butter and low fat cola hit the street, and contestants starting to date their pets instead of other contestants. And shouldn’t tooth paste be called teeth soap?

   The same is true for food advertising in general. In the pressure to gain more sales, for a while, one of the Rice Krispy manufacturers tried to make it a big deal on TV that every little piece of crispy was made from a whole grain of rice.

   Seems to me that that's about the last thing in the world they should be letting out of the bag. Now everyone knows for a certainty  that a bowl of Rice Krispies is the equivalent of about, oh a whole teaspoon full of rice. I don't know how well fed you think you are after eating a whole teaspoon of rice, I know for me it comes up a little short on the stick to the ribs department. 

   And what about 'Organic vegetables'. Aren't all vegetables organic. Well, aren't they?

   And I saw a box of vegetarian cookies at the supermarket the other day. Let’s think about that one for a minute. Isn’t that like saying there isn’t any chicken, fish, or meat parts in them. 

   Or what about the TV add that once said, 'delicious chocolaty flavor'. Makes you think they were trying to cover something up.

  Kids today have no idea. One of the burger chains jumped onscreen in the earlier nineties with a perky young counter girl chirping excitedly into the camera with the awesome news, "and we use REAL processed cheese". Unfortunately for the chain, some parents were also apparently watching because the ad was pulled almost overnight.

   On the other hand, kids can be very smart. Every kid knows that the golden ratio is not an exhotic mathematical formula, it’s two parts ice cream one part pie. Similarly, most kids know that pi R squared is completely false. Pie are round, cornbread are square.

   Another area of fast growing concern is fresh frozen. If you don’t know what an oxymoron is, look at the term ‘fresh frozen’ again. Seems like nearly everything is coming fresh frozen these days. I even saw a restaurant advertising hand made pancakes recently. I kid you not.

   Or have noticed that all the fast food hamburger joints are now calling hamburgers 'sandwiches'. Politically speaking, that's probably a lot closer to what the thing actually is than 'hamburger'. After all, the closest thing to ham to ever hit a burger is probably the guy flipping the patties on the barbie. But now that leaves open the gaping question of a politically correct name for sandwiches. My vote for favorite is 'nutritionally layered flavor partitions'.

  Scientists claim that the universe is expanding. That's utter nonsense. Everyone knows that it's shrinking faster than you can squeeze a dollar. Just look around you. At one time a package of European Frankfurters contained seventeen 'foot long' hot dogs. Then for the same price only fourteen. Now only eleven.

   Chocolate bars have suffered even more in the ‘Incredible Shrinking Meal’ department. At one time, they were so and so long for a nickel. Then for a dime. Then they got smaller. Then they got bigger but the price went way up. Then they got smaller. Then the price went up. Then they got bigger but the price went way up again. Then they got smaller. Then the price... Well you get the picture.

   The bottom line is that for a smaller size bar than originally, you now pay over fifteen times as much. And what about penny candy, no such thing any more. A penny doesn’t buy the wrapper, forget the candy.

   Nothing has been shrinking as fast however as the universe of fast food sandwiches, formerly known as hamburgers. In the sixties and seventies you had to hold one in both hands just to take a bite. Nowadays you can hold one in one hand and have to keep your little pinky out of the way just to keep it from going down the hatch by mistake. 

   The only burger which survived the effect of the ‘Incredible Shrinking Ham’, is the Double Whopper with Cheese. It must be in some kind of space time warp and therefore well out of the universal shrink zone. It’s exactly the same size now as it was in the sixties. The only difference now is that it has a zillion calories. Food apparently didn’t have calories in the old days because no one ever seemed to mention it.

   In fact, the only known zone where things have been expanding universally is the world of TV food commercials. Have you ever taken a good look at the hamburger, er, sorry, sandwich commercials on TV lately. Who do they think they're kidding.

   Any similarity between these gigantic monstrosities and the dinky little ones the beaming clerks hand you over the counter is strictly a mistake by the kitchen. In fact some people make it their whole specialized career to make foodstuffs look better in commercials than in real life, and people wonder about truth in advertising. If farmers ever catch on to their secret to success the world food crisis will be over.

   Similarly, TV subliminals are alive and well and very much in everyone's unsuspecting face. If the TV is so low to hear it clearly from another room, don’t be surprised to sometimes hear the unmistakable ding of a single doorbell or quiz show alert from deep within the subliminal sound track during a commercial. I've even gone to check the front door off and on from upstairs just in case, because the sounds are identical.

   Likewise, when watching a commercial you might hear the unmistakable but deeply buried ring of a phone. I've even checked the phone from time to time just to be sure. The dirty rotten scoundrels. Both these sneaky tricks are instant attention getters for the obvious reason and don’t they know it.

   Health foods are another commodity which is on the hook.  Health food supplements spin wildly within the giant vortex of the marketing machinery. Vitamin supplements are the number one quick fix for bad dieting everywhere on the planet.

   Vitamin and weird-thing supplements exist now for just about everything including too much toe hair. You have to read the instructions carefully. I saw one recently that said, two at every meal or on an empty stomach. Nothing like covering all bets.

   Similarly, in case you weren't aware, ketchup is the undisputed hit man of the food chain. Ketchup will instantly nuke any flavor, anytime, anywhere not a contest. Rumor has it that ketchup was the invention of a group of desperate men whose wives were way to wanton with the exotic spices, or not wanton enough and they needed a way out.

    Also if you haven’t figured it out yet, watermelon is the ideal food. You get to eat drink and wash your face all at the same time.

    Finally, the food nutritionists have it all wrong. The four basic food groups are not what everyone says they are. The groups are actually 'Fuel food,' 'Fun food', 'Fake food', and 'Real food'.

   The groups are not that hard to figure out. 'Real food' is the stuff your Mom makes you eat, plus raw carrots. 'Fake food', is also called 'Junk food', or 'Yunk food' in Swedish. 'Fun food' is everyone's most popular category since it also includes deserts whose undisputed King is ice cream, and undisputed Queen is chocolate chip cookies. 'Fuel foods' are anything which comes from a take-out, including pizza, tacos, and Big Macs.

   Big Macs are the grand Mullahs of the fuel food empire. Mashed potatoes are the North American equivalent of white rice. Baked potatoes are the equivalent of brown rice. I don’t know what the nutritional superiority of one over the other is, but I intuitionally suspect they’re not that much different. I do know however that the nutritional dynamo of fast food hamburgers for the palette is not high on the agenda.

   McDonalds has sold hundreds of billions of burgers world wide and sold their three millionth hamburger in the spring of 1961. I know because it was just around about the time my friend John from my stereo tape recorder days and I drove down to Seattle Washington with his Dad to check out the chain for the whole of Canada. The franchise was up for grabs at the time and John's Dad had gotten word about it on the grapevine.

   John's father was retired at the tender age of forty five. His retirement income was a modest fifty thou a year. Even these days that's not bad as retirements go. In those days it was whopping bloody good, probably on par with what Bill Gates would get if he decided to pack it in early.

   Unlike a lot of things Gentiles never do, Jewish parents make it a point to help their youngsters get started in business. That's how John got started in his pizza restaurant the year before and why the Jewish community comprises so much of the merchant class.

   Jewish kids get three kicks at the kitty. If they haven't made it by the third try, they're a Smech or a Schlep and are on their own. John was neither a Smech nor a Schlep nor was he on his own. Actually he was a Jewish father's shinning light.

   Shakey's Pizza Parlor down in Bellingham Washington just below the Canadian border was the very first pizza place in proximity to Vancouver. Shakey's pizzas first showed up in the late fifties and featured dark brown varnished park tables with benches. An upright piano sat in the corner to let the good times roll.

   The staff wore red and white striped uniforms unless you were color blind. Oh yes, they also wore white pork pie hats. The only thing missing was the banjo. But of course banjos weren't compatible with Italian cuisine.

   The first pizza place in Vancouver itself was a small 'delivery only' spot on Davie street in Vancouver's West End downtown owned by John. It operated out of a small purple painted converted two bay service station.

   After a year of delivering pizzas, John decided it would be more fun to have Mohamed come to the mountain and opened his place on Broadway as a regular sit in type restaurant. Since it still hadn’t been sorted out whether pizzas were officially an Italian or Cajun mainstay, the Pizzarama split the difference between Shakey's cheerleading tambourine approach and a Luiggi Milano Italiano approacha. Shakey's eventually got knocked off by Pizza Hut which is why most people never hear of it today.

   John’s original delivery place was bought by a pair of English Jewish twins, who opened downtown Vancouver's first official walk in sit down pizza restaurant across the street, called the Pizza Patio. Instead of going East across Canada with a chain, they said Sayonara and went across the water to Japan with a clamor. So most of North American never heard about it but the two did rather well anyway.

   In later years, one twin opened the very successful cross Canada Yuppie favorite, 'The Elephant and Castle'. The other became chairman of the Canada arm of the annual TV Charity drive called The Telethon, masterminded by the mastermind of masterminds, Jerry Lewis.

   John's new place started to, um, pan out successfully from day one. Also featuring a Spumoni ice cream he had custom made which he used to have me customer beta test from time to time. By next spring pizza dough spun high in the air morning, noon, and night. It was a Vancouver hot spot. A few weeks after my first year final exams at UBC, John called me over to the restaurant one night because he had a business proposal to discuss.

   Turns out he wanted to discuss taking on the Canadian franchise rights for a new fast food burger chain out of California called McDonalds, which had been one of his stake outs in college whenever he got tired of Cornflakes and Kraft Dinner.

   McDonalds had started out as the brainchild of a fast food drive-in operator from Oak Brook Illinois by the name of McDonald. He and his brother opened a high octane Fuel Food type carhop spot in San Bernardino, California in 1940. After the war, they scaled back the menu and opened a self serve and drive through. It featured fifteen cent burgers, twenty cent milkshakes, and ten cent fries.

   What it also featured was fresh food, always ready to go. Prior to their innovations, at a drive in you typically ordered your stuff then waited three years while someone made it somewhere else on the other side of the planet. The outrageous, audacious, daring, and contagious   idea of the McDonald Brothers was to simply observe what people were ordering at each exact time of day each order was taken, and watch carefully to see what innate secrets might befall.

   By keeping a tally matching the two infos together minute by minute, day by day, week after week, the input from this unique but heady brainwave eventually provided sufficient data for them to create a formula. The formula was simple. The stuff was pre-prepared such that ninety five percent of any order would already be up on the rack ready to go when someone came in. No matter what time day or night, no one would have to wait more than five minutes for anything. And no more than five percent of anything would have to be thrown out for having sat around for more than five minutes getting soggy. So the McDonald Brothers dug deep called it their patented five, five, five formula.

   It was an instant winner. Waste was at a minimum, waiting was at a minimum, and waste was at a maximum because customers couldn't resist the convenience. Untold billions of burgers have been sold worldwide ever since based on that simple original little precept.

   In nineteen fifty five, the brothers granted exclusive franchise rights to a food service equipment salesman named Ray Kroc. Mr. Kroc sold multi unit milkshake machines. What had caught the ever observant Mr. Kroc's attention, was the fact that the McDonald Brothers were buying more milkshake machines than anyone else in the country times two so he thought he’d better check it out.

   Mr. Kroc opened his first McDonalds restaurant in Des Plains Iowa. He also enhanced the fast food aspects by some really serious real estate innovations. Actually brilliant thinking in hind site. Each drive-in outlet would be located in a prime real estate location in any given town or city. Head office got to handle the mortgage.

   It was a win win situation for everybody. Head office would get an initial franchising fee. Head office would get a regular royalty fee from the franchise. Head office would earn interest off the mortgage. Head office was really enthused about the idea.

   The franchise owner would be in business from the get go with all their property concerns taken care of and a food marketing formula forged out of sizzling gold. The day to day cash flow would pay for the mortgage. All it would cost them was a hefty chunk up front for the franchising fee.

   The program spread like wildfire from there. By nineteen sixty one, the chain had moved around the much of the USA and up the West Coast to Seattle Washington. Me, like most Canadians living in ignorance above the forty ninth parallel, had never heard of it. The company was now looking for a Canadian entry.

   John's father Mo, had been approached about it on the Jewish connection. It must be a pretty interesting connection that Jewish thing, because Mo was chomping at the bit with input from John. He had a tried and proven successful son to work with and a tried and proven business prospect to look at. Just imagine putting the two and two together, an exciting prospect for any father, even Gentile.

   Mo was therefore interested in the franchise as the next up the ladder project for John. John was interested in me as his partner because we were chums already and already had had a go at partnering. No doubt about it, it's not who you know but how well you know them.

   The plan was for the three of us to check out the McDonald's operation in Seattle. If the deal bore close scrutiny, John's father would pay the tab and John and I would be in business as the running partners.

   You have to understand now, that Vancouver at the time was a brutal battlefield for fast food hamburger joints. Because of Vancouver's warm winter climate, Vancouver had been enjoying the pleasures of first class drive in places for generations while most Canadian cities hadn't even heard of the concept yet.

   Vancouver already therefore had fourteen or so fast food hot spots which had been up and running for years. Some, for not so many years but the point still stood. All places featured top quality nineteen cent hamburgers, same price as McDonalds was selling in Seattle. The Vancouver places also constantly ran highly competitive burger wars.

   This was to the eternal gratitude of the general public who are always on the better end of things whenever an inter dimensional cross street commercial war is going on. This is particularly true if food or gasoline is on the line.

   So to propose yet another fast food hamburger operation to Vancouverites at the time was about at the same as proposing water as a great new product for drinking. And didn’t bottled water producers eventually put that misguided perception away with somewhat wildly stupendous success.

   At the time of McDonalds though, selling water out a bottle would have been considered a laugher. Full cross border TV hadn't even started yet, so to all extent and purposes except for the occasional Canadian who had ventured South on a holiday, no one in Canada had ever heard of McDonalds. To Vancouverites, McDonald would have been just another guy with a farm out there and a truck truck here and a truck truck there.

   However, word on the Jewish connection was that Mo should go down and take a look already. So down to Seattle we went.

   Seattle had four McDonalds up and running. The restaurants were very neat looking white tiled affairs. A big yellow arch stretched over the front entrance instead of on a tall bean pole like today. The sign proudly boasted, 'Over three million sold'. McDonald’s was clearly on its way. We decided to check out all four locations.

   If you ever hear someone knocking the quality of McDonalds these days, just ignore them. Today's fare can't even begin to compare with how bad it was down in Seattle in nineteen sixty one. With all due respect to McDonalds though, the stuff is so far better today than what it was back then that it's not even a contest. Back then, the stuff wasn't even close to what Vancouver was serving up on a daily basis at even the worst places.

  The handwriting was on the wall and it said very clearly, 'Abandon ye all hope of ever selling this stuff in Vancouver. But, the corporate structure was very intriguing.

   A small percentage of the day to day went back to head office for the name and marketing. The franchisee owned the property on which the restaurant sat, and head office owned the mortgage. Tidy, Like I said. Take a look at the real estate locations of any fast food restaurant outlet in North America today and you will get a real quick picture of just exactly how tidy. Same with supermarkets. Whenever you buy bananas the head office goes bananas. The basic modus operands are the same.

   As compelling as the real estate side was, the reality of the food side decreed as a bottom line that only fools would rush in where wise men shuddered. It would probably take a long long time to get the thing up and running in Vancouver at a profitable level given the inertial constant of the competition.

   So we shook our mutual heads and said, 'pass', 'forget it', 'no way Jose', 'not a prayer', 'thanks but no thanks', 'see ya later', Sayonara', and 'hasta la vista baby'. Talk about the three Schlemiels. What we should have said, and paused not a jot in thinking, was, 'great idea, lets improve the burgers.'

   Three years later, as soon as my fourth year final exams had finished, my roommate and I held a big celebration party in our little basement apartment. Word must have gotten out in one of the bigger downtown pubs or something, because just after bar closing time, the party suddenly crammed up with a crush of people I had never seen before in my life. And not just bums. One of the 'slide in' guests as an example, was the son of one of Vancouver's largest stock brokerage firms.

   I struck up a conversation with another unknown guest. A guy by the name of John Jones or as his friends liked to call him, Jonesy. Jonesy preceded yuppies by about ten years. In his early thirties, Jonesy already owned four twenty story high rise apartments in Vancouver’s priciest area called West Vancouver. John was using the monthly rents in a carefully crafted plan to accumulate the down payment for a next.

   Jonesy it turned out, with two other partners, had just obtained the very hush hush exclusive Canadian rights for a brand new fast food burger chain out of the US, that was all the rage down there. "Ah", I said quite nonchalantly, "You're talking about McDonalds".

   "Shit", said Jonesy, almost dropping the two beer he was holding. "How the hell did you know about that". It was supposed to have been the world's best kept secret. I felt an overwhelming need to tell him about my past involvement. So I related the complete details of my close encounter of the Churd kind with McDonalds three years earlier. We instantly became chummy confidants.

   Turns out Jonesy's group's plan was to establish Vancouver as base, and then move east as fast as possible. I ended up spending the next six weeks driving around Vancouver with Jonesy in his cool sixty four Ford Galaxy convertible, spotting optimum possible locations for the first outlet.

   After the six weeks it finally behooved me to ask where I fitted into their picture. "We thought you would be the first manager", said Jonesy like he was offering me the Papacy. "Then afterwards you would be our full time manager trainer, training each new manager trainee on how to handle the five, five, five food formula as fast as we can open new places down the road".

   Having just done four years in math, then philosophy, and being somewhat snottish for having just done four years in math, then philosophy, I quickly concluded that the last thing in the world I wanted to be was the manager of a drive-in fast food restaurant. So I just as enthusiastically passed on the whole thing and simply walked away. Plus, I think, a little of me was still thinking about nearly being a full blown fifty percent of the whole enchilada only three years earlier.

   In hind site, I figure I would at least have been one of the first in line for any new franchise opportunities were any to be advanced by the three partners. Or, after proving my worth as a manager trainer, maybe being given a one percent stake by the other partners. So in effect I would have been like a fourth partner. I stand behind my original claim therefore. You're probably looking at the only guy in the world who turned down McDonalds for Canada twice.

   A couple of interesting corollaries did eventually come out of all this though without my direct intervention. After three years, Jonesy and the boys had expanded McDonalds as far as the cities of Calgary and Edmonton in Alberta. Then one of the original chain founders, and/or a large franchiser from California, I never did know which, smelled the coffee percolating furiously at the forty ninth parallel and bought them out.

   Mr. Cohen still owns the Canadian operation which now has McDonalds outlets all though Russia and China, the actual flavor of the coffee he had been smelling. Far as I know he still has his original holdings in the original US operation too. If so, he's the only guy in the world I know, who, for verbosic verbatim, has his cake and eats it too.

   My chum Jonesy used his share of the take to open medieval styled hot spots in both Vancouver and Edmonton. As far as I know the Vancouver spot called 'The Medieval Inn' in Gastown may still be running. One of the other partners, a Mr. Tidball, a University economics professor and the actual brains of the outfit, used his share to open Vancouver's first so called Hickory and Cedar restaurant in North Vancouver.

   Hickory and Cedar restaurants were the Yuppie innovation of the century. Hickory logs burned in the fireplace and your steak came on a cedar platter. Or maybe it was cedar in the fireplace and hickory as the plate. Either way, the steaks were great and Yuppies couldn't seem to get enough of the place as it filled up in droves.

   It was so popular, Mr. Tidball opened up a second one in downtown Vancouver after only six months. The chain is now all over North America and also on the New York stock exchange as 'The Keg'. For my part, I've gotten to eat at the Keg a couple of times on my own dime.

   John eventually moved on to the gigantic Brother John’s place in Vancouver’s Gastown in the seventies. Still running last I heard. The waiters all wore Friars gowns, and John wore a nice silk suite.

   I also knew of a couple of people who made a lot of money out of franchising the easy way. One was a high school buddy's Mom who owned a fashionable ladies wear store in Vancouver.

   The place catered mainly to the matronly wives of affluent Doctors and Lawyers. Who usually didn't have anything else to do every afternoon except shop for new outfits and wear them to socials. The place was called, 'Town and County Fashions', as befitted the costly attire. When the giant cross Canada chain, 'Town and Country', of trendy women's wear fame came out of Toronto and wanted to move into British Columbia, they had to buy her out to get the name. She retired, um, er, rather well attired.

  I similarly knew of, but never directly knew, the owner of one of Vancouver's fourteen odd little privately owned fast food hamburger joints which were in active competition around Vancouver at the time McDonalds had finally hit the scene. The place was called, 'Harveys'.

   Same thing, Harvey's was not a particularly big or fancy drive in. In fact it was just a little peep hole window with someone sitting on the other side taking orders. Great burgers though, so were always busy. When the cross Canada chain 'Harvey's, also out of Toronto, wanted to move into BC in the wake of the McDonalds successes, the owner was also able to retire with fries on the side and mayo on the side of the fries.

   I never knew anyone in the Chinese food business that went global. But I did know one who almost went to the moon one evening. Early in the fall of nineteen sixty one, my Mom had bought a house at fifteenth Avenue and Sasamat in the upscale southwest tip of Vancouver just off the University of British Columbia campus. As the ebb and flow of families oftimes go, Dad was living elsewhere at the time but was still friends with Mom. So Mom and us six kids were it.

   Moving day was cold and wet. By suppertime the stove still hadn't been hooked up. This was still back in the days when scary thick wires stood up from the floor where the stove was supposed to go. And either an electrician came in to hook them up properly or you ended up in the hospital after trying to do it yourself. Mom sent me over to pick up fish and chips at a local Chinese Canadian Restaurant on 10th Avenue by the entrance to the University of British Columbia campus.

   This was also still back in the days before McDonalds, pizzas, subs, tubs, or any of the other myriads of modern fast foods around had knocked fish and chips out of the box as the number one popular fuel food choice on the planet. Fish and chips were therefore still pretty much the most common type of, 'in a pinch', meal.

   I walked into the restaurant at exactly ten minutes to seven in the evening and sat down unassumingly at the counter. The sign on the door said 'open from 7:00 Am to 7:00 PM'. They were just getting ready to close. The place was empty except for a Chinese gentelman sitting at the counter quietly reading a newspaper. Judging by the quietness coming off the walls, no one else had been in the place for quite a long time. Not surprising given the lousy weather.

   Presuming the fellow at the counter to be the waiter, I leaned over and said, "seven fish and chips please". He leaped to his feet and started screaming like I'd just pulled a gun and shot him in the brothers. With eyes as big as saucers he raced into the kitchen waving his arms wildly, screaming, "Seven fish and chip, seven fish and chip", leaving me sitting at the counter wondering what the hell I'd just said.

   The kitchen likewise exploded into an instant uproar. Chinese people started clamoring everywhere behind the door shouting, "Seven fish and chip, seven fish and chip". The door of the kitchen flew open and a fellow of decidedly Chinese persuasion looked out wearing a cook's hat with eyes as wide as a landing platform. He went back into the kitchen  and the commotion got even louder.

   I sat there for about five minutes, trying to figure out exactly when it was that I had just entered the Twilight Zone. After a few more minutes of non stop clamoring from the kitchen the waiter came out and quietly handed me a cup of coffee courtesy of the cooks.

   By now I had begun to suspect that something very definitely was going on. So I behooved to ask. Sure enough, it seemed that early every morning the cooks made up the supplies for the day. That morning the waiters had noticed the cooks making an awfully big vat of fish and chip batter given the weather.

   So in a sort of kindly helpful way, they had suggested that maybe the stupid cooks were making maybe way to much stupid fish and chip batter for the kind of weather forecasted for whole rest of the stupid day.

   Seems also that there is an unspoken pecking order in these kind of places, where the cooks believe they are highly trained and skilled professionals engaged in their professional calling. And whereas waiters are just any old dumb bozos off the street with no training whatsoever and no need for brains. Who were, well, therefore, grunts you understand.

   So the comment by the highly stupid and ignorant waiters hadn’t sat too well of course with the highly trained and professional cooks, being the ones with all the special training and all who knew what they were doing.

   The suggestion was therefore quickly put back in the other direction that the waiters should stay the heck out of the kitchen and stick to the things they know how to do best like wiping dirty tables with a clean cloth. Or a clean table with a dirty cloth as the case may be.

   This of course infuriated the waiters, who at least had enough intelligence to know that it was raining cats and dogs outside and so the prospects for a lot of fish and chip sales that day were not very promising. So the whole thing had quickly turned into a somewhat less than friendly political debate.

   Now it's a historic fact that the Chinese like to bet. And it's also a historic fact that it's not just for chicken feed. They love to bet and they love betting hard. It's also a historic fact that they'll bet impromptu on just about anything whatsoever at the drop of a hat just for the fun of it. They'll even bet on how long it will take a spider to cross a floor. Given the opportunity, they will bet on anything, bet often, and bet no holds barred. It helps pass the time.

   So the inevitable bet had been laid down. How many fish and chips would sell by the end of the day. Evidently, the wager was no trifling sum.

   I had walked into the restaurant at exactly ten minutes before closing on a cold wet miserable day with not a chance in the world of anyone else coming into the place for anything before the 7:00 PM deadline, let alone an order of fish and chips. You've probably guessed it all by now. The exact number of fish and chips the cooks needed to win the bet was seven. “What are the odds", who could possible imagine.

   It eventually turned out that the waiter was actually the owner. Bing as his name turned out to be and I eventually became good yak buddies during the four odd years I lived up that way. I would stop in off and on for a coffee and snack during my University days, and we would wax reminiscent about the famous fish and chip incident which had long since become a part of the restaurant's lore.

   We lived at the house near fifteenth and Sasamat for about four years. Mom eventually sold the house on double lot for about twenty eight thousand dollars. Seven thousand more than she had paid. If she'd held out just another twenty years until the Vancouver real estate boom of the late eighties, she would have gotten over two hundred and twenty seven thousand dollars because that's what the then owner got.

   When we had first moved into the house, our next door neighbor had two sons. One was four years old and the other was about seven. One morning Mom was out hanging laundry off the back porch. She noticed the two kids playing in a tree next door. The four year old was sitting straddled legged on a branch facing the trunk of the tree, and the older brother was standing on a branch a little higher up in the tree.

   As Mom watched, the four year suddenly lost his grip and slid down the branch banging himself up front against the tree trunk. Mom subsequently and distinctly heard the following short conversation. (Four year old) "Ow I hurt my peepee". (Seven year old) "It's not peepee stupid, its cock. I don't know where you pick up your slang".

   Baby soaps aside, if you do a laundry you need a good soap. And everybody needs to do a laundry. By the late fifties somebody had finally figured it all out big time. In the fall of nineteen sixty one, just about two months after starting my second year of University and only about four months after turning down McDonalds for the first time, I had been hitch hiking off campus one day and a guy picked me up in a really beat up old station wagon.

   Turned out the guy was from Edmonton Alberta and had just obtained the very first official network distributorship in Canada for a new line of household cleaning products out of the states called Amway. He figured Vancouver had a lot more clothes lines out back than Edmonton, so had moved to town and was busy getting ready to clothes line the competition.

   Our guy had been out at the campus for the afternoon canvassing for prospects. Now that I was in his car, what better prospect could there be. So for the whole trip off campus he rattled my eardrums about the product and the plan. Something about not having to do anything but sign up new sign ups. But I was finally and fully into the magnetic pull of university life, so I graciously said no.

   I never knew his name but I did read eventually somewhere that Vancouver had at least one Amway 'Diamond Distributor'. Diamond Distributors were the big boys set for life for doing over a couple of million dollars a year through all their down lines.

   Diamond Distributors never have to officially work again except to appear occasionally at pep rallies and buzz up the rank and file by their example. Nothing turns the new guys on more than the old guys standing around in front of everyone with pure golden rays radiating off their fillings. To this day I have to believe that our guy was the Diamond Distributor.

   It's not much of a stretch to conclude that were I to have gotten involved with Amway at that original early stage, it could easily have been me. Or I could have at least been the second. At any rate, I figure along with McDonalds, I was also one of the very first people in Canada to have had the pleasure of officially turning down an Amway distributorship handed to them on a diamond platter.

   I wasn't the only one though who was watching opportunities slide by in this earlier part of the sixties though. In nineteen fifty nine, Greydie moved to Toronto to pursue his aspirations as a jazz drummer. By late nineteen sixty he had packed it in. His ambitions had run straight into the jazz doldrums of the late fifties.

   The only work around town for jazz drummers by then was in early rock and roll wannabe bands. We used to call them five guitar jazz bands out of deep respect for the level of their talent. These were groups emulating the rock and roll hits of the fifties, and typically not very pretty musically speaking.

   Greydie wasn't particularly interested in the highly sophisticated type of thwop, thwop, thwop, thwop drumming the music required. So he and a friend incorporated a small company selling long life light bulbs and little transistor radios you could take to the beach in your breast pocket.

   Sales were tough so Greydie packed it in the next year and went back to Vancouver to try his luck at creative writing at the University of British Columbia. The point is that the radios had been coming from a little known company in Japan called Panasonic, now Technics. Somebody even had a whole boat load of the things sitting at dockside wanting Greydie to take them off his hands. And he still said no.

   Greydie spent most of his first two years at the University with the student newspaper. He then moved on to peaceful student activism and eventually straight into poetry publishing. His poetry wasn't that bad. Every poem he wrote was eventually published by somebody via the grapevine without his even submitting them.  

   For awhile though, before this became his main thing, he spent the better part of a year as resident reporter and acting editor at a small weekly newspaper in the central BC town of Quesnel about sixty miles south from Prince George on the Fraser River.

   By his first few weeks in Quesnel, Greydie had became good friends with a Czechoslovakian fellow and his Swedish wife. Bill and Margarita were both the same age, both born on the same day. Both were Cancers so both were good with business. When they had first met, neither could speak a word of the other's language and sheer magnetic attraction had pulled them through.

   Bill and Margarita lived in a two room log cabin at the edge of town with an outhouse. She had been born and raised in Sweden. More to the point she had been born and raised in disposable Swedish paper diapers.

   Chinese mothers working in rice paddies have a much simpler way of dealing with the problem. They simply carry their kids on their back in a nap sack and no bottom. The stuff goes phffft straight down into the water and the plants love the nourishment. These Chinese are definitely not one to miss an opportunity to get two birds with one stone.

   North Americans aren't into rice paddies quite so much though. And since going phffft straight down onto the new carpet would be considered unacceptable to most North American mothers, most North American mothers use diapers.

   Diapers in the old days as many of you may know, were square cottony things that either sat in unbelievably stinky buckets in the basement waiting for Mom to get around to the laundry, or sat in unbelievably stinky buckets on the front porch waiting for the diaper service. So diapers were definitely a problem that needed work.

   Bill and Margarita figured that if perfect paper nappies were good enough for the sensitive shiny bottoms of bouncing baby Swedes, they should certainly be good enough for the sensitive shiny bottoms of bouncing baby North Americans.

   They eventually managed to arrange for samples to be shipped over to Quesnel and showed them to a local retailer. The retailer's eyes popped right out of their sockets at the prospect. Who took Bill, Margarita, and the box of the square paper sheets straight to Victoria BC to meet the upper echelon of a very large chain of B.C. super markets. The management likewise couldn't believe their eyes.

   The sample from Sweden had arrived already packaged in a thick pad with printed labels in English, finished, ready to go. The whole deal had been negotiated by mail out of the two room log cabin in Quesnel on a Smith Corona portable typewriter bought from a Simpson Sears mail order catalogue with twenty nine dollars borrowed from Greydie. Proving once and for all, 'if there's a vill there's a vay'.

   A deal was struck on the spot for a boatload of the diapers. Where the super market chain would have exclusive rights.

   Bill and Margarita believed their ship had come in and knuckled down to get the first shipment in progress, and quickly had a whole first boatload on its way on consignment. Proving once and for all, 'if there's a vay there's a vill'.

   As soon as the boatload arrived, the entire shipment went straight into a warehouse under lock and key in Victoria, never to be seen again.

   Because Bill and Margarita had signed an exclusive contract with the Victoria Company which never placed another order, and because the contract didn't have a performance clause specifying a minimum number of orders over a given period of time, and because the contract never specified terms of payment, Bill and Margarita were officially in, and officially back out of, the diaper import business on their very first order.

   What had happened as it turned out, was that the management in Victoria had seen the bigger picture and had tipped off their good buddies at one of North America's largest tissue manufacturers. So the Swedish diapers had gone into storage simply to keep the product out of the public eye until someone could cook up a home grown version at the speed of light ready for the market.

   The precursors to Pampers and Huggies finally hit the street about a year and a half later. Proving once and for all that diapers aren't the only things that stink.

   Never was testament better than this to the old adage that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. But actually, there may have been another side to the tissue, er, issue. The whole move in Victoria may have been simply a fast preemptive move by the North American giant to prevent the Swedish company from stepping onto its turf.

   If the Swedes had gotten a toehold into the lucrative North America market with diapers, how long do you think it would have been before we saw Swedish newsprint and beautiful Swedish models blowing their noses on scented Swedish Kleenex on all the Swedish printed billboards.

   My guess is that the whole affair was little more than a simple turf war between two giant international paper producers, with poor little Bill and Margarita as the bologna in the sandwich. How else would you explain why they had been able to get a whole boatload of product on what was nothing more than a promissory note on a single sheet of paper written on a cheap little portable typewriter inside a tiny log cabin in the rustic interior of the rugged Province of British Columbia. Talk about the wiggly intrigues of the international multinational mindset.

   All's well that ends well however. While having failed to fulfill their lifelong dream of become import magnates, Bill and Margarita didn't come out of it all that badly. Because of connections eventually acquired over the disposable diaper fiasco, and Bill's obvious penchant for moving through the paper work, from a part time laborer's job of three days a week in the local plywood mill at minimum wage, Bill quickly got a full time job with BC Railways which was rapidly expanding into the interior of the province at the time.

   Within a few short years Bill was a vice president of the railway. The quality of the gene pool being great in abundance evidently. And plus of course he was a Cancer.

   Cancer aside, in a somewhat less serpentine loss of opportunity, Greydie and I knew a wholesale florist in Ottawa in the early eighties who likewise missed the boat. Ron been in France on holidays in the early sixties when he spotted something his vibrating antenna told him couldn't possibly miss in the pedestrian North America marketplace.

   He checked it out. Sure enough, the company was definitely interested. He told his wife and she flat out said, "No way". The company was Bic. The product of course was Bic disposable ballpoint pens.

   Similarly, like Greydie's symbiotic moment with the young Panasonic Corporation, it's funny how easily things like that can slip through your fingers totally unsuspected. The older brother of a high school buddy of mine worked in the parts department of a large Vancouver auto dealer. The dealer also had the Canadian rights for motorcycles manufactured by a virtually unknown Japanese manufacturer. My buddy had a similar bike for a while and it sounded indistinguishable from an angry little wasp.

   The brother was the reigning BC motorcycle racing champion at the time. And the dealer wanted to know if he would be interested in setting up a Canada wide parts depot for the machine. The brother thought about it for a while. Then said no. You've probably guessed. The name of the Japanese Company was Honda.

   Or how about the friend of mine in Ottawa who told me that he and a partner had owned, then sold in the mid sixties, a very large orange grove right smack dab in the middle of a very non descript little town on the coast of Florida. The town was called Fort Lauderdale.

   Or similarly, I was listening to an interview on the radio just a few years ago. The guy was an entrepreneur from Oklahoma. He was telling the commentator about a time in the seventies when someone from Victoria BC had called to see if he would be interested in becoming the US arm for a new real estate format he was putting together that had big time Yuppie success story written all over it.

   Our guy was busy at the time, so said, "no". The new venture turned out to be the Century Twenty One Real Estate enterprise. Our guy's closing comment to the interviewer was that from that time forward, he always made it a specific point to look at anything offered his way, regardless, just in case.

   Similarly I recently talked to a publishing agent in California whose grandfather once turned down someone in the twenties who wanted him to help market a new animal character he had just created, a mouse. You probably guessed this one too. The mouse's name was Mickey.

   In the late fifties I likewise knew of someone who missed a whole boatload of opportunity. Literally. My high school buddy and myself both missed the same boat too because the critical idea which needed to be bulbed at the time never lighted for either of us, not even once. A truly close cigar but no smoke.

   My buddy and I were electronics freaks and hi fi geeks at the time. While everyone else we knew were under cars getting wiped out by exhaust fumes, we were hunkered over soldering irons getting wiped out by solder fumes. The someone was one of our main sources for small electronic components.

   The someone was running a small Mom and Pop business out of his basement, importing small electronic parts from Japan such as resistors and capacitors. He would package the items one at a time in neat little plastic bags, staple a printed label across the top, and sell them out of his basement from a little flyer which he distributed around town, which is now the standard packaging mode for everything from chewing gum to auto parts.

   It never occurred to him to expand the business past the flyer and his basement. Or to my buddy and I that he was really onto something big here and that we should look into it like right now.

   To bad we didn't, because less than seven years later another Vancouverite was doing exactly that. Only this time his Company, 'Tenneco', was doing it all over North America and he was already worth three hundred and fifty million dollars and counting.

   But tit is for tat. When the big transistor stereo import boom took off in the middle sixties, Tenneco wasn't paying proper attention and eventually got knocked off by Radio Shack and all the other similar mass marketers who were slicker and quicker with a much better dicker.

   Opportunity even knocked once or twice on my door at the house on Sasamat Street while I was still going to UBC. A small convenience store sat at 10th and Sasamat right by the entrance to the University of BC. The store owners were a charming middle aged English couple straight out of Coronation Street.

   Every couple of weeks, Mrs. Monroe would bring in a small supply of Wilkinson Stainless steel razor blades slipped into the country from a friend in England. Ego, bootleg. She would then phone up her list of eagerly awaiting customers. I.e., like myself.

   They were sold under the counter from a drawer beneath the cash register with those other popular weekend items which now sell unabashedly off the first rack you see when entering any drug store. The stainless steel razor blades sold strictly one to a customer. It didn't matter who you were.

   The bootleg blades would last for weeks and never nick, not even once, ever. Stainless steel blades were the real reason why the British males were so much more suave looking than most North American males throughout the sixties.

   The North American mainstay blade, Gillette blue blades from the world's largest manufacturer, lasted about seven minutes or one shave, whichever came first. And sliced you to pieces. The real reason why beards were so popular in North America for most of the sixties.

   This was back in the days when you either shaved with an electric razor which tore your face off, or with a Gillette blue blade which sliced your face off. Or with a Shick injector razor and you don't want to go there. This was also back in the good old days when the executives of the Gillette Corporation staunchly maintained that stainless steel blades couldn't be done. Having evidently never been to England on a holiday.

   Mrs. Monroe's phone call meant you came in, paid a quarter, and she would produce exactly one blade from the locked drawer under the cash register. It went on like this for over a year until the US Shick Company officially started importing their version of a stainless blade into Canada. Mr. and Mrs. Monroe's bootleg stainless steel blade business instantly dried up.

   However, either the Monroe's or myself, should have sensed the enormous possibilities on the loose from their customer's rabid enthusiasm for the stainless steel blades, like me. And should have lined up Wilkinson blades for North America as fast as humanly possible, like me.

   Gillette eventually came out with stainless blades, which eventuated into the Sensor type blade. And eventually into the Mach three. Which after nearly half a billion dollars in research, managed to produce the only handle on the market which was impossible to hold properly unless you used it in exactly the same manner as the furiously smiling acrylic man on TV.

   A new and improved version was quickly released which sold for awhile for almost half the price of an electric razor. Whether that had been the original plan all along or simply a way to recoup the losses, we'll probably never know.

   At any rate, as they say, the rest was history. As it was, Wilkinson blades did finally made it into North America but not until well into the seventies, and headlong into staunchly stainless competition. I had definitely looked that one in the eye and said, “Huh, where, whazzup?”.

   The one thing about razor blades over the years which still hasn't changed however, is the magical ability of the last blade out of any pack to last at least five or six times longer than the first. It doesn't matter what kind of blade and which end of the pack you start with. The last one out always lasts weeks and sometimes even months longer than the first. The same thing for scour pads out of any package. Not to mention pieces of gum.

   Now if someone can just figure out how to put just last ones into a box, then we will then have some real 'guaranteed for life' stuff as opposed to just, 'guaranteed for the life of the product'. And doesn’t that last one give them a nice little bit of room to wriggle out of.

   And here's another quick tip for extending the length of your expensive blades even more if you're into it. Buy a two dollar pack of disposables and use the cheap ones for rough stuff like hacking through a three day growth or trimming your sideburns back to Captain Kirk. Then use the real bade to do a cleanup like a regular shave.

   Since you're only using the disposable razor off and on, one lasts for weeks or months. Since you are not using your expansive blade for the heavy duty stuff that kills them, they also last for weeks and even months. Not the most favorite news that the major blade companies want to hear I’m sure, but hey, they're not the ones paying the tab or making a dollar go eight ways.

   In fact, there's lots of ways to save a dollar once you're into it. Use only the minimum amount of paper towel you need at any given time. Tear the sheet in half or even in quarters if you have to. Also let it dry and use it again. And again if possible. You will be amazed at how many times you can recycle a sheet of paper towel depending on what you use it for.

   Believe it or not somebody finally figured out the economics of that for marketing. In early two thousand and four, I saw at last for the first time a roll of paper towels which tears in half sized sheets just like I’ve been doing for years. But I digress.

   While at the house on Sasamat I might also have ended up as part owner in a large cross Canada Stereo Store chain in the seventies if I'd been paying close enough attention. If so, it would have all started right from the living room of the house on Sasamat.

   But that's another story for a few chapters further along about my hi fi speaker manufacturing days just after I come to tell you how I didn't make the millions I should have managing a super rock and roll band out of Vancouver in the late sixties.

   Most people, if they're lucky, can count one, maybe two, big chances in their lifetime which they let slip by and then pine about for the rest of their lives to everyone else’s abject annoyance. If you're keeping score, take a look at how many have already gone by in my short life so far. And don't forget at this point, I was still barely older than a kid harboring zits. And what about my acquaintances.

   Not everyone I knew was sleeping at the helm though. I had one casual friend once who at least gave it a college try. His changed his legal last name to Vegas. Then he legally incorporated himself. Then he tried to sue the City of Las Vegas for the use of his name. You couldn't fault the guy for lack of gall.

   Seems he had found out that the city of Las Vegas had never legally incorporated. Not surprising considering how the city began. You know the story, "you makea the city or I breaka you face". The lawsuit judge told my friend, "get real, you makea me laugh", and that was the end of that.

   I also knew a fellow, who, while it was not particularly big time, did at least have something going for a while which was a bit out of the ordinary. After finishing high school, Jim became a professional party host for a while. Not as in catering. He, his house, and the party were one.