Shaun Newman Podcast - SNP Archives #32 - Kim Young

Episode Date: October 27, 2021

Born in 1951 in Vanguard Saskatchewan. He's a father of 8, married for 39 years & spent 30 years as a judge in the Courts of Saskatchewan.  Let me know what you think Text me 587-217-8500

Welcome to the podcast, folks. Happy Wednesday. Hope everybody's having a great week here as we cruise along. Man, Tuesday was just an absolute gorgeous day. And that, man, I don't know. Here in Lloyd, maybe it was more places than just here that evening sky. She was a beauty. Hopefully you got to open up your blinds and see that because she was gorgeous. And I keep saying, I hope we get to October 31st so the kids can trick or treat without a foot of snow. And, man, fingers crossed here, knock on some wood that we get there because everything's better when the kids get to walk around, not bundled up in eight layers. We'll have them bundled, but hopefully no winter jackets and hopefully no snow pants, et cetera. And here's fingers crossed. Now, we've got another good one coming on today.

But before we get there, let's get to today's episode sponsors. Jane Gilbert and team for over 45 years since 1976, the dedicated realtors of Coldwell Banker, Cityside Realty, have served Lloyd Minster in the surrounding area. They offer star power to their clients. That's seven-day-a-week access because they know big-life decisions are not made during office hours. And did you know when it comes to rental properties?

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Ooh, we. I thought, we've all been waiting a long time for the Oilers to be 5-0 starting a season. It feels like maybe they got a few more wins in them coming this year. Their power plate is on fire, et cetera. They look pretty sharp on 08. They got this guy named Connor McDavid. Anyways, besides that, keep it concrete. They've been in business for 42 years.

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and they go, I always bring up the, you know, if you're in town, the Spiro's patio. Well, I remember pulling up beside Chris when they were working on that. And now we've all seen what that patio at Spiro's has become. We'll hop on Instagram and you can get a look at their latest projects. And man, they do a ton of different projects from, you know, shops, scratch pads, patios, barns. countertops, driveways, basement floors, sidewalks. I mean, essentially, if you can dream it, they can do it. So give Chris a call today. 780 875-7678.

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give Wade Gartner a call at 88085025. And if you're heading into any of these businesses, make sure you let them know you heard about it from the podcast, right? Now let's get on that T-Barr-1, tale of the tape. Born in 1951 in Vanguard Saskatchewan. He was a father of eight, married for 39 years, a judge with the courts of Saskatchewan for 30 years. I'm talking about community pillar Kim Young.

So buckle up. Here we go. Well, it is February 14, 2021. I'm sitting with Judge Kim Young. And I got to say, I was saying this to Richard Starkey before. I don't know what we three did so well on Valentine's Day of all days to come and sit and do this. Some sweet talking nonetheless, but thanks for hopping in and coming to talk a little bit about your life. For sure.

Thank you so much, Sean. Now, I always like to start it with maybe, you know, growing up in Vanguard, Saskatch, when you were saying a little bit south of Swift Current. Thank you. Small town. What are some of the early memories you have? Well, we didn't have paved roads for a long time. I remember riding the bikes in the muddy streets all the time. There was about when I was a kid, maybe 200 population.

It's now shrunk to well under 100 people. But it was a little town. Your major service stuff, lawyers and dentists and so on, you'd go to Swiftcrant. So we used Swiftcrant for the town to, you know, buy clothing and things like that. But farming community, obviously, there was no oil down there. They dug to 12,000 feet in this year. He's dry as a bone, so we never had any oil patch activity.

You had to go down to Estaband before you get into that. But it was a good little 14.5 inches of annual rainfall on a 10-year average, and we grew wheat and derm down there. Ourselves, we didn't have any cattle, and they were just straight grain farmers. And yeah, so that was, those are some of my members. I remember the sewer and water coming in in the 1960s. That was something to see the big back was digging up the streets and dumping the pipes and water pipes and sewer pipes down there.

So it was good. I've still got friends from that home area that I see from time to time. How about your parents? What did your parents do for work growing up? My dad was a farmer, and my mother was a postmaster, postmistress, whatever you want to call her, at the Little Vanguard Day. And she had a couple of employees there that would sort the mail and do the things, attend to the counter and so on.

And she did that until she was 65 until she retired. And my dad had some heart attack, so we were getting stuff custom done towards the end because he had some health issues. But we kept all our machinery and stuff, but neighbors we would hire on to do the harvest and put in the crops for the last few years. He was in bad shape for about the last maybe six or eight years of his life. So I was off in university in those years, and life went on that way. He'd had rheumatic fevers. He was a kid, and it wrecked his valve. so he had valve issues, eh, on his heart?

Romantic fever? Yeah, somehow or another, that can destroy your heart valves. I don't know much about medicine, but that's what he certainly attributed to a 12-year-old kid. He got sick, and he thinks that's what damaged his heart valves, eh? And then he was there in the Mayo Clinic getting heart operations a couple of times, and so on and so on, eh? had valves replaced, one of the ball and socket valves were replaced at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester.

That helped them out a lot, obviously, extended his life quite a bit. Saskatchewan at that time wasn't cooling people off, and you had to basically go to the states, otherwise you'd suffer X amount of brain damage if you had a 1970s heart operation in Saskatchewan, because without cooling the body down before they slice into you to do that work, you suffer for some amount of brain damage. But in those days, if you went to the U.S., it was only about $18,000 in those days to get heart surgery in the Mayo Clinic.

So he goes down there and they cool them down and then they put them on the heart lung machine and rip in through his rib cage and replace the valve. And he thought that was well worth it to get that sort of treatment versus at that time in Saskatchewan. They were doing heart surgery in Regina and Saskatoon,

but they weren't cooling you down before they did it. and that was something that he was aware of and didn't want to participate in. So he jumped the system and got done down in the U.S. Oh, would have never ever thought of that? Well, later on in Saskatch, when they came up to speed. I know my dad, when he told that to the doctors in the Mayo Clinic, they couldn't believe it.

And they said they had a colleague in Regina. The actual heart doctor Sherman, I think was a guy's name, phoned in my dad's presence to Regina and asked him if this was true. I had a patient here that said blah, blah, blah. And the doctor says, whoa. But we've all caught up in Saskatchewan. Things are going good now. But in those days, they were kind of behind the times in open heart surgery.

But they're up to speed now, that's for sure. That's super interesting. Yeah, yeah. I wasn't all out crazy long ago in the 1970, 71 in those years. Yeah. For sure. When you look back and think of your parents, what were some of the things they tried to instill in you? Well, hard work.

I can remember we had a pretty big farm back then, and you'd be out kind of partying on a Friday night. And I slept in a trailer in the yard just to kind of be on my own. And you'd hear at about seven in the morning your dad pounding on the door come up. We got a whole bunch of summer. All the Tansy weeds were a foot high, and we were behind, and he'd be banging on. the door you just felt so bad you'd drag your butt out and get to work on the weekend summer following we summer followed 50-50 in those years you'd summer follow half the fields and grow the other half and back and forth but the weeds the weeds the weeds

you had to hit her about three times throughout the year to to keep the weeds rolled under we used discers to roll them under type of thing we didn't have any erosion problems so we could we could get away without cultivators just a one-way disker to flip it over and I can remember riding that old John Deere tractor and wondering, oh my goodness, what is this all about? You got to get out of here, eh? So hard work, I guess, is the only thing that I can recall from that. Kids, we don't, you don't go partying on the weekends, Steve.

Yeah, I sure did then. Yeah, lots of fun. How, how, what, what years were your parents born in? My father was born in 1912 and my mother was born in, in 1918. Did you ever talk to him about their young years? Oh, yeah, yeah, for sure. And they told lots of good stories. They grew up on the farm.

They were both born in the little towns. My brother, Samaroy, my father's from Vanguard. And they grew up, and they would walk to town in those years. My dad was 15, he got a Model T. And he could drive around in his Model T at that point. He was mobile. And at 16, he takes the Model T because he hit the dirty, 30 depressions, and he drives it.

to bury Ontario where his uncle, his dad's brother, owned a grocery store. So the biggest part of the journey was going down there. He kept hitting Old Wives Lake, which is this huge lake, the other side of Moose Jaw. And it took him forever to get around Old Wives Lake. And once he got to Regina, the trail was pretty decent all the way to Ontario. But he drove that down there. And in Regina, it backfired. he broke his wrist from the Model T backfiring.

And with the broken risk, he spent a day or two in Regina and carried on with a broken arm to Barry Ontario. And you can imagine how rough that would be shaking that broken arm. But he was going to get there and so on. And then he hitchhiked back, so to speak, rode the rails back. And he got to Regina just in time for the Regina riots. And Regina was, they were rioting at that time. And one of the stories he told me that sticks in my mind, he had some money in the toe of his shoe, but he didn't want to use it.

He wanted to save it to go back home with. And he's riding the rails, and you get to Regina. And on college drive, there's all these big, rich Jewish houses where all the Jewish people had lots of money, and they were living these houses. And the bum men from the railway tracks would walk, and they'd stand behind the stone fence on college drive in Regina. and the Jewish women would come out with hot loaves of bread, and they didn't want to intermingle with people, but they put them on the top railing of the stone fence, and then these guys could get this bread.

And so those poor women were in there cooking their heads off to keep all of the bums in Regina fed, and he said they had a lot of cherry. It was the only place you could get a meal. There was no food banks and things like that in those days, and these Jewish women would feed the rules of transients that were lined up in Regina. My dad actually had.

money in the toll of his shoe, but he was going to get the free lunch anyhow because he wanted to save the money he'd earned in Ontario to get home. So when he got home, he was able to pay the taxes on the farm, which were in arrears by then to keep the farm in the family with the money he'd earned with his uncle in Ontario. Quite the story. He wasn't participant in the riots, but he was at the Regina riots when he was at Regina at the time. That was on his way back from Ontario. He'd been down there. Yeah. That's a story.

Yeah, it's crazy, isn't it? Yeah. I've taken a road trip out to Ontario on our roads and a car that goes relatively fat, well, compared to smooth and everything else. Yeah. The Model T was quite interesting. It could run on three tires. If you had a flat tire, you just took it off and put it in the trunk and kept going on three. He just couldn't turn into it, but you could go to Toronto on three tires.

It would run on three. And it didn't matter which tire it was. you could run on the three tires. You could take the flat tire off and deal with it. But they had spares, of course. But the way the Model T was configured, it could run on three tires. It's too bad they wouldn't have had this technology. So he could have done a video journal as he or even an audio journal as he's going.

Yeah, yeah. So when he's back home, he was telling me that there's a brass pitcock on a Model T. So when you got home in the winter, you would drain the water out of it. I'm talking water, not anterfreeze. You put it in a big metal pot, and you put it on the cook stove. And then when you wanted to run the Model T, you would take, you'd close that kit puck off, you'd pour the warm water into the radiator that was sitting on your stove all night, and she'd light up and you were going.

So that was your block heater was your cook stove, eh? You just put the hot water in it then from, from, that was sitting on top of the cookstove. And that's how they ran her in the 20 below weather in those days. And now, what was it only like four days ago, it was minus 39, and I just fired the truck up and away she went. I mean, not quite that way, but you know. Yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure. But yeah, yeah, quite the old stories from way back when. When you're in high school growing up, did you always have your eye on what you wanted to do?

No, not at all. I was happy to get my grade 11. I was actually accepted conditionally to the RCMP. but you had to have grade 11. When I got my grade 11, I figured, oh, I got the world by the tell. I got my grade 11 now, eh? And I went over to Pontex, and they measured me and did my chest expansion, all these things, and said to me, you're kind of young.

Why don't you wait a year, and you'll be accepted then? And so I goes, and we had a big crop that year. And when June was done, we had this big crop one we hadn't seen for quite some time. My dad said, you just got to stay and help me take off the crop. It's all there's to it. You can't wander off. So, fine, ain't? So he gets the crop off in October, and at that point,

universe already started. My sisters were going to university. So I decided I'm going to Alberta to get a job on the oil rigs. That's where all the big money was in those days. So I gets in my 59 Chevy two-door hardtop and starts driving to Alberta to get a job on the oil rigs. I think I was 18 years old at the time, 17 or 18, I forget just which. And it gets to Gull Lake and I seize this.

this big oil drilling outfit. So I pulls over there, walked around, who's in charge here? And I didn't even know the names of the players at the time. And I finally gets the guy and I says, I'm looking for a job on O'Riggs, but you're right here. And I'd left on a Saturday morning.

So my dad knew her, my parents knew where I was going, I was going off to get a job in O'Riggs. Guy says, sure, Monday morning in the Gull Lake Hotel. And I remember the Gull Lake Hotel is, buffalo on the wall when I got there he says you be there at 8 o'clock in the morning and you're hired he was obviously desperate for for employees because I I was somebody that knew nothing so I drives back to vanguard and on Saturday night my dad looks out the window and there's my quite distinctive 59 Impala driving by and he must have shook his head and he says what the hell what kind of a guy's

that he's back already I'd left in the morning and I was back at night driving the streets visiting with people because I had this job come Monday morning eh so I gets off there was one of the coldest damn winters that there's ever been and freezing to death it was an open rig this was antelope drilling and precision was next door with these closed-in rigs so it goes over to precision it says could i get a job with you guys because i'm dying was like 20 below in in november no no openings here at all so i goes back and i freeze set that comes home for christmas my sister says you should come to university it's really easy and i said oh god you know i said i'm no good to school, I'll flunk out. She says, no, you come to University of Regina and I'll put you in easy

classes. You'll do really, really well. It's warm. It's nice. I said, absolutely, eh? I'd made some money by this time with Antelope Drillings. I had some money in my pocket. And that goes off to the U of Regina and just like she said. It was a piece of, I was taking geography and economics and English and things like that. And it was a lot easier I found in high school and did very well at university so uh so that was i just kept going because that was the life then it was a way better life than working out of dollard and shonevin and gul lake and all these places uh because in those days the drinking age was older was 21 eh so all the other rig hands would go to the bar and i'd be stuck in my room because i was a far cry then they then they they changed when i was in university

the drinking age changed to uh to younger but uh but when i was on the oil rigs i couldn't go to the bars that all other people were because of the of the 21 drinking age in in Saskatchewan. So you go to school then after your four-way, foray into work in the rigs, which... Yeah. It was good. It was good. It was just so damn cold. Any other year I'd have been probably way better off. I'd still be there, but it was so cold. And we were outside on the, on the, on the, on the, on the, on the, on the, on the, yeah. Well, I mean, We've all worked outside. Well, I can't say we all have, but for anyone who's worked outside in any part of the winter in Canada, you get a new appreciation for being inside more often or not because there's a lot of days.

And this week has been proof in the pudding, so to speak. It has been brutal, right. For sure, for sure. So you go to university. What steered you to becoming a lawyer? My sister, the same sister. Because I have to, before you go, I'm going to flunk out, I'm going to be known. good at it and all of a sudden you become a lawyer well my sister the same sister denise her and her

fiancee but this time they're both going to law college so you could go down to the to the registrar's office in regina and get the form supply for law college i says no no no she says we're going you should go to so she gets the form she fills it out not me fills out the application for law in saskatoon And then I start looking around and all the guys I was hanging out with, the Dale Canems and all these other people in Regina, they were all going to law college. I thought, geez, I better go because there are going to be nobody left here in Regina.

So my sister had sent him my application. She filled it out, sent it in, and I got accepted, and I went up to Saskatoon and started doing law courtesy of her. It wasn't my idea to apply for law college, but she did it for me, so it's because she was going and John was going, and so on and so on. So it turned out pretty good. And sure enough, when I get to law college, I knew all sorts of people there that I'd been hanging out with in Regina at the Regina campus.

So it turned out really good. You make it seem like it was just so easy to become a lawyer. Well, I had good marks in Regina, so when I applied, that was the meritocracy back then. You got accepted on the basis of your GPA, your mileage. Now there's all sorts of other woke sort of. of criteria that they're trying to fill all these quotas. But back in my day, in 1972, it was how good of a student you were determined. There was no interviews.

There's no interviews to this day. You sent in a picture yourself in your application. They looked at the classes you took and the marks you got. They weren't trying to have other sorts of criteria. So I have been good marks in Regina who got accepted no problem, as did my sister and her fiance say and everybody else because it was based on marks. Nowadays, who knows how they accept students to either medicine or law college. But back in those days, it was a meritocracy.

It was the kids with the highest marks got into law college, period. And that's how I got in because I happened to. They didn't look mercifully at my high school marks. They'd have thrown me right out. They looked at my university marks, which were a lot better than my high school marks. Which is a good lesson for, if any kid just caught that. or any person for that matter, your high school marks were okay, but you went somewhere. I think I had a 74 or 76 average in high school. It was not great.

I remember the Giotrigg when I wrote it in 1969. I knew I had flunked it because off to the left-hand side, they had the marks. And I was struggling. God, it was hard. I couldn't get through it. By the time I had to hand it in, I did about 45% marks. If I'd have got 100% of those, I'd have still only got 45. So I knew I was going to flunk grade 12, period, because the gerotrig was going to kill me. I'd come back, I got 72 or something. The whole thing, they marked it on the curve, because it was such a hard exam that people all over the province, obviously were having as much difficulty with me.

So I got a 70-something in it, and I know to this day that I only did 45% of the questions on it. But that curve thing was what got me through that. Pulled you along. Yeah, yeah. Otherwise, I wouldn't have made it for sure, Ray. So was it interesting that once you got to university, why it was so easy? I took economics, geography, classes like that, and I thought they were very interesting.

I enjoyed them, and I worked at it, and I got good marks, and I partied a lot, too, just like you'd imagine. but I didn't take any, my sons all wondering, but they took the organic chemistry and physics and really tough classes. I took what I consider to be easier classes than what my kids ended up taking when they went to university because I looked at some of the stuff they were doing,

it was just freaky. It seemed so difficult to me when I looked at their course content. So I didn't think economics is hard. I didn't think geography was hard. and it fit me maybe a lot better than it fit other people, that's for sure. Maybe I just stare at lawyer as not an impossible degree to go get, but as more difficult than some degrees. Maybe that's just my own thought process.

The hardest college to get into it. The U of S now was a dentistry, period, period, period. They take 24 kids and you've got to be, it's ways you're getting into medicine and the dentistry and law is pretty darn easy because there's so many law colleges around literally we places like colonna and stuff have law colleges left bridge places like that that don't have the medicine and dentists and colleges so your chance of getting in let's say in alberta to law there's all sorts of places you can go and get a law degree left bridge mount royal calgary edmonton who knows what else whereas the the more difficult ones like dentistry you can only hit the target i think

in Edmonton or Calgary and it's the same for medicine. So there's more competition for some of those because there's less kids getting in to those because of what it takes. So law now is, I'm sure, a little bit easier to get into than the dentistry or medicine or VetMed or any of those other ones where there's less of an intake. VetMed would be probably the toughest of them all to get into now because there's so few, I think there's only 20 kids a year from Saskatchewan that get into, to vet med. So it would be tougher on the odds to get into that than it would be even to

dentistry where I know they take 24 kids each year into first year dent. So that's a tough one. You know, you bring up kids and knowing you've had eight in a world that two seems like a lot, three seems like a lot, why did you and the wife decide, why did you and Colleen go, was eight always the plan or did it just kind of happen it kind of happened it wasn't the plan but uh we had good healthy kids no problems any kids they were good kids and they we weren't scared to have another one because the the first batch that we had was so darn good that uh that it wasn't scaring us off and they they were easy kids to raise boys are clearly tougher to raise than girls there's no doubt about that but uh we just we just uh we're having kids that we quite enjoyed and uh it was uh just

went from there. It wasn't planned to begin with. You had no idea where we're going. The last two were twins, of course, so that doubles it up. The last batch of kids we had were Ace and Duke twins. So, ooh, bingo, you jumped to eight from six real quick, eh? But you were going for seven.

Yeah, we were going for seven, correct, correct. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. But some people struggle with raising kids, and it's not fun for them, and the kids are difficult. The kids have health issues or other ADHD problems. or something that, which I'm sure puts a lot of stress on the parents.

And they start wondering, my goodness, do we want any more of these hard to raise the little critters, but ours were easy to raise, I think. How many years between all eight? What was the youngest to the oldest? Oh, we had about 13 years, I think, spread. And the twins, of course, you get two there, the same birthday, eh? So I think that's about the spread that we had. So the oldest was 13.

You were having the toys? Yeah, in Nevada, we had a built-in babysitter, the poor thing. So you know how girls start babysitting about 12 or 13? Our poor daughter was being the oldest. If we want to go to a movie, guess who's looking after the kids type of thing, eh? Pretty rough life for her. She got into it. Yeah.

We had other babysitters some time to time. What did you pay for a babysitter? Oh, God. You'd give the kids five or ten bucks. I know the college girls babysat for. us and other neighbor kids and so on, eh, and it was nothing. The movie cost away more than the babysitter in those days, eh? Yeah.

Or whatever in the heck you were doing, eh? Yeah. I just have this, I envision the babysitter walks in, and there's just kids hanging from everywhere. Hanging from the chandeliers, you betcha, yeah, yeah, okay, yeah, for sure. No, it's, it's tough. We didn't have two babysitters, you only had one. Without a amount of kids, you could have just,

I'm not satisfied having two of them running the show, but we got away with that. It was kind of bedtime-ish for the most part, so, yeah. We never went on long. If we were going for a long period of time, we would use our, Colleen's parents or Colleen's sister or something like that

to do the babysitter. They'd move in and stay with the kids for a bit that way. No. What was a family vacation with eight? Like, did you take any family vacations? Oh, tons. I had a 15-passed. passenger Ford Van.

Kid you not, just like the Hutterites would have, eh? And we would tie a boat on the back of that and go fishing in Campbell River. It was the greatest holidays we've ever had. It was wonderful. My mother was in Calgary, so we could spend the night there. That was the first leg of the trip. And then we would go to the water slides at salmon arm for the next night. And the kids would be scooting down the waters.

And the next night, we're at Campbell River to go salmon fishing, eh? We took everybody along. It was a wonderful vacation. And that big old 352 Ford would pull that sucker through the mountains and pull the boat behind and kids hanging on the windows. And it was a good vacation. We'd be out there for about two weeks, 10 days, two weeks, whatever it turned out. And get out in the boat, we'd pile them in there and go. I had a pretty big boat so we could pile everybody into it and go out on the ocean and fish.

It was lots of fun. That was our main vacation. We had a cabin at Perch Lake later on, and we would use that for some of vacations too. but we went 13 years in a row salmon fishing before the salmon kind of dried up in about 97 or so they kind of went extinct out there overfishing clearly of the of the herring but but then we kind of went back the last few years we were back there last summer even in the pandemic we stayed at Painters Lodge and you could have shot guns off in in some of those resorts they closed down April point because of no no American

and fishermen were allowed to come in, and we were Canadian, so we went there, and we had the hotel to herself and the ocean to ourselves, for the most part. There was the ferry traffic and a few other boats, but she was dead out there. BC was dead this summer, compared to anything we've ever seen before. We still went out there,

and Casey brought the kids along, and most of the kids flew out. We'd pick them up at Comox and did some fish in A. We thought at that point, we thought that we were seeing the tail end of the pandemic, It looked as if it was waning this summer. And then, of course, it jumped up again in the fall and took off again. But there's more restrictions now than there even were in August.

Yeah, it's, I would assume in all years you've never seen anything like this. No, nobody has. It's so devastating to the local businesses and so on. It's so bad. How many restaurants will go under? How many will survive? survive all sorts of other businesses so difficult on them. You know, when you look back at eight kids in a van, are those some of your happiest days?

Oh, for sure, they were. They were great days. Yeah, they were great days. Yeah. Yeah. I had a thought about, so a vehicle would have been a very interesting purchase for you because you wouldn't have been able just to be like, well, we're going to go pick up even the minivan because the minivan when they sat y'all.

We had a GM suburban when we had about four or five kids and just grew out of it. I wore out two of those 15E 350, which is built on a 350 truck chassis, great big brakes. I wore two of them out. I ran them 240,000 clicks on the first one and ran the second one out, hey? Then we hit a Musa, Waseka, with it, and that was the end of that one. But then we were hauling kids that day. we were hauling them Duke and Ace to University, and we'd taken some other local kids to drop them off at residence.

And on the way back from Frosh week there, we hit a moose and broke the block on that 352 Ford big van. And I know the SGI guy had never seen that before. The moose hit so hard that the motor broke, which is unheard of. Anyone heard? No, the moose, but not. us. Our airbags went off and so on and so on. I was worried. I kind of panic all that white

foam comes from the airbags and I was pulling people to go out and stand on the fence. I figured that the truck would get rear-ended again because it was dead. The battery and everything was all busted. It was dead sitting kind of half on the curb and a little bit onto the highway and I was afraid it would get rear-ended a second time. And I was hauling everybody up to the fence line. and then sure enough, some farmer guy from Lashburn came by and hauled us all back into Lloyd Ministers. We took some of the items out of the truck and he was good enough.

He hooked on to the van and skidded it into the grass part of the ditch so it wouldn't cause a second accident, which could easily happen. When it's dead like that, without any battery functional and so on, somebody could rear-ended a second time. We stood by the fence and the farmer guy

towed it well into the ditch then, and then we load it up and he drove us to town, but we weren't hurt at all. But it was quite the deal. And those mooses have no reflectors. They're just, I remember I was doing the claim at SGI. The guy said what happened. I said, the moose dropped out of the sky right in front of us

because we never seen it coming. It was just there as if it had come straight down. Never saw it coming through the ditch or anything. It was just bango right in the front of the band. Right there by Ousica, right by McFadden's insurance, big sign. Very big cow moose. Where along the way do you meet Colleen? I met her when I was a lawyer in Saskatoon.

We were in the 279 3rd Avenue North, which is the SAS Mutual Building. And in that building was Consumer and Corporate Affairs, our law firm, which is the ground floor, and then SAS Mutual Insurance. And SAS Mutual would put a girl at the front desk when you came in to direct traffic because people who come staggering in there wanting to see the lawyers. Well, you go through that door. You want to see weights and measures and consumer affairs.

You go that door. So she was employed by them to direct traffic within the building right at the front foyer. And Colleen had that job. And I see her every morning and say hello to her type of thing when I walked into work. And then I met her downtown. We were at the Senator Hotel

and she was downtown shopping. It was a Saturday night. And I bumped her and I said, oh, you're the girl from the desk type of things. So I bumped into her downtown but I'd said hello to her for a few months before, before I met her downtown. I didn't even know what her name was when she worked at Sask Mutual.

Maybe I did, I don't remember, but I didn't meet her until later on. But that's how I first saw her was working at the insurance company there. What was it about Colleen then? Oh, just fun-loving person and a good person. So we just hit it off real easy. It was good. Yeah.

And she helped me. I was into politics in those days out hammering doors and working on the political scene. And she kind of got drug into it at that point, following me around doing all the political things, hey, back in the 70. I ran in 78 with Dick Culver for the conservatives. And we lost that one. I lost that one. But that was our first.

We got into some by-elections and federal elections and so on and so on and so on. So finally I got elected in 82. And then I was Emma lay there at that point. And we got married by then. We were married by then, me and Colleen. So she's seen it all from that end. Now you're seeing the reverse. No, I'm seeing the reverse.

You betcha. Now I get to go with her sometimes, eh? Yeah, for sure. Yeah. If you were on the clock then, married in 82? Yeah, yeah, right. Yeah. So closing in on 40 years.

Oh, yeah. We've married a long time. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. What is eight kids in almost? almost 40 years of marriage tie. Well, you got to pick them right in the first place, and I got lucky there. I don't know if it was brains or good luck, but you've got to have somebody who will stick with you.

And there's lots of ups and downs and downs with the kids and ups and down with us and so on and so on. But you just have to get the right one. And whether that's a result of my good choosing or just my dumb luck, I don't know, but it sure works out good when you get the right one. Yeah, I tend to think it was my good choice, you know, versus my good luck. Maybe a little bit of both. Yeah, who knows, yeah, who knows. But some people have some very bad habits that they're hard to live with if they're chain smokers or this or that or whatever, you know.

And you just hopefully don't get somebody that's tough to live with, that's for sure. And the kids certainly marry you together as well, eh, you've got to comedy. interest in their well-being, so you're working on the same task at all times, eh? I'm going to stick with this eight-kid thing. You're hung on that. You're hung up on that. Well, that's a lot. For sure, for sure.

I mean, and I don't know. Was Colleen on board with it right from the start? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. She wasn't forced into that at all. She's a Catholic, eh? And these Catholics like big families. So I attribute it to her, you know. I'm a prod.

She's a Catholic. and Catholics like big kids, hey, lots of kids. That came out of the way. What I was meaning was, it's like, when you sat down and had a conversation of, hey, do you want kids? Yeah, I do. Do you want lots of kids?

No, no, no, no. We got married to have kids. We were living together for quite some time before we got married. Are you with me there? Okay. So we were of the old school. You can't have kids unless you get married.

So the marriage was a function of wanting to have kids, not the other way around. Interesting. Yeah, yeah. We lived common law for quite some years, and then we decided we're going to have kids. And well, we're going to have kids. You've got to get married and blah, blah, blah, blah. I'd put that all together in that way, eh.

So that was the cause of our marriage was having kids. We were from the old schoolers, all sorts of people now that have kids out of weblock, but that wasn't in our DNA. So you're willing to be common law, live together, but not have kids together. No, and nor did we. We drew the line somewhere, so that's what we drew the line, eh? And, you know, right after we got married, you started having kids. Just that simple, eh?

Yeah. For sure. People have different values depending on how they grew up and so on and so on. And nowadays, that's certainly with some people, it's the norm. For other people, they'll have kids in or out of wedlock. They could care less, eh? But we thought that was a big deal back then. Going back to your career, I kind of switched topics on there for a little bit,

but you mentioned politics, you mentioned graduating becoming a lawyer. Right. Why politics? Why did you get into politics? I was just enamored with it. I had worked on federal campaigns when I was back for Frank Hamilton and Swift Crenton. My dad was a fire-breathing deep and baker guy, not active, but in those days, the, the, The new party was the NDP party.

The liberals had a strangle hold on Saskatchameral all these years. So my dad was an NDP because that was the party of change, if you can imagine that way back, way back. And I would go out with him and hang on to his leg as a little kid at these NDP meetings and so on and the politics disrupt. When I got to Saskatoon, I met Dick Culver and the conservative warriors there, and I got enthralled with conservative politics. My dad was a conservative federally.

So federally he was a Defenbaker guy. Provincially, he was an NDP guy. Because you've got to go back to 1930 in Anderson government, before the conservatives were in play in Saskatchewan. It was the liberals and the NDP all of those years. My dad hated the liberals, hated Trudeau, and wouldn't support the provincial liberals. So by default, he had to be a provincial NDP.

But when Dick Culver single-handedly invented and reinvented and reinvented the conservators, party in in 1975 then there was an alternative to the liberals on the on the on the on the on spectrum and it was a natural for me and my dad quite agreed with me that that was at that point the nDP were getting old by that time and i remember when blake nickam over the seatbelt laws my dad went through the ribs says what's going on we had the freedom blah blah blah so he was really upset with being forced to do something that wasn't in his nature. Well, of course, when you look in hindsight, Blakeney was right and my dad was wrong, but my dad felt he was being stifled by the government with all sorts of things like that. So he was growing tired of the NDP about the time that I took

out a membership in the conservative party, which had just been invented. We'd have much hope. The liberals were the opposition. It was the third party, the provincial progressive conservatives by that time. But the time I joined them and started working for them and federally, we're always conservatives, of course. I feel like this is a dumb question, but before the Conservative Party, what was there?

There was the liberals. Yeah? Ross Thatcher and those kind of people. And the NDP, the Tommy Douglas people and so on. That's in Saskatchewan. In 1930, there had been a one-year conservative that's called the Anderson government, but then they went dead.

They went dormant. They didn't exist. They didn't elect any members. They were gone. And it wasn't until 1975 that this Dick Culver guy, who was an accountant in Saskatoon, reinvented the conservative party, the Progressive Conservative Party of Saskatchewan. But he was still the third party because the liberals under Ted Malone and Alan Blakeney and all these guys were in power and they had all the MLAs.

So he elects seven members in 1975. then Gary Lane and Colin Thatcher walked the floor from the Liberals to the Conservative Party, which gives them the momentum. So in 1882, by the time that rolled around, that was the election I got elected in, the liberals were wiped right off the map. And it was just the conservatives under Grant Devine by that time and the NDP under Alan Blakene at that time. And the liberals disappeared. They've been disappeared ever since.

Linda Haberstock was there for a bit and she did a good job, but it was stomped out. When they got rid of her, that was the death mill for the Saskatchewan Liberal Party, and that has just been a two-party. Now it's the Bradwell Conservatives versus the NDP, so we're back to two parties. But, yeah, Culver reinvented the Progressive Conservative Party in 1975, and I was with him by about 1976 on a work in Fortiscus, Saskatoon and Harold Lane's by-election in 1977 and Bill McKnight and the federal guys and so on. It was actually provided with a bit of a social life.

We had curling bonds bills and we had conventions and it was a good opportunity to go out and meet people over and above the pure politics of it. It had a social aspect to it as well. You mentioned a name in there, Colin Thatcher. There's a name that everyone should probably know. Yeah, yeah, for sure. He got elected in 75 as a liberal, and then him and Gary Lane,

who went on to the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal, both walked the floor to Dick Culver. They left the liberals while they're sitting members and walked over to Dick Culver and the conservatives. When Culver then lost the 78 election, he took off to Arizona, and Grant Devine was elected to be the leader of the party, and then he won in 82,

and with a landslide victory. and just about wiped out the NDP in that 82 election. They only had, I think, nine people that got reelected for NDP, and Divine took over from there. And then it moves on to Brad Wall was the next reincarnation in 2007. He starts coming again. So his first election was 2007 that Brad Wall got. And he's kind of been in power ever since.

It's now Mo, but it's the same group of people that got it going. again in 2007. Colin Thatcher going to prison must have been a shock, though, to everyone, I assume. Right. It was an interesting. It was a lot of law that Jerry Albright was his defense lawyer, and there was some strange law. It was the first time that I think Quinn's bench, Judge Maher, ruled that the jury didn't

have to decide whether Thatcher did it themselves or put somebody up to murdering his wife. Either way would be murder one. And I think prior to that time, everybody had in their mind, me as a lawyer, that the crown had to pick one or the two. They couldn't say, well, we don't care. It was one of the two, and we're leaving at that. So that in my mind was a change in the law at the time. Now, Dick Culver testified against him at his trial, if you remember.

So Dick Calver was certainly a man of principle because this guy had been one of his loyal supporters over the years. and Culver came up from Arizona and testified that to the effect. I won't quote it exactly, but Culver had been down at his Wickenburg ranch and was looking around for a hitman type of thing. That's roughly what it came. So Calver did not help him at the jury trial in Saskatoon. Didn't help him at all.

And I'm sure that Calver was just telling the truth. Culver died here about two years ago. He died in the Philippines. but he was quite the guy he really brought the conservative party again and then of course on the Brad Walde's the remaining liberal guys amalgamated with the progressive observers to form the SAS party that's the genesis of the SAS party it's an amalgamation of the liberals in those days the kind of remnants of the Linda Haverstock days joining up with the with the progressive conservatives and Bill Boyden all those people and they formed this new party

called the SASS party, amalgamation of the two. Yeah. Merger. It's worked pretty good, really. Well, you've got quite the mind for politics, because, I mean, you've been able to call on it here quite easily. Why did you get out of politics? I got appointed the judge, and it was the premier,

the premier appoints the judge. And the crazy part about being a judge in the days I was appointed, If people mistakenly think you're the best lawyer out there, that the government's going to pick the best lawyer to be the judge. And I was not the best lawyer in Saskatoon, far from it, but I was one that the Premier knew. So it was like a political appointment. The Premier appoints the people he knows and has confidence in.

Not necessarily the best lawyer in town, because having been a lawyer in Saskatoon, I know had a pretty good handle on who the best lawyer. lawyers were and I wasn't in that category but I still got appointed to be the judge. So that's how it works. It's political appointment if there ever was one. Nowadays there's other criteria going into the hopper but I'm sure it was an okay lawyer but certainly there was lawyers that were head and shoulders above me in any particular field

and yet I get appointed to be the judge because I knew the premier type of thing. And how have you enjoyed is it can I even call it enjoyment being a judge? Oh, yeah. It's been treated me very, very well. One of the things that I talked to people, we had a Filipino guy that I got to know, Eugene, here the last couple years, and he tells me how things go into the Philippines and how the system works there and how the politics works and how the bribing the traffic cop works and all this kind of stuff. And I think back, and I've been 35 years now as the judge and Lloyd Minister, I have never had one. one person even attempt in any way to unduly influence me on anything ever. And that says so much about the people of Western Canada for sure. Nobody has tried it. And I had one poor kid years and

years ago, a kid from Kitt Scott. He phoned me up. He was charged with somebody. He phoned me at home because my phone number is in the phone book. I don't try to hide. I got to sign up on my acreage where I live and I'm not hiding for the people. This one is. about a 17-year-old kid phoned me up and said, I didn't do that. I said, whoa, whoa, fella, you can't just phone me up and tell me your side of the case. So I dutifully, the next day, told the prosecutors I had this call from this kid. I said, he was innocent. He didn't know any better.

He didn't realize that that was wrong. But that's the only time any accused person has ever phoned me up at home when I'm in the phone book. And they never have. And this kid didn't know any better. He wasn't trying to be underhanded. He just thought, well, I better tell the judge that, that, I'm innocent here. So I have never had anybody tried to unduly influence a decision or anything.

Everything is done proper if you want to make a statement on behalf of the cues. You come to open court and your character witness form. That's all according to the book and that's the way it should be. But nobody has ever full me up at home and tried to influence anything I was doing. And that speaks so well of the people of this area. you would not find the same thing in most countries on planet Earth. There'd be somebody trying to influence your decision if you were in some other country. And we don't have that here.

It really speaks highly, not of me, but of the people in this area who just have that sense of decency about them. Did I catch there that you've been doing it for 35 years? Did I hear that right? So if my math is correct, you turned 70 this year. I do, and I'm forced to retire then. I'm glad to retire. So on March 31st, which is a Wednesday, is my last day in the job. And the legislation has an end date for the judges.

We can't stay on the bench until we're 90 or something like you can in the U.S. So at 70 years of age, you are out the door. And I've been thinking I should get in my robes and hang on to the back door and then have some people pulling me, have the press there, and they could have a picture in their paper about the judge refuses to leave and he's clean to the back door. You can have fun with that, hey? But, no, you're forced to go,

and there'll be a new judge and Lloyd Minister to do my duties when I'm gone, of course, eh? Well, I think by the time people hear this, it'll be, that'll come to pass, right? Yeah, yeah, for sure. But essentially then, for half your life, you've done, you've been. Exactly.

35 and 35. I was 35 when I got appointed, and another 35 years takes me to 70. So exactly come March 31st, I'll be doing half of my life as a judge, and the other half as other things, eh? Well, I turned 35 in May. Okay. I'm now curious, in the 35 years you've sat in that position,

what are some of the things that you've learned along the way? I have actually learned the goodness of people and the honesty and sincerity of people. I think a lot of people might be skeptical. You make a bad card deal and a guy sells you a car and it's got a half-blown gasket or something, you start to get skeptical. But I think looking at all the people that traips through the courtroom and all the players, they are 99.9% good people. And nobody's...

Even sitting on the bench and seeing some of the, like, you must have seen... Well, they did bad things, but when they come to court, they're remorseable for the most part. And things that went really bad. Yeah, I hit my wife. I feel just absolutely terrible about that and so on and so on. And there's punishments that come their way, of course, but probably deep down, even though they committed that one crazy error, they're probably good people that would give you the shirt off their back,

but yet they got drunk and they punch their wife or something. It doesn't make them forever a bad person. They've got to pay the price for that mistake, but they're good. Gee, that's, that should give everyone. everyone a little bit of hope. Because I would assume in your position, you get to, you know, everybody talks about the bad car salesman. But, I mean, you're talking about guys that have come in and, you know,

some of it's harmless, I'm sure. But some of it certainly isn't. Certainly isn't. That's for sure. That's for sure. Yeah. What the biggest thing I've seen in the last four years, I'm going to say, is this methamphetamine stuff is just turned the world upside down.

Methamphetamine, I don't know why. Somebody's got to do a study. It makes thieves out of people. But if you're an alcoholic, you're not necessarily a thief. You may be, but you're not necessarily. You could be the biggest town drunk and you don't steal things. Methamphetamine, for some reason, makes thieves out of all of the addicts. I don't know what's going on there.

So there's a lot of property offenses that are methamphetamine-driven. And that drug didn't exist four or five years ago. It wasn't in the cards. There was heroin and cocaine and stuff. This methamphetamine stuff has really, really, really did a lot of things. damage. You can tell when they're in the prisoners box, they've got the meth teeth, their teeth turned into a little wee brown straggar thing, so they've got the, they've got the, they've got the, they got the Mountain Dew and the cup holder. For some reason, they have a craving for Mountain Dew.

What the heck's going on there? Who knows? But Mountain Dew is something they have to have, and they've got the bad teeth. And that's a clue that this guy is strung out on meth. and he's usually in court for stealing something that he's trying to pawn to look after his addiction. That's where you see most of it. But that's really changed things around. It's really increased the workload. There's such sorry cases. They're so bad because they're the damn good people before, and they get into that,

and it just ruins them. Yeah, it rest of their life. It ruins them, ruins them physically. Obviously, if your teeth are rotting away, there's other things. going on bad in your body just beside your teeth and it wrecks all day. Sell the toaster right out from underneath their mother. There's nothing that they won't do in order to keep that drug coming. As a guy who sat on and seen different walks of life fall into problems,

what was some of the lessons you tried to impart on your kids? Like you're seeing, you know, if you get into this, this is where it leads and that can be, Did you pass along any of that? Or was it just? I don't know. I don't think none of my kids have had any addictions problems. That is for sure. And they all have, in my view, exceptionally good work at this.

They work like dogs, all of them, all my son and my daughters. And everybody just is really hard working. Whether that's just by osmosis or what, I certainly wasn't lecturing people. I remember when Riley was in grade 11, I loaded them up in the car. and I drove and there was a nice M&M meat shop just off of the highway there over by the sheepskin loft and I drove them. I parked in front of the M&M meat shop.

And he said, well, what are we doing here? I said, well, Ritey, I'm just showing you this place to tell you that I don't own this shop. I can't give you my job. I've sold the farm by then. And you got to make it on your own kid because I have nothing. A lot of kids in town,

their father has some big business, a construction company, or you name it. And I have nothing to give you, Riley. He says, I know, I know. I said, well, you've got to make it on your own now. You understand that. The kids in grade 11, just the summary is going into grade 12. And he already knew that I had nothing that I could provide him by way of occupation. He had to make it on his own.

And, of course, all my kids have made it on their own because I can't give them my judgeship. It's not something I own. Like if I owned a tire store or something, I could help them out. So maybe it has worked out that way. He's the only kid that I lectured to to make him damn sure that he knew there was nothing coming from me as far as life career went. That's an interesting thought because, you know, farm, I come from a farming background.

So there's always stay on the farm and take over the family farm. Yeah. Dad and the brothers run a trucking company. So there's always go work there. I mean, anyone can put themselves in that position if they're, parents own a business or yeah yeah right it's a great fallback i had it when i was my dad had the farm i was an only son and i got the farm and uh i tried i was going to kill myself i had way too many balls in the air and i was going to die in my sesna airplane crashing flying around it from

saskatoon to vanguard to put the farm in and i i just said i got to stop this i cannot keep doing it so you were a lawyer flying back to vanguard yes trying to farm trying to farm i had a full line of She had a new John Debt tractor discurs. I was putting the crop in and working at it. Your neighbors must have thought you're nuts. I landed on my neighbor's airstrip because I was too cheap to build my own and just walked to our house and got in a truck and monkey. It was tough.

How long did you try and do that for? I was doing that from 82 to about 92. You did it for 10 years? Yeah, yeah. Now, I had other people, I had Norman Tessier did this spring. I had other people doing the harvest. I didn't have a line of harvesting equipment, but I had grain bins and augurs and seeding equipment and cultivating equipment. And then if I got swamped, I would phone up Norman and say, you've got to do the summer follow.

So he would, because we were going 50-50 farming, which you don't see around here. We'd summer follow half, cropped the other half, eh? And he would jump to it and do it that way. It wasn't a very efficient way to farm because that's more expensive than doing it yourself. But that's what I was forced into doing, eh? because I just couldn't get there. And you'll get down to Vanguard, down by the U.S. border, and she socks in, and without an IFR rating, which, of course, I never had,

I'm stuck there. I can't get back to the legislature, back to my law firm or anything, because you can't fly in that skunky weather. It's got to be bare weather flying, eh? So I tie up the airplane and catch a ride back to Saskatoon in those years, eh? Just a mess. So what was the nail in the coffin? What was the final thing you went?

I just, I can't do this anymore. I got a phone call from the guy who I had farming my farm at this time. Tom Denehaye, and Tom Denehaye was my farmer. Tom Denehneh now has MTM oil field supply here in Lloyd, the beggar. He phones me up and he says, I'm sorry, I can't farm your farm in the spring. And this was about critical. Christmas he phones me out. Oh my God. Now, because he was about the third guy I'd had. And Tom himself was getting out of farming, so he was going to get out of farming mine. And he winds up in Lloyd Minister here

with me running my little-bill supply stuff. He's a wonderful guy, him and his wife, Gloria, but he was my last guy. And then my other neighbor, Henry Barbier, had found these German investors who, through a sineboy land group, were buying up all sorts of farmland, and they were paying prices that we'd never seen in the RM. So I sells my farm for the highest price that had ever been seen in my municipality. And two years later, it was worth half of that much again, eh? It just kept going up. But at the time I sold the farm, I got numbers that were through the roof for that time.

Yeah. And they never been seen before. Was that a tough day to sell the farm? Yeah, it was tough. But none of my boys, all my boys were in medicine or dentistry or something by then. And they were going off in another direction. of them had expressed any interest in, let's keep the farm, I'm going to go down to nowhereville and start farming this stuff. And thus, it wasn't a loss to my sons or my daughter because

none of them were into the ag business. And it was a goddamn headache for me, put it that way. So, yeah, it kind of fit at the right place. And everybody that I talked to was for it, my wife, and so on and so on. And it became one of these big things. corporate farms, all my stuff, a big Ascentibah Land Group and it's farmed with massive, giant 400 horsepower tractors now and it's one of these, like California, we're going to into big farmers in Saskatchewan and my farm is just one of many of the holdings that went into this big pot down there. And the reason I was curious about whether it was a tough day or not as well.

I just think of the... We're homesteaders, you betcha. Absolutely, right? Yeah, yeah. But I got up here, there's no bloody way that I could even manage that, let alone farm it from Lloyd Minster. That just, it was just too far. Yeah. And the Cessna traffic is so unreliable, you cannot do it.

And by then I had the Tom Denahes of the world that were farming at Norman Tessier. The Norman died and then had another guy from Pontex. And then Tom and Gloria were the last people. They did a wonderful job, except they had bigger fish to fry, i.e. starting. a M-TM oil field supply here in Lloyd Minister. They're just out there by the old Peabee Mart there. Across from the rapesee plant, eh? And doing well, I hope.

Maybe not in this crazy economy, but it started out good for them. People can't see me chuckling right now, but I'm laughing because you go, yeah, the kids are all hard work. I have no idea where they get it from. Yet you were a lawyer, actually a judge at the time then flying back and forth to try and farm. At the judge time, I was only managing it. I had given up actually farming.

at that point. Tom Dennyi and others were doing it. But prior to that, I was trying to do everything at once. And it was crazy. Absolutely crazy. Yeah. You just couldn't do it.

My distances were all wrong. People always give me a rough time because I work. I got three kids that are four and under and I'm doing this podcast and I'm, you know, and everything. But when I listen to you, I got, I'm not doing that much. Like that, that seems like a workload. Yeah.

Yeah. It was too much. That's for sure. Too much. Yeah, quite a bit easier without that headache, that is for sure. But you look back and now the farm's worth a lot more than I sold it for. The ground prices went up and you've lost the heritage business of having been in the family all these years. And you really got to have a kid to take it over is the only way that the farm can carry on.

Keeping it in the family as absentee landlords is not the way to go. So if I had one of my sons that wanted the farm and express, some interest in it, then certainly you could have, could have did something there and made it, made a goal, but that was a foreign country. It was a long ways from Lloyd Minister that, uh, yeah, that place. They've been down there and looked it over and stuff, but, uh, that's not where their heads are at. Yeah. And for, for your kids not growing up on the farm, it wouldn't have, wouldn't have the sentimental value that it had for yourself. For sure, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Boy, I'm one of many stories like that. There's so many farms that have disappeared for out of

the family or, you know, throughout the whole of Western Canada. It's just how do these big farmers exist without buying up a little guys, eh? That's what they do. And that's what they all, for the most part, all started out as little guys. And I myself, I'm philosophically against that. I'm a small farmer guy. I think that a farmer should wear coveralls and farm five or six quarters. But oh, no, Today they got to have a $500,000 combine and a 400 horsepower tractor and farm 20-quarter sections before they figure. But I, you know, I'm nostalgic for the ways it used to be when I was a kid. I'd like to see a bunch of small farms, but it's never going to happen. My wife grew up on three-quarter sections.

They had 12 kids on three-quarter sections east of Saskatoon. They'd have two cars to go to church. It was, she grew up in and they had people. pigs and cows and chickens and animals, and the big expenditure eyeglasses you couldn't make on the farm, so they had to get money together from cream cans to buy the kids' eyeglasses. And she grew up east of Saskatoon on three-quarter sections of farmland and raised a real good family, all her brothers and sisters very well.

It can be done. It's just that you can't have a new half done every two years, like they expect to have now, right? But it was done then, and she, grew up on three-quarter section. Big garden animals. They grew all their food right on the farm. And, yeah. I've talked a lot about exactly what you just said.

And what's probably scary about the world now is very few people know how to grow a big garden or a garden. Very few people know how to, even if you had the livestock, what to do with it to make it, you know. Yeah. We still have a garden. We still do it. But there's one at our place. Some other people come and we've got so much dirt there that other people garden.

But we have our own plot amongst the big garden, and we still do that. There's nothing better. What's your favorite thing to come out of the garden? What do you look forward to? I like them little potatoes. The little potatoes, yeah? Little buggers that are the size of a golf ball. I really enjoy them.

But we grow everything in there, you know, the whole work. It's the best thing about going out of the farm for myself is mom and dad still live on the farm. Mom still grows a garden. and little potatoes, they are fantastic. Yeah, a little bit of butter on those. Oh, wow. I'm going to have some tonight. My wife's cooking.

We ate chickens last year. We had 36. Butchering yourself? We butcher himself. And Dr. Saeed come out. And we got all the stuff going, the boiling big drum of water. And we chopped off their heads and we plucked them and eviscerated them and vacuum pack them and froze them. And we put 36 of them away.

and we're eating one tonight, eh? Yeah. And the potatoes come out of our garden. And that'll be the main staple of our, of our Valentine's Day suppers tonight. Colleen's cooking that big chicken right now. They get big. Oh, man. They get like a turkey these things.

Yeah. Well, actually, we did that the summer with Mom and Dad. They had, we did 24. Yeah. And they hadn't butchered chicken since I was like knee high. Wow. Yeah. And so the group of us went out and helped and did everything.

you just said. I'm chuckling right now. I got the fingered plucker that runs on the furnace mold. Oh, did you? I got that. We used their hands. Oh, yeah. Well, gloves. Would you got it? That doesn't get underneath the wings. You still got to pick off the pin feathers. So that gets the bulk off. And then after that, you got to go by hand and then over to the gutting table and away you go away. So we had a big horse trough there with cold water because we've got all that heat in them. So as soon as you get the guts on them, you've got to put them in that water to cool them down. Yeah. And once we get them all then we take them ball out and pad them off with napkins. So are you doing butchering chickens every year?

Pretty much every year. We have laying hens this year. We have laying hands most every year. We tried turkeys this year. We lost them all. A weasel came and ate all of our, killed all of our turkeys. But we had 24 Nicholas turkeys this year as well.

And the weasel killed them all? He came, he bites them on the back of the head and they're all laying dead in there. Really? Kill all of them. We had seen the weasel the day before on their back deck and oh, a little weasel going along. Yeah, right.

And we had them, we had them off with a big net, but the weasel can go through anything. He just go through anything and killed them all. I feel like I'm just. And after that happened, then I felt bad. We loaded them up and put them on our manure pile. And then I was out. Every year I take my laying hens in October out to Wallace Sauve at the petting zoo.

And he used them, he feeds the bobcats, feeds the bears with the laying hens. And he said, we were telling the story, he says, well, what did you do with all of those dead turkeys? And I realized I should have put him in the truck and taken them out to the petting zoo so that at least some bobcat or lynx or bear. What had a good meal?

Yeah, I wasn't thinking very hard at all. I wonder why a weasel would do that. He just wants to kill. He just wants to kill things. Didn't eat them. He just bit them on the back of the head and killed them. It was just like a snowbank out there with dead turkeys. Weasel, the cereal killer.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, they're difficult. If they were going to eat them, you wouldn't feel so bad. A coyote will take one and run away and eat it or a fox. You'll take one chicken and they'll go eat it. But they don't methodically kill the whole flock like a weasel does. Yeah, for sure. I've heard about that before, eh?

But. CNN is believing. Yeah, for sure, for sure. Little wee thing, not much bigger than a gopher. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, for sure.

I got to ask, what's one of your favorite memories of, now that you've been in Lloyd for a considerable amount of time. What's one of your favorite or fondness memories of being in town? Well, this is odd. The Fair and the United Church Food Booth, and that sort of stuff is something that's stuck in my mind. I love that and not working at the food booth. My wife worked there a bit,

but just going there and having the apple pie and ice cream and so on. It's a staple. The kids are out in the midway, and I'm the grandpa now with the kids out. the midway, but boy, that's a nice memory of that. Yeah. Well, that's a staple of the Lloyd Fair. You've got to stop by the United Church booth. Yeah. They're all good. I've patronized the other food booths at all, but the United Church one is a nice one. Bob Jack built that building, as I understand it. When you go in there,

you look up at the rafters and so on, he was the guy that slapped that building together for that church booth. He's long dead, of course, Bob Jack, but he's the guy who did it all, as I understand it. Yeah. I don't know how many rainstorms I've hit out that building and grabbed a cheeseburger and a piece of pie, like you said. You can hear the chuck wagon's going behind you. That's right. The sound blouse right through, eh. Yeah, very thin place. Yeah, and there's other memories, of course, but that's your good one. I enjoyed the fear. Gosh, we're ever going to have a fair again. It'll be Mike's at arcs gone. Things are changing out there. It's a whole new world, eh, and with this virus thing,

who knows what they'll be doing next, uh, next July, you know? What was one building maybe that we got in Lloyd that you were excited when it first came to town, like that they were putting up or? Yeah, many of them in that category. I watched intently as Musgrave built his big building on the cock-eyed. He didn't get it on the lot very square. He's on the angle there. That was fun to do.

We watched Upgrader get built. We knew people who were working out there and watch that get built. It's not a building. It's really something. Yeah, that must have been something to watch go up. I couldn't believe it. Me and my wife drove by that. We were hitting to Saskatoon for.

some reason and they had a half section of land out there i think it was old conland's land and they were running road patrols they were scraping this thing so they took they took that and they they tilted it like a pool table so it's low on one side so it would drain and i thought to myself what in the hell could they be building there that would take such a big footprint what are they doing why are they clearing all this land like that and i couldn't wrap my head around the size of the footprint on the upgrade here. So when they were doing the leveling work, I was absolutely baffled. Like, what is going on? And they took that quarter section and they flattened it out and then they tilted it all to one corner, just like if you lifted up the end of a table so that the thing would always forever have proper drainage. So there's

never any duck ponds or anything there. And that's a lot of work. They moved a lot of ground. They'd have laser levels and they'd move a high spot to a low spot, but they flattened it all out. And And then they started building it, but I was boggled at how big of a area that they had to flatten out to build that upgrade. It was nuts. You know, when you see it all, it all makes sense, you know, all the pipes and the tanks and this and that, it all makes sense, eh, when it's in place. But trying to wrap your head around it before. Big blue coming here, that giant is crane ever to the hydrogen cracker. That was the one that had just been to Saudi Arabia.

put out the fires on the Saddam Hussein stuff in what year was that? 91, the Gulf War. But it had been that when Saddam Hussein lit up all the Kuwaiti oil wells, they took a great big bell and they'd crawl up getting upwind and they'd put this big bell over the oil wall fire and snuff it out just like you snuff out a candle, eh? And that crane got dissembled and then it came to. And brought to Lloyd? brought to Lloyd. It was called Big Blue. The hydrogen cracker, it's five inches thick of stainless steel,

and it changes under, I think, 4,000 pounds of pressure. I'm not a steam engineer, but it changes the molecule from heavy oil to light oil by, it actually changes of molecular structural oil. And that thing was so heavy that only could be built in Germany and Japan. I think they picked Germany. it was floated over because it was so big to Thunder Bay and then they had to wait till January where the rail lines were frozen solved before they could bring it to Lloyd Minister because if you brought it in a non-frost month

it would destroy the railway track all the way from Thunder Bay to Lloyd Minister. So when the rail bed got frozen, then they brought the hydrogen cracker, then Big Blue lifts it off, puts it on the cement pad to, it's the heart of the upgradeer is a hydrogen cracker. And that was such a big thing that only,

they couldn't even build the United States. It was too much of a thing. Germany or Japan. And that's what changes. That is the upgrader, is the hydrogen cracker, right? Wow. A big blue, I loved that crane. I couldn't believe it.

Crane had four sides, four drivers, each on each wheel, move the crane around. It's got four drivers. It's quite the deal. It's a very, very famous crane. They came right until I minister. And that was something to see. I didn't see it in action.

I went out and seen it either before or after it. It did it's one lift. Just brought here for one lift. One left. Yeah. From the rail bed onto the cement pad that they built for it, eh? Wow. Quite the deal.

Quite the deal. Bud Miller was the guy who was in charge of building, the executive guy in charge. He wasn't an engineer anything. But he had offices in my building, so I'd go and visit him all the time. He's the guy they named Bud Miller Park from, the MLA, but he was in charge on the,

he was a chairman of the, of the Upgrader board that was in charge of that. So I got to visit with him a lot. And there were engineers from all over the world. It was, it was something else. But they had a board, and Bud Miller was the chairman of us.

I would visit with him over the noon hour sometimes, go down to his office and talk to him. And, you know, a lot of it, I'm sure, was over Bud's head. It was fantastic engineering. You can't have any bottlenecks in the process. It's got to be all done to proper scale and so on and so on. So quite the thing. That was the biggest thing that's ever hit Lloyd Ministers, that upgrade.

It is a big, big deal. You think the refinery is a big deal. They moved that, you know, from Cody, Wyoming. Yeah, up here. Yeah, a Samson trucking. Yeah. They cut it in pieces and painted numbers on it and brought it here and re-welded it and welded it back together again.

That is nuts that you could move an oil refinery the way they did. In the late 1940s. Yeah, yeah. That was something else. Yeah. So that's the refinery is a big deal, but the upgradeer is a much bigger, bigger deal. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Did you notice a change in Lloydminster once it was up and running?

Like more traffic, more people? Yeah, you notice a change in the turnaround. They do that every once in a while. Yeah. And every hotel room is full. And I've had people come and camp in my yard with motorhomes and stuff that are involved in the turnaround. They just want, they just need someplace to stay. So they park out there.

I let them park, of course, and then they run to the upgradeer and do the turnaround work. Lots of fun. What do you think is better? Being a grandparent or being a parent? Yeah, they're both different. The grandparents's good because you're not with them 24-7

and you get to do all the fun things with them. So the grandparent one is good, very good. It's a lot less work than being the parent, and you just get all the fun stuff, eh? I'm having them over tonight. We're having one of them chickens. I was telling you, but we're cooking it tonight. Some of the grandkids are coming over.

Casey and Jessica and the kids are coming over, so we'll have kids running in every direction. Yeah. If you could go back to your 20-year-old self. Yeah. What would you tell them? What would I tell my 20-year-old self? That is correct.

Just as it turned on by 20, I'm in university. I was having a good time. Just keep plowing ahead, try to enjoy life as much as you can. I didn't get married until I was about 30, so I had a lot of years to go there before I actually got married. And I did all sorts of did some traveling. Where did you travel to? Oh, just around North America. Okay.

Yeah, I had an opportunity. I remember when I was in second year of arts and crafts, I had this job lined up that wasn't very good. So I thought, hell, I'm going with this John McLeod guy. he's going to go to Europe and do the URL thing. So I was going with him. I was all ready to go and be damned if I didn't. I had applied for a job at the Regina Research Station, which really paid good.

It was a federal government job. And this job came through. And I thought, oh, my God, I can't turn this job down. It's such a high-paying job. So I phoned John and said, listen, I got this job that I never expected to get is going to pay me like $18 an hour back in those days. I said, I got to take it.

So he goes to Europe without me, and I end up grubbing out the whole summer. summer at the research station and I got some money for it of course but I wish to hell I'd have did the European trip with him as opposed to make the money with the federal research station in Regina I didn't know let's go on the Swift Current's a big research station now for for Ag Canada but they had one at Regina in those years too and yeah so I miss out on some trips and got lots of other good trips who went to Hawaii a lot me and Kline back in the Ward Air Days and we'd blow out of

Saskatoon it was 230 bucks return you got treated like a on the ward air and Hawaii was cheap and we went over there most winters and just had a great time back in the day. Now, of course, accommodation is high and with this virus you can't do anything anyhow and things have changed. But in those days we took advantage of the cheap airfares and things. Yeah. Yeah, times have changed there.

Yeah. God, haven't they ever, eh? Yeah, no more ward air. Yeah. Well, I appreciate you coming in. Okay. This has been a pleasure. Yeah, absolutely fun to sit down with you, Kim.

Good, good, good, good. Okay, well, thanks again. Okay, thank you very much. Hey, folks, thanks for joining us today. If you just stumbled on the show, please click subscribe. Then, scroll to the bottom and rate and leave a review. I promise it helps. Remember, every Monday and Wednesday,

we will have a new guest sitting down to share their story. The Sean Newman podcast is available for free on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and wherever else you get your podcast fix. Until next time.