Shaun Newman Podcast - SNP Archives #7 - Rod Sellers

Episode Date: October 29, 2020

Born & raised in Lloydminster AB/SK. His parents owned the 1st KFC in town that was first pitched to them by you guessed it the Colonel. After high school Rod traveled the world by way of hitchhiking. Europe, Turkey, Pakistan & India just to name a few his world travels; the stories are at times surreal. He met Alan Watts and this would set his course for the rest of his life.   Let me know what you think   Text me! 587-217-8500

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Profit River is a retailer of firearms, optics, and accessories serving all of Canada. They specialize in importing firearms from the United States, hard-to-find calibers, rare firearms, special editions. Check them out for more information at Profitriver.com. I've been rattling off here the last couple weeks that I'm teaming back up with the Lloydminster Regional Health Foundation for giving Tuesday Radiothon on December 15th to help raise money for the hospital and a bunch of other little projects going on. It's going to be at 12 hours 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Facebook live stream where we'll sit down with different people from the community to share stories about why the hospital is so vital to our community and share some other cool things that I think are important and that we want the community to hear about. Last year we raised $50,000 for a new PIXIS automation automated pill dispensing machine. And this year we're looking to exceed that goal. I know that times are tough.

Every time I say that, our community just seems to impress me even more, and I am positive we'll break the $50,000 threshold. And we're going to need all of you out there to help us do that. Be on the lookout December 15th, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., Facebook Live at Lloyd Minstreliginal Health Foundation's Facebook page. I got some cool announcements that we're going to start releasing here in November on some different people that are going to be joining throughout the day. It's going to be a lot of fun. Special thanks to Leibmister Archives, who've been helping me put together these episodes, interviews each week, especially Lynn Smith, who is working tirelessly behind the scenes. Another one is Don Duncan.

They both together approached me to do this project, and as you can tell, I'm having nothing but fun doing it. If you're heading into any of these businesses, make sure you let them know. You heard about them on the podcast. And if you're interested in advertising on the show, visit shon Newmanpodcast.com. in the top right corner hit the contact button and send me your information. We've got lots of different options, and I want to find something that can work for the both of us. Now, let's get on to that T-Barr-1, Tale of the Tape. Originally from Lloyd Minster, Alberta, Saskatchewan.

His parents owned and operated the first and only KFC in Lloyd-Mister, even meeting the Colonel. After high school, he traveled the world twice over, hitchhiking. Him and his wife, Pat, even did it. Once back in Lloydminster, they opened the doors to Sellers RV Center, which has been operating for more than 40 years now. I'm talking about Rod Sellers. So buckle up. Here we go. So it's October 4th, 2020.

Today I'm joined by Rod Sellers. So first off, thank you for coming in. Thanks for having me. I'm flattered. Well, what we're going to do here for the next little bit is we're just going to kind of go through a bit of your life. talk about some, you know, some things that have happened in your life, maybe your parents, your family history, Lloyd Minster, that kind of thing. So I try and start back at when you were a kid,

maybe what's one of your first memories that you remember? Could be where you grew up, could be, you know, what you did for fun, could be school, could be discipline, it could be anything that kind of just sets us back in the time era of when you were born. young child? Probably one of my earliest memories is probably I was about four years old, stepping on a nail at the site of the old curling rink in Lloyd Minster where it'd been torn down. And the reason that we were kids horsing around in that demolition area was my father had just bought that property from the curling club. And it was right on the corner where

Kentucky Fried Chicken sits now. There actually used to be a service station close. to the highway called Ron Jones Texaco. And my father bought the property right next to that, which was the curling rink, which was being moved down to the exhibition grounds that were going to rebuild down there. So he bought that property and moved his skid shack dairy bar that had been over roughly where Arby's is now, moved it over there, and started an ice cream stand on that property.

When the construction was taking place, somehow I can remember playing in the construction site and stepping on a nail that went right through my foot. We lived in a mobile home, an old-use mobile home, on the same property while this construction was taking place. So that's probably one of my earliest memories. That would probably have been about 1956, somewhere in there. So as a kid, you got to live in a big old playground pretty much. I mean, in today's standards, we wouldn't let kids run around in a work site.

But, I mean, essentially, you got to run around a big work area. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, the town was small then, and the highway was just a skinny little two-lane highway through town that even the traffic going through wasn't great. It was a sleepy little town in those days, and the kids pretty much ran wild. You know, going back to the early Lloyd days, was it paved the entire way through? Was it dirt? I think it was gravel in those days, but that's hard for me to remember.

But I believe the highway at that time was gravel through town. But you can't quote me on that because that's getting way back in my memory. But it was pretty basic back then. The Meridian School was right across the road. That's where the city hall is now. That was a Meridian school. It was on the corner right across from this property that my father had bought. My parents started this dairy bar, and it was a summer thing,

sort of like the ice cream stand. You see some of them now that they just operate in the summer. and my mom tells me that I used to, she's put me to sleep on gunny sacks underneath the counter while her and dad worked their butts off trying to make a few dollars selling ice cream. And then they eventually got into hamburgers and fries. Then they got this new property and put up a bit of a building. And then it kind of went from there. I think an interesting story there that most people enjoy hearing is that in the mid-50s,

my dad had the dairy freeze going for a few years. About 10.30 in the morning, a Nash Rambler station wagon pulls into the parking lot when mom and dad are starting to get ready for the day to get things going. And a guy gets out of this little station wagon and comes in and introduces himself. His name was Colonel Saunders. And the colonel came in and he talked to my mom and dad and said he'd like to cook them some chicken. And my dad said, sure, why not, you know? And so the colonel had all his pots and pans

and his boxes and bags of spices in his car. He runs downtown and buys some chickens downtown, some fresh chickens down at one of the stores downtown, comes back, uses whatever facilities my parents had for a stove and so on at that time and gets his pressure cookers out and cooks up some Kentucky fried chicken. And my dad tried it, and my mom tried it,

and they were pretty impressed. and then, long story short, on a handshake, they made a deal, and Dad was the second Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise in Canada. The first one was in Saskatoon. A fellow named Joe Young had the same thing happen there, and Dad and Joe knew each other through the ice cream business, and Joe had taken the first franchise. When the colonel came across the border from Kentucky,

he turned left instead of right, and so he headed west. That was his first foray into Canada, and the first place he was able to set up a franchise with Saskatoon, the second place was Lloyd Minster. That seems kind of odd. No knock on Saskatoon or Lloyd Minster, but you would think Toronto, Vancouver. I think it was just a coin toss when the colonel crossed the border for whatever reason

he decided to turn west. I don't know why I can't answer that for you. Having one of the first two franchises in all of Canada, did they get to meet the colonel multiple times then? Oh yeah. The colonel would come by. I would say about every three or four years. years, he would come up and do a promotion. He would travel around from the various

franchise and do a promotion. We had the colonel in probably four, maybe five times in the time that we had the business. I met the colonel many of those times. And he would come and they would have a big promotion and everybody would come and meet the colonel. The colonel would help cook some chicken and then glad hand with customers. And it was a big deal. And we'd generally make it a bigger celebration. We have what called the peanut man in those days. They all used peanut oil for all the cooking oil in those days. And the fellow from planters, peanuts, they had a costume that they would send up and somebody would walk around and be the peanut man and the colonel would be there.

And it was quite a big, quite a big deal. And they would work hard. The colonel and the parents would work hard all day with the staff and this celebration would go on for quite a while. And the colonel, interestingly enough, when it was all said and done, he loved Chinese food. So my dad would phone up Lem Dur at the Royal Cafe and ask Lam if he could stay open a little later because the colonel wanted to come down and have Chinese food for supper. So they would go down there after working all day and eat Chinese food at the Royal Cafe. Oh man, that's crazy. That's crazy.

Yeah, yeah. So I met the colonel several times. What was he like? Well, he was a real character. And I think one of the stories I remember best is he, mom had him over for lunch or dinner. I think for supper for some reason. One night he ended up at our house. And, uh, and mom told him that she had pecan pie for, uh, for supper, for dessert. He said, my dear, he says, it isn't pecan pie. A pecan is something you put in the car for your kids going down the road. He says, it's pecan. Picon pie, my dear. And, uh, and don't you know was his, uh, his infamous, uh, punctuation on most statements is, Don't you know. Don't you know, dear, that it's pecan pie, not pecan pie.

What was growing up with a KFC? Like, did you just eat, was it Kentucky fried chicken every night? No, actually, I was more into the hamburgers and so on. But no, not every night. My mom made a point of coming home and cooking us a proper meal. My brother and I, my brother was quite a bit older than I, but she would come home every night and cook a meal. She would take time off to make sure we got a meal probably 90% of the time.

I would eat lunch there quite often go from school for lunch there and usually just had a hamburger or something like that. And chicken once in a while, but I was more into the hamburger and fries. And my friends loved it when I invited them for lunch because they could come there and have whatever they wanted. And my parents were always glad that I had my friends with me. So they accommodated everybody. And usually, of course, ice cream was always on the menu. Always on the menu? But, you know, my parents worked very very.

very, very hard in that business. So it was basically seven days a week and long hours every day. So, you know, our home life was, you know, I was home alone a lot once I was older. What's older? I'll probably from eight years old. Okay. Yeah, you know, I'd be home alone quite a bit and hanging out with my buddies and that. And it was no big deal in those days. And, you know, I'd walk back and forth or ride my bike back and forth down to the dairy freeze

from our house that we had at that time. Any siblings, right? I've got an older brother. He's nine years older than I am. Oh, yeah, okay, okay. So he was almost gone then by the time you're by yourself at home. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was gone from the house when I was, you know, by time I was nine years old, he was 18 and he had moved out.

Yeah. Your parents then operated the KFC together? Yes. Did they ever, as you grew up, did you ever talk to him about? run a business like that and maybe some of the things they had learned? Well, it was always, I mean, it was a part of our life. We lived it. So it was talked about all the time. Around the supper table. Yeah, I mean, it was always a part of the conversation. What were the big challenges of running the KFC? I think it was just the long hours. I think it was a long hours and the hard work.

And then trying to keep customers happy. And my dad was a bit of a perfectionist. So that made it fairly hard on staff sometimes because he was always striving for perfection. And if a customer complained, he did his very best to make it right because he said, all you got to do is feed a customer a bad meal one time and you lose him for life and maybe some of his friends. So he always tried to keep the customer happy. Now, was this a sit down place or was this that where you walk in, you order and you take it and you go? It was a drive-in. There was a drive-in. There was a front front windows where you could buy food through the front windows. And then eventually when we got a newer building,

they had a big sort of walk-in area that you could purchase from. But it was a drive-in, more like you had seen on happy days or so on. They had car hops with the trays that hung on your windows and a big parking lot, and the car-hops whipping in and out with trays full of food and hanging it on your window. It was a hangout. It was one of the most popular spots in town. I mean, in the evenings, there would be just a steady stream.

of kids and cars, teenagers coming through there, buying hamburgers and ice cream and so on. And even when we got the newer building, it had quite an elaborate roof on it. And my brother, my father, got a local rock band play on the roof. And the parking lot was full of kids. And I played on the roof there till 11 o'clock at night.

And it was quite a deal. But that used to be a part. And when we were, even when I was a young teenager, there was always a sort of circuit around town where everybody drove around looking for something to do or just, you know, just kids driving around in their cars. You dig in your pockets and dig out the change and get some gas and whatever car you'd beg board or whatever and drive around town. There's this sort of circuit and driving through the dairy freeze parking lot was part of the circuit. And then later on

there was an ANW and so you'd drive through the dairy freeze lot through the ANW lot back downtown. There was just kind of like a little circuit there and you drove around looking for for girls to chase. were fun to have for an excitement and find it where the parties were and that was just kind of the way it was a small town what uh growing up uh in lloyd back then um what did you do uh for fun what were what were you into were you into sports uh well i like most kids i played hockey uh we played we lived and breathed hockey we played shenny out in the front of the houses on the street and then the little corner rink was about a block block and a half from my place We would congregate there in the winter time. It was just like almost a ritual.

Every night you come home from school, put your skates on. We'd skate down the road. The roads were all iced over, skate down the road to the rink, and skate until supper time. And sometimes you'd go back after supper and play, but it's played on the corner rink. That's what we did for, that was basically our entertainment or tobogany on a little hill that was nearby, go tobogany there.

We were always outside. Summer or winter, as kids were always outside. really good group of friends in our neighborhood. I had quite a big bunch of kids and played together in winter sports. Summertime, the swimming pool was a block from my house. And myself and particularly one other buddy of mine, Greg Barabow, we spent hours and hours in the swimming pool. Outdoor pool?

Yeah, outdoor pool is still. Outdoor pool is still there. And we lived about a block from there. And we would just about live there. and then later on I even became a lifeguard and a swimming instructor there when I got a little older. When did it cost go to the outdoor pool back in there? I don't remember. We had season tickets and it had to be cheap.

I don't remember. There's that seller's kid again. Yeah, oh yeah, we terrorized the lifeguards and we weren't too bad kids. We'd only get kicked out once in a while. When you graduate, first off, I guess where did you? did you graduate from high school in town? What was the high school back then? Well, it's where it is now, but it was the earlier version of it. We started high school in the old high school, which was down in the east end of town. It's gone now. It's down close to, I don't even know the name of the,

the junior high used to be just a little further east than the same property. And I think they call it Neville Goss now the junior high. But anyways, the high school was down in the east end. and we, I think it was in grade 10, they moved to, we moved to the new school in the latter part of grade 10 and into the new high school. So we were the first students in the new high school. In the comp?

Yeah, yeah. What was that like? Well, high school. Brand new building, beautiful? Yeah. Oh, yeah. It was, wow, we thought we had died and gone to heaven. It was great.

But I wasn't a great student. I wasn't an enthusiastic student. I got through high school on that, but it, you know, had, I think the social aspect high school was the best thing. I wasn't a great student, but I sure enjoyed the social aspect and all the kids and the buddies and so on in high school. So when you graduated, was your first thought, you know, I just want to get out of Lloyd for a while? Yes, it was. A buddy and I decided to, we'd been talking in the last years of high school,

and we decided to go to Europe. What year is this? This would graduate in 1970. So I think it was, I went back for a few, for a semester just to bring up some marks. And so we left for Europe in spring of 1971. I got to know. Did you have the long hair? Oh, yeah.

Mustache? I was growing a beard. I had a beard by then. Had a beard by then. In high school, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, we headed, Darrell Plant and I headed for Europe.

We went Icelandic Airways out of New York. York, that was the cheapest way to go in those days. That Icelandic airways landed in Iceland, and then over to Luxembourg, and we go off the plane in Luxembourg and started hitchhiking through Europe. You hitchhiked? Yeah. So you left here with the idea, let's go see Europe, and when we get over there, we're going to hitchhike. Yeah. Was that a common idea in the time? Yeah, it was. It was. And there was a Bible in those days was Europe on five dollars a day. It was the name of the book. And, And you put that book in your pack with some clothes and whatever money you had and hitchhiking. Yeah, it was fairly common all over hitchhiking.

We had terrible time for the first week or two. We had a hard time getting rides. And so it was sometimes pretty discouraging when you're wet and cold and having trouble getting a ride. But as things went on, we got, you know, it got better. Did you learn any tricks on how to get picked up? Like, was there ways to it? Patience. You had to be patient.

That was the big thing and we were young, you know, and we weren't very patient. So, but that was the big thing. But we eventually made her way down into Spain and then across to, across the south of France to Italy. And in Italy, Daryl, he decided he had had enough and he decided to come home, but I wanted to stay. So then I hitchhiked on my own from Italy all the way back up through Austria, Germany, up to Holland, Amsterdam. Amsterdam was revelation. It was a very, very interesting city in those days. How so?

Well, it was fairly wide open and free, and there was the first sort of, we'll say, 60s-type nightclubs were still going there, Paradiso and Fantasia, and these were clubs that, lots of live rock music and lots of kids from all over the world congregating there. It was, Amsterdam was like a hub. It was almost like a fly paper for all the kids in those days.

It was just wide open and the Dutch people were very, very welcoming. One of the interesting things when I hitchhiked into Amsterdam and I got out of the car I was riding in and I jumped on a, they dropped me off where there was a trolley close by and I jumped on a trolley car. I wasn't even sitting down in the trolley car and I had a backpack on with a Canadian flag on it. And I didn't even get to sit down and a little old man is waving me. over, he's waving me over, and he gets me to sit down beside him in this trolley car. And he starts to explain to me how the Canadians had liberated Amsterdam. And he was a young kid in Amsterdam in those days, but he could still remember it very well.

And as we're driving along, and he was very, very grateful. And it made me understand, helped me to understand what we had done. Sorry. And it's, it's quite all right, Rod. It really hit me. And he would point out, as we're driving by, he'd say, right there, there's a Canadian tank sitting right there. And over there, there was a Canadian little hospital set up over there. And as we drove along, he was pointing to all of these places in the city.

And this was about a half-hour trolley ride. So for about a half-hour, I got an education that I hadn't got in Canada about all these details about how the Canadians liberated Holland, or helped liberate Holland. and we were definitely a significant part of that liberation and they're grateful, really grateful. So that was a really moving moment for me in the whole trip. I get off the trolley and I wasn't off the trolley three steps and a guy comes up and he sees my Canadian flag and he says,

you're from Canada? I says, yeah, he says, where are you going? I said, well, I was looking for a youth hostel to go to. I know where there's a good one. come with me, another Dutch guy, and just immediately starts guiding me through the streets, these narrow, windy streets, Amsterdam is, when you don't know, until you know it a bit, it's a very, very confusing place to get around in, but he's dragging me through these streets towards this youth hostel. And we're going through the Red Light District, which was a real eye-opener.

You know, I'm walking along, and this is about two or three in the afternoon, and we're going through the Red Light District, and they have, like, storefronts, and I'd never seen anything like this, or I didn't even really know what existed. I'd heard about it, but here we are, why. through the Red Light District to get to this youth hostel and that was a wide open that was an eye-opener for this country boy but anyways we get to the youth hostel and I hung out in Amsterdam probably for two weeks it was a great great city just loved it and he could do brewery tours in those days too the Heineken Brewery and the Amstil

Brewery and everybody knew what time the brewery tour started because you do an hour an hour and a half tour in the brewery and then you get free beer for about an hour as much as you can drink so that was pretty attractive to us in those days So, and in Amsterdam in the youth hostel, I ran into an American. His name was Alan Goldstein. And Alan was a really, really had great head of black, black curly hair. And he was a skinny, wiry guy. And we really hit it off.

And he said, well, why don't we buy a van and head back down through Europe? And I had lots of time, and we had a few bucks. And so between us, we threw together some money, and we started shopping for a van. And in those days, the American Express office was where everybody kind of congregated to exchange information or try and get a ride or anything.

So we go down the American Express office and there's a guy there selling a van. So we go for a test drive in this van. And I was fairly mechanical. I knew a bit. So it seemed like a good one. We paid $800 for this Volkswagen van. Volkswagen window van, $800.

And we, through the next few days, we bought a couple of pieces of plywood and some pots and pans in us a little cooking stove and got this thing decked out to head off. And we took off, Alan and I took off in that thing. And we had this deal. We'd pick up hitchhikers. And when we picked up a hitchhiker, we'd pick up one or two a day, we'll say, and at the end of the day, Alan and I would have a little powwow together. And if we liked the guy, we'd say, offer him the chance to keep coming with us, just got to split expenses. And if we didn't like him,

we'd just say, well, we'll see you. As it happened, though, we liked just about everybody we picked up. So we ended up with six of us in the end driving across Europe in this Volkswagen window van and sleeping in ditches. And we never ever got a hotel or anything like that. Once in a while, we would stop at a youth hostel to get a shower. What was it smell like in the vehicle? I don't know. You can imagine six guys sweating.

And we went right down through Europe all the way down the coast of Yugoslavia, it was Yugoslavia in those days had a wonderful time in Yugoslavia and it was very very Humble in those days Yugoslavia was just basically fishing village after fishing village and Pretty pretty Basic we were traveling through the mountains from going down the coast of Yugoslavia you go past Albania and you kind of take a left hand turn at Albania to head for Greece or in our case Bulgaria and You go over quite a high mountain pass and this was just a very narrow barely paved road and you're going through what basically i call like gypsy territory with these people with horse carts and very very um back woods atmosphere but

they loved us we were a real novelty when we pull into somewhere to stop we'd be just surrounded by kids and people wanting to talk to us and of course we didn't share their language so we had to laugh and make sign language and so on but it was a great time and they just loved us we were treated really, really good. Then we headed for the Bulgarian border and we were about, pretty much took us all day to get into Bulgaria, going through other formalities. And then we've discovered when we were in Bulgaria, they told us we had to spend, I can't remember what it was, $10 a day each or something to be in the country. Well, that didn't sit very well with us because $5 a day for us was a lot. So we needed to get out of there as fast as we could, but we wanted to see a bit of it. But

In those days, you saw communism in its finest because you'd go into a grocery store and there'd be nothing in it. People would be lining up in the morning and there might be 100 loaves of bread for 150 people. And basically nothing on the shelf. Sometimes you might find a bit of feta cheese or something like that. But really, really, the people there were almost starving. And we realized pretty quickly that this probably wasn't. best place to be. Because even with what little we had, we had a lot more than most of them. And so we kind of booted it out of there as quick as we could, and we ended up nicking through

the corner of Greece and over to Turkey. And then we got to Istanbul. And I think that's what really perked my interest in traveling further. Istanbul was a phenomenon that I had never imagined. It was the Blue Mosque in San Sofia, and it was very, very, very. exotic and the Grand Bazaar which is just this huge market that goes on for blocks and blocks and blocks all that had been there for hundreds of years and Istanbul was a revelation and I wanted to go further east but between the six of us we weren't all on the same page so we headed back into Greece and long story short in the end we ended up on Crete for a month or so we sold our van in Crete for $850 and made a little bit of cash

50 bucks, 25 bucks each to Alan and I. And that was kind of, the data kind of started my way home from there. What did that first foray out into the world teach you? Like, what do you? It taught me, I think it teaches you a lot of things. I think the first thing is, is that, you know, there's a lot of good people out there. Yeah, we ran into a few bad eggs along the way occasionally, but overall, the majority of people were very nice and very friendly. In those days, things were pretty relaxed, and we didn't get

in any trouble on that whole trip. We came close. We skirted it a few times, but overall, it was, I think, is just that people are people wherever you go. The other thing it made me really appreciate was home. You know, you really appreciate what you've got back here, especially go through places like Bulgaria and even Turkey in those days was the actual living standards were pretty, were pretty meager. And even southern Europe, Greece and Spain, things in those days were pretty, pretty tough. So it really made me appreciate home. And when you get home, you really appreciate it. You know, most people don't venture off to do something like that.

I'm curious about Bulgaria because, well, you've listed off a few countries. I've never really talked to lots of the countries. Spain, Germany, Amsterdam, well, the list goes on. I've either been to or know people who've been there. But Bulgaria is interesting. How many days do you spend there? I think we were probably, boy, that's a long time ago.

I'd say we were six or seven days in Bulgaria. Okay, so pretty close to a week then. Yeah, yeah. You know what? It was dark, dank, it was oppressed, and you felt it. You could feel the oppression. And it, you know, of all the places, we went to lots of places, and we'd had lots of experience by then. And it just was almost overwhelming the sense of oppression that you felt there.

And that was probably the thing I remember most, and that the buildings were, there was no liveliness to anything. There was no bright colors. The buildings were drab. The roads were bad. The infrastructure was weak. You go to try and buy food. We weren't eating in restaurants most of the time.

We were making our own food a lot of the time. Even the restaurants were meager pickings. But like I said, going in a grocery store is just nothing there. You know, you might have a couple of cans of something on a shelf. And it was just, felt very oppressed. And when we were trying, when we were heading for a Greek border, we were pitch black driving at night. And all of a sudden, I was driving.

And all of a sudden I could see these kind of things flashing in the, by the road. And before I knew it, I'd driven through a road stop, a military roadstop. And all they had was these little reflectors they held up on a stick. They didn't even have flashlights. All they had was these reflectors. they held up on a stick and you're supposed to see this and know what was going on. Well, I'd driven through the roadblock before I knew. And I stopped finally.

And these guys, we could see them coming up and they threw open the van, the van doors. And there was like two machine guns sticking right in our face. And they're yelling at us in Bulgarian. And we have no idea what they're saying. And we're all just going, student, student, student. That was the catchphrase in those days was claimed to be a student. And we were all just yelling, student, student, student. and one of the guys probably had his passport up

and just trying to calm these guys down because we just driven through their roadblock and they were upset. Upset. So, you know, and then they raved at us. And this went on, this altercation went on for probably half an hour, 45 minutes. Finally they calmed down and finally they let us go.

But we were pretty afraid at that point because these machine guns sticking in your face, you don't speak the language, you don't know what it's about, you don't know what you've done wrong. I mean, it was just, and it was like one or two in the morning. And, you know, it was tense.

Changes your outlook on a few things, I assume. Absolutely. Absolutely. And it made you appreciate freedom of movement, which sometimes even today, we're starting to see infringements on our freedom of movement in our country. And that bothers me because I look back on those days and think about what was going on there and how extreme it can get. And so you came away from that.

And gee, I wish I was in Canada. You know, this stuff doesn't happen there. And so, yeah, there's lots of things go through my mind. But Bulgaria, at that point in time, in those years, wasn't very attractive. It's a strange time now, isn't it? You know, you talk about infringement of the ability to move. I'm married to a girl from Minneapolis. Well, we haven't, you know, we just Zoom.

I mean, technology is a wonderful thing because we get to at least see them and can kind of interact. They aren't coming here and we aren't going there, at least until some things lift. But it's a strange, you know, and, you know, you hear people going to BC right now. I don't know if I want to go to BC. Why not? Well, I hear they're like putting knives through tires and they don't want Alberta there. And you're like, that's strange. That's, you know.

It bothers me a lot because I've seen the other side of it, not only in that trip, but on subsequent trips that we can talk about if you want. But it bothers me a lot to think that we're swinging that way, especially when you've seen what communism really is like. And now we're starting to lean to this whole socialist sort of outlook. And I've got to be so careful what you say these days. The social justice thing is so prevalent. I'll give you an example. Let's go back to the Dairy Freeze days, my parents in the Dairy Freeze.

And there used to be the parade in Lloyd Minster for the fair every year. and one of the best floats my parents ever had in the parade, it went over really, really well. Today, I don't even, we might end up blackballed for it, but my parents got a water trough shaped sort of like a bowl, or like a, it's a long tapered at the end water trough, and they decorated it up to look like a tray for a banana split. This was a big watertrop. They put it on top of the vehicle. And they got myself, I was a blondey and very pale, skimely. in. I had a good friend of mine, Lauren Mills, who had vivid red hair and a really red freckled complexion. And across the alley from the dairy freeze was a family of black folks, very nice

people. And they had one of the boys that we used to play with all the time. And he was a black fellow. And mom and dad went and asked their parents, if it'd be okay if we put him in the parade too. And what we were, we were chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla in the banana split on top of the car. And they had some banana-looking things on there. And this was our float in the parade. And everybody loved it. And it was just innocent, good nature thing. And, you know, I don't know if you could do something like that these days.

You could not do that. Yeah, you know. You could not do that anymore. Yeah. And it was, everybody loved it. And nobody took offense to it. It was just good, honest, fun. And after that, in subsequent years, the parents did some more floats.

but then they eventually started a, they've sponsored the bicycle contest, decorated bicycle contest in the parade. And for many, many years, it was decorated bicycles, and dad would, they would have a prize for the first second and third and so on. I've ridden in that, I crashed in that. You want to talk about bad memories as a child. You get your bike all deckled up, I'm all excited, and I wiped it and wiped out like four other kids along the way.

I hope you got a free ice cream out of it. I can't remember all of it. Honestly, I probably buried that memory deep. Yeah. But I see, I don't know, things have changed so much. And, yeah, it's worrisome to see how things are going. It seems a shame that we forget our history and have to go back and do it all over again. It just boggles my mind.

Even now, people look back at, I don't know, 100 years ago. And, like, just hold everybody to today's standards. which is just, it's hard to even, like, have an argument or a conversation like that. It's like, well, they, 100 years ago, there's a lot of things going on that we all look at, like, why would that ever go on? But it's 100 years ago. Or if you go back 500 years, you can go back as long as you want, and people did some pretty crazy things that were common at the time.

And now they're just not common. And that's okay. But to hold them to today's standards is kind of odd. Well, it doesn't make any sense. And what you're, what, what, what seems to be, there seem to be seeking perfection. And you can't achieve that perfection in, in anything. No, it's, it's an impossible goal. And if you try to go there, you're going to drive yourself and everybody else crazy.

I mean, every, every saint has a past and every sinner has a future. So, you know, to think that you want everybody to be perfect. And then they end up, these people are really, they end up eating their own right now because you can't achieve this goal. You can't. Somebody's going to slip up. You're going to slip up. It's just the expectations are, I guess it's like Grace Slick said in White Rabbit, logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead. When you come back from this trip, hey, how long was this trip? How long did you go? I think it was about four or five months, that first one. Were you sending anything back to your parents or family to let them know, hey, I'm still here.

Not much. Probably a postcard here and there. That would be about it. A few postcards, I would say. Maybe a letter. Not much. Not a lot. No.

You come back. How many times do you go for new adventures out that way? Well, I got back from that and worked for my dad on. My dad raised standard bread horses at that time. He had sold the Kentucky Fried Chicken business. And I helped my dad on his farm. for the summer after that. And then I was into skiing.

Downhill skiing was my big sport by that time. Okay. And I decided I want to be a ski bum for a year or two. So I headed off to Jasper and I washed dishes at Smitty's pancake house and skied. And always had in the back of my mind, I wanted to go further east in my travels. After Istend bull, I always had the lure of the east in the back of my mind. So I went to Jasper and, uh, Pretty soon I ran into a young lady who fell in love with and we started dating and then after about a year we got married in the fall of 1972.

And we decided that we were going to go back to Europe the following summer. The following fall we were going to work through the summer and then head back to Europe and maybe go overland to India. And that's exactly what we did. We worked hard and saved up money and headed to Europe. By this time I had a friend from the first trip that lived in London. And we slept in the store of the record store he was renovating in downtown London. And then he took us up to visit his parents up in Yorkshire. And we stayed up there for a few days with his parents and got to see Yorkshire, beautiful, beautiful place.

And then came and headed over, took us. ferry over to the mainland. Let's back this up for a second. Before we go too deep into them, we kind of glaze over your wife. I feel like we should give her a little more of a talking about. What was it about your wife back when you're a young guy and Bavp that, that lured you in?

Or did you lure her in? No, I think it was mutual. Actually, it's maybe different than some stories, but she came to, we lived, there's four of us living in a little apartment called, it was in a staff lodge, the local place where most of the staff that worked in Jasper lived, and a Fort Point Lodge it was called, and she ended up coming, we had an Halloween party there, and one of my buddies ran into her down in the Halloween party down in the cafeteria and brought her up to the room that we all shared with her friend, and it was quite a big party going on. on and that's the night I met her. And then she invited us to a party at her place. Her parents were going to be away the next weekend and asked us to, if we guys wanted to come over to a party there. And I was quite attracted to her at that point.

And then at that party, her and I really hit it off. And when we went home from that party, I just was really hooked, really smitten. You stole the word out of my head. I was going to say smitten. Yeah. And I knew she was something special. And we had a relationship. She was just finishing high school.

I was robbing the cradle there. And I was there working in Smitty's Pancake House. And then later on I worked for the federal government at the swimming pool. But we went for quite a while. And then fall came along. I'd been working at the swimming pool for the federal government as a locker, or pardon me, as a boiler room attendant. And couldn't get a job as a lifeguard.

Their lifeguards would not let that job go. I learned a lot about working for the federal government there and how little work gets done by a lot of people because I was one of them at that point in time. And those days it was great. We were young and working and playing hard. So a job where you only had to work two or three hours a shift and it still got paid for eight,

that was fantastic. That was the federal government. But anyways, because the park is all federal run, so everything there is federal government. So fall came along, and Pat, my wife, she was big into horses, and she wanted to go to an equestrian school in Edmonton. And I had heard about a course through my brother

in the lower mainland at Douglas College that I found, sounded interesting. So I went out there and she went to Edmonton. So we kind of split up, not formally, just went our different ways for a while. And I wasn't very happy out there and didn't really know why. But I wasn't very happy. The course was interesting. I met a lot of neat people, but just wasn't really happy.

And I was a little confused at that time like most kids are at that age. I was, you know, 18, 19 years old and a little confused about life and where it should go and so on and what I was going to do and a little muddled and a little depressed too and Pat and I worked together and trying to make sense of it all. And I was going to this Douglas College. My parents, I've staying at my parents' house. They lived out there at this point. That's another story. They lived out there for a little while. And I was staying at their place and they were gone. They were down with one of their horses down in the States. And I came home from college one day, and I laid down on the couch and turned on my favorite FM station.

I think it was CKLG. And there was an interview going on there with a guy named Alan Watts. And I remembered Alan Watts was on my reading list for college. And Alan Watts was a philosopher of the day. Yeah, I know who Alan Watts is. Interesting. Not many people do. And so I lay down on the couch and I'm listening to this interview.

I would say this before we go any further. If you don't know who Alan Watts is, pause this and just YouTube, Alan Watts, and you'll get a good idea. There's probably thousands of videos of him talking and his philosophy, carry on. You lay down. I lay down on the couch and I'm listening to this interview. And this guy, he's got a British voice. He's got a British accent. He's got a deep fatherly voice.

And this Alan Gar was the interviewer. I still remember everything about it. It's really etched in my memory. And he's interviewing Alan Watts. And Alan Watts is telling about his philosophy and all of the things that he's learned and so on. And the time we get into this about 20 minutes, I'm just really interested.

And this guy is fascinating. about a half hour, 45 minutes in an interview, I found myself on the floor rolling around laughing. And I'm laughing at myself. And I was absolutely almost in high stairs. I was by myself in the house. There's nobody else there. And I'm hysterical laughing at myself.

And realizing how complicated we make our lives, how convoluted we can make things. and Alan Watts at that point in time on the radio unbeknownst to him, of course, or anybody else, helped me to see things very, very clearly. I had an epiphany of sorts that changed my life. And the interview was a long one. It went on for a couple of hours,

and Alan Watts was going to have a... On a radio program. A radio program in Vancouver. And Alan Watts was in Vancouver. and he was going to be live at UBC for a couple hour lecture a couple of nights later. And then he was going to go to an island in the Gulf for a weekend retreat, a three-day retreat. And people could join that retreat. Well, I signed up for the retreat.

I went to the lecture and I spent three days on Quadra Island with Alan Watts. There was a group of about a dozen of us and Alan Watts for three days. And his wife, Jano, was her name. and we spent three days with them. But honestly, at that point, that was all icing on the cake. I got the full cake, the full meal deal in the radio broadcast. And the rest of it was just gravy and icing on the top. And being with them and really helped to understand him, get to know him a bit.

You know, we talked a bit personally. We had him and when we came back, he rode back in our car with us back to Vancouver. We drove, it was quite a long drive because you've got to go through several islands. and ferries and so on to get back to Vancouver and it was a long a long day with him and the ferry just with him and jano talking for about an hour one-on-one so it was quite a enlightening adventure to say the least i miss something there who are you sitting with it's like my brain was thinking about something and i missed that who were you sitting with driving Alan wants okay wait a second rewind that how the heck do you end up in the vehicle with Alan Watts?

Because he needed a ride back to Vancouver. And he got it. We had, you know, there was a group of a dozen of us. In our particular group, we had room for a couple of people. You were telling me you got to sit with Alan Watts for hours. Yeah. Yeah. Wow.

Okay. Carry on. Okay. Well, I just, my brain grabbed it, but didn't comprehend it. People who ended up listening to this. It's interesting. You know who he is. because a lot of people have never heard of them.

And he was a... Well, shout out to Kyle Wack if he ever listens to this. Kyle Wack put me on Allen Watt. I went to high school with... Or elementary school with Kyle in Hillmont. Oh, really? And he was a guy who put me on Allen Watt's... I don't know, five years ago, three years ago.

Oh, wow. And very, very interesting, man. Well, this was 1972. This was a fall of 72. He died in the fall of 93. Or 73, pardon me. Right. 73, yeah. Yeah, he died shortly. You know, a year after that, he passed away. He passed away. We were on a train in Pakistan when I read them, I got a, I think it was a McLean's magazine or something. A magazine anyway, and in there it had had his obituary, and I didn't know at that point. That's how I found out he had died. Was traveling on a train in Pakistan. But anyways, that's another, just an interesting detail. But I got back to Vancouver, and the next day I went to college and quit.

And people saying, what, you quit college? And yeah, because for me, that was the right thing to do. And the other thing I did, and I think my van must have been broken down or something because I hitchhiked to Edmonton and asked Pat to marry me. I hitchhiked the next day. I quit school on a Monday. I know it was must have been to Tuesday because it was a long weekend. So Tuesday I quit school.

On Wednesday, I walked out to the highway and put my thumb out and hitchhiked to Edmonton. And got to Edmonton. Pat was living in a basement suite down on, near White Avenue and went down there and asked her to marry me. Because I just knew. I just knew this was the right thing to do. I didn't know what was going to happen after that. I had no clue what we were going to do.

But I knew this was the right thing to do. And we've been married for 48 years. It'll be 50 years in 22. Before we get to that, can you ever just think, like, what happens if you don't hear Alan Watts? If I didn't turn the radio on. And you know, it's a common thread through anyone's life where they have a meaningful event happened that is by chance

that if they aren't in the right spot at the right time, the whatever you want to call it, then what you're talking about isn't a slight yield onto a highway. You're talking about like stopping the car, getting out, leaving the keys and just let's start. walking the other way because which way I'm heading ain't where I want to go anymore. Yeah. And to have the balls to do that.

Well, it wasn't hard because I knew. I mean, the, the glimpse of reality that I was afforded was definite. There was no, there was no doubt in my mind. It was the clarity of mind that I had at that point in time was undeniable. And there was no doubt. None. That must have been a very, very, very powerful mindset moment, all the above when you just like, you know what, I know this.

I'm turning around, I'm going this way and the way I go. Yeah. Yeah. And the interesting part, too, was that even though I was dead certain about certain things I wanted to do, like, for example, marrying Pat, the rest of it, I had no clue, but I had full faith that it. it will work itself out. And that was, you know, I knew that for sure too. What did Alan Watts say that got you, do you remember?

There's many, many things, because it came in in a series of doses, we'll say, of statements he made and things that just made sense to me. In those days, there was all kinds of gurus and Maharishi's running around. Yeah. There was Maharishi Maheshiyogi from Transcendental Meditation. There was Guru Jai or something, some 14-year-old kid who was a yoga. There was tons of them. And I had investigated some of these and looked at them and gone to this meeting or that meeting,

but it never, ever clicked. I always felt there was something just didn't feel right. It just, I just never. But you were searching then. Oh, yeah. Everybody was in those days. We were all hitchhiking around the world. looking for answers to life.

I think that's, I think everybody, well, I don't know that, but I assume everybody does that to one degree or another. And not everybody has to go, you don't have to go around the world to find your answers. Usually the answer is right next door. But I think everybody searches at some point. Most people do, or I certainly did. But I never ever found anything that clicked really well. It never made much sense.

I always found something ingenuous. or just didn't work. But with Alan Watts, it was just the opposite. He's, as he talked and his stuff made sense. The other thing, some of the key things that he said that caught my attention were he didn't want followers. He discouraged people clinging and wanting to follow him. He would not have an entourage following him or anything like that.

He did not want people clinging. One of the messages he had was, once you've received the message, hang up the phone and get on with your life. He wanted people to live their own lives and know that it'll work out. And he was able to help me realize that. And it's hard to explain. The realization that you have in those moments is beyond words. All you can do is just go, I get it. And there's a number of things he said that triggered it.

I have many, many memories. I can quote him endlessly because I, and consequently since then I've accumulated back then before the internet and all of this and YouTube, you'd buy tapes and audio sessions and so on. And I listened to tons of his stuff. Not so much because it's more of a sharpening of the axe because sometimes life gets busy and you get busy with things and sometimes you get dull and you can go back to these speeches or books or whatever. He wrote tons of books, I don't know, 40 or 50 books. So you can go back to these and sharpen the axe. And I do that once in a while.

I just get what you're talking about. For me, I'm like, I better make sure I'm thinking the right guy. So I just Google it real quick. And before I could even type it in, it's in my search. history, right? Callum Watts. So I'm like, yeah, yeah, I'm all right. I'm thinking the right guy. For me right now, he's a controversial figure for different reasons. But Jordan Peterson is a guy that really he has interviews or talks where he lectures for,

you know, you can get his lectures on YouTube for when he is teaching at UFT where he talks about people and trying to find meaning in life and that kind of thing. or a person's journey, and it just clicks. And I totally get that. It's super interesting to hear that while sitting there, Alan Watts comes on the radio and just, what's your favorite Alan Watts quote? Or is that putting you on the spot?

Wow. Well, I think one of the things that I, that sticks with me is that, is to have, I guess, faith that when things are confusing, that it's going to work out. That any, and that you don't have to beat yourself up and you don't have to, you don't have to go out and it sounds counterintuitive, but you don't have to go out and work hard at searching for this. for the answer because they're there. And you've got eternity. If you believe in anything, you've got your eternity, especially people that believe in reincarnation and so on, which is a whole different subject.

And I think it gets too complicated by some philosophies. But is that to have faith that things, work out. And some people, every religion kind of has that aspect to it. But in his mind, you didn't have to prescribe to a religion to have that faith. Matter of fact, one of his sayings was religious partisanship is intellectually irresponsible. And what he meant by that is as soon as you say I'm a Christian, I'm a Jew, I'm a Buddhist, I'm a Hindu, I'm a Muslim, whatever it might be, you've immediately created a divide. You've immediately created separation from yourself and somebody else who might say something else. And that separation is an illusion because we're not separate.

We're all in this together. But if you prescribe to a particular religion, you've got to be very, very careful. you're immediately almost by rot negating others. So be very, very careful with partisanship because you create division almost instantly by even using those words. So he was very, very cautious about it. He was at one time an Episcopalian priest,

and he was a follower of Buddhism. So he studied all of the main religions of the world in great, great detail. But he never liked to be nailed down to one of them. He never wanted to be, he felt they all had their strengths. And he never wanted to be nailed down to any of them because he thought as soon as you do that, you're leaving somebody up. Interesting. Yeah. So that's probably one of the more interesting lessons that I think I picked up on. Let's hop then to, you're now married. And you head back over to

another journey through Europe. I mean, now you, at least you have the knowledge of what it's going be like what you're going to see at least in the beginning. Where do you go on your next travels with Pat now? Well, our goal was India and we had decided to go overland to India. And the Bible for that trip was a book called Overland to India. And so you then have you read this book and you go, this is what we got to do this book right here? Well, what those books are is basically a bit of a guideline. They give you some kind of a map to follow and give you some introduction to what to expect in the various countries and some of the things. It's just a guidebook and it's just a way of giving you some insight to what you're doing

rather than going along blindly. So it gives you ideas on whether to take the bus or the train and what you're going to run into and the formalities that are going to be a problem and the culture differences and so on and what to do and what not to do. It's just a and Overland India was a very sort of crude, homemade book that you, I don't know how I got mine. I don't remember. Maybe a buddy gave it to me.

I can't remember now. But you put that in your backpack and you'd refer to it. If, okay, we're going into Turkey, how are we going to get from Turkey to Iran? Because Iran was the next stop after Turkey. And then from Iran into Afghanistan, from Afghanistan into Pakistan. So, just so I'm clear here, you end up going through Turkey, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, all these countries. Yeah. Basically with our backpacks, mostly buses, occasionally a train.

It was basically from... And just you and your wife? No. A friend of mine, our var is Brian Greenway. This is a funny story. We were sitting in one of the watering holes here in Lloyd talking about our trip. We were within a few weeks of leaving Pat and I. And Brian is sitting at the table with us.

And he's an old friend from way back, a hardworking farm boy from around here. Greenway is just north of town. And Brian's sitting with him. He says, well, I wouldn't mind going. And I am thinking, well, I don't know if he's. serious or not. But Brian's one of these guys that if he says something, he means it. He doesn't usually have to say it twice. I said, you want to come? He says, yeah. I said, well, we're leaving in a week. He said, you got to get your shots. You got to do this. You got to do that. He says,

okay. And so I talked to him about two or three days later. He says, yeah, yeah, I got my shot and I'm and sure enough, he flew over with us and he traveled with us the whole trip. As it turned out, it was a godsend because Brian's, he's about my size, a little leaner and meaner. And and no-nonsense guy. And so there was two big guys, and my wife was much smaller than us, traveling through these countries. And sometimes we got our, sometimes we ended up in some hairy spots. What is a hairy spot?

Well, there was quite a few. But having Brian and I there, I think, gave us the security and the safety that we needed. Pakistan was a very, very strange place. There was strange places. Turkey was in Turkey, in the train station in Istanbul. We were waiting for a train to go partway through Turkey. And there was an Irish guy and his wife, and she was a red-headed Irish lady, a very nice-looking Irish lady about our age.

But she had this bright red hair. And that is a real phenomena in those countries. And in those days, it was considered if you had red hair, you were probably a witch. and you have to remember this is back in the early 70s so there was a lot of superstition and so on and we found in the train station in Istanbul we were waiting for the train

we had a couple hours to wait and all of a sudden there's a whole crowd of men around her and they're starting to get closer and they're talking we don't know what they're saying because it's all in Turkish but it was aggressive and Brian and I and Pat were just sitting at another bench just over a bit from these people we've been talking to these people

and we struck up a friendship So we realized that this is getting antsy. So Brian and I go over and stand with them and stand beside them. And so now there's the Irishmen and us too. And it was enough to get the crowd to back off. And the crowd finally dispersed a bit and kind of left us alone. So that's the kind of thing that would happen occasionally. And then, you know, in Iran we had a...

interesting experience there. We were on a bus in Iran going from Tehran towards Afghanistan. It was three o'clock in the morning on this bus and all of a sudden the bus screeches to a halt and there's this huge squabble and we have no idea what it's about. We don't speak the language and this lady, everybody's off the bus except us, everybody piles off the bus and they're all screaming and yelling at each other. And this woman has a baby in her arm and a bus driver finding he's pulling on her arm and this baby is in her other arm and the baby's head is jerking around and we don't know what's going on. We have no clue what this is all about and there's a huge squabble going on and I see this

baby's head jerking around. I got up out of my seat because I figured we got to do something. Brian reaches up, grabs my arm and says, sit down rod. We don't know what this is about. just sit down. And he was right. And eventually they all get back on the bus and away we go. We have no clue to this day what it was about. But again, having Brian there at that point in time, he was raining me in. And I don't know what I would have done.

And I have no idea, but I was getting upset watching this go on and watching this baby almost being abused. So those are the kinds of things that run into every once in a while. There's another story I've got to tell you. It's pretty interesting. It's a little out there. I don't know I should be telling it. But we were traveling in India on a train.

We were going from Agra, where the Taj Mahal is, and we were traveling to Bombay. And it's about, I can't remember, 24, 36-hour train ride, third class on the train. And the train is just absolutely packed. And we're in traveling third class. So you basically get in a little booth that's made for about eight people, and there will end up to be 12, 15 people stuffed in there.

And we were actually using luggage rack. We were taking Pat and I and Brian were taking turns laying up in the luggage rack to try and get a little sleep because otherwise you were squeezed in so tight you couldn't even sit properly. The people were squeezed in so tight, and the train's just jammed. And in Agra, before we left Agra, a rickshaw driver, that bicycle rickshaws there, had told us that he could.

get some ganja for us. So, and it was a, it was legal in the state that Agra's in. And he, he could go to the store and buy, but we couldn't. So he bought us, I know, four ounces of ganja or something. And brought it back to us. So that's great. So we have it in our, in our, in my pack. And I got a little wee tin in my pocket of some of this. And I'm up on the, it's my turn on the luggage rack. and we pull into a train station and I'm up on the luggage rack and I can see down, see the people out on the walkway by the train

and there's people coming and going and it's busy, the train is absolutely packed and I see a railway cop go by and he's got a really nice khaki turban with a big badge on it and a khaki shirt with the epaulets and a little badge and he's got a nice creased shorts and so on. I just see him go by and he's got a guy

a helper with him and I see him looking and he sees us I make eye contact with him just briefly, and then he disappears. And about 10 minutes later, he's inside the train standing at our carriage spot, our booth, and he starts searching us. And we don't know what's going on, but he finds this little tin in my pocket. And it's got this gange in it. So, okay, this is bad and tells us we're all going to jail and make quite a fuss. of, oh boy, here we go. This is going to be interesting. A little concerned. And then finally, he says, no, Brian and Pat are getting up to start getting their stuff. He says, no, he tells them to sit down. And he looks, points at me and come with me, come with me. And he doesn't, he didn't speak much English, but we wrestle down through the car. We're in the middle of the car. And we have to fight our way down through the car, through all the people. It's just absolutely packed. And we go down, the train still sitting still at the train station. And we go down, we get to the bathroom, and we get to the bathroom. And we go down, we get to the bathroom. And, and we have to the car. And we have to the car. And we have to the car. And we have. And we have to the car. And we have. And we have to the car. And we

and points me in there, we go in there. It's just a little bit cramped bathroom, stinks to high heaven. And he wants money. He wants a bride. So I reached in my pockets, and I didn't have much money as it happened. I'd run out of Indian cash. I was really low. I only had maybe $4 or $5, if that, in Indian cash on me.

So I gave him what I had. Well, that wasn't enough. I don't have any more. And I'm sure not reaching into my little hidden pocket for my American cash. Those days we used a lot of travelers checks. So he's not happy with that. So back down the carriage, we fight our way back down to where we're sitting. And Brian and Pat are sitting there.

And this guy's raven. And I said, Brian, it's a bribe. It's all about the money. I didn't have enough. He wants more. And Brian stood up. And the guy's beacon, is yakking. And Brian reached out with his hand and grabbed the guy by the throat,

reached him right off the floor and pins him to the wall. pins this cop to the wall. His feet are off the floor, a foot. Brian's a big, strong guy. And this guy's a little guy, and his feet are kicking. And Brian's giving him hell. You're nothing but a effing thief. You're nothing but a crook.

And he's just lecturing this guy. And Brian is a calm, quiet guy, but this guy hit a button on him. And Brian had no use for people like this. So he's got this guy, and he's just lecturing this guy, and this guy's starting to turn blue. And I'm starting to think, we're going to jail for a long, long time here. This isn't going to be good. And finally, I said, Brian, Brian, he can't breathe. So finally Brian lets him down. About the minute his feet hit the floor, the train lurches,

and the train's going to start going again. And this guy's holding his throat and he can't talk and his helper with him is just freaking out. He doesn't know what to do. And finally, the train starts moves. They've got to get off the train. Trains don't stop for anything there. Once they're going, they're going to the next stop. So he has to hustle down through the people and get off. the train and got off the train and disappeared and that was the end of the story. Probably the only man who's ever choked a cop almost out and lived to tell about it. Oh, I tell you, it was quite a moment, but that was another time when having, you know, some able-bodied guys around really helped us get through. And there was, you know, lots of little

incidents where it was just nice. Pakistan was an extremely strange place, extremely strange in those days and it was really, really nice to have somebody along to be a reinforcement. What is extremely strange mean? What was strange about? The first, one of the first nights in Pakistan, we got back to the hotel room such as it was pretty crude. But Pat was really upset. And she says, I've been pinched and prodded the whole day and you guys didn't even see it. We didn't. We didn't know. And she showed us, She had bruises on her all over her, on her arms, on her side. Because she wasn't covered up?

Yeah. Yeah. Because in those days, I guess probably the same today. I don't know. The women were all covered in burqas, completely covered head to toe in burqas. You couldn't, they might have a little screen on the eyes. You could hardly see, you didn't see anything. And Afghanistan, Iran in those days, was under the Shaw, and it was loosening up.

And you didn't, you only saw maybe 50% of the older people wore the burqa. The younger people were all dressed more Western. Afghanistan, nothing but burkas, except for the nomads, the nomadic women on the gypsy, or on the camel caravans, they dressed as gypsies. They did not wear a burqa. But in Pakistan, all of the women did. And it was very, very oppressed. And so Pat, walking down the street without a burqa on, they considered that made her free game. So as soon as we realized this after that, when we walked down the street,

Brian and I walked on each side of her. And then we started, we started to watch and we would see it happening. So then we got pretty, pretty good at heading these guys off. They were really, really sneaky. They would come up from behind or just going by. It was, it was pretty weird. It's pretty weird. And I don't know, supposed to talk about that stuff, but that's the truth.

And so we didn't spend a long time in Pakistan. It's funny. It's funny. You know what's funny about today? today's day and age is I find nothing about that should be offensive to it's just the truth it's just the truth

but the truth now you've got to apologize for it it's like I don't know what you're apologizing for although I will say this to whoever listens to this right that's where we're at today in today's age where you tell what you're talking about it's just it's your experience and it's the truth of what went

on and you're apologizing for I don't know it it's a strange time we're living in and the fact you went through all those countries back then is well i mean what do we know about them now and it's my life we've half of them been a war and bombed and everything else it's yeah well you can't go to you wouldn't want to go to iran or afghanistan and i don't think pakistan either now those it'd be crazy to go to those countries now india that was another an interesting thing is going from pakistan to india i tell you that was a breath of fresh air going across the border into india instantly you

A change. A change instantly. And it was like a breath of fresh air. And I still remember walking down. It was almost as if they hadn't ever watered the grass in the Pakistan side. And it walked into India and it was green. And there was booths with people selling food and whatnot. And a lot of the booths were run by Sikhs.

And they were all immaculately groomed. They had their turbans were immaculately put together where we just come from Pakistan where things were a lot more third-worldy I guess is the best way to put it and you know you were dealing with grime and and stuff all the time pat and India was just like a breath of fresh air and it was immediate and it was just wow it was just such a relief to walk into India and you just sensed it right away so and then our adventure started there and well You get your started there. Well, we toured all over India.

You know, that was the beginning. And that trip... Oh, sorry. Well, the train trip I told you, but was in the middle of India. Oh, the middle of India. That was the middle of our tour, yeah. Was that the last trip you ever took like that? No, went to India.

Raf and Zui Said, uh, commandeered us to go to India here, uh, 2010, I think it was. And, uh, we went with them and some other people. We went a little different class. On that trip, we went from the 10 cent and night hotels to the very nice hotels and did a luxury trip in India, which was extremely interesting. India had changed a lot, a lot over those years. Over those years in between, changed a lot. And certainly has come a long, long ways from then.

It was as nice as it was to step into India, it was still very, very poor in those days. things were pretty tough there too but it was a whole different atmosphere and then going back again here a few years ago with with Raff and Zui that was really interesting to see it how it had all changed and so on there was some disappointing things

within a few days of being there I said to Raff or Zui I said I haven't seen any snake charmers because the snake charmers were always a fascinating thing when we were there on the first trip there was a snake charmer you know every city had a half a dozen of them with cobras Cobras, yeah. Hate snakes.

I do too. I'm like Indiana Jones. Yeah, I'm the same. But it was a very, very fascinating part of the whole experience. Yeah. And the other thing, you didn't see people smoking cigarettes on this last trip. The first trip, they were selling single cigarettes every half block. And I don't smoke cigarettes, but...

But there, would you smoke them or no? Tobacco? Yeah. No. No? No. But there was changes I'm not. I'm not seeing the snake charmers, and they said, well, they outlawed snake charmers for the sake of the snakes or whatever.

And because these snakes were, I guess, most of them were defanged by the snake charmers so that they wouldn't get bitten by them. And I guess that was considered cruel, unusual punishment, which I suppose it was. But so there are no snake charmers. And the tobacco was outlawed in India. You, I think you could smoke tobacco if it was in your own property in your backyard sort of thing and that, but not out in public at all. It was very unusual. and, you know, now we're kind of that. That's before we even did that here in Canada.

On all your travels, what's maybe one of the things that, I don't know, it sticks out to you? Like, you've told a lot, like you've been to some very unique countries. You've gone about it a very unique way. But when you look back, was there a lesson you learned or something about Canada you learned or was there just something that stuck out to you that you just kind of learned from going and doing it? I don't know that there's one lesson out of it. You know, I think it's an accumulation of things

and certainly appreciation for what we've got as one of them here in Canada. And unfortunately, so many people take it for granted and don't realize that the things that our forefathers have fought so hard for are fragile and can disappear so quickly. So, you know, we've got to be careful of that because, but I think it's an accumulation of things. I think to say one lesson is very, very difficult.

Again, I think it's that basically people are people everywhere you go. You know, we met friendly people everywhere, and people that went out of their way to help you. And maybe you were lost in the city or whatever it might be. There was always seemed to be somebody to help you. And it seemed like the good people outnumbered the, the idiots by, you know, 100 to 1. Yeah, yeah.

Unfortunately, sometimes you remember the idiots the most because they did something that stands right out. I say the same thing about Canada. I've been across Canada, and, well, I mean, just feel the temperature in Canadian society right now, and we paint the East as whatever you want, evil, bad, I don't know. I've been the nicest person we met all across Canada, and I don't want to knock anybody out in the west.

It just sticks out in my mind. I think that's why I say it, but it was in Ottawa. Ottawa, we were biking, and we went across a ferry. This old guy approached me and my brother and our friend and led us through Ottawa on bikes, pedal bikes, and rush hour traffic, and just made the process so easy, took us back to his house, fed us beer, fixed our bikes,

then ended up taking us to where we were supposed to stay, was like the nicest human being and I think back to them like you didn't really have to do any of that right like that's super cool and that's translatable to what you're saying no matter where you go that there are those people and it they don't get enough the world likes to hang on to the negative the negative sales papers the negative yeah you know it's easily sellable heck the the COVID-19 the fear of it that fear was paralyzing back in what was that March yeah Like the fear of it, everybody's locked up and look out your window and see what's going on, right? Yeah.

The fear and bad and that just. I didn't like it. I was very anxious for a week or two when that all. When we ski in the winter and we spend our winter skiing in the mountains and we'd come back from skiing. We got shut down early because of the COVID. And we headed up to the lake. We have a place at Bright Sand and we headed up there to hunker down. and I didn't like it.

I felt very anxious and I'm not used to feeling that. It was an anxiety that I, I don't know if I've ever had it. And I got a grip on it fairly quickly, but it did bother me for a bit. And the anxiety wasn't over fear of the virus. It was over the weird stuff that we were doing to try and deal with it. The beach next to us had been roped off and they had signs up that he had $2,000 fine for going on the beach. And I have about a quarter mile of nothing. but Bush and Beach beside us,

and they had it all roped off in a sign-up saying $2,000 fine for going on to the beach. That's insanity. I'm sorry. I don't get it. And those kinds of things, that's what was bothering me, was how we were trying to deal with this. And I understand that everybody didn't know quite what we were dealing with, and that was pretty obvious with all of the switcherooze that the supposed experts kept having

in terms of what's right and what's wrong to do with this thing. And but I think it was the reaction that may be anxious. I just knew in my, I had a feeling of some kind that I couldn't really articulate that this was wrong. It felt wrong what some of the things we were doing. It just didn't feel right. And sometimes you can't quite put it into words or articulate it, but you just know there's in your gut there's something wrong with what we're doing here. And that's how I felt.

And I still do to a degree. It's, uh, what's an, nerving about it to me is how quickly you can shut down the entire world. Yes. The entire world. Not Lloydminster, not like the entire world. Yeah. That hurts my brain.

There's a lot of things when you think about them, space travel, that kind of sort of thing, right? Try and look at the universe and try and your brain just hurts trying to think about it. What's going on in the Latin Lake is unbelievable. It doesn't feel right. And part of what's made it's possible, of course, is our interconnectedness that we have. Well, no, the world's never been more interconnected. Yeah. Yeah.

In the history. Yeah. Another Ellen Watts saying is that technology is an amplifier of human behavior. And I had to think about that one a bit. Technology amplifies human behavior. And human behavior is what it is. It's either good, it's bad, or somewhere in between. and technology amplifies that.

So what we're experiencing right now is human behavior amplified by a huge amount and how we're reacting amplified by a huge amount. So I think the amplification sometimes distorts the significance and makes it seem grander than it is. you know if your rock band plays too loud it gets to a point where it hurts and amplification I think is is fine but it can be a detriment too I'm going to have to listen to that again probably later and really sink my teeth into that that's that's interesting yeah technology amplifies human

behavior and it doesn't matter whether we had a we started out with a stick to dig the ground, then we had a spoon and then a shovel, and then we had a backhoe, and then we had dynamite. And I mean, it's all technology amplifying human behavior. That behavior might be building the building or it might be knocking it down. So, yeah. Hmm. Well, you know, we've been going for a little while now, and I haven't even got to, you know, Sellers RV, which is funny, right? Like, for the listeners who are just hopping on and listen to this, I told Rod before we started, I said, like, listen, we're going to take this, we're going to let this thing take us where it takes us,

and we're going to try and answer a few questions along the way and steer the ship, so forth. But the best conversations are the one you let happen instead of trying to force one. But with doing this with the archives, it probably behooves us to talk a little bit about Sellers RV here in town, and the journey, you know, you come back, from all these travels, and you see different, I mean, you go to all these different countries that are side by side, you see all these different ways of living life, and you come back to Canada, which I think, I'm going to presume now you're like extremely thankful.

You're coming back to Canada, I think you've even said it. How do you get into the RV business? Okay, we got back from India, Pat had contracted hepatitis. That's what kind of ended our trip in the end. So we got home, and Pat wasn't, she was sick for a while, but we got through that. And then I went through, we went through a few jobs. And I worked for Tuplin Gravel, driving gravel truck for a few years. I even had my own truck at one point.

And then I worked for bearing and transmission for a short time when Tuplin, Frank Tuplin sold out of the gravel business. And about then I ended up working at bearing and transmission for a while. But then Frank and my father were good friends. And my father, Jim Sellers. And so Frank Tolland and my dad were great RV enthusiasts. They both had RVs and loved them and everything about them and the lifestyle that they promoted. And they came to me one day and asked if I wanted to be the legs and energy

in an RV dealership. They were thinking of selling some RVs. At that time, John and Bill Skinner from Skinner Motors, who were the Ford dealer in town forever, had gotten out of the country. car business and we're selling vanguard RVs in town for a few years and they were going to retire and give up the Vanguard franchise which in those days was a very very good franchise to have. Vanguards were built in in BC.

So and Dad and we're related to the Skinners, the shirttail relatives to the Skinners. So John and Bill asked Dad if he wanted to, if he was interested in this and dad said, yeah, and so we got together with Frank and then they came to me. So Dad and Frank were kind of the, the. brains and the old boys with the experience and and they had enough wherewithal to be able to get some money from the bank, Peter Gulak in those days. And they asked me if I was interested in being the energy and the front end. And, you know, it didn't take me long to say yes to that.

It sounded like a really interesting opportunity. And we were in the marine business originally. I had a real interest in marine at that time. I'm a sailor into sailing and boats and really interested in Marines. So we were sellers in Tuplin, RV and Marine sales limited to start with in 1979. We opened on April 1st, 1979. And we started selling boats and trailers. And Frank and Dad both worked in the dealership to start with for the first few years.

They were very active to get things rolling. And we slowly grew. And Frank started to back out of the front end a bit. Dad stayed there quite a bit. Dad was an old salesman from way back, and he loved the game. And they were both instrumental and great mentors. Frank was your steady eddy businessman with really down-to-earth, quiet business sense. My dad was more energetic salesman type with lots of experience,

both from the chicken business and lots of other things he had done in his life that gave him good business experience. So they were the catalyst, and I was the energy. And they slowly, they put up with my ineptness through the first few years and coached me along and my wife. We both got very involved. Pat was running the parts department. I was a general manager. And through the years, we got some really good employees.

We've had employees have been with us for 38 years. And, you know, anywhere from 20 to 30, 30, nearly the 40 years we've been in business, we've had some of the same employees. and so we gradually grew the business. In 1982, things were pretty tough in the economy, and that gave us a real opportunity because we were fairly fresh and new. And actually, because we didn't know any better, we came across an opportunity to buy a bunch of product.

The Skylark factory in Lefbridge had gone bankrupt. And Tripoli, out of Winkler, Manitoba, who was one of our suppliers had bought Skylark for a very good price. And Skylark made Skylark trailers in Empress Motorhomes. And two other dealers and ourselves got together, and we bought all other inventory that they had, and they had a lot because that was a really bad year in the RV industry. So there was a ton of inventory sitting on the ground.

In those days, the manufacturers built spec inventory way ahead. They don't do that anymore, but in those days they did. And so they had all this inventory sitting there and they gave us a, it was a pretty good deal. We had to step up to the plate big time. We're talking millions of dollars of inventory. And we had to step up to the plate to buy this with these two other dealers. Between the three of us, we bought all of this inventory. And it was a lot.

Millions and millions of dollars worth. That's an interesting deal too. Dad and I, we decided we wanted to do this, Frank, and Dad and I. So Dad and I went down to the credit union, see Peter Gulack, and sat in the office. office with Peter and told him what was going on and said can you lend us the money to buy this inventory Peter and he thought for minutes just well he says there'll be some paperwork to fill out but I think we can do this and shook his hand walked out came back the next day to do the paperwork and that was Peter Gulac he was the best character lender that probably certainly ever existed in

this town just you know there was you know how many interviews I've done now hundreds no well sorry how many Lloyd Archie interviews I've done. I think you're number 14 and 15. Now many times Peter Gulloch has come up? No. Over half. Wow. But I believe he is no longer, correct? That's right. No, Peter passed away quite a while ago. Not long after he retired. What an interview he might have been. Oh, and Peter is the most unassuming guy. I mean, he's one of these people that very quiet, very on assuming. If he was at a, if you were in a party, he would be the last guy to say anything.

He would be very quiet. And, but very, very astute, sharp, intuitive. He was probably single-handedly the most important person in the credit union movement, certainly in Lloyd Minster. There was others that came along. I know John Venick was really instrumental in the Saskatchewan side, and there was others, but I would say Peter was the number one push for getting the credit union movement going, and he lent on character.

You know, yeah, they had to dot their eyes and cross their T's to a degree, but most of Peter's decisions were made on sitting across the table and looking in the eye. And, of course, my dad and Frank had a reputation, too, in town. They were both established, they had established themselves as good businessmen, and they were retired. This was a hobby. The RV industry for them was a hobby. They went into it.

They didn't. It wasn't about the money. It was about the business. They loved the lifestyle. They wanted to promote it. And it was a hobby for them. And I was the guy that was putting in most of the hours. And they came, dad worked a lot of hours.

And Frank, Frank did it at first too. But they sort of backed out. They were getting older. And we were young. And that was great. It was great. We never had an angry word in their relationship. And then eventually, my wife and I bought Frank and dad out.

Don McDonald, another Peter Gulac type of person. Don McDonald's still a practicing accounting here in town. Helped us glue a deal together with Frank and dad to buy them out over time and got that going. And then we put together a deal with Frank. Frank owned the property and we put a deal together with Frank to buy the property over time. And that's all been done long ago now, but we glued all that together. And again, another instrumental person in that was Don. McDonald helping us put that together because he managed he dawn could put

together a deal that was fair for everybody and that everybody walked away going okay I can live with that and he was an expert at doing that and is an expert at doing that Don helped facilitate the purchase my daughter's purchased the business from from Pat and I now and is buying us out over time and Don put that together and I that was a very complicated deal because I have another child in the family and you know it's it's when there's family dynamics involved, just like a farmer handing the farm over. He's got one child that was interested in the farm and maybe others that aren't.

How do you do that fairly? And we had kind of the same type of dilemma. Now in the end, after lots of grinding the teeth, Don made it pretty simple. And so now my daughter is buying us out. But through the years, the business just grew and grew. And then of course, Lloyd Minster was a really good, is a good business town. And that's one of the big keys. the oil patch when it was thriving back in 2004, five, six, seven in that area in there.

Holy man, things were hopping. Things were hopping. And our biggest challenge in those days was keeping inventory and employees because the oil patch was paying so much money. It was very hard to keep people. I'm curious about the 80s because the 80s for people who were older than, I was born. in 86 so I don't know anything about the 80s so for people who went through the 80s what we're going through right now the people who are old enough to remember talk about the 80s and the people

who are older than that maybe talk about what their parents said about the depression yeah those are the only other two times that even remotely come close to what the heck we're going through right now and you're telling me in the 80s you went out and bought millions of dollars worth of camper trailers I would think there wouldn't be very good sales of those in the 80s. But heck, maybe you can enlighten me. Well, that's an interesting thing about the RV business, is that, and I think today actually tells the same story because, you know, you would think that probably our business

would be suffering based on the economic climate right now. But in fact, we've learned that Canadians like to camp, and they like to have fun. and we only have our summers are short. So Canadians make the best of summer. You know, it's only, we only get a couple of good months, real good months, and the rest is just gravy. So we're pretty determined to enjoy ourselves for those short months

because you work hard all winter, you freeze to death all winter. Summer comes along, you want to get out there and have a little bit of freedom and fun. And now people aren't going, they're not going south to Florida, Arizona, Mexico, go wherever and they're having to stay home but they're still determined that they're going to enjoy themselves a bit so one good way to do that is in an RV and so the industry is very resilient that way it's not bulletproof there's certainly going to there's been times when it's been tough but it's certainly got a resilience in the 80s was about the same thing because in the biggest challenge in the 80s was the interest rates we were talking double-digit interest rates of up to 18

percent and maybe higher and that made it very, very tough. The saving grace in that period of time was we had a base, a really good base industry in this town. The agricultural industry has always been fairly strong and the basic oil industry was, you know, there's always a base there. And people could buy, inflation was rampant. You had that double digit inflation or interest rate and then inflation was rampant. So we could sell you an RV in the spring of, we'll say, 82 or 83, and let's say you paid $20,000 for it. Well, by the next year, that same RV is going to probably sell for $25,000 or $27,000 based on inflation the way it was then. So you could get your money back on your RV. Now, you're interested if you had to borrow the money for it,

that was going to be eating away at you, but you could conceivably flip that RV. in a year or two and still get your money back because of inflation. So that became attractive to people. It was maybe for all the wrong reasons, but that was the way it was. And so you could buy an RV from me for $20,000, trade it in a year or two later and I give you your $20,000 back. That's pretty attractive. So funny things happen when the economy is flipping and flopping around.

And that was the reality then. And especially when we bought these RVs at distressed price, we were able to come on the market and sell these RVs at our competition's cost. So you could buy an RV from me at my competition's cost and come back the next year and trade it in and get your money back. So everybody's happy except my competition. Because if they were stuck with inventory that they had paid full pot for, they very difficult to compete. And that's the wonder, you know, that's free enterprise. That's the way it works.

And sometimes you're sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. sometimes you're on the other end of that stick. Somebody else gets a good deal and you can't, but that was the situation then, and we bought a lot. What did you learn? You know, I ask a lot about learning, but you ran a business for 40 years, and I've seen some very, very good times,

and I assume some very, very tough times. What is running a business for 40 years tell you? And what advice do you pass on to your daughter now that she's taking it over? Like, what is something you're like, you know what? The first thing you have to understand is the mathematics. If you don't understand the mathematics of your business, you're not going to make it. Because the reality, it doesn't matter how optimistic you are or how hardworking you are. If you don't know the math of your business, you don't know what it takes to generate a profit.

If you don't know that, if you don't know what your goal is, you've got nowhere to go. So budget is number one. You have to have a budget. And these are all things that were foreign to me when I got in business. I was like a sponge. I wanted to know these things. but it took years to pick it all up. But you have to have a budget.

You have to know what your goals are, and then you have to figure out a plan to get there. So this is all about the mathematics of, okay, we're going to sell this many units at this many dollars. Here's what our expenses are. Here's what's going to be. Here's our cost of product. Here's what we're going to sell it for.

See, we sell a unit for $20,000. That $20,000 doesn't go in our pocket. We've got to pay the manufacturer. Maybe we're paying that manufacturer $18,000 for that unit. So we've got $2,000 a gross margin. That gross margin has to pay all the expenses, has to pay the overhead, has to pay the light, the heat, the employees, everything, and hopefully have a few cents left over for the shareholders. So you have to understand that. If you don't understand that, you shouldn't be there.

And that doesn't, you can't always know all of that going in, but you better be wanting to learn it, and you better be wanting to learn it quick. So, and having good financial backing is also another big part of it because so many businesses go in there because they just don't have the finances to get through the hard times. and that's another aspect of it. So you need to understand the math. Then the next thing you need is to be able to handle the people. And you've got people as customers, you've got people as employees, and you've got suppliers. So you've got people on all sides of you.

So you're balancing people and money. And that's what it's about. And once you understand the math, if you get the math down, that never changes. There will be adjustments and you'll adjust it, but the basics of it never change. The people then becomes a big challenge. So in the end, you end up spending 80% of your time doing with people

and 20% of your time doing the numbers. Because the people are the most important part in the end because the attitude of your customers towards your business, do they like you, do they hate you? Do they come to you because they have to? Do they come to you because they want to? You know, is it fun to come to your business? Do your employees like it?

You're not going to keep employees if they're not happy there. And so you've got all of these factors to balance. So I think balancing people and money is the big thing. But the first thing you have to do is the numbers. If you don't have that, the rest doesn't matter. And then you have to understand the people. And then you have to understand the numbers as they apply to your people. Are your staff getting enough money?

Are they being treated fairly? You make, you do one little favor for one staff, maybe pay him a few bucks more for whatever reason it is for doing the same job as somebody else, you're dead. That gets out there and that's like poisoned in your dealership or in your business, whatever it might be. You've got the, you have, they have to all perceive that they're being treated as fairly as they can for what they do.

And if you miss that, then you're going to start, you're never going to keep staff. And being honest with your staff and up front, teaching them the numbers so that they understand why. Quite often your staff doesn't know what your margins are. They don't know how tough it is. They don't know that you're going six months. months or eight months of the year and losing money.

And that there's only four months of the year that you're actually going to make any money and that you have to make lots then to make up for the other eight months. So, you know, there are all these things and your staff needs to understand what you're going through and what you have to deal with. They don't have to understand all of it. They don't have to have all the details, but they need enough so that they can get a picture. What's maybe one of the lessons you learned early on that, well, you just, you know, you don't know about it until you experience it, right?

You can't know how to do something properly until maybe you go through it and go, oh, you should have done that, just a smith differently. Like when you look back to those early years, I assume there was a couple, oh, moments. Oh, yeah, there's lots of mistakes. And, you know, most of those mistakes were with handling people. The financial mistakes you pay for yourself, you know, but people mistakes, whether it be customers or staff, and those are the ones that bother you for a long time,

is when you make a mistake with the way you handled a customer, you've got impatient or you got upset or you let them get to you or you just plain screwed it up or with a staff member. Those are the things that bother you. And we're all human. We all do it. And, you know, those are the, the ones that bother you the most.

You know, we're talking an awful lot about a lot of different things. I'm curious on the Lloyd side of it. You know, you got to see the change of Lloyd from a very small town. Your parents owned the KFC to coming back and running Sellers RV for 40 years. What was one of the biggest changes you noticed

from when you were a kid until whatever year you want? But what was one of, I mean, obviously the population expanded, the money going through town expanded. But was there something that when it came to town, maybe Lloyd built something, maybe you were a part of something. When it got here, you were like, oh, wow, that's pretty cool. Or something along that lines? I think economically the biggest change for Lloyd was the upgrader. You know, I think, you know, we rode the oil patch roller coaster for years. And I could chart our companies good times and bad times with the oil price.

I did it one time. I sat down and did a kind of a graph of the oil price and our good years and bad years. And it just followed it lockstep. Yeah. And then when the upgrader came, it smoothed that up and down out. It didn't eliminate it, but it smoothed it out a lot. And I think that was probably, and that upgradeer was a long time in the Monon and Grownon stage before. happened there was what year did the upgradeer come in gosh you're testing me now I feel like I

should know this but I actually can't think of the year right now I'm thinking it had to be the early 90s but don't quote me on that I could be wrong but it it smoothed out the the flow and it made the roller coaster easier to ride economically the oil the oil industry has just been fantastic for this town. The agriculture and oil is what is about. Our future in this country is beneath our feet. It doesn't matter if it's agriculture, oil, mining, forestry. It all comes from beneath our feet. And until we understand that, some people don't understand that, some people in very high places don't understand that, or don't care, I don't know. But that's our golden egg. And to think that we would,

would, it doesn't mean, it can be done intelligently. We can intelligently use our resources. And that's what we've got in Canada. We're a resource country, and very few people. Resources are our golden goose, and yet we're beating it up. We're not doing it with it. Fisheries, all of these things. These are basic, basic things that the world needs, and we've got them. And here we are struggling along right now when we've got all of this right beneath our feet. It just drives me crazy. And this town's a perfect example of it when when things are humming and people here work hard. You know, I think that's the big thing out here in Lloyd Minster. I've got lots of friends that work in the oil patch. And yeah, some of them are a little crude and rough around the edges,

but you know what? They're out there in 30, 40 below weather, getting covered in oil and they do it day in and day out and getting knuckles wrapped, sometimes losing limbs, whatever. they're out there day in and day out and people will badmouth these guys because they're a little rough around the edges but these are the people that make our country work and I have nothing but gratitude for those hardworking guys I tried a little stint in the oil patch stuff it was tough I'm much much happier doing what I do maybe your final one as we approach the two hour mark is you know Alan Watts you're sitting there on the coach and it's it's one of those life-changing moments that just you're going this way

he steers the other way did you ever have another one of those in your life where you're going and you have a life-altering moment doesn't have to be so uh grand of a of a moment but is there it does kids change you yeah i mean obviously kids is probably the easiest one to say it changed you but is there another one that goes along that i know there's not nothing, there's nothing quite like that experience, but it's a different realm. And, you know, you mentioned kids, and that's the, I think that's the next thing, is that, you know, when you have children, your whole perspective changes. When we had our first child, all of a sudden, first of all, there's this huge responsibility,

you suddenly realize you have. And then when you get your head around that, then you have to fulfill that responsibility. And then another child comes along, and next thing you know, family is the most important thing in your life and I think that children are the second more recent thing that's happened that changed our life and then now it's grandchildren so and family to me is is the most important that's what it's all about that's what we do all of this for his family and the future generations and that's that's the most important thing and trying to help them get

ahead and, you know, I've got a son and he's doing fine out in BC and got grandkids out there and I've got my daughter here who's taking over the business and a couple of grandkids here and their partners and that's what we live and breathe as family and we have a good relationship with our family. We ski all winter at sun peaks near Kamloops and family comes out there or they just can't wait to get out there and ski with grandpa and spend some time on the mountain. And then in the winter in the summertime we have a sailboat and we sail and we have a little motor boat as well and do some boating and fishing. And that's all for family. It's the whole thing. It's the most important. Well, I've really enjoyed this. And getting to know you and you sharing

some of your story with me. It's been highly enjoyable. I say that every time I have anyone sit across me, but I truly do mean it. I hope it's been as enjoyable for you as it has been for me. but once again, just thanks for coming in and share. Yeah, I'm sorry we didn't talk about the business more, but, you know, that's a long story too. But yeah, things are going great. Lloyd Minter is a great city, and I really appreciate you doing this. It's nice to know the archives are going to bank this

and hopefully to help somebody down the road. Maybe some in the meantime on your podcast. I went on your site and I've been checking you out, so. Well, I was just going to say there's no need to apologize. That's the lovely thing about, doing this, like sitting across from somebody. I love that the archives, I've maybe said this to him a couple times, but I love the fact the archives have entrusted me to do it my way.

And my way isn't to try and do two minutes on your wife and then two minutes on what you did at high school and then two minutes on here. Right, to me, it's about the person sitting across. So if, well, traveling is a big chunk. your life. Alan Watts story is in my mind fascinating. It's fascinating. And that's what it should be about because when if I was your daughter per se, actually I'll give you my story. When I first started doing this, the archives gave me a list of ones they did back in the 90s and early 2000s, I think. And at the top of the list was my grandfather and none of us in the family knew what had

happened okay so imagine my amazement when I'm like holy earmuffs folks holy shit there's grandpa Newman on there and I was like like he'd been he passed away like probably I actually I can't think of this now probably I don't know 10 12 13 years ago I can't I honestly can't remember which is a sad thing and so I haven't heard his voice and how long and here's it here's an archive recording of them so I click on it and it's amazing right I got all I thought the entire time was just ask him a little bit follow-up on that just like you know oh yeah you know how'd you meet your wife oh well we met at a dance okay and then on you go right yeah and it was a

it was a brief interview and I call brief like 58 minutes or an hour and four minutes to me that is still a very long interview but I I I just wanted more because you knew you never get another crack at it. Yeah. That's all you get. Yeah. And I just wish he expanded on some things, right? Talk about what his thoughts were on the depression and what they did and how they got through that.

I mean, he farmed for he was 80-some years old when he passed, right? Like there's a lot of life there. Yeah. And even with yourself, everybody goes, oh, man, two hours, geez, where'd that go? But it's like, you're trying to cram an entire life into two hours. That is impossible. Yeah. So we might as go where you want to go.

And I'll follow along gladly because it's enjoyable to see, I see it all the time. The emotion grew up when you get these memories and you're going back to your life. And, you know, it's fun. It's fun to watch. It's fun to be a part of it because I want to talk about what means something to you. Because at the end of the day, when your family or whoever comes along and listens to it, they might as to know who you were, not, you know, know, 10 thoughts about this, that, and the other thing, because I don't think that is very enjoyable listening.

I could be wrong on that. Well, I appreciate it because, and history tends to fade away on us. And sometimes I, I drove by a house that we lived in, original house that my parents built. And I, there was a fellow in the driveway, and I stopped to talk from him. I said, well, my parents built this house. And he says, is your name, Cafford? I said, no, it's sellers. He says, well, you didn't build this house.

I said, yeah, we did. said my parents did. And we had to have a bit of a discussion, we'll say. And finally, I convinced him because I had such an intimate knowledge of the whole neighborhood. And finally by the time we're done, he's looking at me and realizing I knew what I was talking about. But that's how history gets faded and muddled and muddled. And, you know, there's some acracies there and there's some inaccuracies. And so it's nice that somebody's trying to keep it somewhat straight, even though some parts will get lost.

But yeah, we don't learn from history. we're doomed to repeat it, as the famous saying. Yeah, well, I think the history doesn't repeat it rhymes, I think is the thing that I've been told multiple times by my former history professors. Oh, yeah. But regardless, I really do appreciate you coming in, and I enjoy hearing the stories.

I enjoy sitting here and seeing your eyes light up and everybody else's eyes light up when they talk about all these journeys from the past and, you know, lessons learned, and hopefully somebody gets something out of it moving forward, right? Right, I hope so. Yeah. Thanks very much, Sean.

You betcha, thanks. Hey, folks, thanks again for joining us today. If you just stumble on the show and like what you hear, please click subscribe. Remember, every Monday and Wednesday a new guest will be sitting down to share their story. The Sean Newman podcast is available for free on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and wherever else you find your podcast fix.

Until next time.