A Month on Skid Road

In February 1972, I was in the fourth year towards a Commerce degree at McGill University in Montreal. I was struggling and my grades were poor (involvement with campus politics had become a huge distraction), so when my friend Tony asked if I wanted to take time off and go to California with him, I jumped at the chance. "You bet!" I cried.

We left just after a huge blizzard had dumped a foot or more of snow on Montreal. We took the train, stopping in Orillia to visit my old friend Ralph. After a week there, Tony hopped a train to Calgary to visit an old flame before we were to meet up in Vancouver for the trip south.

A few days later I took a train out. Not my first train trip, but my first across Canada and my first time crossing the four Western provinces. The Rockies were spectacular in winter, as they always are. Eventually we pulled in to the train station in downtown Vancouver.

Now these were the days before cell phones. And when Tony's train didn't show up, I didn't know what to do. Go to California without Tony? As I was wandering around the train station with my backpack, a young guy approached, noting I was looking a bit lost. He asked if I had a place to stay the night. No! Would I like to join him and crash with his friends in an abandoned house near by? Sure! So we went to this old house near by and I stayed the night. My first (and only) time as a squatter.

The next morning I decided I would stay in Vancouver for a while, maybe longer. I walked up Broadway, opened a bank account and deposited most of my travellers cheques and then stopped at a Denny's to have breakfast. While sitting at the bar eating, an attractive woman sat next to me and started chatting me up.

"You're a great conversationalist," she said. "You would be great in the business my husband and I are in."

I explained that I was still looking for a place to stay. She said I could stay with them. They lived in a gorgeous old heritage house almost directly across from City Hall. She and her husband made the pitch for their business. They would fly me out to Edmonton, at their expense, putting me up at the Chateau Lacombe Hotel, to attend a recruitment meeting. I had never been in a plane before, so I thought, why not?

That Saturday we boarded a plane for Edmonton, my first ever airplane ride. The Chateau Lacombe was fabulous. My first stay at a luxury hotel. The meeting was....well....

The business was called Dare to Be Great. It offered self-improvement courses to help you achieve your maximum potential. The man running it was a rags to riches guy named Glenn W. Turner, a man with a physical disability, born into poverty, who had made a fortune with a line of cosmetics made from mink oil. Now he was peddling a course on how you, too, could be great.

When we walked into the room, the crowd was chanting "Money! Money! Money! Money!" like some sort of mantra. Money played a big role in this business, which, if you haven't already guessed, was a multi-level marketing scheme. It was my first exposure to MLMs.

An array of speakers took the stage, many of whom had to overcome handicaps in their lives to succeed. They included twin dwarves John and Greg Rice who made a fortune in real estate. If all these people with handicaps could make it big, so could you, was the pitch.

At the meeting, I ran into an acquaintance from high school and his wife. They also lived in Vancouver and were heavily into Dare to Be Great. His wife also had a physical handicap, one of the things that got them interested.

The upshot was that you could make a fortune selling their motivational courses. They started at $400 for a set of cassette tapes. But to be allowed to sell them you had to buy the $5000 course, which included personal training at Turner's ranch in the United States.

Not only was this my first exposure to MLM, it was my first exposure to the self-improvement business, and not my last as I have had an interest in it ever since. As it was, I didn't have $5000. So when we returned to Vancouver, I called my Dad asking to borrow five grand. Why? I explained. Sounds like a scam, he said. No dice. But I did have enough of my own money to plunk down $400 for the cassette course. I wrote my hosts a cheque and then told them I needed to move on.

I scoured the newspapers looking for a place to rent. Now I knew Vancouver from a hole in the wall, so I just called up the cheapest place I could find, a place that rented by the month on East Pender Street. They had a room and I said I would be there that evening.

Then I went downtown to where A&W Food Services had their head office. I had worked as a roving assistant manager, subbing for management on vacation or days off, for a few summers in Montreal. I knew the Director of Operations. He hired me on the spot and invited me home to have dinner with his family. That evening we drove to North Vancouver, my first time through Stanley Park and over the Lions Gate Bridge, both of which left me in awe. Driving the causeway, I looked up at the giant trees on all sides. I had never seen trees so big before. They dwarfed anything in Montreal.

After dinner and some chit-chat, I took a bus back to Vancouver and found the place I had called, an SRO just on the eastern edge of Chinatown. I paid my $60 and the manager, George, a burly ex-Vancouver cop, showed me around. I had a small furnished room on the second floor. The washroom and showers were down the hall. Downstairs was a large common area that included a large kitchen area and grill, and a large common room with a TV.

This was my first experience living in poverty. The bathroom was filthy. The shower stall had wooden slats on the floor which had green algae growing between the slats. The grill in the kitchen looked like it had never been cleaned.

After a good night's sleep, I showered, and then I went and bought a car, a great white boat of a 1966 Chevy Biscayne. Then off to my first shift at work, the A&W in North Vancouver.

I stayed at that SRO (which stands for Single Room Occupancy) for a month. The other tenants were an interesting bunch, all men. Nearly all unemployed.

When they found out I had a car, I was like a rock star. One of the fellows proudly told me that he had a car too. Want to see it? Yeah, sure. So he took me out to the vacant lot next door and showed me an old heap up on blocks, no wheels. It didn't run, but it was his pride and joy.

Contrary to what you hear about the downtown east side now, I saw no drugs, though there was booze. The manager discouraged excessive drinking. He ran a pretty tight ship. One night I was lying in bed and heard drunken voices from down the hall. All of a sudden there was a fearful pounding. "I know you've got a whore in there!" shouted George as he rousted the woman and threw her out.

I put a stop order on my Dare to Be Great check, but somehow the guy I wrote it to managed to cash it anyway. The bank was legally prohibited from accessing my account for the money because of the stop order. So it led to my first and only time being sued a few months later, when the Royal Bank tried to get me to cough up the $400 they were out. I defended myself against the Royal's high powered lawyer and won. Dare to Be Great, by the way, was later outlawed for being a pyramid scheme.

I stayed at the East Pender flophouse until my month was up when I moved to a rooming house in North Van, closer to work. Here I was, thousands of miles from home, setting up on my own. I had a job as an assistant manager at a restaurant. I had a cool car. And I had had an exciting first month that included my first and only time as a squatter, my first plane flight, my first experience with multi-level marketing, my first experience with the self-help movement, and my first experience living in the slums. Life was good!

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