Editor:
Re: “Silent generation speaking out of turn,” Nov. 15.
When I saw the photo of George Skea and his wreath it brought a huge smile to my face. The world needs more Georges. I’ve known him since the ’70s when we were both framing carpenters. He greeted everybody and anybody with a “How’s your body?”
We were building houses side by side, and once Hydro was about four days late setting up power for him. He kept busy digging up stumps, removing rocks, etc. When they arrived, he doffed his cap and said with a huge smile: “Greetings, gentlemen. If I knew you were coming, I would have the coffee on. Glad you could make it.”
He was always upbeat. His wife once told me that he was always like that, even when there was no work, the fridge and cupboards were bare, and there was a pile of bills – he still had the big smile. He told me some stories of his time when he was in the ’56 Suez conflict and things that happened that never made the news.
Yes, we had real characters in the old days here. I remember in the early ’60s when I was aged six to eight. The bay was still a natural tidal bay, no breakwater, no marina, just the government floats that were literally all fishing boats. We would have huge herring runs through there. There was a guy also named George who made Relic look like an extroverted socialite. He showed me how to catch herring as only he could, calling me a stupid little waste of space (polite words) and saying I would never survive a day on my own. He brought me into his 30-foot fish boat to show me how to tie hooks onto my line. That was also his home, which consisted of a piece of plywood for his bed, one pan and a couple of utensils, and one old percolating coffee pot. He used the warmth of his diesel engine to make food. He reheated the same coffee in that pot for days until it was used up.
Then there was an old Finn who wanted to see his daughter in Finland one last time before he died. For months he would walk from Gibsons to the old Penn every day looking for discarded bottles and cans along the roadside and ditches, and through that saved enough money to fulfill his wish.
There were so many colourful characters then – very, very different demographics.
Dale Peterson, Gibsons
