What Do You Want Be When You Grow Up?

By Tony Custode

Sometimes funny, sometimes sad, but always educational, this is one man's journey through a working life that has lasted over sixty years. Woven throughout are tales of some of the characters met and their unique work stories.

Also detailed is the thrill of pursuing, buying and then selling the business he loved and the lessons Tony learned along the way.
The last chapter is a treasure trove of practical advice on how to buy and run any business. Whether you are just starting your work life or are a seasoned professional there is something in here for you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tony Custode
• Release date: Jan 5, 2018
• ISBN: 9781773704555

Book preview

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This book is dedicated to all those who work

and to the four people that it was my privilege to work and provide for: my wife Grace and my three beautiful daughters; Angela, Pia and Tasia.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

EARLY JOBS

WORKING MAN

MOVING ON

LIFE AT GM

OFF TO COLLEGE

A HELPING

HAND OR TWO

FRANK WARD

LIFE AT CARBO

THE CHASE BEGINS

REALITY SETS IN

SELLING MY BABY

LIFE AFTER CARBO

HOW TO BUY AND RUN ANY BUSINESS

INTRODUCTION

I am not a celebrity or a sports star. I am just a guy who grew up in a working class family and had a host of experiences during his working life that I thought might be of some interest to others; so, after sixty-plus years of working, I am writing about some of those experiences.

I got my first job away from home at age thirteen. By away from home, I mean a job that was not in my neighbourhood where a family friend or relative paid you to mow their lawn or wash their car.

That first job was picking fruit on a farm in the summer of 1956. That winter I worked as a pin boy setting pins at a local bowling alley. In my sixty-plus years of working I have been a labourer, a payroll clerk, a personnel manager, a business owner, a business consultant, a labour negotiator and a half-assed farmer, among other things.

The biggest lesson I learned from all this was that while I could not change my gene pool lottery (not being born rich), I could do something about surviving in the work world; hanging onto a paying job and, if necessary, being the last man or woman standing. I found out that to keep earning a living you had to survive in the dog-eat-dog world! You had to have a job to make money and often if you were willing to go the extra mile or do what others would not do, you could survive and keep that pay cheque coming. If I were in the Mafia, I would be considered a good earner; a guy who knows how to make a buck. And while I am not in the Mafia, I am a good earner. Most bosses want an employee with that can do attitude and are willing to pay for it, as this type of employee will make them money.

What follows in this book is a loose history of my ongoing attempts to survive in the working world. Sometimes I just survived and sometimes I thrived! I had good experiences and bad ones; good bosses and bad ones; but through it all I kept on working. Hopefully, anyone reading this book will learn a little from it and apply it to their own working life.

I have not put a lot about my personal life in this book, as that is not the purpose. Suffice it to say, I did have a personal life outside of work that included my marriage to my wonderful wife Grace, and three great kids, Angela, Pia and Tasia and two fabulous grandkids, Isabella and Xavier.

Be inspired by the motto I live by Illegitimi non carborundum or in English Don’t let the bastards grind you down!

Enjoy!

Thorold, Ontario April 24, 2017

CHAPTER 1

EARLY JOBS

Almost all of us remember doing things for money as a child or youngster. If you were like me, your parents didn’t have a lot of money to shower on you and you had to earn some of your own if you wanted more than the basics of food and shelter. To be fair, my parents always gave us two choices at meal time…take it or leave it!

When I was going to high school in the 1950’s, the students or their parents were responsible for buying the textbooks needed as well as the pens, pencils, paper and so on that you would use for each class. Very little was provided by the school. My parents encouraged my sister Angela, my brother Jan, and I to work in the summer to earn enough to pay for the next year’s supplies. This was partly because money was tight and partly because it taught us to respect our school books and supplies since we were paying for them. It still sounds like a good idea to me and perhaps if more kids today had to do this, they might have a better appreciation for money and a better understanding of how earning it can instill a work ethic in you and give you a basic economic lesson: There is no free ride. Somebody, somewhere, has to pay for your education.

As a ten year old I did a variety of things to get spending money as I was not given an allowance by my parents. My parents would give me money if I wanted to go to a show or if I wanted a treat at the store, but it was always specific for a purpose and I never had my OWN money. I learned to mow lawns, wash cars and shovel snow. I thought it was great to have my own money. Pretty soon I even had my own bank account even though the bank wouldn’t put it in my name; it had to be in an adult’s name! I used my mother for my first account until, at age fourteen, the bank let me have my own.

At age thirteen, during the harvest seasons, I tagged along with my brother Jan who was fifteen, to wait at the Unemployment Office in downtown St. Catharines for the farmers to come along and pick a bunch of us to go with them to pick fruit. My mother would pack us a lunch as she said if a farmer saw you were carrying a lunch, he knew you would work the whole day, and your chances of getting picked improved. The farmer would arrive very early, about 6:00 a.m., and he would simply point to you say, get on the truck and away we would go, piling into the back of his pickup truck to be taken to his farm for the day. In the evening, he would drop you off where he picked you up. If you did well, the farmer might ask where you lived and if three or four of us lived in the same area, he would pick us up on a corner in our neighbourhood.

I learned very soon that farming was an unpredictable way to earn money. Sometimes the weather wasn’t right to pick in; sometimes the fruit ran out before noon and we would wait until three or four in the afternoon for our ride back; or, if we wanted, we could walk or hitchhike home. Most times we waited because the farmer paid you every day, at the end of the day, and if you left early you may not be back to that farm again and would not be paid for what you did.

Some fruit was easier to pick than other fruit. Tree fruit was the easiest and strawberries were the hardest, with constant bending. You could make more money picking tree fruit as you were paid by the basket or container for most fruit and you could fill up a basket of peaches or apples much faster than you could fill up a small container of berries. The only job that paid by the hour was driving the tractor. This was really the best job, I thought. You drove around the orchard all day and loaded up the farm wagon with baskets of fruit. Once full, you took it to the sorting table and unloaded it. Then you started your route all over. The first time I was offered the tractor job, I took it! You did not make as much driving as you did picking, but I didn’t care; I hated picking and wasn’t that good at it; so a steady, lower pay was fine by me. And I got to drive the tractor all day at thirteen! How cool was that?

During the summers of the 1950’s, if we saved one or two hundred dollars from our farm jobs we were lucky. This usually paid for our fall school supplies and left a few dollars for spending or saving.

In the winter, I was able to get a job setting pins at the Ace Bowling Alley on Ontario Street, in St. Catharines. This paid much better and was steadier than farm work. In those days, there were few summer leagues, and if there were, the full-time employees had first crack at the jobs. So from ages thirteen to sixteen it was summer on the farms and winter at the bowling alleys.

A friend of my dad’s, Mouse Sacco, was a rink rat at the arena in St. Catharines. As kids, he would tell us to show up at the side door after the first period and he would let us in for free to see the rest of the hockey game. He told us to be cool, don’t cause trouble and stay out of the way and to wait for him when the game was over. Part of his duties was cleaning the ice with a pull behind cart with a tank of hot water and a burlap bag hung over the rear drip pipe, to resurface the ice. Zambonis had not yet been in wide use and three or four guys would pull these hand ice resurfacers around the ice until the whole rink was done. That was done at the end of each period, just like the Zambonis do now. Mouse also swept up the seats and aisles after each event and recruited young boys to sell programs at the events. In return for the free entry to see a game, we helped sweep up the arena!

Mouse was pretty cool and he gave me a job selling programs at both the ice rink in the winter and at the lacrosse bowl in the summer. Unfortunately, he recruited so many kids that individually none of us never really sold a lot of programs; hence we didn’t make very much money, but Mouse got credit for selling a lot of programs. So it was back to the farm in the summer and the bowling alley in winter.

I worked for a man named Bill M. at Ace Bowling Alley on Ontario Street in downtown St. Catharines. The bowling alley had been an opera house around 1900 and the area at the back where we set the pins used to be the old stage.

As a bowling alley, the pin setting area was dark and dank. It smelled strongly of urine; as there were no washrooms for the pin boys to use and when nature called we just peed against one of the walls. It always amazed me that the bowlers couldn’t smell it! But they were about fifty or sixty feet away and the only opening to the pin setting area was to duck under the wall over the pins and crawl to your post; about a three foot gap, so the smell didn’t drift out to the bowlers.

The lanes were split into sets of two; the dividing wall between each two lanes had a notch cut out of it so the pin boy (there were no pin girls in those days) could get from one lane to the other instead of jumping over the wall. The pin boy sat with his legs in this notch and jumped down to whichever lane needed resetting, always paying attention, because a pin could easily fly up and hit you on the shin. A good pin setter could easily handle two lanes. Sometimes when we were short a setter, we would do four lanes and this was quite a challenge as you were constantly dodging balls and pins to go from one lane to the other. It was really hard to keep up doing four lanes and bowlers would sometimes get frustrated but there was no other choice, it was either one guy do four lanes and cause a bit of a delay or don’t bowl!

All the pins had a hole in the bottom and this hole was placed on a peg that came out of the floor when you stepped on a foot pedal. The pedal raised ten pegs and if you were doing ten pins, you placed one pin on all ten pegs; if you were doing five pins, you only placed five.

Ten pins were larger and heavier than five pins. Also, in ten pin bowling each bowler got a maximum of two balls per frame; whereas in five pin, it was three balls. The ten pin balls were also bigger and heavier than the five pin balls.

A good setter could pick up three five pins in one hand and two in the other and could reset all five pins with a sweeping motion. It was pretty quick. With ten pins most guys could only grab two pins in each hand and it required three or four sweeps to place all ten pins. So setting ten pins was harder and a little slower. It also paid a bit more than setting five pins.

This whole pin setting process was called manual setting. In later years, when I worked at Parkway Lanes setting pins, a semi-automatic pin setter was used. This was basically a cage-like machine that was above the lane and you filled the cage with the pins instead of placing them on the floor pins, as in manual setting. Once the cage was full (either with five or ten pins) you pulled a string and the cage set the pins on the lane. It was a much faster system and each setter could now do four lanes instead of two. In manual and semi-automatic lanes, the setter still had to manually return the balls. They were placed on an elevated rail running between each two lanes and push-started to roll back up the alley to where the bowlers were. Again, a good setter would cradle two, five pin balls in one arm and one in the other hand and in one motion could send all three balls back up the return track. In ten pin bowling, the setter would grab one large ball, hold it to his chest, grab the other ball and then cup one hand under each ball and place them on the return rail together. Both types of returning balls were very similar to cradling a baby in your arms, close to your chest and then sliding it onto the rails so it could be sent sliding up to the bowlers only to be hurled down the alley again!

Setting pins manually was by far the hardest physical work I have ever done. You jumped over the small wall between alleys; you bent over and picked up balls off the floor; you stretched out fully to replace the pins and did this over and over again! The only break came when the league you were setting for finished and another league came to take their place. Most nights you set for two leagues and often after the league you could, and would, set for individual bowlers.

A few years after I quit working in bowling alleys, the pin setting became fully automatic with a machine that could set the pins and return the balls. All the pin boys were replaced by one technician who could look after the whole bowling alley and do other jobs as well. This was one of the first examples of automation replacing workers. A twenty lane bowling alley needed ten pin setters when manual setting was used; this became five with semi-automatics and one with fully automatic machines. This modernization took place from about 1957 to 1965.

You can’t really blame the bowling alley owners. Pin boys were at the low end of the social-economic scale, being paid piece work that about equaled minimum wage and most were either new immigrants who really needed to work or were students like me. There were very few full-time pin boys other than recent immigrants. Almost all of them were also unreliable because if they found other work, they took it. I was quite reliable as I needed and wanted the job, but once I found other, better paying work I, too, was gone.

One fellow I worked with early on at Ace was Al. One night while working beside me, he asked me to watch his two lanes for a minute or two. We did this for each other if, for example, a guy had to pee. I thought that was what he needed to do. Instead, he stood up, took out his left eye, spit on it and put it back in! Up until then I didn’t even know he had a glass eye! I must have looked surprised because he said to me that when it got hot, like it was that night, his glass eye dried up and he had to lubricate it or it would get irritated and he would not be able to continue working. Who knew? Not me. Most of the rest of the fellows I worked with were Italian immigrants who needed to work and they would work in the bowling alley in the winter and farms in the summer. There were no handouts for them, or for me. If you wanted money, you worked. In their case, it meant feeding their families as well. At least I was still at home and wouldn’t have starved!

The Italians were always gambling and playing cards on their lunch breaks or when there were no bowlers and no work. They played a game called sep de mets; which I learned was called Seven-and-a-Half in English. I don’t remember all the rules but they said it was popular in Italy and they only played for nickels, so no one got too badly hurt.

Speaking of nickels, that’s how Bill paid us; in rolls of nickels. This was because he had put in two pinball machines and each took a nickel to play. If you beat a certain score on the machine, you would win free replays worth a nickel each. If you wanted, Bill would pay you a nickel each for each free game you racked up on a machine. This was illegal at the time as it was gambling. A lot of times many of us would spend our whole pay on these pinball machines, hoping to win. As with all gambling, the house always won!

To ensure that you would play these pinball machines, Bill’s girlfriend and counter girl would come and stand behind anyone playing the machines and she made sure to rub her ample breasts into your back. This always encouraged us to play as long as we could. If she got a customer we would wait until she served him before returning to our game. She always made it seem like an accident that she was rubbing against you and she would never flirt or accept any advances from any of us. This was a shame as she was quite a bit younger than Bill and was closer to our age. It didn’t hurt that she was a real good looking, well-built young lady!

In spite of Bill’s wanting to get back some of what he paid you, he was a pretty good boss. He appreciated the hard work we did and if needed, he protected us. One night I had just finished setting for my second and last league of the night when Bill asked if I would stay and set pins for three young men who wanted to bowl. I agreed, as often when you set for these late nighters, they would throw a tip down the alley when they were done in appreciation of you staying late to set for them.

The three were bowling five pins and it became clear very quickly that they were trouble. Instead of waiting until I set the pins, they would throw the next ball down while I was still in the pit setting the pins. At first, I thought it might be because they didn’t know much about bowling but after two or three times of nearly getting hit by a ball I realized they were trying to hit me. So the next time one of them threw a ball when I was setting the pins, I picked it up and threw it as hard as I could back up the alley at them! I then crawled out from behind my setting spot and walked up the lane to the public washroom to wash up. I told them I was finished for the night. They were pissed! I did not see them follow me into the washroom and as I was bending over the sink to wash my face, two of them grabbed my arms from behind and held me while the third punk was preparing to punch me. Fortunately for me, Bill, my boss, did see them follow me into the washroom and just as the punk was ready to hit me, the door burst open and Bill rushed in and in one motion kicked the punk as hard as he could right in the ass. I was never so happy to see a boss! Bill told the three of them to leave and never come back. He asked me if I was okay and once he saw I was fine he said he would pay me for the three games the punks had paid for even though the trouble started during the first game.

I left Ace and went to work for Archie Katzman at Parkway Lanes further down on Ontario Street in St. Catharines. Parkway was fairly new at the time and Archie treated the pin boys much better than we were used to at Ace. He provided a pin boy room with actual lunch tables and lockers for the setters. He paid in bills as opposed to nickels and did not have pinball machines to take back your hard earned money. Shortly after I started there, Archie converted to semi-automatic pin setting machines. As stated earlier, this made the job much easier for the pin boys, but it also cut the number of setters needed by more than fifty percent as each pin setter could now work four or even six lanes.

For most of my pin boy career, I was going to high school. It was winter as a pin boy and summer on the farms. One exception was when I was sixteen and about to enter grade twelve that fall; my brother Jan and I were lucky enough to get enlisted in the 44th Field Regiment Reserves. I didn’t think I was that lucky at the time but the experiences I had and lessons I learned as a member of the 44th would serve me well for the rest of my life!

We went home every night and reported early every morning to the Armory on Lake Street in St. Catharines. We were treated as close to new recruits as they could manage. We were issued regulation army uniforms, were trained to march together, were given survival and gun training. We basically had to do whatever a new recruit would do upon entering the army.

We were paid via a pay parade where we all lined up in formation and the paymaster would call out each of our names and we would march, quick step, up to his table, salute him and be given our cheque. If you did not do it properly or were sloppy in any way, the paymaster would order you to return to your formation and you would have to wait until all the other soldiers were paid before you were called again. If you did it right, you saluted again after getting your cheque and the paymaster would say dismissed and you were to march out of the Armory in a smart and soldierly fashion as you were finished for the day.

We brought our own lunches and were allowed – no, ordered, to eat only in the mess hall. The mess hall had its own set of rules. Only privates and non-coms (non-commissioned officers) were allowed in our mess. Non-coms included corporals (two stripes on their arms) and sergeants (three stripes). If a commissioned officer wanted to come into our mess, he had to stand at the doorway and shout permission to enter. If one of us said permission granted he could come in. We were told never to deny such permission as the officer in question would make your life hell if you did so. No officer ever requested permission during my eight weeks in the reserves. Officers had their own mess and we were never to go in theirs or to even ask to go in!

Upon entering the mess, you must remove your hat (beret), any gun you were carrying and your belt. We were told the mess was a place of rest and peace and no weapons of any kind were allowed. You might think that a belt was not a weapon, but you would be wrong. We were taught that our three inch wide web belts with the large brass buckle could indeed be used as a weapon. If you wrapped it around one hand and punched someone with it, it could do a lot of damage, similar to brass knuckles. You could also use it like a whip and flay an enemy with it, especially if you held the non-buckle end, allowing the buckle to become like a sharp rock on a rope when it struck your enemy. The belt could also be used to pull or haul things and as a lifeline to a drowning man. It could be used to tie up a prisoner or to tie two prisoners together. It was much, much more than an item used to hold up your pants! So…no belts in the mess hall.

We were also taught to use a rifle while in the 44th, 803 Enfields. Prior to firing it, you had to practice dismantling and cleaning it. If you could not completely dismantle and reassemble it in less than one minute, you were not allowed to go to the gun range and fire it.

Once allowed on the range, everything was done in a precise, orderly fashion. We had to do exactly as our sergeant said or our gun was taken away and you were put on shit parade. Shit parade was the army’s way of punishing you. In the movies you often see soldiers being put on KP duties. KP was Kitchen Patrol and meant you washed dishes or peeled potatoes or did some other menial task the camp cook assigned you. Since we never had a real kitchen, there was no KP duty for us. Shit Parade was the next best thing as far as the sergeant was concerned and it often was cleaning or polishing the Armory floor, sometimes with a toothbrush! That’s right, a toothbrush. The idea wasn’t so much to get the floor clean as it was to humiliate and give the soldier a task he could not complete to teach him to follow orders without question. That was drilled into us over and over: follow orders, no questions.

The firing range was at the Canadian Department of Defense’s Niagara-on-the-Lake site. This was a large site and in addition to a large firing range, it had a large bush where we were taught map reading, survival skills and how to recognize landmarks to allow you