Howard Kessler, reporter (1914-2010)

Howard Kessler in 1954. BELOW: A page from the family scrapbook.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
March 6, 2010

VICTORIA

A week after his marriage to a pretty co-ed, Howard Kessler conjured an idea that placed his name in newspapers throughout the continent.

The young Alberta-born student was studying journalism at the University of Oregon in 1936, a year in which Depression hardships gave rise to faddish pastimes and eccentric movements.

Mr. Kessler and his bride, the former Edith Davis, a home economics student known as Edie, formed a campus organization called the “Two-Can-Live-As-Cheaply-As-One Association.” The idea was for married students to test the age-old adage by making bulk purchases and sharing the rent of large apartments.

Everyone scrimped in those days, so the eager young couple’s experiment with thrift gained wide publicity. Their tongue-in-cheek use of a pared-down acronym — T.C.L.A.C.A. — amused reporters who included the unwieldy shorthand in their copy.

The initial reports garnered hundreds of letters from other students eager to follow their example.

The president of the university, the aptly named C. Valentine Boyer, encouraged the success of the campus association, as married students scored on average a 20-per-cent higher grade than other undergraduates.

The fledgling group even invited the abdicated monarch, the Duke of Windsor, and Mrs. Wallis Simpson to become honourary members.

“I see a national organization with affiliated branches in many universities and having headquarters from which the organization will be directed,” Mr. Kessler told the Lethbridge Herald seven weeks after his marriage.

The grand dream never happened. A final newspaper nod to their adventure came with the birth of their daughter, Stephanie, in 1938, which received coverage even in Click, a magazine with a wide circulation. The Oregonian in Portland published a photo of the parents and their baby beneath a headline reading: “Two-can-live-as-cheaply plan complicated.”

Howard Eugene Kessler was the son of Lulu Bell and Anson Kessler, who settled on a 960-acre farm in Alberta just north of the border with Montana. The Kesslers hailed from a family of barrel manufacturers from Dayton, Ohio, arriving on the Canadian Prairies in 1909. He soon had a steam plow and six four-horse teams working his spread, most of which was planted with winter wheat. In time, the elder Kessler became an insurance agent.

From a young age, the boy made known his desire to be a journalist. At age 16, while attending Lethbridge Collegiate Institute, he wrote for the school newsletter, called the Ballyhoo.

He left Alberta to study journalism in Eugene, Ore., where he met his future wife, a student from North Dakota. He took a break after his first year to travel through Europe, a journey during which he wrote several long reports for his hometown newspaper.

His first dispatch in 1934 described the arrival in London of Princess Marina of Greece and Denmark for her pending marriage to the Duke of Kent. After culling 13 daily newspapers in the capital, the tyro reporter bemoans the overwhelming interest in the hat worn by the princess, a concern that bumped coverage of constitutional reforms in India to inside pages.

He visited France, Germany, Switzerland, Spain and Morocco, sometimes passing days without eating. He spent a month touring southern England by bike, train and on foot, finding a land struggling with the ravages of the Depression.

“The tin mines of Cornwall, great gashes in the earth, are nearly all deserted and the machinery shipped to South Africa for use,” he wrote. “The fisheries, which especially along the east coast, are the principle sustenance of English seagirt towns, are poor and ailing, hard hit by the most disastrous fishing season in history.”

A recreational tennis player himself, Mr. Kessler interviewed the great Bill Tilden while dining on roast beef at the Savoy Hotel. “I came away impressed by the vitality, the versatility and the good common sense of this champion who stands undisputed, the monarch of all champions of the tennis Valhalla,” he wrote.

Mr. Kessler also spent time in a Spanish cabaret with Charles Zimmy, a man whose feats he first marveled at in a Ripley’s “Believe It Or Not” item. A sideshow attraction billed as The Human Fish and The Legless Wonder, Mr. Zimmy lost both limbs as a boy after falling beneath a Chicago streetcar. He became an world-renowned marathon swimmer, setting marks for distance and for hours immersed in the sea.

Mr. Kessler wrote that he found his time with the swimmer so engrossing that he barely noticed as the cabaret’s dancing girls swayed nearby. (The Herald displayed the article under the tasteless headline, “No pulling his leg.”) Two years later, Mr. Zimmy, his torso coated in grease as protection against numbing cold, broke his own records by swimming from Albany to New York over several days without ever leaving the Hudson River.

Mr. Kessler returned home by ocean liner to New York, after which he hitchhiked to Washington, DC, before continuing to Kansas and north to Lethbridge.

On his return, he warned the Herald that Huey Long was the most dangerous man in American politics, so great was his popularity among the disenfranchised. The Louisiana senator was assassinated three months later. Mr. Kessler also reported that the administration of Franklin Roosevelt was losing support. “Too much going up blind alleys and then backing up,” Mr. Kessler said, though his prediction proved wildly wrong, as the president won overwhelming re-election a year later.

In 1938, he wrote a humorous article for Movie Mirror magazine in which he described meeting Hollywood stars on luxury liners about to depart for vacations in Hawaii. He poses a question to one pint-sized star, only to have Shirley Temple complain, “But Mamma, I thought this was a holiday!” He also posed beside Robert Taylor, the handsome leading man of “Magnificent Obsession,” and interviewed Groucho Marx, who lifted a pant leg as a bit of burlesque for photographers.

After graduating with a science degree specializing in journalism, Mr. Kessler packed his young family into a motor trailer and began a cross-continental journey in 1939. They drove through the Appalachian states before heading south to Florida and west through the Gulf states into Texas. It had been his idea to write a book about the journey, but the travel proved to be too taxing and the trek was aborted.

He launched a newspaper called the Mill City Log in an unincorporated lumber town on the North Santiam River about 90 kilometres south of Portland. It did not last long.

Mr. Kessler worked as a reporter for newspapers in Portland and Bend, Ore., as well as in Petaluma and Sacramento, Calif. He spent many years with the California Farm Bureau.

In 1965, he moved to Victoria, where he opened Poor Richard’s Books, stocking the shelves with his sizable personal library. His wife opened her own storefront operation in the suburbs in which she specialized in inexpensive paperbacks. The bookstore was sold in 1976 and the couple retired the following year, returning to the wandering that marked so much of their life. They counted 50 different addresses in a half-century of peripatetic curiosity.

Mr Kessler was a thrifty, energetic and optimistic character, always eager to try out a scheme, even if so many proved to be pipe dreams.

He maintained a series of notebooks in which he chronicled his adventures. He kept every letter he received and every missive he sent dating back to 1934.

Howard Eugene Kessler was born on Nov. 10, 1914, at New Dayton, Alta. He died on Jan. 8 at Surrey, B.C. He was 95. He leaves a daughter, Stephanie Belanger, of Ferndale, Wash.; a grandson; a granddaughter; and, a great-grandson. He was predeceased by his wife of 72 years, the former Edith Davis, known as Edie, who died in White Rock, B.C., on Aug. 9, 2009.

Bob Chakales, baseball player (1927-2010)

Bob Chakales appears in a 1955 baseball card with the Chicago White Sox. BELOW: Chakales with the Cleveland Indians, as shown on his 1952 Topps card.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
March 5, 2010

The baseball career of Bob Chakales, so full of promise, seemed jinxed.

After six seasons of toil in the minor leagues, he got called up by the Cleveland Indians, only to find himself as the extra man in a renowned rotation. He wound up exiled to the bullpen.

When he at last got a chance to be a regular starter, he had the great misfortune of being plagued by nagging injuries.

He hurt his arm, developed aches in his elbow, winced from a sore back.

By the time he arrived in Toronto in 1959, reporters knew about his history. “Through adversity may come a star,” reported the Globe. The pitcher is “an antidote for frustration,” pronounced the Star.

Mr. Chakales — his name was pronounced “shackles,” appropriate considering his hard-luck background — pitched for baseball’s Toronto Maple Leafs for three seasons. He had a supporting role in the team’s spectacular 1960 championship season.

Mr. Chakales looked every bit a ballplayer. Tall, handsome and blond-haired, with a crooked nose hinting at an accident in his past, he stood 6-foot-1, weighed 185 pounds. He was known as Chick and, for his fair colouring and ethnic heritage, The Golden Greek.

Born in North Carolina, he was a star athlete at Benedictine High in Richmond, Va. He was named All-State in baseball, basketball, and football.

The Philadelphia Phillies signed him as an amateur free agent at age 17 in 1945, assigning him to the Class B Wilmington (Del.) Blue Rocks. His signing bonus was $12,500, a generous sum he thought until the Brooklyn Dodgers offered him twice as much too late the following day.

He was drafted and missed a season fulfilling his military obligations with the U.S. Army.
It was during spring training in 1948 that he hurt his arm.

A few years later, Baseball Digest would describe the circumstances, presenting his words in an approximation of his Southern accent.

“Ah was tryin’ to snap a cu’ve an’ Ah snapped mah arm,” he said. “Mah arm was rilly soah. I tol’ em ‘bout it an’ they said, ‘Keep throwin’, it’ll work out.’ Instead it got soah and soah. I culd hahdly lift the ball.”

The pitching prospect fell into some bad habits, indulgences made possible by the dwindling supply of bonus money.

“Ah became a playboy. Ah learned how in the Army. Ah got out of shape.”

The Cleveland Indians selected him in the minor-league draft three years later. He finally got promoted to the parent club in 1951. He recorded three wins and four losses in his rookie campaign, cementing two of those victories with his own timely hitting.

Though delighted with the opportunity, it was his misfortune to join a veteran pitching staff including Bob Feller (22 victories in 1951), Early Wynn (20), Mike Garcia (20) and Bob Lemon (17). The stellar quartet of right-handers forced Mr. Chakales to the bullpen as a relief pitcher, a role which he felt did not allow for a full demonstration of his pitching repertoire. He possessed a decent fastball, an ordinary changeup and a wicked curve. He worked on but never mastered a knuckleball he described as a slip-pitch.

The pitcher was beginning his fourth season with the Indians when traded to the Baltimore Orioles for first baseman Vic Wertz. His old club went on to win the American League pennant with 111 victories. His new club lost 100 games.

Mr. Chakales also pitched for the Washington Senators, Boston Red Sox and Chicago White Sox over parts of seven seasons, compiling a 15-25 record with a 4.54 earned-run average.

He was a welcome presence in the clubhouse and as an easy-going player likely to offer a reporter on deadline a good quotation.

It is said he once promoted himself with the tongue-in-cheek statement, “First came Hercules, then came Socrates, then came Chakales, the greatest Greek of all.”

His career was in decline by the time the Maple Leafs added him to the roster. He undoubtedly was happy to wear the uniform, as Toronto had been responsible for four of his six defeats the previous season.

His first act with his new employer was to hold out and refuse to sign a contract, as he was one of the International League players leading a campaign to improve pension provisions in contract language. “No sign for ’59” was the slogan. As it turned out, Mr. Chakales made holding out for better pay an annual rite of spring training.

In 1960, the Leafs won 100 games thanks to a robust pitching staff fronted by Riverboat Smith and Al Cicotte, who led the league in wins, strikeouts and ERA. Mr. Chakales went 9-3 working as both a starter and a reliever.

A sore shoulder limited his action early in the 1961 season. He came off the disabled list in spectacular fashion in May, defeating the Richmond Virginians, his hometown team, 3-0, while also managing to knock in what would be the winning run.

He was traded to Hawaii the following month, a destination the dream of many ball players. Yet, for Mr. Chakales, the assignment meant he would be even farther from his family. So desperate was his new team for pitching that he was ordered to grab a charter flight in San Francisco on which the owner was also flying to the islands a troupe of hula dancers. The hurried departure meant the Leafs did not have an opportunity to hold a night honouring the likable player. He was 20-14 in three seasons with the Maple Leafs.

After 16 professional seasons of baseball, Mr. Chakales worked in insurance before becoming a builder and designer of more than 200 golf courses, many of them in Virginia. He also worked on the famed Sawgrass course at Ponte Vedra, Fla.

Though reporters liked to write about his unlucky progress, the pitcher did not care to indulge the notion he had been an underachiever.

“I don’t believe in complaining about the good things that didn’t happen to me,” he told the Toronto Star’s Milt Dunnell in 1959. “I’m grateful for the things that did come my way. If I ever start getting sorry for myself, I think of my father. He brought up a family of five on $16 a week.”

Robert Edward (Chick) Chakales was born on Aug. 10, 1927, at Asheville, N.C. He died on Feb. 18 at Richmond, Va. His was 82. He leaves his wife, Anne; two sons; three daughters; 10 grandchildren; three great-grandchildren; and, a brother. He was predeceased by three brothers.

Youth of tomorrow get taste of Vancouver Island's past

Tara Saracuse displays the cover of "Island Kids" on a computer screen. Photograph by The Martlet. BELOW: Emma Stark as a girl.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
March 4, 2010

VICTORIA

Tara Saracuse remembers history being taught as a dry list of dates and events. Kings and things in seventeen-seventy-something.

Or maybe that was eighteen-eighty-something.

Only in the final years of high school did a couple of exceptional teachers help her realize history told the stories of real people.

“It was hard for me to digest all those names and places and dates,” she said. “All those events were abstractions in my mind.”

Ms. Saracuse, 22, will complete a degree in creative writing at the University of Victorian next month. She is a rare undergraduate to have published her first book before earning a sheepskin.

Written for ages 8 and up, “Island Kids” is history of the most memorable kind — stories about Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands told through the eyes and words of the real-life children who experienced those times.

The book includes 22 narratives, from a Haida creation story to Luna the Whale swimming in the waters at Gold River.

The young writer does not shy from unhappy events, including stories about residential schools and the internment of the Japanese-Canadians during the Second World.

Some of the other events described include the Ladysmith Chocolate Strike of 1947 and the tsunami that washed through the streets of Port Alberni in 1964.

One of the more remarkable tales told is of little Emma Stark, the daughter of former American slaves who moved to Salt Spring Island to avoid the bounty hunters in California. She attended classes in a log schoolhouse where her teacher was John Craven Jones, a graduate of Oberlin College in Ohio.

The schoolmaster offered his charges instruction in Latin, philosophy and human rights, a rich education that would have been the envy of even some of the wealthiest white citizens in nearby Victoria.

Two black men were later murdered on the Stark farm, mysteries unsolved to this day, so the family fled to a more remote locale.

“The story tries to imagine what it would have been like for her to be in so wild a place, so untamed,” Ms. Saracuse said.

The girl eventually moved to Vancouver Island with her father, Louis, in about 1875, becoming a teacher herself at Cedar, south of Nanaimo. She died in 1890, aged 33.

The Stark’s family tale can be told because her mother, Sylvia, left reminiscences rich in detail about family life.

While the children’s history book is described as creative non-fiction, the author has composed a fictitious conversation among the Stark children. The end of each story includes a section titled “What do we know for sure?” in which the fictive is separated from the historical.

Ms. Saracuse would like readers to imagine themselves as bystanders as the events take place, from watching a young Emily Carr avoid being trampled by cattle to a boy delivering groceries on a bicycle.

“I want them to connect with Vancouver Island as a place. I think we live on an amazing island. Amazing for its culture and its sheer natural beauty.

“What was once a wild, untamed land is now a wonderful dichotomy of civilization and nature. We are so lucky.”

The book assignment came in a most fortuitous manner. Working on a term paper for a university writing class, Ms. Saracuse interviewed the author Linda Goyette and the publisher Ruth Linka. The pair, as it turned out, were looking for a writer for the third in a series of books. The undergraduate was invited to join the project, resulting in the release last month of “Island Kids.” The book got written, but the paper never got finished.

The author describes her good fortune in connecting with the publisher as “planned happenstance.” After graduating, Ms. Saracuse will begin a new job as an assistant to Ms. Linka at Brindle & Glass, a Victoria-based publishing house.

A self-described “seeker of information,” Ms. Saracuse traveled north to Courtenay to interview Norman Leung, through whose eyes the amazing story of Cumberland’s Chinatown is told. Mr. Leung offered a tour of his garden and introduced her to his wife, before offering a spellbinding accounting of life in a Chinatown of which little remains today though it was once said to have rivaled San Francisco’s in size.

Mr. Leung’s father had come to Cumberland to be a miner, though low wages and deplorable safety standards led him to instead take up the long hours of being a green grocer. The family’s vegetables were peddled from a truck with twice-a-week deliveries.

“He told me wild stories about the fan-tan houses and the Chinese medicine stores, the sounds and the smells,” she said.

His tales were not without melancholy. She asked him about playing. He could not remember doing so, as his days were filled with work. Riding a bicycle to run errands was as close as he came to a carefree pastime.

Mr. Leung eventually opened a grocery in nearby Courtenay, complete with a lunch counter with stools. The family store became a well-known landmark until the patriarch retired about three years ago.

The ancient grocer, old enough to be Ms. Saracuse’s great-grandfather, brought history to life.

Tara Saracuse will be reading from “Island Kids” (Brindle & Glass) at 1:15 p.m. on Thursday at the Esquimalt Library.

A playground for dead-tree products

The spectacular interior of Munro's Books in Victoria.

By Tom Hawthorn
Boulevard Magazine
March/April, 2010

Skip up the steps from the west sidewalk of Government Street, place a hand on the brass handle, pull open the doors to heaven.

Inside is a shrine of commerce of the most edifying kind.

A bookcase holding the latest trade paperbacks appears straight ahead, the brilliant covers miniature masterpieces of the graphic designer’s art. The case is one among dozens that line all walls and create aisles throughout the store.

Some books are presented spine only, a demure presentation made necessary by the sheer number of volumes at hand.

Every title carries the possibility of a transcendent experience. (OK, a copy of "Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Puzzle Book #3" might challenge so high-falutin’ a concept.) Change your life, have a laugh, time travel, build a shelf, plant a garden. No wonder books are a delight.

My all-time favourite bookstore — and I have visited many over the years — is Munro’s Books, a playground for any who love the printed word on dead-tree products such as this.

A measure of a city is the quality of its retail merchants. Some places become known for certain goods — Milan for high fashion, or Taxco, in Mexico, for silver. Our city still carries a reputation as a far corner of Olde England with tattered Union Jacks, a tiger skin over the fireplace at the Bengal Lounge, cosies over the pots at the tea rooms. That’s all fine, if a little hokey. A better reflection of who we are is that the people of this city support a variety of excellent independent bookstores.

Munro’s downtown is joined by Bolen Books at Hillside Mall and such smaller neighbourhood stores as Tanner’s Books in Sidney, Ivy’s Book Shop on Oak Bay Avenue and the Cadboro Bay Book Campany, not to mention a selection of shops specializing in children’s literature and crime books.

We’re readers and these stores provide our sustenance.

Just stepping into Munro’s makes me feel like one of the faithful on a pilgrimage. Pillars rise almost eight metres to hold up a coffered ceiling designed to resemble that found in the ruins of the Roman library at Ephesus.

Not familiar with ancient architecture? They’ve got books about that.

My route into the store always follows the same path — go to the right of the front desk, past the new releases, to the mid-rear of the store, where magazines were added some years ago. Sitting at my computer, I can map the store as easily as my own home. The children’s section is in a nook in the far corner. Bought my daughter some Harry Potter volumes there. The classics section rests just before the entrance. Humour is against a rear wall (should you need a bathroom reader), as is fantasy.

Literature is along the south wall, though the substantial poetry section has its own place on the north wall, not far from the history section. Music is hidden away near the foyer.

In the centre are tables upon which rest stacks of publishers’ rejects, orphans of a fickle trade. One local political columnist describes this part of the store as the “free book table,” so inexpensive are the volumes whose remaindered status is dictated less by their literary quality than by the cost of warehouse space.

A bookstore is no more than bricks and books without a staff. You never know when the clerk chasing down the latest Dan Brown exercise in typing is a published author of greater talent, if not necessarily popularity and certainly not riches. At Munro’s, Deborah Willis is the author of Vanishing and Other Stories, a first collection that was nominated last year for a Governor General’s award. At Bolen’s, Robert Wiersema, who, as the store’s events coordinator handles author readings and signings, is also the author of the best-selling novel, Before I Wake, as well as The World More Full of Weeping, a novella published last fall.

Harder to find a more erudite crew outside a campus than bookstore workers. My visits to Munro’s have included conversations about music, sports and politics. And when I’m tweaked about the sad state of the newspaper industry, I counter with accounts of the perils of the book trade.

The independent stores have survived the rise of the Internet, the arrival of big-box rivals and the rising Canadian dollar, which made a mockery of the prices printed months earlier on dust jackets. The latest challenge is the advent of portable readers with their Age of the Jetsons’ promise of eliminating physical books.

Munro’s has been in business for 46 years, a longevity owing much to the vision of the eponymous founder. Jim Munro, who is 80, left a steady job at a department store to open a paperback bookstore with his wife, the former Alice Laidlaw. The business has lasted longer than their marriage, though they remain on good terms. Why, you can find more than 20 Alice Munro titles among the stock, including editions in French and German.

The proprietor’s best decision came in 1984 when he bought the neo-classical bank building that is now the store’s home. He has thus avoided the fluctuations of retail rents and the whims of a landlord.

I do not believe I have ever left the store empty-handed, often indulging my weakness for doorstopper-sized works of history. The intent is to be rewarded with a good read and a glass of red wine after a hard day's keyboard labours, though often enough the books wind up in stacks on the floor of the home office. Over time, these teetering stalagmites mock me for my intentions. Oh, “Shock Doctrine,” you were once top of the list, but now you seem so last year. “Stalin's War,” you've been in the pile longer than the siege of Stalingrad. I promise to get to you, “Best American Magazine Writing of the Year, 2009,” as soon as I find out the date of the apocalypse from “Have a Nice Doomsday: Why Millions of Americans are Looking Forward to the End of the World.”

Drop the puck

Archivists cast wide net for collecting Games history

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
February 25, 2010

This is how the archivist Courtney Mumma spent her summer.

She hung out at a company's office, listened in on meetings, watched staff play volleyball after eating lunch outdoors at picnic tables.

She peppered them with hundreds of questions, polite but incisive. She wanted to know how the project and information management team handled their records. What did they keep? How did they store it? Where was it all logged?

When the Olympics come to an end, when the Games' organizing committee (VANOC) has completed its work, its voluminous records - minutes, memos, e-mails - will wind up in the hands of the City of Vancouver Archives.

Ms. Mumma, 34, who graduated with a masters degree less than a year ago, was invited by VANOC to study the organization.

It is believed to be the first time Olympic planners and the future repository of their records have worked together.

Thrilled though they are to handle the records, the staff at the Vancouver Archives know the official papers will tell only part of the story.

So, they've put out a call for any group affected by the Games to consider donating their records to the archives, too.

"We're casting a really wide net," Ms. Mumma said. "At this point, we're open to everyone."

Archivists take a neutral position on controversial issues. They are interested in facts. They love primary material. They are masters of metadata.

Their lives are such that phrases like "large event methodology" and "controlled environment storage areas" pepper ordinary conversation.

Guided by a code of ethics, they value objectivity to such a degree it would shame all but a handful of journalists.

Archivists solve mysteries, says archives manager Heather Gordon. "It's like playing detective all day long," she added.

While the call for donations to the Olympic archive does not encourage any specific group to contribute, it is easy to imagine a wish list for future researchers - documents from media outlets, tourism groups, hotel and restaurant associations, as well as advocates for the poor and the homeless.

Sensitive information can even be restricted for a period of time.

Few will be aware of the city archives' success in handling the records of Vancouver community groups.

It has papers from the Downtown Business Association; the Gay Alliance Towards Equality; the committee organizing celebrations for the city's diamond jubilee in 1946; from the citizens who opposed urban renewal in Strathcona, saving Chinatown from the wrecking ball; and, the group that stopped development at the entrance to Stanley Park.

It also has the earliest documents from the Don't Make A Wave Committee, which became Greenpeace.

The archives in Vanier Park include a large storage area not open to the public. An entire aisle of shelving has been left open for Olympic records.

On her first visit to the archives, as a graduate student, Ms. Mumma noticed the empty shelves, which, as it turned out, she has since been hired to fill.

There's plenty of space for community group contributions, since most of the VANOC records will be digital.

Ms. Mumma, who describes herself as an army brat, was born at Cape May Court House, N.J., but grew up in Texas. She graduated from the University of British Columbia last May.

She's enjoyed the happy crowds downtown, marvels at the spirit of the city.

Her big Olympic event so far involved riding the zipline across Robson Square the other morning. She arrived at 8 a.m. The reward for three hours of queueing: "Eighteen seconds of bliss."

It was a rare moment of derring-do for someone whose work day involves the preservation of records for future generations.

That might seem a dry occupation. Those who do it do so because they believe in an informed citizenry.

"I became an archivist," Ms.Mumma said, "because I want to be a part of a society that doesn't forget."

As if any of us - pro or con, thrilled or disgusted - could forget the events of the past month. Thanks to the archivists, we will have a fuller understanding in future of what we're experiencing.

Ice masters

Tracy Seitz at the Whistler Sliding Centre in the summer of 2009.

By Tom Hawthorn
Vancouver 2010 Official Souvenir Program

Tracy Seitz leans against a railing. From his perch midway up Blackcomb Mountain, he overlooks Whistler Village in a stunning valley vista framed by nature with mountains as a backdrop. On a warm June afternoon, he is alone save for a visitor and a young male black bear, who, as our sports truck’s engine roared on the way up, barely glanced from his solitary forage.

The warm air was still. Only the chirping of birds could be heard from this crow’s nest.

How different it all would be in just seven months.

Spectators in their thousands will cheer from bleachers. Television cameras will capture the spectacular view, an image certain to thrill broadcasters and a worldwide audience.

The athletes for whom this vantage point was constructed will be too busy to sightsee. They will be concentrating instead on the icy path they face and the few, fleeting milliseconds that will be the difference between infamy and glory.

As he rested at the start area for the bobsleigh, skeleton, and men’s luge, Seitz traced the winding course in the air with a forefinger. All the crooked twists and turns follow a perilous drop here that will give pause to even the bravest daredevil. Like the black tees for professionals on a golf course, or the launching pad at Cape Canaveral, this is not for the faint hearted.

“The speeds here are like nowhere else,” Seitz said

In a competition preceding the Winter Olympics, a luge athlete set a course record of 153.98 km/h (95.68 m.p.h.). A fellow could get to Vancouver in a hurry at that speed.

The athletes careening at such breakneck speeds do so atop a ribbon of artificial ice no thicker than two fingers pressed together.

The responsibility for maintaining this slippery surface falls to Seitz and his crackerjack crew of scrapers and groomers. He is the ice meister of the Whistler Sliding Centre, a demanding job for which there is no quitting time. The ice always demands attention.

“If you’re a perfectionist,” he says, “if you’re never satisfied, then this is the job for you.”

He has been doing this rare job for so long, has become so familiar with minute differences in ice quality that he judges the quality of the ice not with his eyes, but with his ears.

Seitz, who turns 40 later this year [2010], discovered the sport that would become his life’s calling as a teenager in his Calgary birthplace in 1988. After the Games, a younger brother asked to be taken to the venue. In time, Tyler Seitz became an Olympian and won a bronze at a luge World Cup event on his home track, the first Canadian man to win a medal at the highest level of the sport.

(A third brother, Trevor, became involved in moviemaking. His first movie credit came by working on “Cool Runnings,” the Disney movie about the Jamaican bobsled team, unlikely heroes of the Calgary Olympics.)

Seitz served as track master at Bear Hollow for the 2002 Salt Lake Olympics, a difficult task at high altitude, as it seemed to him “like we’re almost touching the sun, it’s so hot,” he told a reporter at the time.

He belongs to one of the world’s most exclusive fraternities, as only a handful of technicians take on the arduous task of ice preparation. Among his counterparts for the Vancouver Olympics is Kameron Kiland, who will have spent two years preparing the ice at the Pacific Coliseum for figure skating and short-track speed skating. Kiland hails from Kelvington, the Saskatchewan town known as “Canada’s hockey factory.” He learned his trade preparing hockey rinks and curling sheets across the prairies.

Humidity, temperature and the impact of spectators on both can lead to condensation and frost, ruining even the best ice.

“Water is water,” he says, “but there’s a chemistry to water and how the molecules freeze.”

So, who makes the best ice meisters? “Someone who doesn’t like to sleep,” Kiland said without hesitation. “When the athletes have gone home that’s when we’re working on the ice. We do our repairs and maintenance when all else is quiet. My goal is to have the most fair, open competition as possible.”

Back at the sliding centre, Seitz says his goal is the same — to ensure the ice is as good for the last competitor as it was for the first.

“For us, it all depends on what Mother Nature brings to us.” The run is set on Blackcomb’s southeast slope, exposing it to the midday sun. The air is thick with humidity, an unavoidable presence in the midst of a rain forest.

Nor does Seitz want the ice to be too cold, lest it become brittle, breaking up as a competition progresses.

“The toughest part of the job is getting it smooth. The second toughest is keeping it smooth.”

In summer, the snaking, 1,450-metre long run is about as interesting as a dry culvert. In winter, when the ice is right, it will be a spine-tingling ride through intimidating curves nicknamed “Shiver” and “50/50” (because only half the sleds got through it during a World Cup run).

No Zamboni fits on this ice, so a crew scrapes away with handmade tools.

Even the smallest bump in the ice will cause a sled to become airborne, though just for a fraction of a second. It then returns to the ice with a jarring shudder, cracking into the surface. “One bump,” Seitz sighs, “ creates a hundred.”

He likes to stand along the track, cocking an ear for what to him is a happy rumbling sound.

“It’s like an airplane flying over, louder and louder the closer it gets and then fading away.”

The sound he does not like is silence. Silence means a sled is in the air. It means his ice is not performing as well as it should. What he wants to hear is the steady roar of a speeding sled, interrupted only by cheers and cowbells. Always more cowbell.