Grant McEwan Community College #

I left Rulen Records after probably about a year and a half, but I left on good terms with Ruben as I would still come back in when he needed me. Sometimes as a musician, recorded some talks at a conference, assisted in a record session, and once just rode with him to the airport to pick up a record order and deliver it to some people that he did not feel comfortable with. I just couldn’t make enough money to justify driving around the huge territory that I had to sell records. My plan was that to get to where I wanted to be I also needed some additional music experience to hone my composition and arrangement skills as this is what I would need more of to be a good effective producer.

First off though, I needed to make some money, so my Uncle Fred got me a job with Facette Construction. They were building condos in this new subdivision that they were calling Millwoods. This must have been in the spring or early summer. I worked as a general laborer and soon the foreman took a liking to me and had me assist and do various jobs around the site. It was kind of funny, I always had my lunch with me, and the Facette team would all eat lunch together. They did not know that I was Uncle Fred’s nephew, and they were laughing and talking about a crazy job that they did for F. Tonn Construction (my uncle’s company). They were kind of making fun of him, I never told Uncle Fred but it did sort of bother me at the time.

In the meantime, this job convinced me that I was not made for construction work. I was considering the possibility of apprenticing as an electrician and Uncle Fred was using his contacts to find me something, but near the end of my time with Facette, they came around to ask me, and I turned them down. I did look into Grant McEwan Community College which had a great jazz music program. I applied and after interviews, and auditions, I got in so to fund this I also found myself a new job working nights at Fullers as a dishwasher. This would be the graveyard shift and it went from 11:00 pm until 7:00 am. Which gave me plenty of time to get to Grand McEwan for my classes.

I should mention that in my re-organization of my financial situation, I could not afford to make car payments and pay for the insurance. So, for over a year, I parked my car on my Uncle John’s Farm and just made car payments and fire and theft insurance on the car and rode the bus everywhere I needed to go. Going from Fullers to Grant McEwan was just one bus that took me to the Jasper Place terminal which was just a block away from the college. I started late, in their winter semester. My schedule was a bit crazy. The Burma brothers were part of Cornerstone by this time. We would practice in my Aunt and Uncle’s garage out back, as I was still living in their basement suite. We practiced once a week, I worked from 11 pm til 7 am and went to Grant McEwan all day till about 4 pm. I was writing new material for the band every other week. Once a week I would go to Auntie Elsie and Uncle Fred’s place for dinner and give guitar lessons to my cousin Marlene. I was running very low on sleep. It was common to just sleep as soon as I got home from College on Fridays and sleep until Saturday late.

One time I was on the bus from the restaurant to the college and fell asleep hard. All of a sudden I could feel someone shaking me and my first thought was how did someone get into my basement suite? It was other students who also rode this bus every day and knew I usually get off here. That was so weird, if they didn’t wake me I am sure I would have ridden this bus for hours. I would often pinch myself to check if this was a class I should be paying attention to or if this was a rehashing of the material in a dream.

I should mention that at my job they had a mandatory meeting every Monday at 4:00 pm that everyone had to attend, busboys, dishwashers of all shifts or you risk getting fired. There was no way that I could make this meeting and never even attempted to. One night I came in for my shift and the guys that I was relieving said I must be some super worker with the way the managers were describing me. I heard that someone asked why I wasn’t ever at these meetings if they were so mandatory. Their reply was and I quote: “If you worked as well as Donald, you would need to be here either”. I did do a good job and I loved the work, if you can believe it. Before cleaning the dishwasher I would scrub all the catwalks with Ajax and put them through the dishwasher. There was a set in the Kitchen as well as the dishwasher area. We would time this and I would keep trying to break my record. The cook and I had some great fun challenging each other. When he got flooded with a lot of tickets because a bus arrived, I’d help him out to get through the rush. Then he would help me out as the flood of all these dishes started flowing into my station.

I always got my work done and often had a chance to catch up on some homework, or just take a nap in the employee area. I remember one night the supervisor came in through the doors to my station and was calling my name, then saw me napping and said, never mind and went out. I felt that I got a lot of respect at that place and that made me feel good about working there.

In that first semester, I did manage to get a satisfactory on all my classes. This program only had 3 marks you were either satisfactory, unsatisfactory, or outstanding. So anything from satisfactory or higher was a pass. So even with my crazy schedule and as tired as I was all the time I was still able to pass all my courses. While at McEwan I was privileged to meet the best guitar player that I ever heard named Wes Yaciuk. Not only that, I liked him and he was always so humble like he didn’t believe how good he was. While at college we were put into teacher groups and Wes was in mine. I principally played rhythm guitar in these practice sessions. I had a very deep desire in my heart, just wanting to be Wes’s friend but I am a natural introvert and if I ever step out of that shell it is very frightening to me. So we never exchanged phone numbers or anything we never met outside of class.

Sometime before all this, I had been going to Central Pentecostal Church which is a 2000-seat church shaped like a pyramid and famous for their singing Christmas tree presentations during the Christmas season which worked naturally with the shape of the church. I had been going there ever since I moved to Edmonton. Anyway, Edwin (a cousin who played in my band), and his older sister talked him and me into going to this new church that broke away from this church that was right in my neighborhood and they were meeting in an elementary school auditorium. It was a great church, a much smaller congregation so I got to know the people there and many were around my age as well.

Now, the real reason that I told you this little bit of this story was to show you how in tune I was with my spiritual self. Because I started in the winter semester, I was only there for one semester and we had a four-month summer break. During that summer, several things changed for me. Bob Harmling, an old family friend from Barrhead had moved into the Edmonton area and was still in touch with my Mom and Dad. They must have told him I was working as a dishwasher at Fullers on Calgary Trail. He came by for breakfast and told me that the meat packing plant where he was working was looking for shippers to work the night shift and it is a union job paying union wages. It was within walking distance from the restaurant so I walked down there and they hired me on the spot but I would have to start that night. I had to walk back to Fullers and tell my boss that I would have to quit and could not leave any notice. He was not happy with that news but he understood.

After about 2 weeks they shut down the night shift and I was moved into the packing line for the day shift. Now I was working normal hours and socking away as much money as I could so that when I went back to McEwan in the fall I would not have to work another night job. One Sunday morning, I woke up and did not feel like going to Evangel Church. I had this real desire to go to Central today, so that is what I did, I went back to the church where I started from. During the service, they greet each other a lot, each other where you turn around and shake the people behind and in front of you. Somewhere in all of this, I thought I saw Wes from Grant McEwan in the congregation. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I went back that evening for the evening service and I just happened to be sitting right behind him and his wife. When we did the turnaround and greet your neighbor, he was just as excited to see me as I was to see him. That was the beginning of Wes and his wife Birget and our friendship. He became part of the Cornerstone band, and I joined the Church band and pulled some additional players from there to fill out all the missing pieces.

I also introduced Wes to the music pastor of Central Tabernacle, Laurie Bertig, and he put Wes to work on a number of the Churches projects. I did a lot of copyist work for Laurie Bertig as well. There were a number of sessions that he was producing for and writing these big scores for and I would take his score and write and transpose the parts for the various instruments their individual parts. He also worked on a musical of sorts that he was using popular music and a number of us in his circle of composers and arrangers where given the task to build out some arrangements and I did one song for him. It might have been an arrangement of “Minute by Minute”, I don’t really remember exactly as it was over 40 years ago.