Back to the Meat Packing Plant #

After one semester, I was running out of money and could not continue my studies at the college. There was no way I could go back to what I did that first semester, that was just too hard I could not tell if I was dreaming or in reality. However, my marks sure did improve as I got a number of outstanding in a couple of subjects.

I liked the money I was making at F.G. Bradley so I went back that and approached the manager of the plant and he hired me on the spot, as I knew that he would. His only warning to me was that I lost my seniority position and others have moved up to the position I had gained last summer. That was no big deal and it wasn’t long before I was an important and essential person on the line. The work was pretty easy and I had a lot of time to think and plan in my mind as I was making boxes or dragging full pallets of packed meat into the coolers.

While I was there I put together my publishing and production companies. On my days off I would persue getting my corporations put together. While I was there I incorporated my first federal corporation. They are a lot harder to get because you have to clear the name in all the the provinces and territories. However, once you get that then you can apply for a provincial corporation in any province and no one can grab your name or keep you from operating there. That corporation was called “Wild West Music of Canada, Ltd”

I am not sure how long I was there, I think it might have been about a year but I am not sure. I do know that there was a part of me that was not happy with where I had settled. I would hear, and this is helping you get farther along in the music industry how? So, one day I looked into evening classes on shooting graphic images and page layouts for the printing industry. I thought I could take some of these types of classes in the graphic arts as this would allow me to communicate to the printers of album covers and so on to get my vision of what I wanted more clearly. I called up my friend Gary Steinbrenner from my home town, as he was also living in Edmonton if he wanted to take any of these evening courses with me. So, now in the evenings I was taking these classes.

The other thing that was going on was I had opened a number of bank accounts under these different doing business as production and publishing companies and putting some of my money into them. This plant was a union job and the pay was really good and every Friday was pay day. Any single pay check was enough to pay all my living expenses for a month. Anyway, the signal as the time to go when F.G. Bradly was planning to go on strike. I knew they would be coming out of this with even more money and that would have been really hard to let go. The only way I could move up by the way was to start apprenticing as a butcher and I really did not want to go there so I left and started looking for a new job in the printing field.