C.W. Boon #

The ad said something about making sandwiches for the Red Rooster convenience stores and it was during the day, perfect. I got this job and was considered a pretty good worker. I got along great with my immediate supervisor and really enjoyed the work. C.W. Boon was a division of Horne and Pitfield who is the Franchise owner of the IGA stores and provided the groceries that they sold. They also owned the Red Rooster convenience stores and had a Cash and Carry Warehouse where the restaurants or convenience store owners could go and pick up their own products. C.W. Boon was a real mixed bag as it also supplied restaurants and convenience stores with products to sell except that they delivered them. It was also a union shop and here I was part of the Truckers Union. Besides that there was also a vending division where they would fill vending machines with food and cigarette products.

The overall General Manager of this facility seemed to me impressed with my work ethics and willingness to jump right in there and get the work done, so every few months he would promote me to a different department. It wasn’t until much later that we both discovered that we had some common connections. It all came to light when I saw a picture in his office of a burning IGA store that was totally engulfed with fire. I knew this store, it was the IGA store in Barrhead and I was even there like most of the residence of Barrhead as it was probably the worst fire we ever had there. He owned that store, that was his Franchise. He also coached hockey teams in Barrhead with my Uncle Leo. However, when he was promoting me though all those departments he did not know that we had this connection, he promoted me because I was a good worker and I would have done anything for him, as this was the first time I really felt I had a boss who saw my true value and made me feel appreciated.

Some of the work that I did there was that I started out making sandwiches, then I was in the warehouse getting big orders together. I drove a delivery van for a while to deliver some of the smaller orders to places where it was harder to get into with the big trucks. I worked in their repack cage which was a lot of fun. This is where a small convenience store would order individual cartons like candy bars and cigarettes, these came in huge boxes that we would get from the warehouse and pull the number of items for them. These were stored in shelves like a grocery store inside of this big caged area. We had a shopping list and shopping carts and would go down the aisles, pick out the things that were on the list, put them in the shopping cart and take them to the front of the cage where one employee would pack them into a box and label them with the customer information and billing information. As I moved from department to department, I was given many warnings about staying away from the vending department. C.W. Boon seemed to have a us vs them kind of thing going with the vending guys and gals. You don’t want to go over there.

Well, one day it happened, the supervisor of the Vending department came up to me and said you are coming with me. My immediate reaction was “No I’m not” and went to see the boss. He explained to me that he has always been impressed with my work ethic and would be a good candidate for the management program as I have worked in almost every department. Go into the vending department for 6 months to a year and we will move you on from there. So, began my vending career, it wasn’t a bad place to be at all but one thing that it did do was hating long weekends. It just meant that I would have to work harder for the four days as I still had to get all my work done but now with a missing day. I had a very big route that covered most of Northern Edmonton and went as far as Morinville. This included both of the Military Bases. Greisebar which actually part of the Navy, was bringing in refugees from Vietnam and when they first arrive they are stripped of their clothing, and showered down and wear paper gowns as they go through the initial health checks. I was not allowed to get to my vending machines on those days. The other base was Namio and it is an air force base and they had a warehouse of goods that they would ship around the world, were ever their troupes were. This airport has the longest runway in North America and I think maybe just 2nd longest in the world. It was built by the US Military as an emergency front against Russia (cold war). I was told that the amount of cement used under this runway is more than 6 feet thick.

One day I was at the base and I noticed all these US Tanks lined up and they were loading them onto these huge Hercules airplanes. I think I was 6 of them being loaded into this plane. Before I left the base I was there to witness this airplane running down the long long runway, rolling, rolling, rolling and then it started to lift off. That is why there is this runway here, cause you could not do this anywhere else in Canada or the US. Years later I was in college and took part in a debate to abandon the Edmonton International Airport and turn the Namio base into a joint airport as the band to not use this runway for commercial use had ended, this was a stipulation with the US when they built this runway. My argument here was that it was a lot closer to Edmonton, you could fly straight over the arctic circle with these enormous planes that were flying out of Russia. You could be in Europe in record time and would even be advantageous for other parts of Canada to fly into Edmonton to get on one of these Jumbo planes and get to Europe faster and more direct. It would have been an easy extension for the metrolink to go all the way to this airport. This would have turned Edmonton into a mini hub, as it currently stands you only come to Edmonton to come to Edmonton, you don’t come here to catch a plane to further your destination. I never won that argument though, I think people were just afraid they would lose their crappy airport. These debates were going on when the International Airport was in need of some major repairs and renovations and they were considering putting in the millions to fix up the International or move it to the military base. They ended up spending millions upon millions on this airport.