Schulz Motors #

For the next five years I was the Accountant at Schulz Motors. We also had a bookkeeper named Pearl who also started close to the same time that I did. The previous bookkeeper was leaving but she was there to train Pearl. The bookkeeping job involved cashing out each of the tills, writing in the totals into a journal and making the bank deposits and any help that she could help me with. Somewhere within this period, the Ford dealer in town when broke and called it quits. I think this was the second time this happened in Barrhead, so the story goes that Ford approached us and I have heard another version of the story that my Uncle Dave approached Ford as we were an established business and could make this work for them, this was in 1982. My Uncle was also the mayor at that time. Some of our German relative really found it amusing that a Schulz was a Schulz. In German the word Schulz was synonymous with the village leader. Last names in Germany were generally made up from your occupation. One of the reason there are so many Schulz’s and they are not related to each other is when the period in history when everyone was to get a last name there would be thousands of Schulz’s across Germany. The same goes with the last name Schmidt or the english translation would be Smith, cause every village had at least one Black Smith.

There were a couple of times that I went to the Juno Awards. This was something I could not do working on my music as any extra money went into more productions. The first time was by myself where I flew to Toronto. This was also the very first commercial airplane ride. From there I took a taxi with two other guys from my flight to Hamilton. Because we were sharing the ride they could only drop me off somewhere along the way. I got out and went to a phone booth to call my cousin Armin that I planned to stay with for the weekend. He would drive me to Toronto where I had my hotel reservation at the Four Seasons on Young Street where the Junos were being held later that week. Anyway I told Armin the name of the cross streets and waited for him. According to Karen (Armin’s wife), she never saw Armin move that fast out of bed. As I now looked around at my surroundings I was thinking this almost looks like a movie set for a gangster movie, cars flying by with Tommy Guns cutting through the windows. According to Armin, that is exactly what happens there from time to time.

That week I hung out with Lover Boy on Sunday and ran into Bill Henderson of Chilliwack the day after the Junos. At the Junos, they served a sit down steak dinner and Mr. Dressup and Sandy Beach were at my table. Sandy was a sister to the members of the Irish Rovers (Canadian Band that had their own TV show). During the week, I put in an order of 8x10 portraits for Susan Whalen. When I picked them up maybe a day after the Junos I got lost in trying to meet up with a new friend that I made at the award show as I landed up at a parking lot (I was driving by bus). I put the pictures down on the bumper of a truck and called a cab. When I arrived at the right location, which was a restaurant, I realized I did not have the pictures. Told my new friend what had happened and she told me I should go now to get them, so I did. Took a cab there and back, the box of photos were still there, and then back to the restaurant where I then had my meeting with my new friend and we were talking about after hour clubs.

The second time I went to the Junos I think I drove with Mom, Dad, and Connie. On this trip I realized that I got over my wanting to sleep every time I drove the car for any distance. When I was selling records for Rulen Records I had the hardest time staying awake. This was my first real job away from home and any time we traveled any decent distance I would sleep, so when my body would feel the open road it would say, hum good time for a nap. I drove most of the way until we got to London where I stayed with a friend for a couple of days before heading to Toronto to meet up with Ted Howard where we went to the Junos together. The food this time around was rather disappointing as it was all just finger food and no formal dinner like I had the year before. Ted was from Kingston but I met him in Edmonton and I think he was a friend of Helen Wong, which is how I met him. I was supposed to travel back to Kingston with him for a couple of days after the Junos, but we went to separate after parties at the Junos and lost contact. This was all before there were cell phones, so I just took a bus to Port Colborne where the rest of the family were visiting relatives and eventually we made our way back to Barrhead.

Schulz Motors took on the Ford franchise and that change also meant we would have to give up our American Motors and Volkswagen franchises. Volkswagen took it the hardest as we were one of the oldest Volkswagen dealership if not the oldest in Alberta. I kind of got excited as I heard that Ford was in the process of computerizing all the franchises. However, Uncle Dave quickly squashed that bit of hope as he was involved in the computerization of the Town of Barrhead and he did not see any kind of savings in manpower, they increased by more than double. The point that he was missing was the reporting capabilities that they now had were instant instead of weeks of manual labor to pull numbers together and then those reports would always be off because things changed while they were pulling the numbers together. However, this did spark an interest in me to start looking at computers and what caught my eye was the Sinclair which was a cheap tiny little box that you plugged into a black and white TV, stored your programs onto a cassette recorder as it had no hard drive or any way to store your code that you wrote. Sometimes that recorder thing worked but mostly it did not so when I was working on a lesson I would leave it on until I completed it to see it working. These were not meant to be running all the time either and I went through three of these units.

My friend and old business partner from the Recording Studio decided to move back to Oklahoma where the rest of her family lived. She was there maybe a year or so and then I decided to go down to see her and her two sons Eric and Dillion. I got this Greyhound bus pass for two weeks which was cheaper than if I was to buy a return ticket from Barrhead to Tulsa and back. With the bus pass I could go anywhere that Greyhound goes during those two weeks. My sister Connie was going to Claresholm to visit her friend who used to live in Barrhead for many, many years. She and I rode the bus together, which was great as she was still pretty young and I got to see her off at Claresholm and I continued on to travel across the prairies to Winnipeg where we then headed South and into the United States. We had issues at the border as one passenger did not have a return ticket and she was packed like she was moving. They would not let her cross, so we had to turn around and drop her off at the first town on the Canadian side and then try the crossing again.

Had a good visit with my friend and she even had a meeting lined up with a lawyer in Tulsa who also operated a small Country Music label. On my way back I decided that I had seen enough of the Canadian prairies and wanted to go west on the US side, hit Las Vegas and travel north. I stopped off at Las Vegas and probably stayed too long because it looked like my pass was going to run out before I got home, I needed at least one more day. The good news was that I could extend it for $10.00 a day. To give you an idea about how incredible this bus pass was, a one way trip from Barrhead to Edmonton was $14.00 and that is probably about an hour and a half ride. I could ride a Greyhound for 24 hours on $10.00. However I needed to get to Great Falls, Montana before midnight which I did, got the extension and got home a day later than expected.

When I got home I was informed that we were getting the Ford computer system in our dealership and they had left us with the Manuals before the equipment arrived. I devoured these manuals and learned all that I could about these things. It was just a terminal that posted to a main frame that was located in Markham, Ontario through a dedicated line.