I was born on a flourishing grain farm in southern Saskatchewan which, for at least the following eight years became part of the barren dust bowl. My parents held on until late summer 1934 when they sold what they could and migrated to Vancouver.
I had turned six just before our departure, which means that I never attended school in Saskatchewan, but received all my education in British Columbia.
Being a restless, adventuresome lad, just as soon as I had completed junior matriculation I took work on a Canadian merchant steamship. This sort of work on numerous vessels was to be my livelihood for ten years. During this time I had the privilege of visiting San Francisco and going through the Panama Canal and onward to Cape Town, Durban and Louren o Marques [Maputo], then to Dunedin, Christchurch, Wellington, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Suva, Lautoka, Papeete, Apia, Nukualofa, Tsing„Tao [Qingdao], Kamaishi, Yokohama, Antwerp, Bremen, Le Havre, St John's, Halifax, St John, Quebec, Montreal, Wilmington, Baltimore, Jacksonville, Kingston [Jamaica], Santiago de Cuba, Tunas de Zaza, Tampico, Vera Cruz, Buenaventura, Barranquilla, Cartagena, Georgetown [British Guiana then, now Guyana] abroad. During this time I also visited inland ports such as Fort William [Thunder Bay], Prescott, Erie [PA], Buffalo [NY] among others.
Sailing is extremely pleasant on a calm sea under a cloudless sky with a gentle roll to the vessel, and extremely unpleasant in violent winter storms. But my main interest was the time spent in port mingling with the natives. The nature of the job was undergoing gradual change with ever faster turnaround times in port and more especially Canada’s merchant fleet was fast dwindling. These factors pointed also me toward change. After an intensive and time consuming search I was accepted as a trainee public health inspector/sanitarian. It took me a year to qualify and seven years to realize that I was not right for the job … so I left it. However, during those eight years I took correspondence, night and summer courses sufficient to complete the first two years of university. I had intended to proceed until I had earned at least one degree, but a job transfer to another area made the commute to a university too long a drive. I therefore forwent that ambition. It is true that a diploma is a status symbol and a door opener but that, I believe, is where its value stops. Performance and ability, in my view, have little correlation with academic qualifications. Hands on training is another matter entirely. I found temporary employment at Expo 67, after which I gradually proceeded along an itinerary that took me to Cuba for a little while, then on through the DDR to Hamburg, Groningen, Amsterdam and Paris, where I spent a month. The student riots and the heavy police response made that city most uncomfortable. So, I proceeded to Milan and Bergamo, where I enrolled in a Montessori training course beginning the following September. This gave me three months to absorb as much Italian as possible, which I did in Perugia and Naples.
I took the course but, by a decision, unjust in my view, of the person running the training center, was provided with no more than a certificate of audition. In any case I would not have been allowed to work in Italy where, by now I had acquired a loving wife and her darling daughter and therefore simply remained.
Work in Italy was difficult to find even for Italians. As a foreigner I had to take advantage of my language skills, being that by now I could manage even if sometimes only barely in six languages. I credit my trilingual upbringing for facilitating language„learning.
The work I found, therefore, was with travel and tour agencies, with several years in the Lloyds of London office in Naples. While in Naples an office colleague introduced me to translation by insisting I work on various legal documents, often handwritten, for him. This gradually raised a hope in me that perhaps that could become a steady livelihood. Our little family then moved to Rome where for eleven years I worked as a freelance translator with as much work as I could physically and mentally handle. At the end of that period, though, also that fell apart when the agency for which I had done a great deal of work changed the rules so completely that they became unacceptable. A new start was necessary.
This led to eighteen years in Montreal, seventeen at the Montreal Neurological Institute as secretary to neurosurgeons and neurologists, and secretary to two ethics boards. I finally retired in 2005 and moved back to Rome, where we are comfortably ensconced in a suburban apartment.