I'll never forget the excitement of opening the letter which contained my Gas-fitter License. I was going to be alright now. I was a tradesman and I could ‘go anywhere in the world and write my own ticket.’ After doing a victory dance with my wife, I cracked open the yellow pages. Seventy-three rotary phone calls later, I realized that gas-fitters were a dime a dozen in Vancouver’s Lower Mainland and for every nonexistent position there were fifteen guys in line ready to work for pocket change.
The trade union situation was such, that in practical terms, you put your name on a list and sit at home for weeks waiting for a possible call to go to Ft. St. Nowhere. You would make big bucks for a month, spend it all on overpriced food and lodging and be back in town stone broke and ready to go again. This was untenable for a twenty year old soon to be family man. I wanted a career. I wanted a house and I wanted children. I also wanted to feed, cloth and educate them.
Money got very tight and I found brand-new ways to cook pinto beans and bacon so they tasted delicious. My eighteen year old immigrant wife was unable to work legally and we were on the verge of starvation. I scanned the papers which I delivered each morning and visited Manpower Offices throughout the day when I wasn't doing odd day labour jobs. I noticed that there was a demand for bank tellers and there was a handy quick course one could take for $300, which virtually guaranteed a successful job interview with any one of the Five Big Canadian Banks.
Cogitating on this awhile, I looked up what bank tellers made for their salaries and found that it was a tiny fraction of what pipe-fitters made, when they could get work, that is. I decided the bank was a go but I'd do it my way. I didn't want to be a lowly teller, I wanted a lifetime of employment with room for advancement.
Having already learned that the secretaries of this world had an important function to perform. That was to discourage anyone from applying for a job in THEIR company and to always shield the boss and the Personnel Manager from having to come into contact with the unwashed masses. Here's what I did to deal with that bottleneck.
Using a list of the local head offices of the Big Five Canadian Banks, I phoned each one and in the style of Jim Rockford, got the name of the Personnel Manager of each one without once letting it be construed that my request had anything remotely to do with employment.
I washed my shoulder length hair and took my cassette tapes out of their briefcase style carrier and put my resume and school papers within after tearing out the little slotted compartments. I got a bus to downtown and walked into the first tower.
“Hello, please tell Mr. X that Michael Hawes is here to see him.”
“Do you have an appointment?”
“No, Darlin'.”
“Is this to do with employment at our bank?”
“Nooo Ma'am! This is personal.”
“I'll see if he's in, I believe he has stepped out.”
“Sugar, I know he's in and when you buzz him and tell him that Mr. Hawes is downstairs, I promise you, he will want to see me.”
After a brief exchange, I was told to take the elevator up to a floor near the top. I had never been that high off the ground in my life. It was a surprisingly quick trip. The doors slid open and I adjusted my eyes to the murky hallway. I found the big door I sought. I opened it and went on in. A man about twice my age sat at a big desk with his hands folded. He stared at my hair and stood up to shake my hand. He offered me a seat and asked what he could do for me.
“I want to work for your bank. Not a job, a career. For life.”
“Extraordinary. Do you have any accounting, business, marketing, clerical skills or related training?”
“No Sir. I have a Grade B gas-fitters license, I can type 32 WPM with two fingers at 100% accuracy, I can grill-cook, broiler-cook, short-order cook and I am a sous-chef. I am married, a dual US/Canadian citizen, I speak passable Spanish and French, excepting the past tense.”
The man politely told me no and because I was new to this type of endeavour, I let him get away with it. He told me with a smile as I left that no one had ever breached his secretary's defenses before. I went home and lined up my next appointment. That next interview went similarly to the first one. So, I tweaked my delivery a bit. In the third tower, I was gob-smacked by what the man told me.
“Son, I would hire you on the spot for having the brains to get inside my office and the balls to demand a job but I can't get past that long hair.”
“I'll be back in thirty minutes with a crew cut.”
“Too late, son. You should have thought of that detail first. Take a lesson from it. Good day.”
After a haircut, which was my first in five years, I rode a lift to my fourth tower. Behind the desk was the first woman I had encountered. The bank in question was the CIBC. After the reason of my visit became known and I had run down the list of my pertinent skills, the lady focused on the restaurant I had worked at for about six years. It was and still is a very popular steak and lobster chain. She asked if I knew a certain person. He was a young, rich partner in several of the company’s joint ventures. He was a legend to his friends and shall remain nameless in this account.
Evidently she had gone to university with him and her face brightened at the mere mention of his name. I knew him well as a boss and as a cohort in many hi-jinks which I could not repeat in her company. I could tell this aspect was the same for the lady. So, on the strength of that connection, I was hired that day and placed on a CIBC Bank Manager Training Program. She told me to go get some decent clothes and to report to a branch that was close enough for me to walk to from my apartment in Lynn Valley.
If this sounds far-fetched, I must tell you that in runs in my family. My father once applied for a job from Vancouver to operate a gold-dredge on the Orinoco river in Colombia. He had never seen the machinery close up. As the qualified operators were few and far between in those days, he was flown down to the site at the company's expense and treated as royalty when he got there. From the motor launch on the way out to the rig, he was relieved to see a man in the cage. The other fellow had a week left on site and he showed my father what to do in that short time. My father got four years of employment out of his adventure and his first two children were born in the jungle camp.
I went home and told my little wife that we were not only going to live, we were going to go places. The next morning I went to a tailor shop in a local mall. I usually wore jeans, a tee-shirt and either a red or blue tartan flannel shirt with a cowboy belt, gray wool socks with either carpenter’s boots, cowboy boots, moccasins or clogs.
I was greeted at the entrance by a young Jamaican named Neville. I told him the truth, that I had the fashion sense of a chuck-wagon cook and that I needed to get tricked out for a bank job on a pauper's budget. He smiled and said that I would surely be back in a few years time to buy the silk stuff. That afternoon I placed Neville in total control.
At the end, I had a wardrobe of two pairs of slacks, four Arrow shirts, five pairs of thin socks and three ties. The slacks had been altered by hand and it was at that time that I first learned what “dressing right or dressing left” meant. Neville prepared a hand-written guide of which pieces to wear with which other pieces, so as to appear different each day. He was a gentleman of the first magnitude.
As I left the store, he said, “Mr. Hawes, Mon you a steppin' ray-zah.”
“Don-choo watch my style, I'm dange-ris. Thanks a lot, man. You saved my hillbilly life.”
Thus began my time as a banker.
fin