The shorthand on Marcia Carroll’s life: From the White House of LBJ to the Precambrian Art Centre

Marcia Carroll was to my mind a Thompson “original.” Now that’s a bit different than perhaps a Thompson “pioneer” as Marcia didn’t live in Thompson quite from the beginning, marked by those halcyon days that closed out the late 1950s, although she did live here a long time. Marcia was original more in the sense of the unique personal back story she brought with her to Thompson, Manitoba, and the equally unique contributions she made for more than 25 years to minor hockey, through the sponsorship, with her husband, Dave, of the Carroll Aeros Atom “B” minor hockey team, where she incredibly knit or crocheted scarves for all the team’s players for years, and the arts in the North through her unfailing encouragement and patronage of Northern artists – be they indigenous, Métis or white.

So when I read of Marcia Carroll’s Sept. 27 passing at Thompson General Hospital in a 137-word Oct. 9 online obituary in the Thompson Citizen, I thought there might be a few more words to say beyond that about the woman who was my next-door business neighbour for the first five years I edited the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News, from 2007 to 2012.  Our office was at 141 Commercial Place, while Marcia’s Precambrian Art Centre was adjacent at the same address, occupying space she rented from our corporate owner. Being Marcia’s landlord meant newspaper staff were dispatched on occasion over to her premises, summoned by her to perform some landlord-like task, such as changing commercial grade fluorescent lighting tubes, a task that often fell between 2007 and 2009 to lanky production newspaper page designer Garrett Wiwcharuk (now a colleague at UCN), who was sometimes ably assisted by the paper’s production manager, Ryan Lynds. I suspect now editor Ian Graham and myself may also have been pressed into service the odd time as well.

Marcia owned and operated Precambrian Art Centre for 18 years. But it was her husband, Dave, I actually first heard about from Steve Ashton, our former Thompson MLA, who I had just met on a tour of the then newly-upgraded Canada Safeway in July 2007. Marcia and Dave have two grown sons, Matthew and Morgan, as well as grandchildren Carter and Jerzie.

Ashton told me about Dave’s prowess as a butcher and the demand for his products at Carroll Meats at 20 Nelson Road, where he worked with veteran Thompson meat cutter Joan Monuik, who died two years ago at the age of 76.

Dave Carroll was married to Marcia for 50 years. Finding himself in declining health, he sold Carroll Meats, which had been closed for a time, to Kelly Bindle in 2013, and trained the civil engineer, who had no previous experience in the field, about the meat business as part of the sale. Bindle changed the name to Ripple Rock Meat Shop and still works as its proprietor, although dividing his time between Thompson and Winnipeg since April 2016, when he ran for the Tories and defeated Ashton for the local MLA seat.

Marcia one time told former Thompson Citizen general manager, and still occasional “Out & About” columnist Donna Wilson, that she said she always has three rules for her Carroll Aeros Atom “B” minor hockey players: Learn the rules of hockey, learn to enjoy the fun; learn to lose gracefully, because there may be years that they’ll never win a game, and as far as she was concerned, she said she didn’t care, as long as they all had fun.

Marcia worked with many artists showcasing their work and supporting their talents at critical career points. A short list of such artists would include Jasyn Lucas, Gerald Kuehl, Murray McKenzie, Angus Merasty, Jeff Monias, Ron Disbrowe, Alan Chapman, Tom Dubois, Dr. Ron Zdrikluk, Dave Cadwell, Gene McCarthy, David Williams, Leonard Bighetty, Bruce Ecker, Judy Waldner, Anne Snihor, Desmond Raymond, Marijo Ready, Jan Bain, Cathy Therrien and Michael Spence.

As her health declined noticeably seven or eight years ago and she spent more and more time away from work, with the Precambrian Art Centre often closed only to reopen again briefly and irregularly, those artists and friends became increasingly concerned for her wellbeing.

My first conversation with Gerald Kuehl about half a dozen years ago wasn’t primarily about his famed Portraits of the North pencil portraiture, but more about how Marcia had been a big booster of his work. Kuehl didn’t know me at the time, but knew I worked next door to Precambrian, so he telephoned to check on her wellbeing after being unable reach her on the telephone there on several occasions.

Marcia Carroll may have been best known in Thompson for her long and loyal support of both minor hockey players and artists, but she had been a witness to history before her arrival in Thompson.

An American by birth, originally from Greene, New York, northeast of Binghamton, she was living in Toronto and attending university when JFK was assassinated in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, but later wound up using her machine shorthand and note taking reporting skills to work in the White House of President Lyndon Baines Johnson, best known as LBJ, Kennedy’s vice-president and successor. Very good stenographers using machine shorthand on a specialized chording keyboard stenotype can write American English at speeds up to 375 words per minute. 

“I don’t think there’s any doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald did it but I believe there was a second shooter based on what I was told by witnesses,” Carroll told the Nickel Belt News in an April 23, 2010 story. “I suppose one will never really know because there’s no way of proving it now.”

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Abandoned dreams: The empty Power store supermarket and its lone Vendorama ballpoint pen dispenser

Power store photos courtesy of City of Toronto Archives

The lone and lonely chattel: My morning walk from my house a few blocks away at 537 Nipigon Street to Oshawa Catholic High School in 1973 meant a walk by the empty Power store supermarket at Rosslynn Plaza at the corner of Rossland Road West and Stevenson Road North, which stood empty except for a perhaps forgotten 1960s-era Vendorama ballpoint pen dispenser. Such is the stuff of abandoned dreams.

Urban landscapes change, sometimes almost imperceptibly, sometimes suddenly and dramatically. Any visit to a city photographic archive will tell you that. Sometimes it’s the physical landscape; old buildings are demolished or altered through exterior renovation or addition; or empty spaces are in-filled with new buildings. At other times, the change is more subtle. Physically, the building may well look pretty much the same, but its use and signage may have changed. Or just the latter perhaps if a competitor buys up a property to carry on the same type of business.

Right here in Thompson, while the larger signage may still say Canada Safeway at City Centre Mall, if you look at the smaller legal fine print, Thompson’s largest full-line grocer has indeed been owned by Sobeys West Inc. since Nov. 4, 2013, supermarket banner notwithstanding. Safeway has been in Thompson since 1964.

Canada Safeway, with about 29,000 employees and based in Calgary, was a wholly owned subsidiary of the American parent company Safeway, headquartered in Pleasanton, California, making it the second largest supermarket chain in North America, surpassed only by the Kroger Co. of Cincinnati, started in 1883 by Barney Kroger with his life savings of $372.

Safeway got its start in 1915 in American Falls, Idaho when Marion Barton Skaggs purchased a tiny grocery store from his father for $1,089. By 1926 he was operating 428 Skaggs stores in 10 states. Skaggs almost doubled the size of the business that year when he merged his company with 322 Safeway (formerly Los Angeles-based Sam Selig Company) stores. In the 1930s, Safeway introduced produce pricing by the pound and open dating on perishables to assure freshness some of the first parking lots for customers.

A well as Safeway banner stores across Canada and the United States, Safeway also operates under other multiple banners as Vons stores in Southern California and Nevada, Randalls and Tom Thumb stores in Texas, a Genuardi’s store in Audubon, Pennsylvania, as well as Carrs stores in Alaska. None of the Safeway-owned stores in the United States were included in the Sobeys purchase of Canada Safeway.

John William (J.W.) Sobey started in 1907 with a horse-drawn cart as a meat delivery business in Stellarton, Nova Scotia. In 1924, his son, Frank H. Sobey, persuaded his father to expand the family business from meat and a few local vegetables to a full line of groceries. Sobeys tripled its size and became a national company when it acquired The Oshawa Group – a Toronto-based supplier to Canada’s IGA stores – in 1998, although it had opened a grocery store outside Atlantic Canada in Guelph, Ont. as early as 1987. It is now Canada’s second largest grocery chain, sandwiched between industry leader Loblaw Cos. Ltd. of Brampton, Ont. in top place and third place Metro Inc. of Montreal.

Loblaw, the largest food retailer in Canada, was started in Toronto in June 1919 by Toronto grocers Theodore Pringle Loblaw and J. Milton Cork. Bread salesman George Weston started George Weston Limited, also in Toronto, in 1882. Other Loblaw banners include Extra Foods, Shop Easy Foods, OK Economy, No Frills, Valu-Mart, Real Canadian Superstore, Provigo, SaveEasy, Fortinos, Zehrs Markets, Dominion, Red & White Food Stores, Atlantic Superstore, SuperValu, Lucky Dollar Foods, Freshmart, Maxi and Your Independent Grocer.

Before Sobeys Inc. was allowed to complete its $5.8-billion purchase of Canada Safeway, the federal Competition Bureau on Oct. 22, 2013 ordered in a consent agreement with Nova Scotia-based Sobeys that they sell 23 stores in Western Canada to preserve competition in certain markets in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

In the 1960s, growing up in Oshawa, Ontario, my parents liked to shop at the Power store supermarket in the Rosslynn Plaza the corner of Rossland Road West and Stevenson Road North. Power’s slogan was “More Power To Your Food Dollar.”

The origins of Power store supermarkets date to 1904, when Samuel and Sarah Weinstein opened a grocery store named after themselves in downtown Toronto. The family’s first store under the low-cost Power banner opened at Coxwell and Danforth avenues in 1933 with the slogan, “Why Pay for Fixtures?” Power was purchased by Loblaw Groceterias in 1953, but continued as a distinctly separate budget brand until 1972, when its parent company decided to spend $10 million improving its image. Leon Weinstein, the cigar-smoking son of founders Samuel and Sarah who oversaw the company’s expansion years, was briefly president of Loblaw from 1968 to 1970.

And what of that left behind building after the demise of Oshawa’s Power store supermarket in Rosslyn Plaza close to 45 years ago now? The plaza is essentially still a small strip mall more than four decades later and the old Power store has become a subdivided combination of several stores, including a Coffee Time outlet, part of a privately-owned Canadian coffee-and-donut chain started by Tom Michalopoulos in Bolton, Ontario, just northwest of Toronto, in 1982. The company is now headquartered in Scarborough, in the east-end Greater Toronto Area (GTA). Also in the mix is a Lovell Drugs pharmacy, one of the largest, independent drug store chains in Ontario with 12 locations now in Whitby, Oshawa, Kingston and Cornwall, started in Bowmanville, east of Oshawa, by David Stott in 1856 (the business was later joined over the next century by family owners and partners including A.W. Gregory, John H. Jury and generations of Lovells – Edwin, Stan, Everett, Arthur and Diana Lovell. Pizza Pizza and Subway round out the old Power store tenants.

And what of that abandoned Vendorama ballpoint pen dispenser in 1973 in the front window of the empty Power store in Oshawa?

In a Nov 16, 2013 Daily Kos post (the blog started by Markos Moulitsas in 2002) headlined “History 101: Pens and Ink,” the blog editor known as Ojibwa writes,  “The idea of using a rotating ball to distribute the ink to the paper was developed by the American inventor John H. Loud. His first patent for a ball dispenser pen was issued in 1888. This first design was intended for writing on rough surfaces, such as cardboard. Loud’s designs – he was issued several more patents – never reached the point of providing the user with the flow of ink needed for good penmanship.

“It was up to László Biro, a Hungarian living in Argentina during World War II, to use a spin-off of war technology to create a pen which could write on paper. In 1943, Lazlo Biro and his brother
György form Biro Pens of Argentina. Their design was licensed for production in the United Kingdom to supply the Royal Air Force who had found that the ballpoint pens worked better than fountain pens at high altitude. In 1945, Marcel Bich bought the patent from Biro and the pen became the main product of his Bic Company.”

In 1960, Victor Vending Corporation of Chicago moved into full production of its Vendorama ballpoint pen dispenser, known as the Pen Vendorama, which revolved and could dispense up to 168 ballpoint pens for a dime each. Different models of Vendorama ballpoint pen dispensers sold pens for either a nickel, dime or a quarter.

Alas, no word on the final dispensation of the Vendorama ballpoint pen dispenser in the window of the Rossland Road Power store, circa 1973.

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