As Pete and Raymond Zaworonok look to retirement, will Crazy Petes carry on?

The brothers aren’t getting any younger. Pete Zaworonok is 77. His younger brother, Raymond is 72. Neither are in the best of health these days. So retirement looms, with Pete planning to relocate permanently back to his longtime home near Nelson, British Columbia, while Raymond’s home is in Calgary. Until recently, the brothers would often takes turns commuting back to their Alberta and British Columbia homes for months at a time, while the other brother remained in Thompson minding the store, Crazy Petes, their legendary eclectic small-town hardware-like store, at the corner of Hayes Road and Seal Road, with one of this, and two of that. On rare occasions, I’d come into the store while the brothers were together during a brief overlap.

Back 10 years ago, Jonathon Naylor, then the editor of The Reminder in Flin Flon and a freelancer for the Winnipeg Free Press, wrote a piece for the Free Press that nicely captured what Pete and Crazy Petes is all about:

“Need a campfire tea kettle or some high-end embroidery thread? How about a home potato chipper or military toys you thought were banned?” Naylor wrote. “A movie poster from 1991’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II or fishing tackle that looks designed to snag a whale?

“It’s all here, along with gas and a car wash,” Naylor wrote on June 20, 2013.

Pete, who was born in Germany, was living in Edmonton when, in 1967, he accepted a job as a technologist for INCO, now Vale, here in Thompson. After a decade, he left INCO to go into business for himself, running his own insulating company before operating what Raymond June 7 referred to as the brothers’ “three profit centres”: the original car wash and gas bar, along with the store he added to them to make a business trio in 1979. The car wash wasn’t open last Wednesday as a water line was still frozen up, Raymond said. Pete actually was in Thompson, but home recuperating from some aorta trouble a few months ago, he added. Raymond has had some prostate trouble of his own.

Truth be told, Pete and Raymond are two of the most creative business guys that I have ever met. When it came to customer loyalty cards, such as Aeroplan and PC Optimum Points Reward cards, Crazy Petes had the broadest definition of what constituted groceries than it has been my pleasure to discover.

Pete one time explained his marketing strategy to me by way of an illustration. He had some old cowboy belt buckles quite literally gathering dust on the shelves for years, not selling at all. One day, he simply doubled their price and they started to sell like hotcakes. The store has a collection of local indigenous music cassette tapes and CDs you won’t find anywhere else.

I have done my bit over the years to promote the wonders of Crazy’s Petes far and wide. With mixed results, I admit. In April 2022, the former University College of the North (UCN) Thompson campus librarian, Monica Mun, came back one day after making a trip with a pet to the vet, and mentioned to my then boss, former library technician Andrew Conner, that she had just seen lots of RCMP cruisers outside Crazy Petes store. “Isn’t that the place John was talking about?” she asked Andrew. At that point, Andrew may well have been advised to reply, “John who?” But he didn’t. Andrew, hailing from the Alex Murdaugh Lowcountry of South Carolina, shares something of that outlaw streak, or at least admiration for same, that I admittedly have.

I suspect we’re not alone. Hence the sympathetic notoriety enjoyed by some bank robbers, including John Dillinger, Clyde Barrow, Bonnie Parker, Butch Cassidy, Harry Alonzo Longabaugh, better known as the Sundance Kid, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Edwin Alonzo Boyd, or say someone like D.B. Cooper, who with his audacious skyjacking, jumped into history on Nov. 24, 1971 – the day before American Thanksgiving – with several parachutes and $200,000 in $20 bills from of Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305, a Boeing 727 jetliner flying over the Pacific Northwest, en route from Portland, Oregon to Seattle, Washington. Cooper, an alias, disappeared into the late autumn, as he bailed out into the rainy night via the plane’s rear stairway, which he lowered himself, somewhere near the Washington-Oregon boundary in Washington State, probably near Ariel in Cowlitz County, or possibly around Washougal or Camas in Clark County. Never to be seen again.

Any resemblance to Pete and Raymond, of anyone mentioned here, is, of course, coincidental, and if necessary, fictional, too.

Raymond says there have been some potential buyers sniffing around, wanting to take a look at the books, but no serious offers as yet. It strikes me as unlikely that a new buyer would replicate or maintain Crazy Petes inventory, all inseparable, I suspect, from the Zeitgeist that is the Zaworonok brothers.

Pete and Raymond.

Gone Fishin.’

Almost.

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Witnessing history from Boston: The 1980 Jimmy Carter presidential re-election campaign and the October Surprise that wasn’t to be

I never worked directly for Jimmy Carter. In fact, I have never met him, unlike my friend Art Milnes, a journalist from Kingston, Ontario, who would years later become a cherished personal friend of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter. But I did spend the last 2½ months of the 1980 Jimmy Carter presidential re-election campaign working as a supervisor for Cambridge Survey Research, where I oversaw several hundred phone bank employees for Democratic National Committee (DNC) pollster Pat Caddell’s firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Most of our work that autumn was on the Carter campaign and U.S. Senate races.

I was 23 years old and had just moved to West Somerville, Massachusetts and was looking for a job in September 1980. I happened to be walking down the west side of Massachusetts Avenue, near Central Square in Cambridge, on a sunny, but crisp, late summer Boston morning, when I saw a help wanted job ad for interviewers down in a hole-in the-wall basement commercial space below sidewalk level.

I spent my first two days working the phones, polling voters state-by-state. I was then promoted to supervise phone bank interviewers. I remember thinking there apparently really is something to the American Story of meritocracy. My only previous experience in public opinion research had been working a few months earlier in the spring of 1980 on a Quebec Referendum project for a Winnipeg company, Opinion Place/Marketing Insights, as a field interviewer in Peterborough, Ontario for the Center for Canadian Studies at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.

My Cambridge Survey Research boss, Mark Leavitt, took me out to my first Boston Red Sox game at Fenway Park to celebrate my promotion. I still remember his pre-game advice: “Make sure there is a full aspirin bottle by the coffeemaker for employees.” Back then, sampling was done with actual physical telephone directories and coding was done largely by hand. One of the curiosities I quickly noticed was that our ASA-and-caffeine-driven phone bank interviewers, if they spent more than a a couple of days working a region, would fairly quickly wind up sounding like the respondents from whatever area code they were calling and interviewing people on their political preferences, especially in smaller and more ethnically homogenous areas of the country. Some kid from Jersey would wind up talking slower and softer, like he was from the lowcountry of  South Carolina, after a few days. By far the most difficult voters to reach were those who had telephone numbers in the hollers of Tennessee and Kentucky. You could call 100 numbers and 99 would be unreachable because of some technical glitch, or simply out of service.

While we knew we were in an uphill re-election battle against Republican challenger Ronald Reagan, I don’t think it was until the last days of the campaign, when we realized there would be no “October Surprise” with the release of the 52 United States diplomats and American citizens being held hostage by Iranian students in Tehran, that we also realized we were going to come up short on election day Nov. 4.

We lost the election. Big time. I well remember going to work a few days after, late in the afternoon, riding above ground aboard a subway car on the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) Red Line “T”. The November sky was a foreboding steel-gray, with leaves all fallen now from the trees. And there it was, as we headed into Harvard Yard, giant spray –painted graffiti on a cenotaph proclaiming “Ray-Gun” had been elected.

After the Carter campaign, I went to work as research associate at Kenyon and Eckhardt (later Bozell, Jacobs, Kenyon and Eckhardt) in Boston. I worked in the research department of the advertising agency’s Boston field office. Major commercial client accounts included airline and automotive companies.

As it turned out, Reagan did have a fondness for his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), nicknamed Star Wars. But the dreamed-for global missile shield didn’t come to fruition. Instead, Reagan, along with Mikhail Gorbachev, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, managed to end the Cold War with perestroika [restructuring] and glasnost [openness] becoming part of the everyday vocabulary of Americans by the late 1980s, rolling from their tongues as if they had been saying the two Russian words forever.

As for Jimmy Carter, well, he would go on to become the most consequential and respected former president in United States history. At 98, he is also the oldest-ever former president.

Millard Fuller founded Habitat for Humanity International in 1976. From humble beginnings in Alabama, he rose to become a self-made marketing millionaire at 29. But as the business prospered, his health, integrity and marriage suffered, he noted later. In 1965, Millard and his wife Linda turned away from their millionaire lifestyle and rededicated their lives to serving God.

Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, remain the best-known faces of Habitat for Humanity. Their involvement began in 1984 when the former president led a work group to New York City to help renovate a six-story building with 19 families in need of decent, affordable shelter.

A non-profit, ecumenical Christian housing ministry, Habitat for Humanity seeks to eliminate poverty housing and homelessness and to make decent shelter a matter of conscience and action.

Through volunteer labour and donations of money and materials, Habitat builds and rehabilitates simple, decent houses alongside the homeowner partner families. It is not a giveaway program. In addition to a down payment and monthly mortgage payments, homeowners invest hundreds of hours of their own labour or sweat equity into building their Habitat house and the houses of others. Habitat houses are sold to partner families at no profit and financed with affordable loans. The homeowners’ monthly mortgage payments are used to build still more Habitat houses.

Jimmy Carter is not only finishing well. He started well.

“For myself and for our Nation, I want to thank my predecessor for all he has done to heal our land.”

Those were the first words spoken by President Jimmy Carter in his inaugural address Jan. 20, 1977. As Art Milnes noted in 2016: “It is often forgotten but President Carter on a January day in 1977 set the gold standard for how a winner treats their opponent. I will let President Ford, who lost that year, tell the rest of the story via his memoirs.”

“Mr. Ford described what happened the day President Carter delivered his Inaugural Address. ‘The weather that morning,’ Ford wrote, ‘was windy and cold, but the atmosphere was full of hope and the crowd that gathered below the East Front of the Capitol reflected that. Chief Justice Burger administered the oath to the thirty-ninth President of the United States.

Carter’s first words were, ”For myself and for our nation I want to thank my predecessor for all he has done to heal our land’ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgD179mgMow). That was so unexpected, such a gracious thing for him to say. The crowd began to applaud, and I bit my lip to mask my emotions. I didn’t know whether to remain seated or to stand. But when the cheers continued I decided to stand and reached over to clasp Carter’s hand.’”

Carter went onto say, “Here before me is the Bible used in the inauguration of our first President, in 1789, and I have just taken the oath of office on the Bible my mother gave me just a few years ago, opened to a timeless admonition from the ancient prophet Micah: “He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.”

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