William Marshall Barker: My dad would have turned 100 today

My dad would have turned 100 today. Sadly, he left us almost 30 years ago in 1989. My cousin, Sharon Seager posted this picture of her mom and my dad two years ago.

William Marshall Barker, shown here at right, beside his youngest sister, Norma, my sweet aunt, was called “Bill” by everyone who knew him (aside perhaps from my mother, Pat, who called him “William” on rare occasions, which never failed to get his attention), and my Uncle Bob Barker in Indiana, who always called him “Will.”

My dad would have been 100 today if he was still alive. He died in 1989.

He was the finest man I’ve ever known. His word was his bond. I never knew him to tell an untruth, which is simply remarkable. He never equivocated. He was always straight forward, meaning what he said and saying what he meant.

He worked at General Motors of Canada in Oshawa, Ontario, his hometown, as an hourly-rated employee for 32½ years before retiring in 1975. He was a proud rank-and-file trade unionist, a member of Local 222 of the old United Autoworkers of America (UAW).

The men in my Nipigon Street neighbourhood – guys like Earl Kirkpatrick, Snow Willson and my dad – were often working six days a weeks, with overtime on Saturdays when they were on day shift. If they were on nights, they’d be busy flooding the Nipigon Park outdoor rink at 2:30 a.m. – after their eight-hour night shift ended and they went to bed – so us kids could skate the next day. That’s how I remember my dad.

I spent the first of five summers as a university student, beginning in 1976, working in the same West Plant in the high-seniority Completely Knocked Down (CKD) department my dad had retired from the year before. Some of his buddies were still there; some I had heard about for years and met for the first time.

My first job was hammering large wooden crates together. It was just an amazing cavernous building that old West Plant with great big windows and wooden floors. I remember once going across the tunnel (or bridge, I’m not sure now how it was referred to) connecting the West Plant and the North Plant over Division Street. Later that summer, I hung rads in the rad room of the old North Plant across the street.

There are other memories, of course, which I haven’t quite got around to writing about yet. Like how he used to take me tobogganing in the winter at the Oshawa Golf Course. Or before I had a driver’s licence, pick me up after the third period of Oshawa Generals games, where I sold pop and hotdogs when I was 14 and 15 at the old Oshawa Civic Auditorium. That’s where the two of us would go together many winter Friday nights to cheer on our hometown Junior B Oshawa Crushmen, especially our neighbour, Scott Willson.

While my parents came a bit late to the appeal of pizza, I do recall my dad heading out on the occasional Friday night when some of my Nipigon Street friends, perhaps Mike Byrne and Paul Sobanski, were over, and dad coming back with a box of Mothers Pizza from Simcoe North, the first and only Mothers in Oshawa at the time.

Before that, and well into the 1970s anyway, my dad still picked up fish-and-chip dinners for us on Fridays after work, first at Paul and Helen Plishka’s Rose Bowl Fish and Chips at the corner of Bond and Prince streets, and later Pat and Mike Volpe‘s Pat & Mike Fish & Chips on Hortop Street, as well as from the H. Salt, Esq. Authentic English Fish and Chips franchise on Simcoe Street North in Oshawa, where we also enjoyed their fish and chips. Haddon Salt had operated his fish and chips store in Skegness, in the northeastern corner of England, before moving to the United States and, along with his wife, Grace, opening their first shop in Sausalito, California, under the name of Salt’s Fish & Chips in 1965. Pope Paul VI’s proclamation of Paenitemini (Apostolic Constitution On Penance) on Feb. 17, 1966, allowed episcopal conferences to permit Catholics in their jurisdictions to substitute some other penitential practice aside from abstaining from meat on Fridays, a practice which had been in force in the universal church since Pope Saint Nicholas 1, also known as Saint Nicholas the Great, in 851, so dad was in no hurry to abandon eating fish on Fridays, especially Halibut. I was nine years old, growing up in Oshawa, Ontario, when all this came to pass in 1966.

Instead of going to Inco or Vale and down into a mine or working at the surface in a refinery or smelter, the men (and they were invariably men back then) I knew in the 1960s carried their metal lunch pails into the factory at General Motors to build cars and trucks. When they were leaving at the end of their shift, they punched the same clock they had coming in. Every time I hear Men of the Deeps sing Rise Again or Working Man, my union resolve deepens just a little bit more.

In the fall of 1970, he walked the picket line for 3½ months in the longest strike against his employer since the Dirty Thirties.

While he wasn’t much fond of politicians of any stripe collectively, he did have a bit of a liking individually for Mike Starr, Oshawa-Whitby riding Progressive Conservative MP, and a federal labour minister in the Diefenbaker government for a time in the 1960s, but was truly fond of the man who defeated Starr by 15 votes in the June 1968 federal election, future NDP leader Ed Broadbent, who in his youth had been my parent’s paperboy for a time, delivering the Oshawa Times to the south-side of their rented Church Street red Insulbrick duplex, my first home.

Truth be told, my dad liked Ed not so much because of his NDP affiliation, although as a trade unionist that carried weight, but mainly because he saw him as a hardworking, honest politician; a kindred spirit, although my dad would have put it more plainly than that.

My dad had a Grade 8 education and wasn’t much for reading. I don’t think I ever saw him read a book, other than maybe to consult the odd one for some factual information. His idea of leisure was to work with his hands at carpentry or upholstery, and he built me, the reader, several fine custom-size wooden bookcases, with a larger than normal shelf sometimes for oversized books.

My non-book reading father, however, made time every day to read the local daily newspaper, and from 1983, when I began working as a newspaper reporter, until his death in 1989, quite likely read every newspaper story I wrote during that six-year period, and, as I learned only after he died, would often point out my byline in the Peterborough Examiner to shopkeepers and acquaintances in Bridgenorth, a small community just outside of Peterborough on Chemong Lake, where he lived from 1980 to 1989.

That man, an ordinary man by the measures of the world, yet an extraordinary man of character by any measure, was my father.

Bill Barker. Born on July 13, 1919. Gone from this earthly plain to his true home, but never forgotten by those of us who knew him here. My dad.

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The Accidental Lowbrow Fast Food Blogger

 

 

 

 

Back in September 2014, I’d never have guessed some 80,000 views and 2½ years later, how often I’d have written about food, especially fast food joints and other greasy spoons in Canada and the United States. I’m not quite sure what I thought I was going to be writing about, but I don’t remember food being on my composing radar for blog posts. Premillennial dispensationalism? The Rapture? Young Earth Creationism?  Spiritual Warfare? Petrus Romanus? Prophecy of St. Malachy or Prophecy of the Popes? Any and all things Catholic? Sure, all of these and more, some pretty arcane and from the fringe of the respectable-thinking universe. But food? Who’d a thunk it?

Admittedly, I had written on occasion about food, especially fast food, prior to venturing forth with soundingsjohnbarker (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/) but not that often.  Mainly if it involved a road trip from Southern Ontario to New England or vice-versa that wound up taking me to my favourite Red Barn, up in the Adirondacks in Troy, New York, or something got me thinking about high school back in Oshawa, Ontario and memories of Mother’s Pizza and Pepi’s Pizza. That sort of thing.

Just taking a quick look here, it looks like I’ve become an insatiable lowbrow fast food blogger who dreams of being to blogging what Guy Fieri of Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives is to TV. And that’s just looking for headlines that trumpet food, not so much others posts that mention food either in a secondary or passing fashion, overshadowed by a main non-food story. Last year I wrote about Glenview, Illinois-based Family Video (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2016/01/17/who-shot-the-video-store-and-how-did-glenview-illinois-based-family-video-survive-to-thrive-and-still-rent-movies-and-now-sell-pizza/), which continues to survive and thrive and still rent movies, but also mentioned how they now sell pizza made in their video stores from Marco’s Pizza of Toledo, Ohio. Marco’s Pizza, founded in 1978 by Pasquale “Pat” Giammarco, is one of the fastest-growing pizza franchise operations in the United States. The Toledo-based delivery pizza franchisor opened 116 stores in 2015. Pizza is a $46- billion market in the United States that continues to grow at a rate of about one to two per cent per year.

In a similar vein, I’ve written a couple of times about the Burntwood Curling Club’s monthly, from November to April anyway, fundraising pickerel fish fry, now in its third season, to bring in some revenue at $20 a plate for the older crowd and $10 a plate for those 12 and under, with proceeds going towards what it cost to replace the club’s aging ice plant, a big ticket six-figure item for curling clubs. The last fish fry of the season is set for Monday, April 3 in the upstairs club lounge from 5 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. The fish fry involves club volunteers cooking about 50 pounds per fish fry of  fresh pickerel, also known as walleye, from the commercial fish packing station in Wabowden. Pickerel is the most valuable commercial fish catch in Manitoba, with an average value of  about $20 million per year, which is about 70 per cent of the landed value of all species, and comprise more than 40 per cent of commercial fish production in the province by weight. Am I writing primarily about curling or pickerel? I suppose some of both really, but I know a bit more about pickerel. Jeanette and I are looking forward this spring and summer to marking a decade fishing together off the dock for pickerel at Paint Lake Marina!

I’ve written here and elsewhere about driving a Plymouth Duster to deliver for Mother’s Pizza Simcoe North in Oshawa during my last spring in high school for $2.65 per hour – plus tips (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/15/a-taste-for-yesterday-mothers-pizza-and-pepis-pizza/). Mother’s was an iconic Canadian pizza parlour chain from the 1970s – with its swinging parlour-style doors, Tiffany lamps, antique-style chairs, red-and-white checked gingham tablecloths, black-and-white short silent movies shown on a screen for patrons waiting for their meal to enjoy, root beer floats and pizzas served on silver-coloured metal pedestal stands.

Maybe we all just love food, no?

In Winnipeg, we have V.J.’s Drive Inn at at Broadway and Main with its overstuffed double chili cheese dogs, greasy spoon certified cheeseburgers, golden fries and chocolate milkshakes, all for the more discerning among the Fort Garry Hotel clientele methinks.

And speaking of chili dogs: should you ever find yourself down in Durham, North Carolina, you can’t go wrong enjoying a meal at The Dog House, locally owned and in business in Durham since 1970, and serving up an assortment of Bull-Dogs, Boxer Dogs, Collie Dogs, Hound Dogs, Puppy Dogs, Ol’ Yallows and the like.

Living in North Carolina was where I developed tastes for chili dogs, deep-fried cornmeal-batter Hushpuppies, pork barbecue and fat back, cracklins and wash pot pork rinds, while prudently not losing said tastes by overdoing it with low-density lipoproteins (LDL) cholesterol testing at nearby Duke University Medical Center, although I visited the world-class medical facility for other ailments on occasion.

The Dog House says its chili is made from a family recipe with pure beef, and no beans, soy or other fillers; just a blend of secret spices and 47 years of experience.

As for the slaw, it is “not too sweet and not too spicy,” and always freshly made.

But closer to home, when you’re appetite is a bit larger than a sausage dog or one of its cousins,  my pick is Lovey’s BBQ in St. Boniface for hand trimmed briskets, pork shoulders and ribs. Yum!

Sometimes you get to combine your writing interests, say about Catholicism and food, as I did in “Catholic cooking: From Pope Francis’ love for Buenos Aires pizzerias to Father Leo Patalinghug, the TV show Filipino ‘Cooking Priest’” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/03/15/catholic-cooking-from-pope-francis-love-for-buenos-aires-pizzerias-to-father-leo-patalinghug-the-tv-show-filipino-cooking-priest/)

I combined Catholicism and food on a few other occasions as well: In “‘Make mine halibut, please’: Fish-and-chips-Catholic-on-Friday” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/11/07/make-mine-halibut-please-fish-and-chips-catholic-on-friday/) I wrote that until Blessed Pope Paul VI proclaimed Paenitemini (Apostolic Constitution On Penance) on Feb. 17, 1966, which allowed episcopal conferences to permit Catholics in their jurisdictions to substitute some other penitential practice aside from abstaining from meat on Fridays. Catholics had been eating fish on Friday under an edict in force in the universal church since Pope Saint Nicholas 1, also known as Saint Nicholas the Great, in 851. With the exception in Canada of Ash Wednesday and Good Friday in accordance with the prescriptions of Canon 1253, proclaimed in 1983. Fridays are days of abstinence, but Canadian Catholics can substitute special acts of charity or piety on this day.

No need to feel too sorry though for us fish eaters for having to forgo meat on Fridays from 851 to 1966. We made up for it on an annual basis on “Fat Tuesday,” which fell on Feb. 28 this year. Fat Tuesday. Mardi Gras.  Máirt Inide. Dydd Mawrth Ynyd.  Fastnacht. Fastelavn. Sprengidagur.  Güdisdienstag. Vastlapäev.  Užgavėnės.  Fettisdagen. Laskiainen. Shrove Tuesday. Call it what you will, but we made sure we ate  – and ate big and ate rich – on this moveable feast, based on the lunar cycles of the moon – the last day of Shrovetide before the penitential season of Lent begins on Ash Wednesday, which is its colloquial name.  Dating to the A.D. 900s, the official name is the Day of Ashes. Come to think of it, even though we can eat meat on Fridays now outside of Lent, we remain fond of Shrove Tuesday.

“If smell and sound are important to Catholics, so, too, taste,” I wrote in a blog post headlined “With our O antiphons, Smoking Bishops and ‘sinful servants’ we are the Church Militant on Earth.” I noted that we had borrowed the “Smoking Bishop,” a mulled wine wassail, “in a spirit of ecumenical breaking of bread at table” from our “Anglican or Episcopalian brothers and sisters, particularly Charles Dickens, a heterodox Anglican if ever there was one, who wrote A Christmas Carol after he journeyed to Lancashire in the summer of 1843 to see for himself how life was lived in the industrial north of England. He completed the book that fall in six weeks and the book was published on Dec. 19, 1843 (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/12/18/with-our-o-antiphons-smoking-bishops-and-sinful-servants-we-are-the-church-militant-on-earth/).

“A merry Christmas, Bob!” said Scrooge, with an earnestness that could not be mistaken, as he clapped him on the back. “A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, than I have given you, for many a year! I’ll raise your salary, and endeavour to assist your struggling family, and we will discuss your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of Smoking Bishop, Bob!”

It is in that spirit we offer you this recipe for a Smoking Bishop, courtesy of Cedric Dickens, a great-grandson of Charles Dickens, published in his 1988 book, Drinking with Dickens:

Smoking Bishop

6 Clementines
1/2 C sugar
30 cloves
8 C moderately sweet red wine
1 bottle ruby port

Bake the oranges in a medium oven for about 20 minutes. Stick cloves into the oranges and then put them into a large bowl. Pour the wine over them and add the sugar. Cover and leave in a warm place for 24 hours. Squeeze the juice from the oranges and mix it with the wine. Add the port and heat the mixture in a pan. Do not boil. Serve hot.

And you can be pretty sure that while I might not post about it on soundingsjohnbarker, I’m quite likely to put in a bit of a plug on my Facebook page at least for annual Grilled Cheese Sandwich Day come Wednesday, April 12. I’ve done so for the last two years.

Melting cheese on top of bread is a culinary concept that has been around since the time of Ancient Rome,  but modern grilled cheese sandwiches, as we know them, didn’t become popular until the 1920s. Due to the ready availability of cheese and sliced bread for the average consumer by the early 20th century, they became an American staple, but a connoisseur’s love for grilled cheese sandwiches also spread around the world.

Thanksgiving, of course, gives me a change to give holiday nod to turkey, such as in this piece, “Mouthwatering American Thanksgiving recipes correction in the New York Times and other pardonable acts” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/11/27/mouthwatering-american-thanksgiving-recipes-correction-in-the-new-york-times-and-other-pardonable-acts/):

“Correction: November 26, 2014

“An article last Wednesday recommending a Thanksgiving dish from each state, with a recipe, contained numerous errors.

“The recipe from Connecticut, for quince with cipollini onions and bacon, omitted directions for preparing the quince. It should be peeled, cored and cut into 1-inch chunks. An illustration with the West Virginia recipe, for pawpaw pudding, depicted a papaya — not a pawpaw, which is correctly depicted above. The introduction to the recipe from Arizona, for cranberry sauce and chiles, misstated the origin of Hatch chiles. They are grown in New Mexico, not in Arizona.

“The introduction to the Delaware recipe, for du Pont turkey with truffled zucchini stuffing, referred incorrectly to several historical points about the Winterthur estate. It was an ancestral home of the du Pont family, not the sole one; it was established in 1837, not in 1810; the house was completed in 1839, not in 1837. The introduction also misstated the relationship of Pauline Foster du Pont to Eleuthère Irénée du Pont. Pauline was the wife of Mr. du Pont’s grandson, not his daughter-in-law.

And I wouldn’t be much of a former New Englander, if after enjoying a “blue” rare steak, I didn’t enjoy  scarfing down some super premium ice cream, like Steve’s Ice Cream, named after Steve Herrell, as it was in the early 1980s at the original location on Elm Street in Davis Square in Somerville, Massachusetts, or Ben & Jerry’s Homemade, Inc., which got its its start  in a renovated gas station at the corner of St. Paul and College streets  in Burlington, Vermont. In 1980, they were  showing movies on summer Saturday nights on an outside wall of the gas station, I remember.\

Burgers have been the continuing jackpot for my food entries, however, which may not surprise many. What might surprise you, however, is the relatively big numbers (outpacing anything I’ve written on Thompson city council, can you believe it?) has been for two posts on two defunct American burger chains, both of which also operated for a time in parts of Canada, particularly in the 1970s.

Apparently former employees of the two burger chains and hungry aficionados who remember them fondly, salivate, or so it seems, to a helping of words on the Red Barn and Burger Chef, gone, but never forgotten.

Both stories get read pretty much daily somewhere in the world and “Red Barn, Big Barney and the Barnbuster” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/13/red-barn-big-barney-and-the-barnbuster/) was published here back on Sept. 13, 2014, while “Burger Chef: The story of the greatest might-have-been in the history of the fast food business” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2016/03/13/burger-chef-the-story-of-the-greatest-might-have-been-in-the-history-of-the-fast-food-business/) appeared originally on March 13, 2016.

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