I'd give my left arm for a picture of what our house looked like when my dad was studying for a Post Office job because even now my best memory cannot do justice to what a house looks like with 20,000 flip cards dangling from every ceiling. I realize I've presented my father as somewhat of a lunatic so far but truth be told for all intensive purposes he was.
However, he was also a genius. As troubling as it was growing up with him I always recognized how brilliant he could be at times and the event that stood out the most was watching him study for the post office exam.
"Really? A post office exam? How hard could that be?" I can hear you asking yourself those questions now.
It was an astonishingly hard test. Much harder than the doctors MCAT or lawyers LSAT tests that I'd buy for him on holidays. Those were like tic-tac-toe level questions for him and I only resorted to buying those because he had read and answered every single text book in the Math and Sciences department of my University book store by the time I reached the end of year three. The man should have been a surgeon, a mathematician, a scientist, he could have helped the world in some magnificent way had he a desire to express himself that way. I wish he had left a legacy like that.
Instead, I remember him for doing something more heroic than saving the world, I remember him for saving our little family of two by pulling off the greatest memorization feat I have ever seen with my own eyes.
My dad's job was in jeopardy at McDonnell Douglas for a number of reasons. The schemer reason was that he was involved in a nasty union strike. I want to focus on his feat of accomplishment with the Post Office in this story and leave the full story about my father's fight to a more serious Scheme of Schemes book that I intend to write soon. If however, you would like to know the back story of his troubles there you can read this article and when it talks about the harassment of the Shop Steward's know that at that point they are talking about my father.To be specific, I believe (through my dad's stories at a time when i was quite young) that this person they are talking about .... "One Bargaining Committee member, whose case was heard separately, was suspended without pay for three months and was returned to work by the arbitrator" is my dad.
I also believe that the root cause of his dementia and paranoia of being permanently followed, harassed and investigated stemmed from this action taken by his former employer...
It was revealed in a court case not related to the happenings at DACAN, that the company had employed a private detective agency - - Centurion Investigations - - to infiltrate Local 1967 and cause trouble. Three episodes were revealed in that case:
1. They had placed a bomb, with no fuse, in the Plant Chairperson’s car;
2. They assaulted a black member of the Local’s Executive Board and tried to blame the Plant Chairperson;
3. Fights were deliberately started on the 1971 picket lines;
Though that detective company won in the end I believe my dad's scheme to fight back and secure a better life for us was a greater victory.
In short, my dad had been suspended and I remember him being at home for a long time in a state of duress. We were being constantly followed, there were cars parked outside the room we were renting and there were middle of the night attacks where the windows would be smashed and the door would be pounded upon. We were constantly being evicted and I was living under war-time like rules with orders not to appear at the window, not being able to turn the lights on at night time, and having to keep the thick carpet-like drapes closed at all times of the day.
Meanwhile, I have to think that my dad was planning his escape from that job because one day I remember him starting to write what turned out to be postal codes on flash cards ... the kind he would flash at me with arithmetic problems to make me super fast at my multiplication tables.On one side of the flash card he would write a postal code while on the other side he would write the location of that postal code by street name and city. Then with a piece of duct tape he would hang the postal code from the ceiling or stick it to the wall grouping all the postal codes by city together. Thus, eventually, every wall became a city. Our kitchen space was Waterloo, Kitchener and Cambridge. There was no wall showing after a while, every square inch was filled with these flash cards from floor to ceiling. The living room was now Oakville, Burlington and Mississauga ... remember we are talking about back in 1974-75 when these cities were very small relative to today.
Our little 2 bedroom, one hallway, one kitchen, and one bathroom apartment that he was renting had turned into a freak show. It was like something somebody would set up for a halloween party only to have it all torn down the day after. But this preposterous set up lasted for a year.
Now this is where I start to question the depth of my dad's scheme. An unanswered question that will forever haunt me is this: Did my dad purposely cut off his hand in order to get job protection from the Workman's Compensation Board of Canada?
I'd like to know what machine he worked on. I remember one time asking him to buy me a slinky ... "it goes down stairs, alone or in pairs, every one loves a slinky ... a slinky a slinky it's such a wonderful toy ... a slinky a slinky it's fun for a girl or a boy" ...that toy. Instead, he brought home a rectangular slinky type replica about the length of a brick and as tall as a kid's thumb. When extended, this slinky type metal would stretch out infinitely it seemed and unlike the 'snap-back' effect a slinky has, this thing would retain it's stretched out position. I know it was used somehow to support the wing structure of the DC9 aircraft but i'd like to one day know what machine was associated with that metal ... and eventually i'd like to find out if it was possible to severe one's forearm in that machine purposefully. I know I sound as crazy as my dad but I now realize that there was absolutely nothing my father would not do to protect our lives. Attempting to cut off his own hand from the forearm is something i wouldn't put past him as an attempt to ensure job security through a time of plant layoffs.
Regardless of whether it was purposeful or not the result of the accident was that my dad's hand was severed from the midway point of his left forearm down to the fleshy part below his thumb and he permanently lost 80% of the feeling in his left hand as a result.
Approximately six months later my dad was cleared to return to work but it was a workforce that was dwindling fast and it was only my dad's injury which had prevented him from being laid off as well.
"...many new components for McDonnell-Douglas airplanes were assigned to MDCAN until the Boeing Aircraft Company of the U.S.A. bought McDonnell-Douglas and began phasing out the McDonnell-Douglas product line. This served to reduce employment at the new Boeing Toronto Ltd. (Malton) location"
My dad knew that his return to work would be very temporary so he devised another scheme which he openly admitted to me at a later date.
On the very first day back to work he faked a back injury by purposefully slipping on an area of wet floor that had just been mopped. He went right back onto Workman's Compensation and UI checks and knew that this was the final time he would have to do what he had to do.
I have never seen such commitment to a task as my father did to memorizing those postal codes. I kid you not, every day he spent no less than 20 hours putting memory 'hooks' to each postal code. Every letter in the alphabet he assigned to a word as did every number between 0 and 9. Thus, every postal code had a story.
L5C 2E5 would now read something like this in his brain ... "Leopards Find Claws Tornados Eat Claws" and he would add the city ... "Leopards and Tornados exist in Mississauga". He would then memorize an adjacent postal code and find a reason in his mnemonic to correlate them all together within the city they exist.
Like a crazy man muttering to himself my dad for the better part of a year walked around our window drawn apartment without hardly ever leaving reciting little songs to himself the represented the postal codes of every city in Southern Ontario.
At the end it was a wonderful thing to watch. He would start at one end of the kitchen and looking up at the postal codes dangling from the ceiling he would begin to recite a nonsensical story linking every hanging postal code to one another. His song would travel along the ceiling and then down and around every level of all four walls until he was eventually crawling around on his knees looking at the postal codes sitting an inch from the floor.
Much later in my life I worked at the post office briefly doing the same job my dad had done many years prior. Innovation had computerized the entering of postal codes of envelopes by the time I worked there and my machine would send the letter off to the correct sorting sub-facility of the plant. I imagine the purpose of having such an incredibly hard test back then was due to the whole sorting of letters by postal code to be something that was still manually done. I'm guessing, but it makes sense to me that the post office would want workers who could remember as many postal codes as possible so that the mail could be sorted both quickly and properly. To get such people they had to have a test to test one's memory.
Here's what I remember as a 9 year old boy. I remember sitting down in a rather uncomfortable chair in a big bland front fourier of a building with a towering ceiling above me. I took out my book and began reading it early in the morning i'd say at about 8am.
I was very hungry when I saw my dad again in the afternoon and in that time I had read a great portion of that book and it helped me survive that day without being a nuisance. My dad had left me alone so many times in my life out of absolute necessity that I had become quite good at staying out of trouble and letting him do whatever he had to do to get us ahead in life. This had been one of those days.
I don't know why it took so long to write that test. I don't know how many questions were on it or how many people wrote the test with him. What I remember is that my dad got near perfect on it. From how he described it, the test as just pages and pages of postal codes and/or streets and he had to write down either the street or the postal code to match whichever of the two they had provided. It was just as he had memorized and he had prepared masterfully to ace that test and hopefully get the job. But there were obstacles for him to overcome still as always. They did not accept his test and instead asked him to re-write it which was a sneaky way of accusing him of cheating. Nobody had ever scored as high on the test as my dad had done. To them it was simply not possible for somebody to have memorized every single postal code in our area of the province. It was akin to asking somebody to memorize a number 20,000 digits long, who could accomplish such a feat? My dad could! Honestly, fairly, for the sake of our family.
On the re-write my dad scored perfect. I ask the Post Office right here and now ... has that feat ever been duplicated since?
He was let go on a Friday and started work at his secure postal working job on the following Monday and remained there until the day he retired some 25 years later.
My dad was a great man. I love you dad. I am so happy I finally told this story of your greatest accomplishment for us and I will do you even more justice when I tell the entire story of how you provided for me and you all alone throughout my years as a baby continuing right through to this story. It has to be told.
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