Co-op Store Memories
My Dad was asked to take over the Manager’s position at the Oliver Co-Op Store in the late 60’s. He was quite pleased and had a wonderful ally in Board of Director Alec McGibbon. The office staff was Art Danby and Mrs. Willa Doerr. Linda Kearsley and a girl named Jean worked the floor and Alec Bauder and Bill Riley were in the lumber yard along with several other employees! It was quite a big store and carried not only feed and lumber but appliances, furniture and dishes too.
Within a few months there was a huge convention in Regina, Saskatchewan and Mom and Dad had to go. They were to go by train so Mom and Dad drove to Sicamous and stayed overnight with Dad’s niece and her hubby, Donna and Gil Johnson at Canoe. The train started in Vancouver and picked up Managers and wives along the way through BC, Alberta and parts of Saskatchewan until they reached Regina.
The train trip was a drinkathon from the moment they all got onboard! Dad met fellow Managers and renewed his friendship with Sid Campbell who used to live in Oliver. My Mom was the life of the party even though she didn’t drink more than one a day.
She had a little plan though and since all the guys had bought several bottles, she managed to swipe unopened bottles of booze and when the guys said they had run out, she would sell them back their own booze. She sold the same bottle of gin nine times before it finally got used!!! By the time she got to Regina she had $600 of their money which she presented to them the first night they were in their hotel! Boy some of them were astounded at how she managed to steal their bottles out from under them but they were delighted with the joke and proceeded to hit the liquor stores! And remember in those days a 26’er was about $10 so she swiped a lot of bottles.
It was winter time and Regina was pretty cold. One of the guys opened a window in his room and put a bag of pop out on the window ledge to cool down. When he came back from dinner, the pop had frozen and had blown the caps off all the bottles. There was frozen pop all over the window and the ledge!! Not to be put off, the men came up with a way of insulating a cardboard box and their pop was ice cold but not frozen anymore.
They had a great convention and made many new friends. The trip back was just as wild as it was going out and promises were made with the BC contingent to get together in Vancouver for the B.C. convention in the spring!
So now it is spring and Mom and Dad head to Vancouver to the BC Convention and showroom. I was living at the Buena Vista Motel and Mom and Dad’s headquarters was the Astor Hotel right next door.
As usual, there was a party in almost every room and lots of laughter. The hotel was smart and put all the Co-op people on the same floor! The doors to all the rooms were always open except at bed time so there was a lot of wandering the halls, having a drink and moving to the next room! By the way, the showroom was simply spectacular with all the new items that would be flooding into the stores in a few weeks!
Dad had an expense account so I was able to have dinner with them almost every night and had some great meals and also got to visit with them every night.
I remember one night a couple of the managers from the Island wanted to see some night life and I heard that Catherine McKinnon was playing at a lounge downtown. For those of you way too young, Catherine was a popular folk singer along with her sister Patrician Ann McKinnon. A bunch of us jumped in a cab and off to the show we went! We had a barrel of fun!
Another little incident happened long after the conventions and brought the house down at BC Federated head office!
The General Manager was Frank Coffey and he was quite a prankster and loved to have a good laugh. He and his wife were in Oliver on holidays and of course had to take Mom and Dad out for dinner and Mom of course had to make spaghetti and meatballs for them. She happened to have made a beautiful tea ring or coffee cake and Frank loved it…he ate most of it! He had never heard the term coffee cake so figured Mom named it for him!!!
When he got back to Vancouver he bragged about Mom’s COFFEY cake, named for him until his secretary, fed up with his bragging phoned Mom and asked for the recipe so they could make one and shut him up!
Mom being a prankster herself said no problem I will give you my recipe but first let me play a joke on Frank. She sent Dad to the reservation to find the biggest cow pie he could…a nice dry one too! He came home with a dilly and Mom set about decorating it. She made icing out Pollyfiller and decorated it with red and green maraschino cherries and all kinds of nuts here and there. With her piping bag she wrote along the bottom FRANK’S “COFFEY” CAKE.” She tied a beautiful red ribbon around it and Dad had found a box and they packed it in and waited for the truck the next day.
The instructions to the driver were to deliver PERSONALLY the package to only Frank Coffey and the driver did just that! Poor Frank was so excited that Lena had made him his very own Coffee Cake and ripped the package apart! His secretary and all of the staff were in on the joke and waited to see his reaction.
He took one look at it and sat down and laughed until he cried! Then he cleared a space on top of the filing cabinet and placed the COFFEY cake upright. The next day he came in with a wooden frame he made for the beautiful cake to sit in and there it stayed. Whenever anyone new came in, they were given the story of the COFFEY cake. He drove his staff nuts about it! When he retired he took it home of course it had a place of honour on top of his fireplace much to his wife’s dismay!!!
Mom did send the recipe but Frank said that Lena made the best COFFEY cake. Whenever they were in town, Mom made sure she made one just for him.
Ahhh…..such funny memories and such wild times. Do people play jokes on each other now? Is the work place a lot of fun or is it just you go to work and go home? I know that my last two jobs were pretty dull by comparison!!