The content of the Steele Report comes from many different places and I follow so many things, even I don’t know what the topic will be.

This week the editor of this fine publication asked me to do a short biography.  It’s something I never thought too much about actually.  I regard the stages of life personally as individual life times.

I grew up in what is now Lake Country on what was called rainbow hill.  My father and Uncle had a farm up there for a few years and my dad was a carpenter to support it.  Where have we heard that before?  Eventually my father became a cold storage foreman in the packinghouse and later operated a motel and small farm in Oyama.

Like so many others in their first brush with adulthood I headed for the city.  Radio obsessed I was.   Sacrifice was the order of the day.  Radio was a close community and getting in was dependent on perseverance.  I got a side voice job advertising the shows at the Skyway Drive In Theater.

The Program Director of the radio station asked the Theater Manager who I was and I opened a new life chapter.

Getting ahead required moving a lot.  Peace River Alberta, Salmon Arm, Red Deer, Penticton. Kelowna, and pulled back from the industry working part time in Radio and full time managing Night Clubs.  I had my own audience it seemed as  many referred to me as Stainless Steele and eventually as Doctor Stainless (The Doctor of good times).  Incidentally I have the mounted belt buckle and name plate on my wall.

In the mid eighties the radio bug was infectious and it was off to CFCW – an Edmonton Station that operated out of Camrose Alberta.   A year or two later I was back at CKOV in Kelowna and back in Nightclub management.

In the transient world of broadcasting it was time to move on. CKAL and later renamed CICF was looking for a person with specific skills.  It was a different world with some of the most eccentric people I ever worked with and that was saying something.  Consider for a moment in Red Deer Alberta at CKRD I was a rock and roll jock spinning records upstairs above a funeral home.

I liken the whole adventure to being part of a gold rush, when the glitter is gone.  I decided to work on my own at my own pace and went farming.  I had started and finished my broadcast career in the same city at the end of a thirty year adventure.  Now I was going to farm, just like the years I grew up in the orchard.  Life became a giant wheel there seemed to be no beginning nor end.

Quiet peace and tranquility were not to be.  While farming I was persuaded to enter agricultural politics and was elected to the BCFGA as Vice President.  In 2012-13 – I lost the elections for President.  2014-17 –  I served as president of the BCFGA before retiring last year to provide full time care for my ailing wife who passed away this month.

Now I write poetry, I am working on a novel and recently co-wrote an album with a musician friend of  mine.  It has been like participating in several interesting life experiences.

Fred Steele