The Nova Scotia Book of Fathers Read online

  “I think that’s one of the hardest things to figure out in life,” he says. “Hopefully you’ll find a partner who will walk with you.

  “I think there are certain traits, certain strengths, that you’re going to need to keep your head on your shoulders, to keep focused, and to know you’re loved by yourself and by the world around you.”

  Jack’s last piece of advice for me, for Xavier, sounds like it came from the mind of Adam 130,000 years ago: “Know yourself. Love yourself. Go from there.”

  Looking Out For Anyone But Himself

  Joan Baxter

  We were descending from the dizzying heights of the Latin-American Tower, which at that time – 1979 – was the tallest building in the sprawling metropolis of Mexico City, then the world’s biggest urban centre. My dad, mom, brother, and I had got on the elevator on the forty-fourth floor. We’d been to the observation deck hoping to enjoy the panoramic view of the city and the volcanic mountain peaks that surround it. All we saw was smog. It obscured the mountains, draped over the entire city like a toxic, sulphur-coloured blanket.

  Nevertheless, my dad found it all endlessly fascinating. He had tried to engage the ticket agent on the viewing platform in a discussion about the engineering feat that made the building earthquake-resistant. He’d read at great length about the construction of the building in the 1950s, and its remarkable foundation that saved it from collapse through several earthquakes. He wanted to learn more if he could, and to share his enthusiasm about this architectural marvel with the decidedly disinterested ticket seller. This he tried to do in his self-taught, beginner Spanish, one of several languages he took up over the years in his desire to learn everything there was to learn. (When he was in his mid-eighties, he bought a set of “Learn Arabic” books, saying he intended to teach himself that language, too.)

  It was, for my father, inconceivable that the rest of humanity did not share his infinite curiosity and drive to read, explore, look, listen, and learn. I don’t think he even noticed that the ticket seller didn’t share his interest in the engineering details that allowed the Latin-American Tower to remain standing when the earth on which it stood took to shaking madly.

  But once inside the elevator, Dad went back to being his other persona, the man who spent his life trying to be invisible.

  It went like this. At first, it was just the four of us in the elevator. As we made our punctuated descent from floor to floor, more and more passengers came on board. Each time, my dad shuffled backwards, hunching his shoulders and tucking in his head as if to make himself smaller, muttering apologies for his presence and the inconvenience it might be causing others. By the time we got to the bottom, he had backed himself into the rear corner, halfway to making himself disappear altogether. As if, as he liked to tell his grandkids in the last decade of his life, he really did believe himself to be just a “waste of space.”

  When we finally emerged on the ground floor from the crowded elevator, Dad was the very last to do so. And I remember (how it hurts to write this) chastising him for being “too polite” and asking him why on earth he was excusing his very existence to a bunch of strangers in an elevator in Mexico.

  I was young then. My brashness and insensitivity were born of immaturity, but that’s no excuse.

  Truth is that for far too long, my father used to embarrass me with his utter lack of vanity. Oh, the mortification we kids felt when he wore those big black office shoes on bare feet, tucking his socks into the back pockets of his cotton shorts, where they dangled like a dead rabbit’s ears. How I wished he would stop being so weird; none of my friends’ fathers taught them the Russian alphabet, or took them on Sunday walks to wharfs in Halifax to view the ships and the piles of raw rubber and other goods brought to our shores by sea in those pre-container days. None of my friends’ fathers drove up to farmhouses and asked for permission to camp in the farm fields (wearing aforementioned shoes without socks).

  Dad didn’t smoke or drink or play golf or belong to private clubs. His idea of fun on a Friday night involved the Halifax Regional Library and later for us, YM-YWCA swimming lessons in the pool at Shearwater. Or it involved a musical evening of piano and recorders at home with his and my mom’s close adult friends, who drank tea, ate biscuits, and laughed between musical pieces, with laughter their time signature.

  On a naked turntable and an amplifier he put together himself, Dad entertained us with The Goon Show, the songs of Pete Seeger and the Limeliters, Oscar Peterson and Benny Goodman, children’s operetta versions of Peter and the Wolf and Hansel and Gretel, and a round-the-clock diet of CBC radio. We had no attractive hi-fi unit sitting on stilettos in our living room, like other families I knew.

  As a kid, I thought I was missing out on something essential, although I have no idea now what on earth I could have thought that was.

  And yes, even in my twenties, when I should have known better, I felt embarrassed by the kind of selfless humility that my father exhibited in the Latin-American Tower.

  Shortly after that elevator ride, we found ourselves in Mexico City’s subway, heading back to our hotel. Again, my dad was doing his shrinking-violet routine, anxious to make way for everyone else in the car. We were about to exit when two young men ambushed him – one giving my father a push towards the exit while the other picked his pocket. When we realized what had happened it was too late. We watched hopelessly as the train sped away with the two thieves still inside. Earlier that morning Dad had changed a large bundle of travellers’ cheques – another relic of the age. He had put the cash into his wallet, which he tucked into his front pants pocket, assuring my mother that it was safe there.

  In my mind I can still see the stricken look on his face as he stood on that subway platform, patting his empty pocket, exposed as a turtle without its shell. Suddenly I saw – and it sank in for the first time – that my father was not infallible, and that he, like others with this bent for giving and trusting, was incredibly vulnerable.

  Self-defence wasn’t in his repertoire. For Dad, looking out for “number one” meant looking out for my mother, family, friends, complete strangers, the less fortunate, and the voiceless. Anyone but himself.

  Dad was an extraordinarily intelligent man, but he just couldn’t help himself; he trusted everyone. I think it helped him maintain his desire to do good, keep his idealism and community spirit alive. Right to the very end.

  Groomed For A Different Era

  He possessed none of the traits that would have propelled him to the top in these dog-eat-dog days of cowboy capitalism, unfettered by regulation or concern for the public good. He was manically, almost pathologically modest. He had zero vanity, no sense of entitlement, was devoid of greed, and generous to a fault. A giver, not a taker.

  When the Soviets cracked down on the 1956 Hungarian revolution and Hungarians fled to Canada, Dad offered sanctuary to two refuge-seekers, Liaos Lantos and his mother, who stayed with us in our two-bedroom house until Mr. Lantos obtained his dental technician diploma and moved to Newfoundland. Dad didn’t see such acts of kindness as anything but normal.

  Then again, he grew up in an era before selfishness and avarice had been transformed into virtues. He was groomed for a time when these unpleasant, anti-social traits were still considered sinful.

  But I don’t want to make it sound as if he was a failure in any sense of that word. In fact, if we take monetary wealth out of his life’s equation, he had a remarkably successful and rewarding career and life.

  Dad – Arthur Weston Baxter (Wes) – was born on October 21, 1923, in Quebec City, to parents Lillian and Arthur George from Amherst, Nova Scotia. They were descended from Loyalist stock in the Maritimes, whose ancestors had moved north of the border in the late eighteenth century, offered land by the British Crown in its Canadian colony after defending the royal cause against the upstart Americans during the War of Independence.

  When my father was still a small boy, the family, which by then included my father’s younger b
rother Carlton, moved to Montreal. In a short essay he wrote at some point in the last fifteen years of his life, he recalled the ugly hostility that existed between Anglophones and Francophones in his neighbourhood.

  “The house on the corner of Queen Mary Road was the home of a French-Canadian family, and the children on Earnscliffe were all Anglophones, except for the son of this family,” he wrote. “In what, in retrospect, was a racist attitude, we English-speaking kids made fun of the French-speaking son some of the time.” It was on one of these occasions that the boy, tired of the taunts, “produced a bee-bee gun, aimed it wildly at the crowd, and pulled the trigger.”

  The pellet hit my father’s left eye. The scar it left robbed him of any real vision in that eye. This lifelong disability may well have saved his life. Because he lacked depth perception, he was not permitted to join any of the services during World War II, despite his many attempts. It was only in 1945 that he was able to join Canada’s Merchant Navy.

  Life’s Countless Little Pieces

  To try to piece together his life – the part of it that preceded his time as our dad – I have been resorting to the digital catacombs that he bequeathed us on his computer. I’ve culled the whole works and placed it all in a folder called “Dad’s files.” In it there are thousands and thousands of files, some just floating about freely with no rhyme or obvious reason, but most in a cascading labyrinth of sub- and sub-sub-folders, with many duplicates. I look at it as Dad’s own way of burying treasure.

  Love you, Dad.

  It makes me smile and tear up as I recall listening to him arguing with his computer. Have I mentioned that he had a wicked temper? Sometimes cursing himself for being so “stupid” and sometimes directing his frustration at the computer, into which he poured his heart and soul in his last years, as well as just about every kind of document, photograph (those thousands of slides he scanned and pictures he PhotoShopped), and memento imaginable. Why would he have decided to save those 1909 Christmas menus from two hotels in Amherst? How did he even find them?

  But for all his obsessive collection and storage of historical details and all that he wrote, there is still much that remains undocumented about Dad’s life story.

  At some point, shortly after the accident, his parents moved back to Amherst and my dad and his brother completed their schooling there. Later, I know that my dad did an Engineering Certificate at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick, and then after his stint with the Merchant Navy he studied electrical engineering at the Nova Scotia Technical College in Halifax, today Dalhousie University’s engineering faculty.

  Student housing being scarce, he and some college friends built a trailer for themselves and somehow managed to convince the College president to allow them to set it up on campus. They hooked the trailer up to the College power grid, procuring a power meter so they could pay for the electricity they used. Although the facts are a little fuzzy here, for some reason the power meter didn’t get hooked up. When they bought an old washing machine and rented it to fellow students, they did so using the unmetered power. Whether they did this knowingly has never been completely clear to me, but even if they did, I figure it’s probably the only not-completely-honest thing my dad and his college friends ever did.

  Another of his friends at Nova Scotia Tech, Edgar McLellan, introduced my dad to his sister Beth, then a nurse-in-training in Halifax – who would become our mom. She recalls how even way back then, Dad was constantly doing things for other people. As a student, he would rent a projector and films, and take these to show to patients in the Victoria General Hospital.

  Mom and Dad were married in my mother’s childhood home in River Philip on Christmas Day 1948, before heading west, on a honeymoon trip of 8,300 miles from Nova Scotia to New York City to Florida, then through deep snow in Death Valley and north to British Columbia. My dad had a job with B.C. Power Commission, and so the four of us – my three brothers and myself – were all born on the west coast.

  In a book Dad wrote about his family’s genealogy, he made a wry comment about the Baxters never being much good at making or keeping money, and that he was no exception. But he was never driven by money. If he had been, he would likely not have sold that piece of waterfront property where we lived in Departure Bay on Vancouver Island in 1956 for $5,000, worth millions today. But he and my mother didn’t want us to grow up not knowing our grandparents, and they greatly missed Nova Scotia.

  No Slouch, Dad

  In 2004, as part of a school project, my son sent my father an email with ten questions about his life and career. “Hello Grampy,” he wrote. “… Here are the questions I would like you to answer, as soon as possible please. Slightly detailed answers will be preferable. I’m sorry if I sound a little bit demanding but I have put this off for a while. See you Grampy.” My father replied, “Hi … Thanks for the advance warning about this!” Then he proceeded to write ten pages (single-spaced), which detailed much of his own personal and professional history, about which I had known almost nothing (because, as usual, I had failed to ask).

  I learned that before we moved from B.C. my father had been offered a job in Nova Scotia at the Naval Research Establishment (NRE) in Dartmouth. In his writing, he provided a remarkable level of detail about the trip back east (just as his grandson had so impertinently requested).

  “We packed all our stuff into a CN freight car and headed back by train first, to Calgary,” he wrote. “Here we visited our friends, the Denbighs (Al’s paintings on our living room wall are our pride and pleasure). That night we left Calgary on a night flight to Toronto in a North Star, a 4-propeller plane similar to a DC-6, powered with RollsRoyce Merlin engines I believe, or perhaps an updated version of same. The plane’s top speed was about 250 mph, so we arrived next morning and transferred to a DC3 for the flight (5 hrs) east.”

  No slouch, my dad, when it came to technical detail. Or to anything, come to think of it.

  Back home in Nova Scotia, we moved into a small bungalow in Dartmouth on Johnstone Avenue that my dad chose for the stunning view it afforded of Halifax and the harbour. And he started his job at NRE, which he described this way in his email to his grandson.

  “In an organization whose leading employees were mostly physicists with doctorates,” he wrote, “lesser types like janitors, draftsmen, engineers were, in 1957, valued approximately in the order I’ve listed them, and well below household pets, except possibly goldfish or tarantulas.”

  My father’s life, like his writing, was punctuated by and enriched with humour, a great deal of it self-deprecating. I have clear memories of sitting at the table and watching my father sort of bouncing up and down with laughter – “burbling,” he called it – as he listened to Max Ferguson being Rawhide on CBC or chuckling at one of his own puns.

  He had no end of passions that he tried very hard to share with us, his kids. There wasn’t any form of art he didn’t appreciate, and he dragged his often less-than-enthusiastic and sometimes downright reluctant little kids off to the Nova Scotia Symphony and Neptune Theatre, to museums and art galleries at every opportunity. He was an amazing jazz pianist (later in his life he sought to be even better under the tutelage of Joe Sealy), photographer, artist, builder, and fixer, way ahead of his time on issues like the environment and fitness, getting us out jogging way back in the 1960s. He crafted wooden toys for our Christmas presents and built much of our furniture. He gave us lessons in binary code many years before personal computers appeared in our lives, foreseeing the digital age and wishing to prepare us for it (not that I can say his efforts were worthwhile in my case).

  His love for science, sailing, skiing, travel, literature, and the arts was exceeded only by his intense dislike for private radio, U.S. television Evangelists, Republican politics, bigotry, country music, and, for some reason, the song “You Are My Sunshine.”

  He had an insatiable appetite for comedy, especially the absurd British kind and also the irreverence of the Smothers Brothers. In the final mon
ths of his life, when his breathing was laboured and his lungs congested, we hesitated to put on Fawlty Towers or anything starring John Cleese lest he laugh and cough himself to death right in front of us.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  Painful Realities

  A few years at NRE were enough for my dad and his friend Pete Payzant. In 1961, they decided to go into business. In 2004, Dad wrote an essay about his business experience, saying he felt he needed to document the family financial situation throughout the 1960s that he said dictated so much that he and my mother “could and could not do for our children.”

  “Neither of us knew anything about business, especially a sales business, which this was, owned by a Will McKay (not his real name),” he wrote. “We met Will McKay, got the latest financial reports, and decided to try to buy,” he continued. “Pete had some thousands as a legacy from his father who had died earlier, and I had only what I could borrow from the Credit Union. Pete was willing to accept less than 1/2 the required money and I would have less than 50% of the shares, and we did it. Then we began to learn the painful realities of the real business world.”

  Recalling those realities, Dad wrote, “Will McKay, the former owner, whose after-death personage I hope is currently still being, and will continue to be, the subject of unending and excruciating tests for flammability in Hell, had, in his presentation documents, also included a list of some 22 companies in construction equipment manufacturing or related component businesses which he claimed were all active and could produce good sales.”

  It all turned out to be smoke and mirrors, except for a bank debt of $50,000 that had been hidden from them. That was very real.