Pillsbury Canada Ltd.
I remember quite well a beautiful July summer day, me and my best friend, Jimmy had gone down to the Calgary Brewery and picked up a couple of cases of cold beer. We were on our way back to the Ogden to enjoy our refreshments down at the beaver dam, when Jimmy asked me how I was making out finding a new job. I told him above getting turned down at the CPR’s Alyth Shops, as we were driving down Portland Street Jimmy suggested that I try the Pillsbury flour mill on Bonnybrook Road. I remarked that I was not in the mood to look for work at the moment, to which he replied. If I didn’t try. I wouldn’t get no beer. So, reluctantly, I went into the building’s main office and asked if they were hiring, I was redirected to the shipping office and told ask for Pete Luft, I went into the warehouse that was a beehive of activity 100 pound bags of flour piled on the floor’s 10 high, and warehousemen scurrying with two wheeled carts loaded up with flour bags, loading trucks and boxcars, and stockpiling flour into the bays of the warehouse. I talked to Pete and he sized me up, saying that I could have a job, but he didn’t think I could handle it physically. I said I was willing to give it a try. To which he replied that you could start right now, I was thinking about the cold beer in the car, and told him I would like to, but I had a doctors appointment that afternoon. He said okay, and asked me to come in at eight o’clock the next morning. So Jimmy and I went out and drank all the beer that afternoon, and I went home to rest up for my new job in the morning. That morning I woke up with a hangover, and caught the Ogden bus that would take me to Bonnybrook to start my new career as a warehouseman with Pillsbury Canada Ltd. at 4002. Bonnybrook Road. The mill was one of two that Pillsbury owned in Canada, there was a smaller one in Midland, Ontario and this monster that could pump out 10,000 hundred weights of flour in 24 hours. The mill was non-union not like its counterparts in the United States. I was to be paid $1.80 an hour as a warehouse man, or as what I was to learn being a human fork lift.