Post by Stu-E Price on Jul 28, 2007 8:11:47 GMT -5
DEAN
Gradually, I found the ceiling was getting too low for cartwheels. At five-feet-eight and 110 pounds, I was a 16-year-old beanstalk who'd just got her period. I wore my hair in braids and looked like one of the girls from The Sound of Music. This growth spurt gave me stretch marks everywhere: on my calves, kneecaps, hips, seat and chest. No stretch marks on my stomach though. That happened when I was pregnant.
As a teenager, my chest hurt and I lost my edge. I gave up on all my dreams of being an athlete. I thought, "Well, what's the point?" Where would I ever go with this anyway? I was just so pathetic at times. My brother Dean recognized this and, just like in the song, To Sir With Love, he took me “from crayons to perfume.”
I would lounge in the hallway with my chin in my hands, spying on my older sisters Ellie and Georgia as they applied their makeup. They really plastered it on. Heavy dark liner and bleached blonde hair. Cher was a major influence. They also had a daily exercise routine. They had a little chart on their bulletin board that demonstrated the correct technique for twists, pushups, sit-ups and squats. It was a good 10-minute workout. In most homes it was the guys who practiced isometrics, not the girls. They were way ahead of their time.
They were fashion conscious too and managed to pull themselves together quite nicely, no thanks to my mom. She never voiced an opinion on how we should dress or groom, although she was very particular about how she looked. She would simply pull us each aside and say, Take this five dollars and go out and buy yourself a wardrobe."
Naturally, you couldn't get much for five dollars, but my mom seemed to have no concept of the price of clothes. If my sisters complained that five dollars was inadequate, my mom would tell them, "Five dollars can do you very well. Maybe the two of you can put your money together and buy one outfit. Hat to shoes. Combine your five dollars to make it ten dollars, and surely it will cover makeup and bus fare and something to eat." She was completely clueless about how far money would stretch.
My dad knew. He'd slip Ellie and Georgia a little more money. And when things started getting better, my dad always gave more. There were times he'd give Ellie and Georgia $100 so they could buy crushed velvet cords in all colors: purple, gold, turquoise, blue and burgundy. They'd come home with cashmere sweaters and really nice belts. The best deals came from The Bay bargain basement or the Army and Navy store.
My brother Dean would drop by the house between trips to Hawaii and girlfriends and spend time with me. He'd show me how to put on makeup and advise me on what to wear. He was lovely to me. Dean was eight years older than I. He shared a birthday with my brother Ross. They were five years apart. They even looked alike, but you could not find two more different people. Dean was open and notorious for his ribbing. Ross is serious and secretive. He still harbors big secrets.
Dean was so handsome with his gigantic, beautiful brown eyes that were always twinkling. His hair was a luxurious curly chestnut and he had teeth as white as freshly cracked coconut. Of all my brothers, he was the gutsiest. This is what endeared him most to my father. Dean had more nerve than anybody I know. He was fairly compact, which added to his personality. Five-feet-eight, excellent legs and big hands, good for working on cars or fixing the stove. His nickname was Biz because he was always so busy. Even when he was dying he wasn't lazy.
Dean was barely out of school when he organized the very first rock concert in Calgary's McMahon football stadium. He brought Charlie Rich to Calgary. Charlie Rich was hot. He had two hit songs on the radio at the time, “Did You Happen To See The Most Beautiful Girl In The World?” and “Behind Closed Doors.” He was known in the country music circle as the Silver Fox. Rich had a beautiful, rich voice and he was a good-looking man.
Dean was 18 years old. He did all the promotions himself. He designed and ordered the fliers, and recruited Owen, Alison, Ross, Ellie, Bruce, Georgia and me to put them on windshields all over Calgary. We'd go out late when the bars were full of people on a Friday or a Saturday night and run through the parking lots placing these fliers under car wipers.
Dean also ran concerts out at Clearwater Beach, which belonged to my dad. The beach was about 100 acres of beautiful foothills property on the Elbow River. I remember sitting right on the platform where the three-man Canadian band, Chilliwack, was playing. I sat right behind the drummer and listened to them sing “California Girl” and “Monkey on Your Back.”
Things got more hectic out there with Dean because throwing concert after concert the city health inspectors tried to close the place down. There was broken glass in the sand and inadequate bathroom facilities. Wrestling would close down after Stampede Week and we relied on whatever income the beach brought in until the matches started up again in the fall.
Every year we had six weeks of pretty lean times. My mom and dad made money at the beach by charging five dollars a car. Families would cram as many people as they could into their cars. No charge if you walked in. It was located out by what is now called Elbow Valley Acreages, where my brother Owen was building his house and where Martha his widow lives now. I think Owen wanted to build out there because he had such good memories of the beach.
My mom and dad would do well at Dean's bookings. Dean and Bruce branched into hiring bands to play at graduation parties. They would charge admission to see the band and they would run the concession all night long. This was another thorn in the side of city health inspectors – the submarine sandwiches. I remember making hundreds of them the night before each high-school grad. They were good sandwiches too. We used real butter and mayonnaise. My mom would package each sandwich in Saran Wrap along with potato chips and a cookie. We went to so much trouble for these people and I doubt they ever appreciated it or cared. We put more money into making the sandwiches than we made.
One night Dean and Bruce accidentally booked grad parties at the beach for the same night and the two high schools got into a fight. That night, a fire burned everything to the ground. It wiped my dad out. All the buildings went up in flames because the change rooms and patio barbecues were all covered with canvas. The concession was torched. The locker rooms were gone, including the toilets. People were screaming and fleeing.
It turned out that some high-school kids, angry because their rivals were celebrating at the same location, had poured gasoline on everything—trees, buildings, even in the water—and then lit matches.
The health board refused to let my dad re-open. My mom was freaking out. She was hysterical. "We’re going to go broke!" she screamed. "How are we going to survive?"
My mom was really worried about money. As it was, she only had $100 for the entire month to get by. Every night, Owen and I would hear how we were going to lose everything.
Dean was a genius and very charming. He was especially smooth with older women, much older women. They would lend him cars. He drove a fifty-thousand-dollar Jaguar for a while. People also loaned Dean money, and he used it to buy what is now Eau Claire, an exclusive part of downtown Calgary along the Bow River. He owned the Riverside Auto Body Shop there. Calgarians would park their cars on his lot and walk downtown to go to work while Dean had their cars cleaned or serviced.
He also had a landscaping company, Kleen and Green Landscaping. He'd put the biggest ad in the yellow pages and people would think, “Oh, it’s the biggest ad, it must be the most professional.” They'd call Dean to come out to their homes and give an estimate and no matter what the job was, Dean would say, “Yup, we can do that. Yeah, that won’t be a problem.”
Then he'd hire kids like me and my friend Alison Hall, who were both 14 and didn't know anything about rototilling or air raking or power raking. I could pull weeds and mow lawns, but that was about it. We had different jobs every day. “Guys,” he would say, “we've got a fence to paint today.” And we'd paint the fence although we had never painted a fence in our lives.
In a way, it made me a more capable person. Mind you, a lot of customers complained about the quality of the work. A week after we were there, their grass might be burned because we had applied the fertilizer improperly. Or we might have planted shade flowers in the blazing sun. We got a lot of callbacks.
Sandy Scott was a Stampede Wrestling heel; he played a Scottish referee who always cheated. His gimmick was to play a corrupt referee who has been paid off by another heel named John Foley. During the day Sandy worked as a receptionist at Riverside Auto Park. He was very pleasant. It was funny because he was so polite on the phone and then on Friday nights you'd see him grabbing my brother Bruce by the hair, tossing him around and disqualifying him and fining him a thousand dollars for not playing by the rules.
Then Monday morning he'd be back on the phones, “Hello, Riverside Auto Body or Kleen and Green, how may I help you?” You know, nice and polite. Dean would send Sandy Scott out to take care of our irate customers. Sandy would pour on his Scottish charm and manage to calm down the unhappy housewives. We were honorable and always went back to correct our mistakes.
Dean was not only enterprising but he was also a heartthrob. He dated a lot of girls who were the cream of the crop at his high school. On the other end of the spectrum were my sisters Georgia and Ellie. They were being picked on and bullied at the junior high school, Vincent Massey. Ellie was in grade nine, Georgia in grade eight and Bret was in grade seven. Georgia had cheap, big black-framed glasses that were terribly unattractive. Later she turned heads, but back then she and Ellie were on the heavy side.
Ellie’s best friend at Vincent Massey Gwen Cooper had no arms. She, she was a Thalidomide baby. Ellie was always helping her out. The kids at school would tease Gwen and call her “the vegetable.” Gwen had funny-colored skin and she wrote everything with her toes, which made matters worse for her. But she was no Simon Birch. She used to boss Ellie around and treat her like dirt. “Get this for me. Get that for me.”
Ellie and Georgia got no fair treatment at Massey. For Bret, it was even tougher. Some days it would be 30 below and he would only have shorts to wear to school because that was the best thing my dad could get at the Army surplus store or Salvation Army. This really made him stand out.
The only bras Ellie and Georgia owned were the black ones that they got from one of my mom's friends Isabelle Grayston, who used to be Ralph Klein's secretary. At that time Ralph was the mayor of Calgary. Now he is the Premier of Alberta.
Isabelle was very nice to all of us. She and her mother Kitty made their own clothes and gave them to us new or as hand-me-downs. Ellie's first bra was this great big —well big for her because Ellie was just young – black bra. On top of which, she wore dresses with darts.
Their teachers were aware of how badly they were treated by some of the other students, but did nothing. Some of the teachers at Vincent Massey never lifted a finger to stop it. They looked the other way when kids were tried to jam Georgia into her locker or pull her glasses off her face and break them. And they pretended not to notice when kids beat Ellie up.
One day Ellie and Georgia were standing in the schoolyard after school when they were attacked by some of these rotten kids. My brothers Dean and Wayne from Ernest Manning Senior High were driving by at the time. The boys brought the car to a screeching halt. Then Dean and Wayne got out and cleaned house. They beat the hell out of all these kids. The next day, Georgia and Ellie were called into the office and warned that their family had better not darken the schoolyard again.
The only good thing that came out of that incident was that Pat Seigers, a popular girl who wasn't a part of the teasing, took one look at Dean and fell hopelessly in love. She was in Georgia's grade and she was pretty and full of confidence. She came from a nice little home in Westgate with little lunches and normal walks home from school. Nobody ever picked on her. The next day she wanted to be friends with Ellie and Georgia and eventually did date Dean.
Maybe if she had married Dean like they had planned, Dean would be alive today because she would have taken care of him. But Dean left her for another girl, Sue Berger, who was popular but heavily into drugs. Dean got her off drugs and took her under his wing and promoted her like she was a movie star. She was the very first Calgary Sun Sunshine Girl of the Year (the tabloid's most popular page-three pin up girl.) Dean always dated the most popular foxes.
In 1977, Dean was downtown waiting for his ride and got hit by a transit bus. The bus hit him in the back from behind. There was always speculation that it was the bus accident that caused Dean to die of kidney failure. Dean got a pitiful settlement from the City of Calgary for the bus accident. Ironically, Ed Pipella, the lawyer who represented Dean, also happens to be the lawyer Martha hired to sue Vince McMahon and the WWF in the wrongful death suit over Owen.
Gradually, I found the ceiling was getting too low for cartwheels. At five-feet-eight and 110 pounds, I was a 16-year-old beanstalk who'd just got her period. I wore my hair in braids and looked like one of the girls from The Sound of Music. This growth spurt gave me stretch marks everywhere: on my calves, kneecaps, hips, seat and chest. No stretch marks on my stomach though. That happened when I was pregnant.
As a teenager, my chest hurt and I lost my edge. I gave up on all my dreams of being an athlete. I thought, "Well, what's the point?" Where would I ever go with this anyway? I was just so pathetic at times. My brother Dean recognized this and, just like in the song, To Sir With Love, he took me “from crayons to perfume.”
I would lounge in the hallway with my chin in my hands, spying on my older sisters Ellie and Georgia as they applied their makeup. They really plastered it on. Heavy dark liner and bleached blonde hair. Cher was a major influence. They also had a daily exercise routine. They had a little chart on their bulletin board that demonstrated the correct technique for twists, pushups, sit-ups and squats. It was a good 10-minute workout. In most homes it was the guys who practiced isometrics, not the girls. They were way ahead of their time.
They were fashion conscious too and managed to pull themselves together quite nicely, no thanks to my mom. She never voiced an opinion on how we should dress or groom, although she was very particular about how she looked. She would simply pull us each aside and say, Take this five dollars and go out and buy yourself a wardrobe."
Naturally, you couldn't get much for five dollars, but my mom seemed to have no concept of the price of clothes. If my sisters complained that five dollars was inadequate, my mom would tell them, "Five dollars can do you very well. Maybe the two of you can put your money together and buy one outfit. Hat to shoes. Combine your five dollars to make it ten dollars, and surely it will cover makeup and bus fare and something to eat." She was completely clueless about how far money would stretch.
My dad knew. He'd slip Ellie and Georgia a little more money. And when things started getting better, my dad always gave more. There were times he'd give Ellie and Georgia $100 so they could buy crushed velvet cords in all colors: purple, gold, turquoise, blue and burgundy. They'd come home with cashmere sweaters and really nice belts. The best deals came from The Bay bargain basement or the Army and Navy store.
My brother Dean would drop by the house between trips to Hawaii and girlfriends and spend time with me. He'd show me how to put on makeup and advise me on what to wear. He was lovely to me. Dean was eight years older than I. He shared a birthday with my brother Ross. They were five years apart. They even looked alike, but you could not find two more different people. Dean was open and notorious for his ribbing. Ross is serious and secretive. He still harbors big secrets.
Dean was so handsome with his gigantic, beautiful brown eyes that were always twinkling. His hair was a luxurious curly chestnut and he had teeth as white as freshly cracked coconut. Of all my brothers, he was the gutsiest. This is what endeared him most to my father. Dean had more nerve than anybody I know. He was fairly compact, which added to his personality. Five-feet-eight, excellent legs and big hands, good for working on cars or fixing the stove. His nickname was Biz because he was always so busy. Even when he was dying he wasn't lazy.
Dean was barely out of school when he organized the very first rock concert in Calgary's McMahon football stadium. He brought Charlie Rich to Calgary. Charlie Rich was hot. He had two hit songs on the radio at the time, “Did You Happen To See The Most Beautiful Girl In The World?” and “Behind Closed Doors.” He was known in the country music circle as the Silver Fox. Rich had a beautiful, rich voice and he was a good-looking man.
Dean was 18 years old. He did all the promotions himself. He designed and ordered the fliers, and recruited Owen, Alison, Ross, Ellie, Bruce, Georgia and me to put them on windshields all over Calgary. We'd go out late when the bars were full of people on a Friday or a Saturday night and run through the parking lots placing these fliers under car wipers.
Dean also ran concerts out at Clearwater Beach, which belonged to my dad. The beach was about 100 acres of beautiful foothills property on the Elbow River. I remember sitting right on the platform where the three-man Canadian band, Chilliwack, was playing. I sat right behind the drummer and listened to them sing “California Girl” and “Monkey on Your Back.”
Things got more hectic out there with Dean because throwing concert after concert the city health inspectors tried to close the place down. There was broken glass in the sand and inadequate bathroom facilities. Wrestling would close down after Stampede Week and we relied on whatever income the beach brought in until the matches started up again in the fall.
Every year we had six weeks of pretty lean times. My mom and dad made money at the beach by charging five dollars a car. Families would cram as many people as they could into their cars. No charge if you walked in. It was located out by what is now called Elbow Valley Acreages, where my brother Owen was building his house and where Martha his widow lives now. I think Owen wanted to build out there because he had such good memories of the beach.
My mom and dad would do well at Dean's bookings. Dean and Bruce branched into hiring bands to play at graduation parties. They would charge admission to see the band and they would run the concession all night long. This was another thorn in the side of city health inspectors – the submarine sandwiches. I remember making hundreds of them the night before each high-school grad. They were good sandwiches too. We used real butter and mayonnaise. My mom would package each sandwich in Saran Wrap along with potato chips and a cookie. We went to so much trouble for these people and I doubt they ever appreciated it or cared. We put more money into making the sandwiches than we made.
One night Dean and Bruce accidentally booked grad parties at the beach for the same night and the two high schools got into a fight. That night, a fire burned everything to the ground. It wiped my dad out. All the buildings went up in flames because the change rooms and patio barbecues were all covered with canvas. The concession was torched. The locker rooms were gone, including the toilets. People were screaming and fleeing.
It turned out that some high-school kids, angry because their rivals were celebrating at the same location, had poured gasoline on everything—trees, buildings, even in the water—and then lit matches.
The health board refused to let my dad re-open. My mom was freaking out. She was hysterical. "We’re going to go broke!" she screamed. "How are we going to survive?"
My mom was really worried about money. As it was, she only had $100 for the entire month to get by. Every night, Owen and I would hear how we were going to lose everything.
Dean was a genius and very charming. He was especially smooth with older women, much older women. They would lend him cars. He drove a fifty-thousand-dollar Jaguar for a while. People also loaned Dean money, and he used it to buy what is now Eau Claire, an exclusive part of downtown Calgary along the Bow River. He owned the Riverside Auto Body Shop there. Calgarians would park their cars on his lot and walk downtown to go to work while Dean had their cars cleaned or serviced.
He also had a landscaping company, Kleen and Green Landscaping. He'd put the biggest ad in the yellow pages and people would think, “Oh, it’s the biggest ad, it must be the most professional.” They'd call Dean to come out to their homes and give an estimate and no matter what the job was, Dean would say, “Yup, we can do that. Yeah, that won’t be a problem.”
Then he'd hire kids like me and my friend Alison Hall, who were both 14 and didn't know anything about rototilling or air raking or power raking. I could pull weeds and mow lawns, but that was about it. We had different jobs every day. “Guys,” he would say, “we've got a fence to paint today.” And we'd paint the fence although we had never painted a fence in our lives.
In a way, it made me a more capable person. Mind you, a lot of customers complained about the quality of the work. A week after we were there, their grass might be burned because we had applied the fertilizer improperly. Or we might have planted shade flowers in the blazing sun. We got a lot of callbacks.
Sandy Scott was a Stampede Wrestling heel; he played a Scottish referee who always cheated. His gimmick was to play a corrupt referee who has been paid off by another heel named John Foley. During the day Sandy worked as a receptionist at Riverside Auto Park. He was very pleasant. It was funny because he was so polite on the phone and then on Friday nights you'd see him grabbing my brother Bruce by the hair, tossing him around and disqualifying him and fining him a thousand dollars for not playing by the rules.
Then Monday morning he'd be back on the phones, “Hello, Riverside Auto Body or Kleen and Green, how may I help you?” You know, nice and polite. Dean would send Sandy Scott out to take care of our irate customers. Sandy would pour on his Scottish charm and manage to calm down the unhappy housewives. We were honorable and always went back to correct our mistakes.
Dean was not only enterprising but he was also a heartthrob. He dated a lot of girls who were the cream of the crop at his high school. On the other end of the spectrum were my sisters Georgia and Ellie. They were being picked on and bullied at the junior high school, Vincent Massey. Ellie was in grade nine, Georgia in grade eight and Bret was in grade seven. Georgia had cheap, big black-framed glasses that were terribly unattractive. Later she turned heads, but back then she and Ellie were on the heavy side.
Ellie’s best friend at Vincent Massey Gwen Cooper had no arms. She, she was a Thalidomide baby. Ellie was always helping her out. The kids at school would tease Gwen and call her “the vegetable.” Gwen had funny-colored skin and she wrote everything with her toes, which made matters worse for her. But she was no Simon Birch. She used to boss Ellie around and treat her like dirt. “Get this for me. Get that for me.”
Ellie and Georgia got no fair treatment at Massey. For Bret, it was even tougher. Some days it would be 30 below and he would only have shorts to wear to school because that was the best thing my dad could get at the Army surplus store or Salvation Army. This really made him stand out.
The only bras Ellie and Georgia owned were the black ones that they got from one of my mom's friends Isabelle Grayston, who used to be Ralph Klein's secretary. At that time Ralph was the mayor of Calgary. Now he is the Premier of Alberta.
Isabelle was very nice to all of us. She and her mother Kitty made their own clothes and gave them to us new or as hand-me-downs. Ellie's first bra was this great big —well big for her because Ellie was just young – black bra. On top of which, she wore dresses with darts.
Their teachers were aware of how badly they were treated by some of the other students, but did nothing. Some of the teachers at Vincent Massey never lifted a finger to stop it. They looked the other way when kids were tried to jam Georgia into her locker or pull her glasses off her face and break them. And they pretended not to notice when kids beat Ellie up.
One day Ellie and Georgia were standing in the schoolyard after school when they were attacked by some of these rotten kids. My brothers Dean and Wayne from Ernest Manning Senior High were driving by at the time. The boys brought the car to a screeching halt. Then Dean and Wayne got out and cleaned house. They beat the hell out of all these kids. The next day, Georgia and Ellie were called into the office and warned that their family had better not darken the schoolyard again.
The only good thing that came out of that incident was that Pat Seigers, a popular girl who wasn't a part of the teasing, took one look at Dean and fell hopelessly in love. She was in Georgia's grade and she was pretty and full of confidence. She came from a nice little home in Westgate with little lunches and normal walks home from school. Nobody ever picked on her. The next day she wanted to be friends with Ellie and Georgia and eventually did date Dean.
Maybe if she had married Dean like they had planned, Dean would be alive today because she would have taken care of him. But Dean left her for another girl, Sue Berger, who was popular but heavily into drugs. Dean got her off drugs and took her under his wing and promoted her like she was a movie star. She was the very first Calgary Sun Sunshine Girl of the Year (the tabloid's most popular page-three pin up girl.) Dean always dated the most popular foxes.
In 1977, Dean was downtown waiting for his ride and got hit by a transit bus. The bus hit him in the back from behind. There was always speculation that it was the bus accident that caused Dean to die of kidney failure. Dean got a pitiful settlement from the City of Calgary for the bus accident. Ironically, Ed Pipella, the lawyer who represented Dean, also happens to be the lawyer Martha hired to sue Vince McMahon and the WWF in the wrongful death suit over Owen.