‘Enough to buy the odd soda’
In this summer series, National Post reporters and photographers bring us tales of that annual Canadian rite of passage for young people taking their first dip in the labour pool: The Summer Job. Multi-billionaire fondly recalls his first jobs in the ’40
Jimmy Pattison owns a business empire, assembled from scratch. Car dealerships, groceries, illuminated signs. There’s also the unlikely but profitable entertainment ventures, including amusement parks and the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! franchise, billed as the “world authority on the strange, the bizarre, the unbelievable.” His personal wealth is an estimated $5.8-billion, making him Canada’s third-richest man.
And he started with practically nothing. His parents weren’t poor as church mice, but close. “They didn’t have any money,” says the inveterate 83-year-old dealmaker, looking back on hard times.
“It was nineteen hundred and forty two,” Mr. Pattison recalls. “My first summer job.” Canada was at war, and he was an East Vancouver kid, on train bound for Saskatchewan. “I went to the Prairies that summer to play my trumpet at children’s church camps,” he says. “You gotta remember, there wasn’t a lot of entertainment back then, no television or anything, but there was a lot of music. So away I went. I didn’t do it for the money. There wasn’t a lot of money changing hands.”
He went for adventure. “My world was very narrow,” says
I met my future wife
Mr. Pattison. “The biggest thing that had ever happened to me was going to Moose Jaw.” Then Indian Head, and exotic Nipawin, and Hudson Bay Junction, the “Moose Capital of the World.”
Jimmy travelled with a Pentecostal minister, the Reverend Nat Strain, and his opera singer wife. “On weekends, we’d go to churches. He preached, she sang, and I played. It was always gospel music. They’d take what they called a freewill offering. Reverend Strain would give me an allowance out of whatever they got. Heck, it was just enough to buy the odd soda or something,” laughs the multi-billionaire.
The trio ventured to a bible camp near Seventeen Mile Bridge, northwest of Swift Current. That’s where Jimmy met another 13-year-old, a girl named Mary. Seventy years later, Jimmy and Mary are still together. “It was my first summer job and I loved it,” says Mr. Pattison. “I travelled, I met a lot of people, I played my horn, and I met my future wife. We’ve been married 61 years. It was a huge experience for me.”
At summer’s end, Jimmy returned to Vancouver, and to General Brock School on Main Street. He spent the next few summers picking fruit: Raspberries in the Fraser Valley, cherries and peaches in the
Okanagan. One summer, he found work inside a cannery. The next year he was inside a packing house. Each new job seemed better than the last.
Destiny called in 1948. Mr. Pattison was “on one of those gangs building bridges, out in the middle of the mountains. I was just no good at that and it didn’t last long, but I knew then what I didn’t want to do.”
He took a job with the Canadian Pacific Railway, and worked the Vancouver-calgary run. Mr. Pattison was assigned to the dining car, where he cracked ice and made salads. A summer pantryman. Then the skies opened, the rivers rose, and the valleys flooded. Roads and tracks and bridges were washed out. Mr. Pattison was out of work again.
”I made it back to Vancouver on a freight train,” he recalls. “Then I got a job washing cars at Cambie and Broadway. It was a BA [British American] gas station and the owner had an adjacent gravel lot, with eight used cars on it.”
Mr. Pattison spent the rest of the season in a rubber car-washing suit, scrubbing and waxing.
The regular used car salesman was at dinner one day when some customers came to kick tires. Mr. Pattison started pitching. He was still wearing his rubber car-washing suit. He sold one car, then another, and another. He’d found his calling.
“That’s how I paid my way through university, buying and selling used cars,” he recalls. “I worked the next summer on a big used car lot, the biggest in Vancouver, and I worked over the Christmas and Easter holidays, too. During school, I’d advertise cars in the University of British Columbia newspaper.”
After leaving UBC three courses shy of a commerce degree, Mr. Pattison joined forces with a local GM dealer. In 1961, he struck out on his own and opened a GM showroom on Main Street, not far from his old grade school. A quarter of a century later, he was selling more cars than anyone else in Western Canada and had diversified into other businesses. He was also running Expo ‘ 86, Vancouver’s successful world’s fair. Jimmy Pattison had become a household name.
And now, 70 years after touring Saskatchewan with his trumpet, he’s still going strong. “My point in all of this,” says Mr. Pattison, “is that it was those summer jobs that got me into what I’m doing today. True story.”