- - - and out of the West: The Checkered Life of a Prairie Boy

By Hugh Spence Hardy

This is the true life chronicle of a youth who emerged from the flat lands of Western Canada to occupy senior leadership positions in the corridors of influence and power in the often disparate worlds of international business and bankingthe United States, Canada, Europe, and Asia. He was a marketing pioneer whose successes, and failures, will resonate among business and marketing leaders facing unprecedented change in the digital age.

With a loving, understanding wife and children born in four cities coast to coast and two countries, he served in the Canadian army in two wars, and he overcame obstacles that would have beaten lesser men. He rose to several pinnacles without losing focus on his family and managed to enjoy life along the way.

His story is an inspiration for aspiring younger men and women.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 14, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524503710

Hugh Spence Hardy

Author Hugh Spence Hardy has compiled a lifetime of memories, laughter, and disappointment and disappointment as he tracks his way through a life composed of adventure, bravery, and having a great relationship with his family. He is a tough hombre who shocked the great International Davos Economic Conference by showing up dressed as a Western cowboy (without the guns). Hugh left his mark in many circumstances and situation. He was a win-win kind of guy who was no toady but a clear thinker who had the confidence to conceive marketing strategies and execute them to the highest level of business. He was also a Canadian soldier who fought in the Korean War. In one episode, Hugh was the Intelligence Office in the Royal Canadian Regiment 2 battalion and almost daily took flights in a British vintage fabric-covered reconnaissance biplane over Chinese lines to check troop movements. At one point, they flew so close to a mountaintop that a Chinese soldier popped up and threw a rock at the little plane that pierced the lower wing. Returning from the war after eighteen months, he decided to form his own market research company in Vancouver. Business was not what he expected, and he was forced to sell graves at night while doing his own work calling on prospective clients during the day. If nothing else, Hugh has to be one of the great salesmen, as you will discover reading his autobiography, - - - And Out of the West. Hugh has enjoyed a life of thrills and chills, successes and failure. But the man’s character and determination should be an outstanding example for young and ambitous people to emulate and grow successfully. The author is a tireless individual who puts family first. In reading his book, you will realize why. —the editors

Book preview

- - - And Out of the

WEST

THE CHECKERED LIFE OF A PRAIRIE BOY

HUGH SPENCE HARDY

Copyright

© 2016 by Hugh Spence Hardy.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2016908574

ISBN:     Hardcover       978-1-5245-0370-3

               Softcover         978-1-5245-0372-7

               eBook               978-1-5245-0371-0

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,

without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

The University of Saskatchewan Library ID — The archives of the Royal Canadian Regiment — The Royal Bank of Canada Archives

Except for appropriate use in critical reviews or scholarship, no portion of this work may be reproduced electronically or mechanically or by any other means now known or hereafter invented. Photocopying, recording, or storing in any information storage and retrieval system is forbidden without the written permission of Hugh Spence Hardy and/or his legal representatives.

Rev. date: 07/28/2016

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Contents

Preface

Foreword

Chapter 1 Growing Up In Saskatoon, Saskatchewan

Chapter 2 Kinley And The Farm

Chapter 3 Nutana Collegiate Institute -1939 -1943

Chapter 4 Survival On The Mountain – 1943

Chapter 5 World War Ii & Post War Years: 1943 - 1950

Chapter 6 The Korean War

Chapter 7 Korea At Last - October 1951

Chapter 8 Party In The Line For The Brave Glosters

Chapter 9 Return To Reality: 1952 - 1958

Chapter 10 New York And Florida Years: 1958 - 1964

Chapter 11 My Days On Madison Avenue

Chapter 12 Exxon Mobil & The Rockefeller Legacy In The Far East

Chapter 13 Coming Home To Canada

Chapter 14 Twenty Years A Banker 1966 -1986

Chapter 15 The First Re-Organization, 1967

Chapter 16 Redemption And New Opportunities

Chapter 17 The Caribbean Caper - 1978-1980

Chapter 18 World Economic Conferences

Chapter 19 Life In Montreal – 1964 -1986

Chapter 20 President. Richard Nixon & Relations With China

Chapter 21 The Post-Retirement Years

Chapter 22 Reflections

Epilogue

About Hugh S. Hardy

DEDICATION

Sincere thanks must be extended to my son Richard and my special friend and companion Beverly Kadyk, who helped make this book happen.

After the Harvest, cover art by Gregory Hardy, my nephew and a well-known landscape artist whose works can be found in galleries and private collections world wide.

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Caricature by Ray Bartschat presented at a Royal Bank retirement dinner on June 30, 1986. It purports to mirror several traits and characteristics of a white-haired old cowboy from ‘out of the west’; two gold teeth that glinted when he smiled, challenging top management and the status quo as he rode each new ‘hobby horse’ It is quite an accurate depiction.

PREFACE

From prairie doorways to the international hallways of power

Hugh Hardy is a bright 91-year young Canadian who has experienced a life of adventure, opportunity, failures and successes that would daunt the average person.

His story is full of surprises humour and coping with the vagaries of a life lived large. He has lived through two wars as an infantry officer at the sharp end in the Canadian army, serving in both World War II and the Korean War, in which more than 500 Canadians were killed in action.

Hugh is the kind of individual that glosses over the tough parts of his career. His story grows as he relates his experience including selling magazines to farmers and small town people from Moose Jaw to the town of Peace River in northern Alberta.

He graduated from the University of Saskatchewan after WW II, and joined the venerable Hudson’s Bay Co. as a trainee. He went on to become a department manager in HBC stores in Saskatoon, Winnipeg and Victoria.

In his first attempt to be his own boss he set up a market research company in Vancouver. As he now says, he nearly starved to death so he sold burial plots door-to-door to feed his wife and three children.

Then he was hired by Alfred Politz Research Inc., a prestigious marketing research company in New York. It was at the height of the Madison Avenue advertising game that was emulated in the Mad Men television series.

He was on the fast track with Politz when he became head of international operations, expanded the world-wide capabilities, and then became heir-apparent. Among his close associates was Dr. W. Edwards Deming, the manufacturing quality control expert who was the key advisor to General Douglas MacArthur in his mandate to restructure Japan’s industrial sector after WW II.

And so begins the saga.

FOREWORD

I loved the smell of the barn!

Growing up on the Canadian Prairies during the Great Depression, I was fortunate to have farming relatives who were willing to tolerate a precocious, pre-teen city kid. On arrival at Aunt Ruby and Uncle Stan’s farm, my first act was to hang my clothing on nails in the barn, thereby hastening the process whereby the farm smells permeated them. Upon my return home to Saskatoon, by which time my few belongings did, indeed, have the smell. I had to do gentle battle with a mother who did not share my olfactory sensibilities.

It has been said that war is comprised of long stretches of boredom interspersed with short bursts of intense activity. Perhaps it is just that memories become more selective with the passage of time, and one vividly recalls those brief interludes of great tenderness, supreme pleasure, or sheer terror; while the great gaps between assume a less distinct aura. The experience related above, so important at the time, had been all but forgotten until revived by recent visits to five cousins, each of whom recounted the full story, and in almost identical words.

The narrative that follows is drawn from my not-always-precise memory bank, and ranges from simple childhood recollections to life on the international business scene. Although there was nothing terribly unusual about much of my life, it was the usual pattern of growing up, marrying and raising a family, making a living, and growing older. Also it was the interspersion of those relatively short bursts of intense activity, that may make my story worth reading by other than family members. Those still vivid recollections and experiences will be injected as vignettes in the chronology.

Because my background has been vocationally diverse, experientially diffuse, and geographically dispersed, it has been described by some as checkered. Let me start with an attempt at positioning myself for readers.

I was born on the Canadian Prairies, one of seven children in a working class family. My father, Edwin Thomas Spence Hardy was born September 9, 1882 to Mary Esther (Cayton) Hardy, at 511 Mill Street, Bradford, England. His father, Alfred Spence Hardy, was a bookkeeper in that city. The family’s known roots were in Dorset, in the west of England, but there is evidence that Hardys* arrived in Dorset from the Channel Islands in the early 1500s. They were Protestant Huguenots who, some generations earlier, had fled from suppression in France. The lineage included Vice Admiral Sir Thomas Masterman Hardy, who was flag captain to Lord Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar. Indeed, grandfather Alfred Spence Hardy was a first cousin to English poet and author Thomas Hardy, who immortalized his beloved Dorset as the fictional Wessex in his widely acclaimed novels. (See APPENDIX)

In the Spring of 1883, when my father, Edwin, was still in his first year, the family, which included elder son Robert, set sail for Canada and found their way to a new community in what was to become the province of Manitoba. With two infant children, the reasons for such a move remain obscure but must surely have been their search for a better life, along with countless thousands of other British and other European immigrants to the new land.

Alfred Spence Hardy, my grandfather, became the schoolteacher and a lay minister near what is now the farming town of Russell, Manitoba. On January 21, 1884, just more than a year after arriving in Canada, he was caught in a fierce blizzard and died of frostbite walking the 50 or so yards from the schoolhouse to his home. My grandmother later married Colin Brodie, who had been a close friend of her first husband, and we grandchildren always knew her as Grandma Brodie. She died in 1938 in Kamsack, Sask., at the home of her daughter, Lizzie Pierce.

Emma (McMahon) Hardy was born August 19, 1891 to Sophia McMahon, at White Lake, near the village of Kinmount in Northern Ontario. Her father, William James McMahon, was a farmer. Both William James and Sophia were the children of families that had emigrated from Northern Ireland during the great Potato Famine in the early 1800s. The McMahon clan settled, first, near Port Hope, Ontario and then moved north to rocky land that was virtually un-farmable. To sustain his family of four daughters and three sons, William James doubled as the community postmaster before moving west to Saskatchewan.

The reasons for leaving the hard-scrabble land of Northern Ontario, along with most of their friends and relatives, were anything but obscure. About 1910, leaving only their eldest daughter and youngest son behind, the McMahons headed West to what promised to be a better life on a homestead near Perdue, Sask., about 45 miles west of Saskatoon. The walls of their first homes were built of sod cut from the virgin prairie; the roofs consisted of poles cut from the scarce poplar trees, then covered over with the same sod and loose earth. Not surprisingly, it was common to see flowers and other foliage flourishing on the tops of these primitive but warmly comfortable dwellings. As late as 1930 several of these sod homes remained on the property of relatives in the Perdue, Kinley, and Leney area, used as storage or tool sheds after the owners had moved to more permanent abodes nearby.

Several years after their arrival, son Harold McMahon moved to the new city of Saskatoon, where he became a barber. There he met Ed Hardy, who had arrived a short while earlier and who was also learning the trade. And it was he who introduced Ed to his younger sister, Emma, when she came to work waiting tables at a leading restaurant.

Edwin Thomas Spence Hardy and Emma McMahon were married in Saskatoon in 1915. Their first son, Clifford, was born a year later, but succumbed to the great influenza epidemic that killed hundreds of thousands of people over a two-year period. All of the subsequent offspring survived to senior citizen status, but the eldest, Muriel, passed away in 1991. I was the fourth of the surviving children, after Muriel, Bud (William Stanley) and Bernice, followed by Mavis and Shirley. Bernice lives in Saskatoon and Mavis, now widowed, live in Edmonton. Shirley lives in the interior of B.C. with her retired United Church minister husband. Shirley was always the most, perhaps only religious sibling. Bud and I sometimes joked that she was the white sheep of the family.

We lived in a succession of modest homes, most of them boasting what was euphemistically called outdoor plumbing, a simple, two-hole outhouse at the back of the yard. As a concession to the bitterly cold winters, we had a portable toilet in the cellar, but only for emergency use. Water for most household purposes was kept in a large barrel, and was replenished periodically from a horse-drawn tanker wagon. An indoor cistern collected rainwater or melted snow for laundry and bathing purposes. Baths were naturally infrequent, not more than once a week, and generally taken in strict order of precedence. One partly filled galvanized metal tub of hot water was used by most family members. We younger children were at the end of the line, by which time the water was somewhat cooler, with a scum at the edges.

Our household consisted of nine members - mother, father, four daughters, two sons and Aunt Mary. The latter was a spinster-lady, but not really by choice. Her fiancé and most of the other young men of her acquaintance had been killed during World War I, the Great War, the war-to-end-all-wars. Aunt Mary, who helped Mom cope with her large brood, was a kind but uncompromising soul, who had her own method of dealing with what she called her rheumatism. Unscrewing a light bulb, she would insert one or two fingers in the socket. The ensuing shock seemed to straighten her up for several days. (As they say today, if you haven’t tried it, don t knock it!)

Mom was a kind and gentle lady who somehow managed to cope with her large family with very limited resources and virtually no household conveniences other than a hand-operated washing machine. Yet she never had an unkind word to say about anyone. To Mom, everything and everybody was just lovely, causing some of our older cousins to call her Auntie Lovely.

At the start of the Great Depression, round steak, sufficient for our sizable household could be bought for about a quarter. Still, we lived very sparingly, the Saturday night treat being the only departure from frugality. Dad worked in a men’s clothing store, and after the store closed at 10 P.M. he would pick up a five-cent chocolate bar for each of the six kids. While we savored the bounty, Dad might have a Spanish onion sandwich, or one or two of the peanut butter cookies Mom kept hidden from the kids. Yet, I do not recall feeling especially deprived, as most of the people we knew were in the same boat. Indeed, as the fourth child I was scarcely aware of the difficult time Mom and Dad were having just to make ends meet nevertheless. The late 1920’s and early ’30’s were very happy and fulfilling years.

The Hardys were always a very close-knit family, but in the natural course of things we became widely-separated geographically as the years passed. The dispersion perhaps even intensified the emotional attachment of the siblings to one another, undoubtedly enhanced by periodic family reunions at Lake Waskesiu in later years. As the only Easterner in the family [no one else ever lived east of Saskatchewan], and the most out-of-touch, it was gratifying to go home and pick up conversations with my brother and sisters as though I had never been away. All of us have managed to pass the biblical three-score-and-ten-year mark, as have many of our cousins, and we continue to be very close.

Most of the unusual, sometimes bizarre, experiences of my life naturally happened from late youth onward. Along the way I was a ditch digger, labor union co-founder, salesman of many things (including graves), interior decorator and merchandising manager in a department store, infantry soldier in two wars, marketing researcher, management consultant, entrepreneur, banker, senior corporate executive, and editor/author. My wife blessed me with four children, one in each of four cities from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean, and supported me, both literally and figuratively, in moves to many other cities in two countries.

Betty-Joan Hardy, B.J., shouldered most of the burden of raising our three sons and one daughter, and they have grown into fine adults and wonderful parents. Her love and infinite patience have successfully brought us through over five decades of married life. On reflection, those long straight-aways were really not all that boring, but the reader has the option of skipping to the good stuff at any point along the way.

Hugh S. Hardy.

Guelph, Ontario.

APPENDIX

In the 1200’s some members of the L’Hardi clan, persecuted non-Catholic Huguenots, migrated to the Channel Islands, then to the southwest of England around Dorchester. That is where they spawned the author/poet Thomas Hardy, and the admiral. Parts of the clan migrated farther north, to the area around Bradford/Manchester in what is now Yorkshire.

That is where my great grandfather was born, and the modern era begins, at least the period that is relevant here.

Rev. R. Spence Hardy was born in 1803, became a Wesleyan Methodist minister, and was sent to Ceylon/Sri Lanka as a missionary. He first returned to England in 1829-1830, travelling the so-called overland route because of his desire to see the Holy Land, keeping copious notes. He met and married Mary Anne Turton at Bradford, Yorkshire, on July 23, 1835, and took her back to Ceylon for his second tour of duty.

I have in my home library the book about his travels. It was first published in England at Brook House, near Bradford, Yorkshire December 19, 1834, and went through several editions before reaching America. My copy was published in New York in 1836 by The Christian Library, as a Reprint of POPULAR RELIGIOUS WORKS, Volume V, TRAVELS in the HOLY LAND and other places mentioned in the scriptures in 1832-1833, by Rev. R. Spence Hardy. Published by Thomas George, Jr., Spruce Street, New York, 1836.

While in Alexandria, Egypt he had his portrait painted by one P. Marilhat, a French expatriate. The caption reads THE REV. R. SPENCE HARDY, author of ‘Notices of the Holy Land’, in the costume of a merchant of Damascus. Having adopted the dress of the country I have less difficulty making my way."

Photos

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1. Rev. R. Spence Hardy, 1833

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2. Rev. R. Spence Hardy, circa 1861

Hardy;%20Coat%20of%20Arms.jpg

3. Hardy Family Crest

CHAPTER 1

Growing up in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan

In the beginning: Saskatoon was a city of some 40,000 souls founded by Christian abolitionists. A pretty, well-treed town with two hospitals, four high schools, two private golf clubs and a sand green public course. It was (and still is!) located on the South Saskatchewan River about 300 miles north of the U.S. border and Minot, North Dakota. It is in the middle of flatland farming and cattle country. Despite the cold winters, or perhaps because of them, Saskatoon was a great place to raise a family.

Our family lived in a succession of houses, and the household generally included Aunt Mary McMahon, who helped with the child care and housekeeping. One of my earliest recollections is of neighbor Lewis Wilson. We were inseparable buddies aged three or four until the day Lewis didn’t come out to play. I was told the family had moved away, and I was upset that he hadn’t told me. It was many years before I learned the truth - his mother had taken Lewis and his baby sister to the river bank and shot them both. The obviously distraught woman then killed herself. It was the most sensational incident to take place in Saskatoon in a decade.

At the time we lived at 424-8th Street, and Dad owned a Bristol touring model automobile with canvas and-formica side curtains. We made Sunday trips to Pike Lake, about 25 miles from the city, and it was not unusual for some or all of us to get rashes from the brackish water. On one trip, with our luggage strapped to the sides on the running boards, we hit a skunk. It seemed to take, and indeed did take, an eternity for that pungent aroma to finally wear off.

Another year, enroute to Kamsack to see Grandma Brodie (Dad’s mother), we got stuck in a slough of mud and water on the dirt road (most roads were dirt at the time). Eventually a Doukabor farmer came along and pulled us out with a team of horses, but by that time it was quite late and Kamsack was still a very long way off. That kind farmer, in his limited and broken English, invited us to spend the night at his house. His wife made supper for our whole family, and we all found places to sleep on the parlor floor. And she provided a hearty porridge breakfast before we left. I believe Dad offered the farmer a small amount of money, which was declined. That’s the way things were on the Prairies in those years.

The house I remember best was at 122 Taylor Street, on the southeast side of the South Saskatchewan River in Nutana. With the help of a carpenter, Dad built the house himself. When we moved in, just at the start of the Depression in 1930, the house was far from finished. The roof was on, but with no tarpaper or shingles, and we could look up and see daylight or stars between the one inch by 10 inch boards. Fortunately there was no rain during the weeks it took to complete the job.

The small bungalow was without running water or indoor plumbing. We didn’t have a telephone until eldest sister, Muriel, got a job at the telephone company and a free telephone came with the job. Like other homes in the neighborhood, we had a two-holer wooden outhouse at the back of the property. These backhouses were shoveled out periodically by the Honeyman. He performed his odoriferous duties in the dark of night. The backhouses were fair game at Halloween; it was taken for granted that some would be pushed over in the course of the evening, and no one seemed to mind. Once in a while the older boys managed to hoist a backhouse on to the roof of a house, which did cause some consternation.

Losing the house to creditors in 1937

Before losing the house to creditors in the depths of the Depression, that little place accommodated my parents, six kids, and Aunt Mary, also for a couple of winters, cousin Walley Scott, who was going to high school in the big city. The kitchen, the largest room, contained a big table with wood chairs, and a huge wood and coal range with a water reservoir attached to keep a ready supply of hot water.

Even so, baths were taken infrequently and sequentially, with the youngest kids, at the end of the line, climbing into the same galvanized steel tub of water. My parents occupied one bedroom, and the others were shared, as were the beds. Brother Bud and I shared one, and younger sisters Mavis and Shirley shared the other. Sisters Muriel and Bernice shared a room with Aunt Mary, and Walley Scott slept in the sitting room. A trap door opened to a ladder, leading down to a partial, dirt-floored, basement, where a portable toilet was placed for use during the coldest winter days only. Visiting the house more than half a century later, I was astounded at how small it was. The current occupants were a young couple with two infant children, and they appeared crowded! Apart from converting the smallest bedroom into a bathroom, the house remained the same. The couple said they had bought the house in 1989 for $48,000. We lost it because Dad couldn’t pay the $100 or so still owing to the lumberyard. He was certainly not alone, as hundreds of Saskatoon families were similarly affected by the severity of the Great Depression

During most of my young life, Dad was working the then-customary five and a half day week as a salesman and occasionally tailor at Gillespie’s Big 22, the leading menswear store in Saskatoon. Dad was always a very conservative dresser, favouring dark grey suits with vests and small-pattern or paisley ties. His shoes were always black, and in the winter he chose half-rubbers and felt spats rather than overshoes. He was the leading salesman in the store owned by Charlie Arnold, whose son, Craig, became a close friend and classmate of mine in high school.

The Saturday night treat, a 5-cent candy bar

After building the house, Dad couldn’t afford a car, and he rode to work downtown on a streetcar. He had Wednesday afternoon off, but worked until 10:00 P.M. on Saturday. We children always waited for him to come home on Saturday night with our weekly treat, a 5 cent chocolate bar for each of us. It was a luxury he could ill-afford but he usually managed it, knowing what a devastating effect its termination would have on his kids. And he would often have a Spanish onion and peanut butter sandwich. Ugh! I think that is where I lost my taste for onions.

In spite of it all, I have nothing but happy memories of those years. Times were very hard, as they were for most of the people we knew but we always had food for the family. On Saturday night, Dad put $10 in a glass jar in the kitchen cupboard, which was used by Mom to buy groceries for the following week. Brother Bud recalls being sent to the meat market on Lorne Avenue, with 25 cents to buy round steak to feed the eight members of the household. By contrast, some of our neighbors sometimes went hungry for days, or subsisted on donated oatmeal.

One of the more difficult things everyone had to contend with, for several extended periods, was the blowing dust. Concurrent with the Depression, the prairies were subjected to the worst drought people had ever seen. It was