Archives for January 13, 2019

I had a most interesting experience this past week.  I had an old friend and professional blues artist stay with us for the first time in eleven years.  The life of a professional musician and entertainer mirrors our own.  We see tabloids and articles that lead us to believe they have a glamorous life that we don’t.  It is true they rise late somewhere near noon but then they are active until five or six in the morning.

Pat Savage is a musician, producer, song writer lyricist and businessman.  His day is filled with talking to investors and right now they are raising capital for a new world wide television series seeing the world on a motorcycle.  Calls coming in from Spain, Italy, Poland, Norway the United States, Japan and Cuba.

In the middle of it all Pat decided to play some on line poker and won four hundred bucks while talking to a business partner in London.

Word travels fast in the circle as well and soon former musicians and friends he worked with in the past started calling.  By the end of the week there were enough of them to go socialize somewhere.

Here is the difference.  When eleven or eleven- thirty comes, you and I start thinking about sleep.  Musicians like Pat Savage start thinking about their next album.  He took off the business hat and put on the Savage Works International Hat.

Over the course of the week together Pat and I roughed out a new album.  He wanted something different.  I wrote the lyrics he wrote the music.  There will be some minor adjustments but we set the tracks for production.  At first we didn’t have enough selections by Thursday night we had too many and will have to save a few for another production.  This compilation will feature some blues, a couple of country and a few soft rock tunes.  What we envisioned is something without electric guitars or heavy pounding metal.  By next week the beginning of an album will start in Italy and or Spain.

For those who read the tabloids the fact is their life is like yours.  Instead of driving to work everyday they fly around Europe raising money playing gigs (concerts) and getting tired of travel and missing family.

All in all it was an education to be sure and a grounding of thought as it were.  For us all, what we have has to be earned and it takes a lot of hard work.

You and I are better off in many ways, we get time with family and have a chance to spend time with grand children.  Musicians have a creative passion that drives them on.  The next concert, the next episode is like a fix, and the hectic pace of  preparation is staggering.

His lifestyle reminded me of a fishbowl I saw in a shopping mall.  I can truthfully say I am glad its not me….

Fred Steele © 2019

 

Publisher – we need a link to the music bud

 

A bit of a surprise. A man walked into the Elks breakfast Sunday in Oliver and gave chief cook and bottle washer Ron Ethier a special award!

 

Elks Proud Awards!

These awards have been created as a sign of recognition of awesome members. There are 4 awards that will make the journey across our great order. The fun part of these awards is that they are given to you for being an awesome Elk by another awesome Elk.

The purpose of these awards are peer to peer recognition.

If you get the Elks Proud Award, you get to keep it for about two weeks. After that, you get to pass it on to another member that makes you #ElksProud. It does not have to stay within your own lodge. The award is encouraged to travel in your district, province and across the country.

We all look forward to seeing where these purple awards go and the stories of pride they bring.

SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER                                 

Teenage life in the town I grew up in was a bit dull.  We had two movie theatres and not much of anything else.  Once films started to get ratings our choices were much reduced.  Being from a small town has its disadvantages, one of them being that the women who sold the tickets knew everyone and she obviously had been trained by the Gestapo.  Wearing lipstick didn’t fool her, she knew we were under age and she wouldn’t sell us a ticket.

The only way to get into an R rated movie was to get an adult to buy a ticket for you and let you walk in with them.  This was not going to happen as the only adults going in were courting couples and they didn’t want two or three teenage girls going in with them.  Even if you could con an adult to buy your ticket for you the usherette also knew you and wouldn’t let you get by her.  This was probably just as well as the only person likely to get your ticket were single, older  men who were more interested in sliding a hand up your leg than watching the movie.

The only other entertainment for young people was hanging round the local “temperance bar”, as the ice cream parlour was familiarly known.  On any given evening there would be a big gang of teenagers hanging around outside, none of us had money to sit inside for more than one glass of pop and you were not allowed to linger after that one glass was gone.  So we would just accumulate on the corner and chat.  Nobody got out of line, we just needed to collect in our peer group and laugh about nothing.

Once we were old enough to work, we had money to spend and Saturdays were the highlight of the week.  Mornings would be spent doing weekly chores then you were free for the rest of the day.  Nobody had a home hair dryer so a group of us would leave home with hair in rollers, covered by the pastel chiffon scarf, that was the obligatory item of the era and walk the two miles to the train station.  The fashion of the day was a pair of four inch high heels and a dress with a crinoline underskirt that had layers of net to pouf the dress out, we carried a small, oval case called a Dorothy bag.  This held make-up and was strong enough to sit on in the crowded train.

The journey, to the sea side town of Blackpool, was about an hour and we spent part of that time removing the hair rollers and brushing, spraying and teasing our hair into a huge helmet with curls around the face.  We spent the afternoon at the “Pleasure Beach” which was a big, noisy outdoor carnival.  We paid the initial ticket for each ride but because we were girls, showing lots of leg beneath the pouffy skirt, the young guys operating the rides would let us stay on for several times, without paying again.  Young, silly, harmless fun.

We rode the rides until we were dizzy then, eating hot fish and chips, walked the couple of miles from one end of the promenade to the block where the tower stood.  Blackpool tower was, and still is a landmark in Lancashire, designed in a similar manor to the Eiffel tower, but it’s base is located in a huge building which housed all manor of entertainment, including a zoo, a permanent circus and an enormous ballroom.

The dance floor was sprung and would really bounce when lots of feet got into action.  At one end was a very elaborate stage and from the centre of this would rise, out of the floor, a magnificent Worlitzer organ.  It was played by the same man for years, he was called Reg Dixon and the organ would rise from the depths while he was playing it, kind of a magical moment.

A half hour was spent in the elegant bathrooms of the tower, rows of young girls applying make-up and smoothing down hair that had been windblown on the rides all afternoon.  Then out onto the dance floor.  Girls partnered each other until the boys cut in and from then on we danced and had fun till it was time to go home.  During the evening we would usually find a boy who lived in our area so, although we always went home in a group, each girl was also accompanied by a boy.  We always managed to arrive at the train station in time for the last train, which was known as the “Passion Wagon”.

There always seemed to be enough room to get everyone on the train, even if we had to stand in the passageways.  The guard always dimmed the lights for the trip home and the romantic atmosphere encouraged much cuddling and kissing.  Nobody ever got out of hand and nobody ever caused any trouble.  As different people got off at their stop, there would be calls to meet again next week, but nobody really meant it, there was always someone to dance with in the tower ballroom.  Youth is fickle but those Saturdays were a wonderful part of growing up.

 

Ronald Teneycke was locked up last year with a dangerous offender label.

At the time March 15, 2018 – Wayne Belleville stood on the back steps of the Penticton courthouse and told reporters he looked forward to “never hearing his name again.”

A few weeks before Christmas, Teneycke’s name landed on Belleville’s doorstep in the form of a letter from a maximum security prison in Agassiz.

Teneycke shot Belleville in the back during a criminal rampage through the South Okanagan in 2015 that also included an armed robbery of a small grocery store** in Oliver.

Belleville had picked Teneycke up hitchhiking in the hills east of Oliver.

As a part of sentencing for the crimes for which he received a dangerous offender label and indefinite jail term, Teneycke had a no-contact order with Belleville

Teneycke signed the letter “Merry Christmas, your unknown Ron.”

On Thursday January 10th, a new charge of failing to comply with a non-communication order was sworn against Teneycke in relation to the letter, and Belleville says the Crown prosecutors are looking into why the letter wasn’t caught by prison staff.

 

Prior to shooting Belleville, Teneycke had 37 previous convictions for offences including sexual assault with a weapon, forcible confinement and uttering threats, in connection to the rape of an Okanagan teenager in 1993.

Requests for comments from Corrections Canada have fallen on deaf ears.

** July 16th, 2015  at 10:17 a.m. Oliver RCMP attended to a complaint of an armed robbery in the 6400 block of Park Drive. (Eastside Corner)Officers attended and spoke to the business owner who advised that an unknown man entered the store and produced a weapon.

Source files:  CBC, Castanet and ODN