Archives for January 25, 2019

Abstract Frost Crystals

Not sure of the year of the VW

Guess who the driver is ?

The content of the Steele Report comes from many different places and I follow so many things, even I don’t know what the topic will be.

This week the editor of this fine publication asked me to do a short biography.  It’s something I never thought too much about actually.  I regard the stages of life personally as individual life times.

I grew up in what is now Lake Country on what was called rainbow hill.  My father and Uncle had a farm up there for a few years and my dad was a carpenter to support it.  Where have we heard that before?  Eventually my father became a cold storage foreman in the packinghouse and later operated a motel and small farm in Oyama.

Like so many others in their first brush with adulthood I headed for the city.  Radio obsessed I was.   Sacrifice was the order of the day.  Radio was a close community and getting in was dependent on perseverance.  I got a side voice job advertising the shows at the Skyway Drive In Theater.

The Program Director of the radio station asked the Theater Manager who I was and I opened a new life chapter.

Getting ahead required moving a lot.  Peace River Alberta, Salmon Arm, Red Deer, Penticton. Kelowna, and pulled back from the industry working part time in Radio and full time managing Night Clubs.  I had my own audience it seemed as  many referred to me as Stainless Steele and eventually as Doctor Stainless (The Doctor of good times).  Incidentally I have the mounted belt buckle and name plate on my wall.

In the mid eighties the radio bug was infectious and it was off to CFCW – an Edmonton Station that operated out of Camrose Alberta.   A year or two later I was back at CKOV in Kelowna and back in Nightclub management.

In the transient world of broadcasting it was time to move on. CKAL and later renamed CICF was looking for a person with specific skills.  It was a different world with some of the most eccentric people I ever worked with and that was saying something.  Consider for a moment in Red Deer Alberta at CKRD I was a rock and roll jock spinning records upstairs above a funeral home.

I liken the whole adventure to being part of a gold rush, when the glitter is gone.  I decided to work on my own at my own pace and went farming.  I had started and finished my broadcast career in the same city at the end of a thirty year adventure.  Now I was going to farm, just like the years I grew up in the orchard.  Life became a giant wheel there seemed to be no beginning nor end.

Quiet peace and tranquility were not to be.  While farming I was persuaded to enter agricultural politics and was elected to the BCFGA as Vice President.  In 2012-13 – I lost the elections for President.  2014-17 –  I served as president of the BCFGA before retiring last year to provide full time care for my ailing wife who passed away this month.

Now I write poetry, I am working on a novel and recently co-wrote an album with a musician friend of  mine.  It has been like participating in several interesting life experiences.

Fred Steele

Stir

To stir is to gently mix a liquid/substance by moving an implement like a spoon around in it. To stir will blend the ingredients of the liquid. One of the interesting things about stirring things is that we stir them together and it is almost impossible to then get the ingredients apart again. I really don’t know how we could get the milk out of the cake dough or the milk out of the coffee, once stirred. So stirring is a powerful combiner

To stir things up is also to do the opposite of combine. A group of people are meeting/talking and someone loudly says something that is highly controversial. That can stir up the group and get people to taking up sides on the topic, maybe even fighting. That is not combining. This kind of stirring also mixes things up in a way that can be very hard to un-mix. What is it like to have someone stir you in this way?

There can be positive and negative stirring. To be stirred into action on human rights can be a positive thing. Could also be negative if it includes violence etc. This stirring thing, me thinks it is in the mind. I am prodded by something and decide to act, to move. That moving is the result of a thought and it is the thought that was the stirring instrument. I can stir folks sometimes, so can you. Which way do you like to stir?

Emile Waldteufel was stirred to write a waltz by watching figure skaters gliding across the ice. Now, when we listen to his music we are stirred to feel and envision skaters. His symphonic music piece is a classic called the Skater’s Waltz. The skaters stirred his imagination and musical muse. From that he wrote the music that now stirs all of us. So, sometimes one stir begets a return stir. Fun

We respond to being stirred with an emotion. I can feel a stir to write a poem, and I do write about crocus every Spring. Those lovely early splashes of colour stir me into action. I send my poem to many, many people and most are in turn stirred into a happier view of the rest of winter. The arrival of the crocus stir me to write. Others read and are stirred to smile a little bit more. “Stir on!”, I say. It seems a good thing.