Got an email from our friend Geoff today: George Longden died, quite unexpectedly.
This –– when I was on my daily ramble –– led to thoughts about all the colleagues from my Carihi days who have died: an astonishing number; I must be getting old.
The news also reminded me of my one George Longden story. Which isn’t really about George at all, but is worth telling. It requires a rather extensive preamble, at least in the way it makes sense to me. So bear with me while I get to the point:
Already before we left Quesnel and my first teaching gig, Sandy’s father, who was a lifelong enthusiast of innovative European cars, had given us the Fiat 128 he had bought when they were first on the Canadian market. We drove that car for quite a few years until I crashed it one evening driving home from Carihi.
I’m sure I was driving largely autonomously as I followed the same route every working day: Alder, South Murphy, Evergreen, and Dogwood in the morning and the reverse after school. This route was necessitated by the fact that neither Dogwood nor Alder went through the forest which today is the Robron Centre, the Shaw offices, the Merecroft playing fields, and the Merecroft shopping plaza.
When I went to school in the morning everything was as expected, but when I drove home the town had completed the South Alder connection... by removing the stop sign on Alder and placing it on the Evergreen corner. (Nowadays we get weeks of notice when this happens, but Campbell River and it’s municipal workers have become much more sophisticated!)
Anyway, I ran smack into the one person in Campbell River –– totally in the right –– who wasn’t accustomed to stopping on Alder. Because he was new to town.
The police were very understanding; I wasn’t charged; we needed another car.
My parents had a slightly-newer Fiat 128 and bailed us out by passing it on to us.
I never liked that car nearly as much as the first one. I suspect it wasn’t as well-made, because, among other things, after a number of years I started to notice that the steering was starting to feel odd.
When I looked under the hood everything appeared quite normal, until I noticed that there was a crack developing where the part of the body that supported the engine was separating from the unibody that supported the wheels and the passenger compartment. The wheels, in short, were threatening to go in different directions. Not ideal.
And this is where George comes into the picture.
I used to see George quite regularly because we both had rooms in the new Carihi shop building, which had more spaces than were required for the shop classes on offer. I found my assigned classroom delightful because, while it was a long way from those of my Humanities colleagues, it was bright and large and had reams of storage space. Also my students could make all the noise they needed to.
George ran the automotive shop, and he and his students –– some of whom were also mine –– in addition to working on their own projects, quite often helped out by doing small jobs on the cars of some of the staff.
So I showed the problem to George. He was unenthusiastic about a permanent solution, but suggested he could try to spot-weld the two parts of the body, in the hope that would hold long enough for me to get rid of the vehicle. I jumped at the offer.
One Friday shortly after, he told me the job had been done. I went to the shop after everyone had gone home intending to drive the Fiat away. Popped the lid, started the engine, leaned in to see how it was holding together before driving off. Looked surprisingly good.
Then I smelled gas. Couldn’t see why.
Finally I saw a very fine stream of that gas coming from the after-market in-line fuel filter I’d recently installed. And pooling on the block.
Almost immediately there was an enormous “WHOOOF!” and a sheet of flame shot out of the engine compartment, well above the car’s roof.
That got my immediate attention!
Fortunately I had the presence of mind to shut off the engine, grab the fire extinguisher from the wall, and pull the trigger.
A cloud of CO2 and the fire was out.
I don’t actually remember how I dealt with the defective fuel filter, but I must have because I drove home.
And George appreciated both the story and the fact that I hadn’t burned the building down when I told him the next Monday.
Good guy, George.
