During the last year of teaching, as vice-principal of junior high at Mervin, I had taken over the Van den Burg and Beeching farms, getting a period of relaxation much more to my nature than the classroom. We spent one year at that, but it was evident that the returns from that farming were not going to support our family at a level we expected to achieve.

My brother Frank, who was trucking in the oil-fields, and family were living in Lloydminster and during the winter invited me to bring my family and come to help him renovate his house while living with him and his family. To generate some income, he said there was plenty of opportunity for trucking oil from the tanks in the oil-fields to the refineries in the city. It which could be done during the normal workday and do renovations in the evenings and days off. That is how I got to be a trucker.

Driving truck for Willoughby Brothers was great; a much needed relaxation period for me, away from the stress of teaching and when it mattered little when it was somebody else’s machine. They fueled it up and did all servicing and no worry for break-down. All I had to do was learn how to shift through ten stages of gears. Johnny said “not to worry about grinding the gears. There was no way you could shift without grinding”. Heck, It wasn’t two days and I learned to shift without scratching a gear. Each trip you would drive to the tank that needed some oil removed, go to the refinery and get the truck tank exit hole lined up with the pit and open the valve to empty the load. Oh, but don’t forget to replace that pan to catch the drip. Some drivers did forget and trailed a drip all through town. All together, Lloydminster was a disgusting mess.

At that time the whole industry was very careless of oil spills. Every worker had two pairs of boots, one for walking in spilled oil in the field, on the road, at the refinery, down the streets and in the stores.  Even housewife shoppers had to change shoes after their trip downtown, to protect the home floor from the oil they walked through while shopping. Lloydminster was booming and nobody seem to care much! 

Some drivers didn’t take off their oily boots to drive their truck, a habit adopted by all three of the Company owner brothers. When I got my truck, I spent a long time cleaning it up and changed into clean shoes when I got in to drive. Sometimes when I was off, one of those brothers would decide to haul with it and get in with their dirty boots and when I came back and complained, all I got was a laugh in return. It must have been much worse for the stores and for other business people when that sticky oil was tracked over their floors. It was almost impossible for anyone to avoid stepping in oil somewhere.

Trucking oil in the winter was not any fun. On a -30- or -40-degree morning, the grease in gears and bearings was so stiff that you had to travel miles before you could get into a higher gear. Then at the oil-field tank, up on the truck tank or oil-field tank platform, the windchill was hard to bear while you waited for the tank to fill, particularly if the fire that was supposed to keep the oil more liguid had gone out. If it had gone out, you had to sniff the air to see if there was any excess gas smell, because if there was, a serious explosion could result if you struck a flame. One young driver lost his life when that happened.

“Old Bertha” was one of the worst wells to fill your truck from, especially in the winter. Oil from it had no heater and it came out of the spout curling back and forth like Christmas candy, folding wide so the truck had to be lined up perfectly or oil would spill around the filler hole. If that happened, you had to as quickly as possible shut off the stiff valve, turn the spout up, changed boots if you expected to keep you truck clean, climb down to readjust the truck, reset the truck, change boots back and get back to see if it had all been successful. It could take over an hour to get a load from “Old Bertha”. I never found out how it got that name and hated to even much question it.

I could see no financial, real rewarding, future in diving truck and had an offer to earn more at carpentry, so only spent some short time at Bud’s driving the oil truck along with the ongoing renovation. I then heard of the requirement for the officer-in-charge at Fort Battleford National Historic Park. National Historic Sites then took care of my employment for almost all the next 35 years; and as I often said was, “The best job in the word for me!”