Young Turks And Wily Veterans

The early Power Commission years were characterized by a dynamic mix of youthful enthusiasm and "school-of-life" savvy among its employees. The employees included kids fresh out of high school or university; returning veterans ready to get back to work, raise families, and leave the horrors of war behind; and experienced power-utility workers "inherited" from other companies. The mix seemed right as everybody buckled down to get the job done.

Twenty-five-year-old Tom Farmer of New Brunswick started with the Power Commission in 1946, after serving with the RCAF, and retired 35 years later.

I put in some training time in Vancouver in the vocational shops and then got a job as an operator in Sechelt, where the diesel construction crew was installing an old diesel engine. And when I say old, I mean it was probably in the order of 40 or 50 years old. An older Atlas air blast. I doubt that too many other diesel people these days would know what an air blast unit would be. My job only lasted about a month there and then I was told to go up to Smithers. So I parked my wife in Vancouver in a room-all we had was a room-and headed up to Smithers.

The trip was very cold, dirty, and damp. You had to go all the way through to Jasper by rail, and then on up through Smithers. This was in November. Smithers is beautiful now, but it was quite a dirty little dump in those days.

We had a couple of very old diesels, and it was just a matter of changing one over to another smaller unit with the light load, and a larger unit for heavier loads. And then I was told to come down to Westbank, in the Okanagan. The job lasted some three years, so this time my wife could join me. We got settled in a con-verted garage. It consisted of two rooms, an outhouse, and a cold water tap, and that was all. After the first year down there, I was made chief operator. My salary jumped to $125 a month from $110. At that time it seemed wonderful.

Art Price was among the BCPC employees inherited from existing power companies. In 1945, he was a young diesel operator in Vanderhoof when he received a letter from the head office of his employer, the Columbia Power Company. It informed him that the company and its seven small power plants were being taken over in August and that all the employees would be kept on. The letter said, in part:

Personally, I think the men like yourself, who happen to be with us at this time of changeover, are rather fortunate. Government departments are generally easy and pleasant to work for. It is my guess that the Government will be at least as good a boss as the Columbia Power Company, and possibly a good deal better.

The work proved far from easy, but Art never regretted his decision to stay on, working for the Commission and then BC Hydro for 35 years.

When Russ Hamilton returned to West Canadian Hydro in Vernon (where he had started in 1933) after four years in the RCAF, he found that the small company was now part of the new Power Commission and that ambitious plans were afoot. He was asked to help start a meter shop that would serve the interior region. The Commission was responsible for improving the distribution of electricity throughout British Columbia and one of the ways it did this was to take over small utilities, many of which were in dire financial straits. Russ remembers what that meant to someone working in the field.

When we started the meter shop we had to deal with all sorts, including five-amp meters that could only operate a couple of lights in houses. All these new appliances were coming out that people wanted-ranges and electric heaters and so on-and all these small utilities were faced with the same thing: having to increase production. But they couldn't afford it because they just couldn't raise their rates.

I was quite familiar with the plant in Clinton, and in that operation no one could hook up a range because the plant didn't have the capacity. To raise capacity, they were faced with a $50,000 investment, and no way could they could raise the money. Customers were already paying 15 or 20 cents a kilowatt hour. There was no way these companies could have survived.

At Burns Lake there was a diesel run by one fellow. He wanted to keep the plant, but sometimes he'd leave early and shut down at 10 o'clock-and the power was 25 cents a kilowatt hour!

Some employees were recruited straight out of university. The UBC 1946 class in electrical engineering produced eight graduates who became important Commission employees, including Don Wales, Steve Howlett, Norm Olsen, Larry Wight, Norm Latimer, Wilf Kenny, Walter Marks, and Wally Lyle.

Even before the class's graduation, BCPC chairman Sam Weston had talked to the university's combined engineering classes about the government's plans for electrifying the province. Norm Olsen was 22 at the time and remembers how Weston caught the imagination of some of the class members.

He said he was looking for engineers who would be trained to manage this new utility. It was mostly made up of small, diesel-powered communities around the province, but he fascinated a group of us with the picture he painted of how exciting it would be and the tremendous opportunities. And he painted such an exciting picture of what was going to happen in the province of BC. Economic development would only be possible with electrical power, so you needed a public electrical utility. It was tremendously exciting and the best possible way one could spend one's life.

At that time, BC Electric had one job they were offering and that was in their meter department and it didn't interest me at all. One of my friends took that job in BC Electric and was hired at $150 a month. The Power Commission hired four mechanical and four electrical engineers at $100 a month. And no expenses.

Only one of the eight of us was married. Because we would be required to move around the province, and have to be willing to go anywhere and do anything that was requested of us, Weston said he expected us to stay single for five years. As it happened, I stayed single for three years.

Sam Weston always left a strong impression on people as he enthusiastically preached his personal philosophy about public service and public power-a philosophy that eventually became that of the whole organization. "Power according to Weston" was distilled into an epigram that he repeated at every opportunity and even had printed and handed out to his band of power zealots. Part of it read:

A utility is a thing with a heart beat-a steady beat of progress-brought about not by water and wire, penstocks and poles, turbines and transformers, but by all the people who put our resources and equipment to the benefit of all. Ours is a job of service; and the service we render is the lifeblood of the community we serve.

Norm Olsen recalls Sam Weston and his style with fondness.

Mr. Weston was a big man with a deep voice and a very imposing personality. He had cold, steely eyes and I found him very intimidating, but he had a tremendous ability to inspire you.

He had a practice of holding regular meetings with district managers because the district managers were the representatives of the Commission all around the province in very key positions. The towns were very small, like Alert Bay, but it was the beginning of the extension of public power, and public support for public power was essential. Weston recognized and promoted the importance of these district managers, so we had many meetings in head office with the commissioners. The chairman would meet with us lowly little guys and preach to us. And that's what kept a lot of us going, that shot in the arm every now and again about the service we were providing to the community.

The commissioners started building up the staff from nothing. A lot of the staff were former military, so there were all kinds of captains and majors and so on around. But the corporation was very democratic. When we lowly district managers came to Victoria to meet with the commissioners, General Foster would host dinner in the Union Club or the golf club. You could speak to the chairman and have a cup of coffee with him and play poker with him-we used to play penny-ante poker with the chairman of the board. He lost all the time, too!

Tom Farmer was also a district manager, and he remembers Weston's little "talks" at the meetings in Victoria.

Oh, he'd give us a wonderful, fiery speech every year. And then he'd send us on our way back to the district offices, feeling that we could whip our weight in wildcats.

In such a small organization, Weston and his fellow commissioners knew virtually all the employees. Jerry Wills started working with West Canadian Power in 1941 and retired from BC Hydro in 1978. As a union representative during his BC Power Commission years, Jerry occasionally went to Victoria for bargaining sessions, which were quick, frank, fruitful, and always ended up the same way: "We'd play poker."

Charlie Nash joined the BC Power Commission in October 1945 and retired from BC Hydro in 1981. A UBC graduate in mechanical engineering, he had been a pilot in the RCAF and found work in the Commission's Victoria headquarters shortly after his demobilization. In 1947 he was sent to Port Alberni.

I was sent there as district manager. Arnold McGilli-vray, who was the electrical superintendent in Port Alberni at the time, might rightfully have been expecting to become district manager, but the powers that be thought that they'd put a professional engineer into the job. The title didn't mean much because I knew little about the utility business and Arnold knew it. But he was very magnanimous in saying "I know you haven't had much experience, but I'm going to teach you everything I know." And he did, and I respect him for that.

He introduced me to the whole community and taught me all sorts of things in the electric utility business, because being in charge of Port Alberni, you had to know everything. Well, you had to run everything. You had to run a diesel plant, you had to make an interconnection with our electricity supply company, had to design a new substation, had to talk with irate cus-tomers. It was exceedingly good training that gave the young engineers in the Power Commission a tremendously valuable start, because they didn't pursue their careers down a narrow track.

Charlie's experience was typical. The district managers, often young men working long hours with a great deal of responsibility on their shoulders, were the vital link that held the BCPC operations together -especially in the early days. Typically, they would be involved in planning, management, administration, employee and public relations, and cost control, as well as power generation and distribution. It was not uncommon for some district managers to be out there climbing poles and doing the repairs. The
ability of district managers to "do it all" served the Commission well in its rough-and-tumble early years and, some would say, benefited BC Hydro in its first days, too.