Some people asked to know more about Joseph's life, so this is his story ...
according to me, with a little help from some friends.
70 years is a lot of years and I started out keeping it as short as I could, but it's grown and is now in three parts; 1950-1975, 1975-2012, 2012-2020.
(apologies for random picture placement ... a new interface has defeated me)
RETIREMENT
Our retirement plans went something like this:
- celebrate getting there,
- empty store (to the bones),
- sell townhouse and move to Toronto,
- keep excess items in storage,
- settle into Toronto condo,
- entertain Australian guests,
- fly to Australia for a year-long holiday in our van,
- visit Europe and Spain on the way,
- enjoy year in van and with new grandson and other family,
- return to Toronto,
- enjoy Toronto and travel to wherever we want at will … for the rest of our lives.
Retirement went like this …
Sell house.
We somehow managed to sell our town house during the retirement sale and even made a profit!
Celebrations.
As if the sale at the store wasn’t enough and then selling the house, we decided to have a party to celebrate not only that we had Mischa, Simone, Jasper (and Simone’s parents) and Cassia with us, but also a chance to celebrate our retirement. The best bakery in town (Art Is In) happened to be our neighbour and they let us gather there, on a Saturday night, in amongst the flour and dough machines! As we added more and more guests, we realised it was becoming our “Goodbye ONW party” and so more invites extended (and I’m sure some missed) until it turned into the most perfect gathering of (almost) everybody who had been a part of ONW. (Sadly, the speed of the escalation from “little party” to “most-important-party-of-our-life” meant Alexander couldn’t make it.)
On the last day at the store we shared a cake with the customers and then drinks with staff and a few friends afterwards.
Empty store.
It took a couple of days of hard work - some people took bookcases and one even took the mineral cabinet, but most of it went in the dumpster. So that was the end - one of those crazy circles-of-life happenings that are both happy and sad.
Move to Toronto.
Days after closing the store, on a ridiculously hot and humid day (no matter where/when we move it is always hot and if it’s Canada it’s always humid!) we stuffed our storage bay with excess items, and trucked the rest to Toronto. (The Toronto condo was already full of previous-excess items.)
Settle in:
Joseph couldn’t wait to bike everywhere, I couldn’t wait to sit and do nothing… he did bike, and I did sit, but we also did renovate the closets and we did settle in.
Australian Guests:
Mischa et al came in May, brother John et al in July, friend Julie in August and so three trips to Niagara Falls and two trips to NYC that summer, but that’s OK - I can go to both a hundred times and I love visitors - especially from Australia.
After the visitors and after the unscheduled kitchen renovation (I asked Joseph and he said OK) we left for Australia.
Europe and Spain:
After Paris with Carol & Graeme, our side-trip on the way to Australia turned out to be a bit of IKEA nostalgia … Poor Joseph started off with a kidney stone the day before we left Toronto and it wouldn’t move so he was miserable in Paris and London. In Edinburgh we visited with Karen and Rob (IKEA)- and the stone left somewhere on the train ride up from London. Onto Sweden, to Almhult and IKEA and the IKEA hotel. This was the original IKEA store and it was closing (a new one opening a few streets away) and we were visiting Göta and Sven-Göta, (their daughter Marie worked for Joseph in Ottawa) and Sven-Göta was the first store manager for IKEA… at that store!!! Onto LUND to visit Marie & Tedde before we flew out of Copenhagen for Spain.
A few precious weeks travelling and visiting with Cassia and Pablo and Pablo's family in Elche, where they mentioned they were moving to Australia the following year! It was shortly after the GFC and there were no jobs in Spain so they figured they had nothing to lose -and hopefully a job to gain. Then we were off… finally … to Adelaide, Australia.
A Year in the van.
We arrived mid-November 2012. Joseph purchased the van (a small motorhome) over the internet so we were pretty excited to see it and even more excited to see Jasper for his (slightly late) first birthday, and his parents and of course all of my family. We planned to leave on our trip around Australia in March, so for the four months until then, we lived in the van at a caravan park.
Caravan parks are full over Christmas and (any) school holidays, so we parked at Simone’s parents houses (in the city and the beach) over Christmas and then up in the hills to Lenswood and our friend’s Graeme & Fiona’s apple orchard (squash friends from all those years ago).
We parked in their drive-way under the huge oak tree (note to self: falling acorns are noisy!). Since we were right there, we thought we should “help” them out by picking (Joseph) and packing (both of us) their apples.
“Packing apples” is so much more than putting apples into a box; you need to know the difference between a good apple and a bad apple, then a really-bad apple (destroy) and a not-so-bad apple (juice apple) - sometimes it’s obvious, sometimes not so much and with a continuous stream of apples rolling along the conveyor belt, your job, other than removing the bad ones, is to make sure you fill your crate without letting a single apple land on the floor. Once you’ve made those critical decisions and your crate is full, you stop the conveyor then place (or stack) your 14kg crate onto pallets. Lucky for Fiona and Graeme we left in March.
We travelled across the Nullabor, 400km of dead-straight road across a tree-less plain, around the southern coast of Western Australia and up to Perth.
Visited with Erin (Ross), then on the 2,000km drive up to Broome, we saw the stromatolites at Hamlin Pool (you have to be a geologist to really enjoy this), snorkelled just off the beach at Coral Bay (joseph) and swam with whale sharks at Ningaloo Reef (joseph) even though by now we (Joseph) had a broken wrist and needed a cuff to cover his cast.
We drove inland to Karajini National Park and regardless that there were no powered sites (=no ac), and it was so ridiculously hot and flushing “our toilet” woke everybody in the site, so we (Joseph) had to use the bush toilet! Even with all that - it was one of my favourite stops. Making it down to the watering hole was a perilous climb (for me - not for any of the parents carrying children on their shoulders or minions underfoot), and once down you had to shimmy onto a ledge so you could sit in the cool (or sun), but the reward was a divine natural pool, just shallow enough on the edges for the Australian non-swimmer (jill) to paddle in and deep enough for everybody else to swim.
In Broome we met up with the Ross’, Cooks and Frigons, friends from Ottawa and they each rented vans similar to ours. The caravan of vans travelled and birded across the Kimberlys, into the Bungle Bungles, Katherine, onto Kakadu and ended in Darwin eight weeks later.
There was one minor inconvenience (flat tyre in middle of nowhere (us) and one major inconvenience (Ken & Eileen) with a van that broke down more than once and eventually had to be replaced. It was Joseph who organised this trip; so much planning and such responsibility to make sure the trip was money and time well spent, and, most importantly, see as many birds as possible. It was a once-in-a-lifetime trip.
If you want to read all of the nitty-gritty details of this trip look back at blog posts from 2012.
Originally, our plans were to travel right around Australia, but at some point we decided to divide it into two seperate trips. The humidity was getting to us (Jill) and the air-conditioner in the van was so loud we (Joseph) couldn’t sleep so we “agreed” that instead of taking two weeks to drive the 3,000km south to Adelaide, we would limit our stops and drive as fast as we (joseph) could.
We did stop at Daly Waters
and Alice Springs,
then made the 600km return trip to Uluru, although it rained and we missed dinner in the desert
... instead of the underground motel at Coober Pedy we stayed one last night in the van and made it back to Adelaide almost three months after we left.
LIVING IN AUSTRALIA - a slight change of plans!
Somewhere on that trip; between the humidity and the loud air conditioning, I realised that we would soon have all of our family living down here, and I wondered why on earth we would take (yet another flight) back to Canada and end up thousands of miles away from those that meant the most to us. So I asked Joseph if we could change our minds and live in Adelaide … and he said OK. I also asked if we could live in a house instead of the van … and he said OK. So within days of arriving back we found a beautiful house to rent, on the dock in Port Adelaide, just feet from the river. Of course all of our worldly possessions were in the other house - a million miles away.
Joseph had only a one-year Visitor Visa, so he would have to return to Canada to apply for a Partner Visa. We went to Immigration in Adelaide and, the child helping us explained how it would all work, gave us the appropriate papers and information we needed, and off Joseph went to tidy up affairs in Canada, submit the Visa application, pay $1,000 and be back soon. Of course soon after he paid $1,000 and submitted “those” papers we found out the child didn’t really know what it was talking about … so Joseph had to start over again, with the correct papers and $4,000 this time and four more months to wait. To accompany the visa application we all had to submit a character reference and I’m sure Australian Immigration couldn’t believe how amazingly wonderful this person was so they let him back in - pretty much permanently.
I managed to fill the rented house with donated, second-hand or IKEA ASIS furniture and it was a beautiful house, with dolphins leaping in front and the best layout for parties, but I guess, back when I asked Joseph if we could live in Adelaide and he said OK … he must have said “provided I can go back to Canada every two years (at least)” … and I must have said “OK” - because that’s what he did. Much as he enjoyed living here and especially his grandchild, (slowly becoming four) he missed Canada. I’m pretty sure the friends who thought they missed him while he was away, changed their minds after having to accommodate or entertain him on so many of those trips back.
I did go back occasionally - especially when it seemed we would be in Adelaide for a while and we decided to ship some of our “worldly possessions” down here. Not in “book-rate” boxes this time - but on pallets. Joseph did all of the work; somehow, he located a shipper and the logistics of where/how to ship and then that math-brain of his was able to workout how many boxes of different sizes would fit (exactly) onto a pallet; big ones for dining chairs (they are nice chairs), smaller for computer (the old iMac) and all of our records for ONW (that we had to keep for 7- 10years). The storage room in Ottawa was emptied, boxes filled the Ross’ garage, then trucked to Toronto to have more items from the condo added in, then off to a random slice of the container world, in an industrial park somewhere in Toronto, to pack all of those boxes onto three pallets and watch them shoved to the back of a container with the hopes we would be reunited. If Joseph is to be applauded for running a business for 20+ years then he deserves a Nobel Prize for this quietly-executed, brilliant feat of engineering - so much math, so much measuring!
In between returning to Canada and babysitting grandchildren, we moved to an apartment on the 7th floor of the first apartment building in Adelaide, just on the edge of the city, within spittin’ distance of the zoo so that you could hear lions roar in the middle of the night, and the grandchildren close by (in their houses, not the zoo!)
About this time, Joseph started birding and volunteering with some local groups. He walked for miles in the heat and cold, he trudged through (and got stuck in) stinky mud flats, rode in little tin boats, planted trees, picked up garbage, monitored mounds, trapped rats, counted birds and eventually became the resident “bird expert”!
“The Friends of Adelaide International Bird Sanctuary (FAIBS) was formed in 2016 and Joe was part of the original steering committee and then became a Committee Member and Treasurer. … FAIBS was formed to provide volunteer support and improve awareness of the Adelaide International Bird Sanctuary, a 60 kilometre stretch of coastline of Gulf St Vincent from Barker Inlet to Port Parham. It is a key feeding and roosting area for tens of thousands of migratory shorebirds which breed over 10,000 kilometres away in the Northern Hemisphere and spend the summer months in Australia resting and fattening up before heading back to their breeding grounds. Our group, assists Rangers in protecting and improving the habitat within the Sanctuary and assist in educating members of the public about the importance of the area to migratory and resident shorebirds. As well as volunteering his time as Treasurer and providing his knowledge and valued opinion at committee meetings Joe was our birding Subject Matter Expert (though he refuted that). When we held events he was regularly one of the first people there helping me set up and when the event involved bird spotting he really came into his element, skilfully explaining the finer points of bird identification. … Joe also conducted shorebird counts in the Sanctuary and mentored myself and several others as we delved into bird counting and identification. Joe’s volunteering for our group also included planting seedlings and coastal clean ups. He also produced a pictorial hand out / checklist of birds seen in the Sanctuary for children for our Fun in the Sun day, held at Middle Beach in April 2018 and wrote an article about the Sanctuary and FAIBS which was published on the East Asian-Australiasian Flyway website. Any bird survey or count that we conduct whether an official count or an ad hoc few hours birding in the Sanctuary or in other areas we submit the data to Birdlife who hold and collate data of all bird sightings across Australia.
Joe also conducted Atlas bird counts at Gluepot Reserve (near Waikerie) and Mallee Fowl counts there as well. He also did shorebird counts on the Coorong and Orange Bellied Parrot counts, which both are run by Birdlife… “
Way back in 2002 on our trip to Adelaide for the total solar eclipse, Joseph headed off for a couple of days to a place called “Gluepot Reserve” (aka Gluepot). Nobody in my family had ever heard of it, nobody we spoke to either, but he found it and off he went to camp and drive that poor little rental car over the bumpy, bumpy washboard road. I can’t remember what he saw, but I guess he enjoyed himself because when we ended up back here in 2012 that’s the first place he headed for.
Background … “Gluepot was established by Birds Australia (now BirdLife Australia) in 1997, by a purchase, through a public appeal, of Gluepot Station, a pastoral lease with an area of 540 square kilometres (210 square miles) in the semi-arid Murray Mallee region of South Australia. The decision to purchase Gluepot Station, Birds Australia's first reserve, was taken in order to protect its outstanding floral and fauna values, under threat because of an application by the lessee to burn the property to provide grazing for sheep.”
BirdLife mention in their description that Gluepot “ … is located 1.5 hrs drive on well-maintained dirt roads north of Waikerie, SA. …”. Maybe so, but those “well-maintained” roads were nearly the undoing of our van, and the tiny little Suzuki we had as a second car wouldn’t have made it over the first groove so we had to trade it in for a small 4-wheel drive SUV. There is also a reason for the word “glue” in the name, because when it rains those “well-maintained” roads turn to glue! Still none of that seems to bother the people who fall in love with the place.
At Gluepot he met all kinds of retired people; some doctors who volunteer to maintain the buildings, couples volunteer as rangers and stay four months at a time (they can do this at National Parks all over Australia) and he met uni students doing research (a lot of French to help keep his French alive). Joseph also offerred to create an active list of birds that occur, and that activity required regular seasonal visits. He had been to Gluepot more times than I can remember and he so wanted to take me with him. Without the van we needed to stay in one of the rooms set aside for rangers/volunteers, so fitting it in between, him being around, the babysitting, the heat, the wet, and whether there was any room at the inn, proved tricky and I never did make it.
On one of his volunteering trips somewhere, Joseph met Graeme Tonkin. As with the other Graeme (Schultz) in his life, there are no university degrees here, just smarter than most average bears and able to make or fix just about anything, and Joseph was always in awe of (both) their talents.
Graeme (Tonkin) is Training and Database Manager for the “Mallee Fowl Recovery Team”, and to help you (try to) understand why/how/why those folks become so passionate about those pesky birds, here’s an excerpt from their Wikipedia Page.
“… Malleefowl are shy and elusive birds, making counts of the birds themselves very difficult. However, their mounds are conspicuous and provide a reliable means of measuring the abundance of breeding birds in an area. … The monitoring of Malleefowl sites is the agreed method for determining Malleefowl breeding trends on a national scale. Historically, Malleefowl sites have been set up in areas where mounds have been known to exist, and/or where opportune sightings of birds have been recorded. Sites are located in Malleefowl habitat, which is largely found in the semi-arid to arid zone in shrubland or low woodlands dominated by mallee. Malleefowl require a sandy or loamy substrate and an abundance of leaf litter to construct their mounds. … The primary aim of the Malleefowl monitoring program is to track changes in the number of breeding birds inhabiting specific areas. Observers (mostly volunteers) examine and categorise all the known mounds at each site as either active i.e. currently used as an incubator or not active….”
Joseph happily followed Graeme (T) around to sites in South Australia, W.A. (just over the border, off the Nullabor), Victoria and even into NSW. They use anything and everything; GPS, Smartphones, Cyber Tracking Software, remote cameras etc.
The cameras record everything that moves at a nest; a blade of grass, a visitor (foxes), and Joseph would sit for hours back home, flipping through every photo to try and decide what caused the photo. Monitoring requires walking (many) kilometres a day, in a grid, in the heat, with the flies, but they seem to love it and this is what Joseph had been doing with Graeme, the week before his diagnosis.
So our retirement didn’t go according to plan... Joseph made so many meticulous plans; for our stores, for our trips, and for our life. Some plans he worked on twelve months (or more) ahead, and they did work out, so there was no reason to think that retirement wouldn’t be the same … but it wasn’t to be. That advanced cancer diagnosis, December 5, 2019, caught him by surprise and shook him to his core. He started out positive and hopeful that he could steal a few more years, but it was so aggressive and it wore him down. He didn’t want to go - he would miss his beloved grandchildren growing up ... and so many more birds to see!
Along the way, through the volunteering, the treasuring, the mentoring and birding, he ended up with more friends and acquaintances in Adelaide, than me! His final contribution was to donate books to Gluepot and most importantly his seventeen-volume Birds of The World collection to Birds SA, a significant donation and I know greatly appreciated.
Once he had taken care of everything he possibly could (car for me, finances, will, what to donate, etc.) he would wake me in the middle of the night to record his thoughts (about his ethical store and this). He would ask me again and again to show him that I had everything written down, and, if he could have, he might have made some edits … to these words…
“Dear friends … One of the best things that has happened in my lifetime (since high school) has been the acceptance of the LBGT community. When I was in high school there was a young man called Chris McLeod who was obviously different (and in retrospect LBGT). He was picked on by the bullies in our class and most of all by the priests. Much later I found out that he committed suicide. These priests also picked on a black kid in class who came in with his hair dyed red and he picked on me at the tender age of 13 for not being able to describe how to “SPIT-SHINE” leather shoes!! He was a bully - he was a priest and he reinforced the bullies. Chris was clever - had good marks like me - didn’t cause trouble - but he was different.
Later on in the 80s Jill and I made a trip to New Orleans and were able to see black Americans mixing freely and socially in coastal Mississippi, at the bars and casinos and restaurants (where the servers were often white and customers black). How wonderful that these days everybody (for the most part) is accepted when it wasn’t so long ago they weren’t … at least that there is now a movement that recognises differences.
Along these thoughts are immigrants and how they contribute in so many ways to their new “home” and enrich the lives of their new friends.”
So many “sliding-door” moments in our lives to be grateful for, especially those that lined up and let us find each other and he spoiled me for 45 years.
He didn’t discover the cure for cancer, or win a Nobel Prize; and he wasn't a saint ...
he was just a nerd, a birdwatcher, a geologist, an astronomer, an environmentalist,
a reader and a retailer ...
and somewhere in there, people found inspiration from him
and I know he was deeply honoured by that.
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