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)
1975 - 2012
MARRIED LIFE
Once we were married, of course Joseph’s life changed. He always carried his binoculars with him, and when driving was always looking at the sky instead of the road (typical birder habit) but now not so much birding. Once I started working at BNR we would take small trips - mostly to visit Alexander, now living in Kennebunkport Maine, to enjoy the company, the coast and beaches (there is no coast, no beaches (not real ones) and no salt water in Ottawa), to see the odd bird but mostly to discover the world of Outlet Stores!!
We moved out of the house with Ken, to a 16th floor apartment a few streets away and Ken married Eileen and they lived across town. For a year or so, life was pretty normal as we learned about each other and how to live together, without a lot of money and a few friends. Somewhere in the middle, we decided to go to Australia so that Joseph could meet my family. We decided it wasn’t worth going all that way for just a few weeks, that it would take time to get to know all my family and learn about life down there. (I think it helped that Australia is a birder’s paradise.) So Joseph made a budget that we stuck to the fridge and we found a cheap fare and we would leave at the end of November 1976.
That July I asked Joseph if we could go to Disneyland before we left for Aus. If you came from Australia (back then) Disneyland was a place you couldn’t even dream about and I figured this might be my last chance to visit and from Ottawa you can drive to Florida and DisneyWorld! Joseph said OK, added another line to the budget and in November we packed up our apartment- mostly returned the borrowed furniture to their owners - and what was left was packed into “book-rate” boxes to be shipped at “book-rate to Australia! We left our jobs, moved in with Ken and Eileen, rented a car (with unlimited mileage) and drove 3,000+ kms to Florida to visit, Cape Canaveral and DisneyWorld and on the way back, an extra 1,000 kms up the east coast around NYC, and Boston to Maine to visit Alexander one last time. We returned the rental car to the poor rental company, said goodbye to Ken & Eileen and left for Australia.
Not sure how we found the cheap fare to Adelaide! We rented another car (different company), said goodbye to Mr & Mrs. Dafoe (we didn’t know if/when we would be back) and stopped off along the way to say goodbye to family. Returned the rental car and joined others in a Towne Car that drove across the border to Buffalo NY. We flew to Hong Kong with a one-hour stopover in Anchorage, Alaska, the whole time wishing I had ordered the Kosher meals because they were served first. Three days in HK to bird (Joseph), visit the border with China (99 years not up yet), watch our Australian dollars devalue by 17.5% and buy a record player to play our two albums; Gordon Lightfoot’s Greatest Hits and Hot August Night, to our unsuspecting family and friends in Adelaide! In Singapore, the plane from London that we were to join was overbooked so they sent us off to a glitzy-looking but cheap hotel with a few $$s for meals and no luggage. The only good thing about this unexpected layover was the early-morning birding for Joseph. We landed in Adelaide, December 1976 with no jobs, no money, a record player and eight book-sized boxes full of our worldly possessions about to arrive, but we did have somewhere to live!
LIFE IN AUSTRALIA
I started working and Joseph arranged to find a volunteer position to tag seals in Kangaroo Island with the Museum of S.A. He never did get to the seals or K.I. - my boss’ husband mentioned a job at Standard Book, as the “Education Rep” so Joseph applied. This dream job took him all over S.A. seeing the new country, birding on occasion, selling some books and getting paid - pretty good for his first job in a place where nobody knew him. He went on to work in the city store, manage the store in West Lakes, open a Standard Books in both Noarlunga and Elizabeth Shopping Centres, then back to manage the city store. He introduced “remainder sales” (cheap but often excellent books at the end of a print run etc.) . “Price ‘em low, stack ‘em high” was his mantra and it worked, and sales increased. He hosted authors in the store; Dick Bruna my favourite. He met Thor Heyerdahl and Colleen MacCulloch and worked there from 1977 - 1983.
We moved from Semaphore to Crafers in the Adelaide hills, to build a house; a one-level modern wood/brick home on a south-facing fairly steep slope. Our friends Carol and Graeme had the same house one street away but we promised to make ours look different, Theirs had sweeping views of Adelaide - ours was literally perched among the trees. Trees were our view outside the windows and on the balcony you were right there in the middle of them. The slope was so steep the first grader on site sunk in the mud and had to be towed out.
The driveway was (almost) impossible to drive up backwards with the gravelly surface so we (Joseph), with bits of help from my Mother, set about to pave the slope, and brick the gutters and two level areas at the back of the house. A (very, very) lot of bricks. Somebody said they “stuck” better to the mortar if you soaked them in water so he did. After a few bricks it was no longer just water but an acidy mix of goodness knows what. He finished it all and it’s still there today, but his hands never recovered. He suffered with a kind of excema, insanely itchy, cracked hands and fingers until December 2019.
Part of the agreement the council gave us to build our house on the south-facing fairly steep slope, was to keep a reserve of water in the rainwater tanks (we had no mains water) and to clear the undergrowth in front of the house. The water was easy to keep - the tap simply mounted two feet above the bottom of the tanks - the undergrowth was another matter. Unless you were willing to spend every waking minute outside of your regular job, working on it, it was useless. It was full of blackberry bushes and Broom!! (As per Wickipedia: “…Broom thickets harbour vermin and increase fire hazard. English broom is a Weed of National Significance and a declared plant in South Australia. Landowners have a legal responsibility to control it under the South Australian Natural Resources Management Act 2004.)…”. It also has spikes and we (Joseph) tried.
Joseph didn’t play a lot of sport and for some reason I decided he wasn’t a “natural athlete”!! Maybe he wasn’t like me, but (unlike me) he had the ability to read and learn and the determination to persist at whatever he did. Back in Canada his parents curled and so did he and he was pretty good at it. (Curling is like lawn bowls on ice!! ) On the plane-ride to Australia he read a “How to play squash" book and started playing, in Semaphore and now in the hills. He enjoyed the exercise and beer-supper after the game and even won a premiership, but he also made his own friends that weren’t mine, and weren’t birdwatchers!
Mischa was born in December 1979. We both worked in the city and Mischa went to day care there as well. After a 10-month drought, on February 16 1983 came the Ash Wednesday Fires. It was 40+ degrees with a vicious north wind - prime bush-fire conditions and you just knew it was going to happen - and it did! The hills above Adelaide caught fire and there was our little house, on the south-facing slope, sitting above a gully full of broom (gullies create their own wind in a fire).
Joseph went home early to “save” the house. By the time I collected Mischa and tried to reach the house the roads were closed and I was sent to an oval 12kms away. The only thing that saved our house (and Joseph) was the wind change. A cool change turns the winds from north to south and it sent the fire back where it had come, with fireballs jumping kilometres ahead (eucalypts explode!), trapping people who thought they were safe. (In SA, 28 people died, 1500 people were injured, 383 homes and 200 other buildings were destroyed and 160,000 hectares were burnt.). I was safe on Uraidla oval but nobody knew where I was for 6 hours, in the days of no mobile phones and the electricity cutoff and reports of a death and burnt cars on the road I took. So after Mischa and I finally limped home, trees still smouldering on either side of us, I decided I couldn’t live in that little house on the hill and Joseph said OK. He had outgrown Standard Books, and tried selling books wholesale but that didn’t work so we decided to move back to Canada before Mischa started school.
(If you want to know more about the bushfire I wrote a blog in February 2013.)
BACK TO CANADA
To make the move easier on Mischa (now 4) and to save money outfitting a house in Ottawa, we decided to fill a container with all our "worldly possessions”.. The sum total of our “ worldly possessions” being; a nice dining room set, our Ikea-style double bed, purchased with our lottery winnings ( built by a Finn, some 40 years before Ikea arrived in Adelaide), our Norwegian dinner set and 12 boxes of home-bottled wine, labelled “books”. A friend suggested filling the empty space above those possessions with something uniquely Australian. (On our trip back to Ottawa, we remembered how the Canadians were fascinated that Mischa slept on a sheepskin.). So we bought 2,000 sheepskins from G.H. Michell and paid $10.00 CASH for each of them. Joseph did his research and there was no import tax on them … we would sell them for double and be rich.
The odyssey that was our trip from Adelaide to Ottawa - with a four-year old and five suitcases with not a wheel amongst them; overnight train (sitting up) to Melbourne, fly to Auckland, visit Trish (London friend), five days in a camper van touring the north island, then fly to L.A. Three days to see the San Diego Zoo and Disneyland then fly to NYC. Except, the hypnosis sessions to deal with my fear of flying hadn’t worked and once we landed in L.A. I declared I would never fly again and Joseph said OK. So no $99 cheap LA-NYC flight, instead we spend goodness knows how much to travel by train (first-class sleeper cabin) for 3 nights/2 days, via Albuquerque, Chicago, to New York. In NYC, now with no money, no credit cards, an impossible-to-feed four-year old and rain for our two day stay!! Next to Boston by train, with five wheel-less suitcases and a vomiting/starving four-year old. Outside the station Joseph accosts a taxi driver so we can pile everything into his cab for the drive to the bus station - two streets away. One hour on the bus to Portsmouth N.H. and Alexander is there to rescue us. Thanks to him and Kathy they feed Mischa food he eats, and we all recover in that beautiful town by the sea, and then it’s off to Concord MA for a five-hour bus to Montreal. On the way, Canadian Immigration process my permanent-resident application and make Mischa a Canadian citizen and we arrive in Montreal at some ungodly hour of the night with Joseph’s father there to meet us and drive us, and 21 days, two hours and 45 mins after leaving Adelaide, we are finally in Ottawa.
The container arrived and the sheepskins are now designated as “finished goods” by Canadian Customs so we have to pay import tax, GST and a million other taxes (the “book” boxes go unnoticed). The sheepskins now sell for $40 instead of $20 and we never do get rich. Our rented townhouse is filled with our old familiar furniture and we drink very good wine for the next three years, and wish, with every bottle, we had sent more, but mostly we appreciate that after almost seven years away, our friends welcome us back.
I managed to find a job back at BNR while Joseph looked after Mischa and school. Then he’s back in the mail-order business. On our way to Ottawa, in Maine with Alexander and some wine, The Wallaroo Sheepskin Company was born and it was just the right name to sell “Baby Lullaby Lambskins”. Alexander produced the perfect brochure to mail-out, give-out or whatever was needed to sell 2,000 Baby Sheepskins.
So there’s Jospeh, mailing out the sheepskin orders that trickle in. To supplement our income he needed a full-time job, and so in April 1985 he answered an add in the paper for a Marketplace Manager at IKEA. The add is an amusing memo from Ulf to Rob, so Joseph’s application is a slightly brazen/funny memo back and it works. (We fell in love with IKEA in 1980 on a trip to Ottawa and can’t believe Joseph is now working there.) He loves the work, he loves the culture, he loves the people and he loves his boss (Ulf) and management team but the best part of the job is the annual trip to Almhult in Sweden, the birthplace of IKEA. He always took an extra week to drive and camp (you can camp anywhere in Sweden) and birdwatch.
Cassia was born in 1986 and Joseph moved from Marketplace Manger to Furniture Manager but a new boss changed everything and in September 1989 he was let go. It was devastating. His qualifications now bigger than anything Ottawa had to offer, he agonises over what to do; open the bookstore he’s always wanted? Move to a bigger city? We (still) have no money. Alexander had a side business to his advertising agency, Watermark, selling rowing prints, designing t-shirts, bumper stickers and posters, and asked Joseph to manage the orders in Canada. So Joseph fills the year on unemployment selling at regattas; Boston, San Diego, Montreal, and St. Catherine’s Ontario. Working at rowing regattas means early mornings to setup tents and racks and display the items, then at the end of the day, pack everything back into bins and into the back of the car (no sides to the tent, minimal security). Joseph would sometimes work alone but often Alexander would join him and they made a good team; Joseph with his money neatly line-up in his fanny-pack - notes grouped together always facing the same way, Alexander with his notes at random, could never find the right bill for change - Joseph always could.
Somewhere in the middle of the rowing and mailing, Alexander mentioned a store he has seen, called The Nature Company and thinks it would be perfect for Joseph. So we take a trip to the Burlington Mall, 17kms north of Boston and it’s love at first sight.
The store front has a gap at the bottom of the windows where water flows out and trickles over stones; inside the door is the most beautiful Tom Torrens bird bath with bubbling water. Kites, mobiles and a million other things hang from the ceiling, tumbled stones, drawers of fossils and mineral specimens, semi-precious stone jewellery, bird feeders, binoculars, telescopes, bookcases full of natural-history books - but what takes our breath away is the music they are playing. It is Inti-illimani a Chilean group we know of from LPs that Marta, Tom’s wife, smuggled out of Chile in 1973, and also from our Chilean friends in Adelaide. The store is perfect - it includes every one of Joseph’s interests or skills. … We ask the Nature Company if they are franchising but they aren’t. We ask if they are coming to Canada but they aren’t. So - we decide we will have to open our own.
OUR NATURAL WORLD
STORE NUMBER ONE
Alexander designs another name and logo for us. The logo is a diamond shape with the store name “The Nature Trading Company” printed around the edge and different images emerging from the centre of the diamond; a wolf, a whale, a butterfly, a quartz crystal and Jupiter and????. It brings tears to Joseph’s eyes - it is so perfect. We spent a week that summer camping on the outskirts of Washington DC and researching The Nature Company stores in Washington and Maryland.
We plant Cassia for photos but they ask us to stop.
So Joseph clicks away with his camera over his shoulder and we secretly tore off product tags from anything we could. We do this at any store we find that has products we like and by the time we are home we think we maybe have enough to create a store. With no money, Joseph arranges loans from his mother, relatives and friends.
Those days at the CNF and then opening stores for Standard Book back in Adelaide come in handy, and along with his experience in birding, astronomy, geology, bookselling and retailing, he’s ready. With a (very) small budget and being “new-kids-on-the-block” a store in a mall out of the question, he found a store downtown Ottawa, on Murray Street, in the market-tourist area, where stores are open on weekends. It was one street away from the action but on the way to the Art Gallery and we signed a five-year lease . No help from Google or the internet in 1991, so he calls, faxes even writes to companies in the hopes they will sell to us. He chose Darrell from Kris Kustom Furniture to build our (cheaper) version of the cupboards and cabinets, and the rest we did with the help of friends. Painting (so much painting), removing carpet - the floor is now bare concrete - somebody builds a fountain that leaks for five years, my boss feeds us,
the Ross’ bring Easter dinner to us at the store
...and on Monday, April 1st 1991 The Nature Trading Company is open for business.
It’s a soft opening but people come and shop!
We had an opening party two weeks later and at Alexander’s suggestion, we invited every single person in Ottawa that we knew; family, friends, friends of family, friends of friends, school friends, doctor, dentist even our chiropractor, all with the hopes that they would spread the word. The party was one of the highlights of our life together. Joseph thanked everybody who helped us and Alexander (fittingly) cut the ribbon. Those invited guests shopped that day and they must have told their friends because more people came to shop and Joseph worked seven days a week. To keep the family and the store going I kept my job at BNR with the promise that one day I could work there as well.
The store looked so good, and so much like The Nature Company that on June 17th they sued us! After the panic and (free) advice from a lawyer friend, we agreed to change the name as well as the look of the store and they accepted. Back to Alexander and “Our Natural World” was born. The new name fitted the existing logo and only some letterhead and envelopes were wasted, and, as with so many things that seem like the end of the world, the forced changes gave us a name that we liked even more than the first one.
We kept the store open late for any events or festivals happening within a 100km radius of us and we stayed open on Canada Day because that’s’ the day the city core is closed to traffic and over-run by a million people wearing red and white - and we were right there in the middle of it. Joseph kept working until he could afford to hire an employee and with help at the store, he could attend the Gift Show in Toronto where a whole new world of suppliers and products opened up. So, other than the leaking fountain and people preferring to shop in a warm mall at Christmas (instead of a cold street-front store), the store was doing well. We were becoming well known and customers travelled all over town to shop with us (except at Christmas).
STORE NUMBER TWO
A year and half after we opened, Jospeh was approached by Carlingwood Mall. It’s a smaller-sized mall that included more independent stores than in bigger malls and they wanted us! We still had no money but it was too good to miss out on, so off went Joseph to ask friends and family to loan him more money!
Back to Kris Kustom Furniture for more cabinets and cupboards, more help from friends, and late nights and weekends as well as running the market store and in June 1993 we (well it was Joseph really) opened a second Our Natural World. Joseph managed both stores with the help of Charmaigne at Carlingwood and Michelle in the market and a growing list of part time students. Carlingwood was popular but at the expense of the market store and so it closed at the end of the lease. It seemed that everybody had jumped on the “nature” theme so Joseph and Charmaigne made some important changes to Carlingwood - they added gardening! The bird feeders moved to the back wall and still sold, but the addition of the gardening theme was a brilliant move.
Christmas at ONW grew from a few bows and some hanging gold balls to a “Christmas explosion” as Cassia once described it. Those first few Christmases, Eileen would tie some of her world-class bows on anything with a neck and we would hang some gold balls in the windows of the downtown store. At Carlingwood, Charmaigne embraced the bows and they added a garland and some lights around the front of the store. Then along came me… On a trip to the Montreal gift show, a third of the Toronto show, we found these crazy wobbly-tin Christmas statues, nothing like we had ever had but we liked the silly things. When your goods are made in China, ordering quantities are critical, so right there Joseph worked out a schedule to manage quantities and delivery times, starting in October, so we could afford to pay for them with money that didn’t arrive until early December. These crazy wobbly things made such a difference to the front table display, that we kept going back each year to Montreal to find more and more elaborate items - Brenda now joining us to help with the “vision” for that year! Displays not limited to the front table but on top of the store as well. The store was now so full that every time I found something new Joseph would ask (right after he asked his standard “what does it have to do with nature ?“ question) “where will you put it?!”
STORE NUMBER THREE
At the end of 1996 we heard word that the Canadian Museum of Nature was going to be outsourcing their gift store (Joseph had been dreaming of running the Museum store for years). In any Canadian government institution you must be able to serve customers in both official languages (English and French) and Joseph could speak French, so with Alexander’s help, they worked on a proposal and somehow, a “Christmas Miracle”, we were chosen. Alexander created yet another name and logo, and friends and family loaned us more money and Kris Kustom Furniture made more cabinets The store went from pale (insipid) green to vibrant navy blue cabinets and yellow walls and an awning at the entrance with the beautiful polar-bear logo and the name Nature Boutique (in French - Boutique Nature).
The store opened in February 1997 and sales more than doubled.
The museum was mostly a children’s museum … with dinosaurs. The differences between the mall store and the museum store, made it tricky for Joseph to manage both, so Charmainge took over Carlingwood and Joseph concentrated on the museum. Sales were good at the museum until the renovations started; renovations that lasted for six years and Joseph had to move the store three times. The effort involved in moving a store is impossible to appreciate unless you have managed it yourself. The skill to make it as cost-effective as possible, to be as efficient as possible and limit the time the store is closed (no income), to have as much help as possible and to keep them busy. I popped in to “help” with each move, so I had a teeny tiny idea, but as with so much of those years, it wasn’t until I managed the Carlingwood store myself that I really understood and appreciated just how good he was. Each move he used and modified the existing cabinets and cupboards until they could be moved no more. Sales decreased as more and more of the museum was closed, but he stuck it out.
Finally, in May 2010 it reopened to massive crowds. As a reward for the tough times, he had timed our lease so that there would one more year after the reopening. There were some people who thought the new store looked amazing; the customers came in droves, and he did recoup the money he had missed out on during the renovation years, but he didn’t design the new store and the layout drove him crazy. So when the new proprietors made him an offer to leave a couple of months early he was ready . The president of the museum wrote to thank and congratulate him on his retirement … they knew how lucky they were to have had him.
Mischa and Cassia both worked at our stores. Mischa in the early days at Carlingwood and then Cassia at the Boutique (thanks to French Immersion at school). When Nortel, the company I worked for, went bankrupt and I was laid off, I went to work at the Carlingwood store. Poor Charmaigne had me forced upon her because we knew I wouldn’t get a job anywhere else. With the Boutique sales dropping we decided that the two stores couldn’t support two families (ours and Charmaigne’s) so we bought back her share and I managed Carlingwood until we retired. The day Cassia left for university we moved into a tiny town house downtown and devoted most of our time to the stores. It was the perfect arrangement, Joseph in charge of the finances and me buying pretty things to sell. Our travel budget doubled and every now and then he would tell me to STOP spending (buying) but we turned out to be a pretty good team.
In the middle of opening and closing stores Joseph always made sure we took time to enjoy ourselves/himself. Even early on, with only weekends in the summer to spare, and no money, we would join the Ross’ at “the Cook’s cottage” (mutual friends Greg & Florrie Cook were living in Yellowknife). Such a special time.
Then later, with hundreds of thousands of air miles from paying for stock with credit cards meant we could fly wherever we wanted (we still didn’t have any money). We could also buy tickets for our children; Mischa travelled to Australia (Adelaide) after 9/11 and (after he met Simone) settled there, Cassia met Pablo (Spanish) while on a university exchange in Adelaide and they lived in all three countries at various times. So if it wasn’t us travelling there, it was them coming home, alone or as a couple and we loved having those miles to share around, sometimes with friends and even with an employee!
We went to Australia for their weddings, we saw a total eclipse of the sun north of Adelaide, we visited Spain (and Pablo’s parents), we went to Paris a few times and finally I could take him to see David, in Florence. Joseph travelled to Cyprus to see the Leonids in 1999 with Les and Gwen (the Leonids peak every 33 years and the boys missed out in ’66 because of cloud cover). We flew to the west coast and east coast and to Florida and a special trip to Cuba, with our less than basic Spanish. We drove (8 hrs) to NYC and it became our favourite place to visit, as tourists and as retailers at the gift shows.
CLOSING TIME
Joseph was proud of the stores he made - other than the help from Alexander, he did it all by himself. He hired good staff (still friends today). Charmaigne was an important part of the company in the early days of Carlingwood and then Danielle, who could switch between English and French and happily (she seemed happy) shuttle between the two stores, became our rock. Summers were busy at the Boutique and Christmas was crazy at Carlingwood. The girls (they were mostly girls) would work as long and hard and fast as they could. The customers loved our stores and the girls who served them. We also had excellent suppliers, some with us from the start (and friends even now) and even when the cash flow was limited Joseph always paid his bills. He tried to be an ethical business, investing in green power long before it became fashionable, but what he was most proud of was … ( his own words, dictated to me from his bed) “I was very proud that I paid our employees a good wage - above minimum - that I didn’t feel the need to get rich off of their backs, but respected their input and contribution and paid them accordingly”. … and that would be why they all adored him.
I worked at the store for the last ten years, after the loans were paid off - the easy years. It was Joseph who managed the others; the openings and closings, the moves, the good times and bad times and he kept the store alive where others might not. We didn’t sell Our Natural World, we decided that so much of the store was Joseph, that there really wasn’t anybody who could take his place and we didn’t want to ruin the reputation he had worked so hard to acquire. So he managed a three-month long sale at Carlingwood. The discounts increased each month as we went along. He collected all of the bits and pieces of rocks and mineral specimens he had in storage (he’d already sold the best bits) and sat at a table at the back of the store during the day and some nights, pricing them and packing them into their specimen boxes with his hand-written labels.
Even though we sold everything in the store (including the display tables and gift boxes)
it was perhaps those forgotten bits and pieces he worked on that gave us the most profit.
We closed the store (and Our Natural World Inc.) on June 6th 2012 just over 20 years since opening the first store downtown and it was, as we say in Australia, “a good innings”.
So we packed up all of our worldly possessions and retired to Toronto ...
i loved this segment. so many cool adventures, you guys were so brave. i've heard bits and pieces of it before but it's very cool to read about it in more detail.
ReplyDelete