Chapter Eighteen

Pictures

Out of Thin Air

‘ x r e were given very little time to mourn my father’s death. All at once we were crowded in by lawyers, accountants and bank managers—experts. I’m afraid they only made more confusing the problems we had to face. It was the opinion of these experts that now that Dad was gone, the affairs of CFCY would fall into chaos. They believed that Dad and Dad alone was responsible for all major decisions. However, what they didn’t know was that it was Dad’s style to instill two somewhat opposing qual- ities in almost everyone who worked for him: independence and complete reliability.

For example one of these gentlemen went through our accounting system with a fine tooth comb and condemned it as inefficient, outdated and cumbersome. We sat there amazed as he told us in awesome detail after detail how he would streamline our programming schedules and accounting. I could imagine us living in a veritable snowstorm of pink, yellow and green triplicate forms. What he didn’t realize however was that Mickey Place, who could tally the Prince Edward Island election results and calculate the odds and scores at the Charlottetown Race track in his head, had a computer for a brain; and that Bob Large, with his perspicacity and profound common sense mixed with independence, saw immediately just how chaotic the experts’ new—fangled systems would be. The independence and the reliability that had become so much a hallmark of working together made us say “NO!” to the experts. Bob put a stop to any thought of making major changes at a time when some

166