[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]From cooking and beer to animal husbandry and the inevitability of taxes, Frank Shore taught his son how to live [/FONT]
[SIZE=-1]BY RANDY SHORE
From The Vancouver Sun[/SIZE] DEATHS
SHORE—Frank Shore was a logger, potatoe farmer, bartender, fisherman, pipefitter, beer-parlour raconteur and teacher of history and cooking. He will be remembered by hundreds of students for his terse, abrasive lecturing style, deafening sneezes and an unnatural appreciation for Otto von Bismarck and cheddar-cheese biscuits. He was both a free spirit and a homebody. He was a wit, a tuneless singer and an avid reciter of Robert Service poetry.
The oldest of seven children, Frank was born to Lloyd and Lillian Shore in Pemberton, B.C., on October 27, 1927. He grew up hoeing potatoes, milking cows and looking after his younger brothers and sisters in a style that was both cavalier and oppressive. They loved him for it. He married Ruth and had two daughters: Terry and Dawn.
Ruth and Frank divorced some years later. Frank later came calling on his wife-to-be, Barbara, with a raw roast beef in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other and proceeded to prove he knew what to do with both. Frank and Barbara married in 1961, and later that year he went back to the University of British Columbia to gain his teaching credentials. He raised two boys: Gary and Randy.
Frank passed away Sunday evening at Campbell River General Hospital after a brief illness. A memorial service will be held Friday afternoon at 3 p.m. at the Campbell River Legion Hall, because no one could imagine where else Frank would be on a Friday afternoon.
In lieu of flowers, please send generous donations to the SPCA. Campbell River, B.C., Mirror
In the 15 minutes I had to write my father’s obituary, I considered who he was to the people who knew him. It was only in the months after his death that I had time to think about who Frank Shore was to me. Much is missing from that obituary.
Frank was not the type to lecture me on personal conduct. All he ever said was, “You know what to do. Do it.”
He never once told me what that was. I suppose that meant I was to follow his example and if I did that, I couldn’t go far wrong. And if occasionally I did, well, that was okay because he sometimes did, too. In that spirit, I propose to recount what I learned from my father without ever having been instructed. And if I end up writing out of bounds a bit, I think he’d understand.
Actually, it is really that simple.
As one of his eulogists pointed out, Frank was a cowboy, a man with a simple moral code who gave no ear to complaints. About 20 years ago, he gave up a 40-year smoking habit. He was a two-pack-a-day man. Asked how he did it—and don’t forget this was before hypnosis, patches, gum and psychiatric meds were common—his answer was characteristic: “It was pretty easy,” he said. “I just stopped lighting them.”
Solve your own problems.
As a teacher in Campbell River, Frank was often called upon to take on classes that would give lesser men nightmares. Modified English or Socials was for kids who could see no hint of their own home life on The Cosby Show. This may be an apocryphal Frank Shore story, but what is true is that no teacher or school administrator anywhere can remember him sending a kid to the office. I suspect this story is why.
In class one day, a particularly big, muscular and lippy student thought he would try to take over the class by continually disrupting proceedings. When he had finally had enough, Frank told the class to read quietly and took the surly punk down to the boiler room. He took off his shirt and hung it on a pipe, put one hand behind his back and said, “I want you to hit me as hard as you can, and then I’m going to hit you. We’ll keep going until we decide who is going to run my class.”
When the kid started to cry, Frank put his shirt back on and told the kid he had just been deputized to police any further disruption in class for the balance of the year.
True or not, the story gave Frank a visible aura and the respect of the toughest kids in school.
Love animals.
My dad may have grown up on a farm, but he never developed that “animals are just livestock” attitude that allows agrarian professionals to treat animals as though they were not quite human. Frank’s animals were quite human.
His horse, Kane, was a quarter-horse gelding who was bottle-fed as a foal and firmly believed he was human. He was the kind of human that ate spare tire covers, chrome automobile trim and several of Frank’s shirts and jackets—the ones he was careless enough to leave hanging on a fence post. Kane could also grip a beer between his teeth, throw his head back and drain it before you could so much as drop your shovel. He was relentless in his efforts to join the rest of the family in the house.
Kane had a mischievous sense of humour not unlike Frank’s. He once caught me with a shirt full of eggs on my way back from the henhouse one rainy, muddy night. He stepped on my boot and hit me in the chest with the side of his head hard enough to pull me right out of my gumboots and into his personal fecal swamp. Kane also liked to bite, as both my son and my wife can attest, with visual aids if necessary.
Despite their many failings, Frank and Kane loved one another. The scene in so many old movies where the cowboy whistles and his horse comes running right up is not the Hollywood fiction you might assume it to be. Kane loved Frank so completely that the one day I showed up at the Lazy S Ranch to feed him, he took one look at me and became so overcome with disappointment that he dropped to his knees, fell to the ground and lay there as though he had been shot.
There were other horses, too—most of them old, some of them lame. Frank spent all his money caring for them. And there were cats, most of them pathetic acquisitions from the SPCA. And there were dogs, none of whom were ever more than a few steps from him. Even the chickens had names.
Don’t drink and drive.
My father was not a perfect man. He drank. He also drove drunk, and for his sins he was convicted of driving while under the influence. As a teacher and a well-known figure in town, he was mightily embarrassed.
Thereafter, he often drank at the pub just two blocks down the hill, and I grew used to getting a phone call late on Friday nights. My job was to get out of bed and jog down the hill to drive my dad and his car home. For his part, he would buy moderate amounts of liquor for my friends and me to consume, provided I did so in the safety of the family rec room. It must have been a different time, because my friends’ parents seemed to think it was a sensible thing to do. At least, everyone knew where we were.
The boss is the boss.
If you take a job and you like the work and the pay, do as you are asked. If you don’t like it, get another job.
Frank had plenty of jobs in his life. When he stopped liking a job, he quit. I don’t know how many he had, but I know that I have had 26 jobs. So it’s a genetic disorder.
“If you don’t agree with the boss,” said Frank, “make your case, argue it vigorously and then shut up and do as you are [bleeping] told.” And if you don’t like it, see above.
Early in his career as an educator, he rose to the position of vice-principal and then principal, but nothing about administration inspired him. He went back to teaching. According to the teachers he worked with and some he mentored, Frank seldom spoke during staff meetings, though most everyone sought his advice. Young teachers overwhelmed by the complexities of teaching 200 students in seven classes and suffocating in the politics of the workplace found comfort in his homespun wisdom and a pitcher of draught.
Cook well, eat well.
My mother didn’t pretend she could cook any more than she pretended she could fix small engines. Frank learned to cook mainly because he loved to eat and wasn’t inclined to switch wives. No cut of meat was too big for his barbecue, no slab of butter too thick for his toast.
He shared his gift with me, but also with a generation of boys in Campbell River during the ’70s. Ever the pioneer, Frank developed his own basic cooking course for boys, which he dubbed Bachelor Survival. It is hard to imagine anyone else who could have, merely by his presence, compelled teenage boys in a tough, working-class high school—most of them future loggers, mill workers and fishermen—to sign up for home ec, but they did. A few at first, then every one.
Three times a week they would file out of the shop building, their hands stained with engine grease, their clothes covered with wood chips, and march up to the kitchen to learn how to make biscuits, pancakes, casseroles and gravy. A man who can’t make gravy is no man at all.
Pay your taxes.
Okay, he didn’t exactly teach me this one by example. Frank never filed income-tax forms. He didn’t make a big deal of it. It never came up in conversation. There was no railing against the oppressive hand of government reaching into the little man’s pockets—he just quietly ignored the government.
Ten years ago, about the time he retired, the inexorable machine of Revenue Canada served him with a lifetime tax bill. He was forced to take out a loan and make payments from his pension, and when he died in April 2005, he left most of that debt behind. He also left a stack of unopened tax forms, one for every year since Ottawa tried to crush his spirit.
Keep your sense of humour.
It was only in the last few days of his life that Frank realized he would never go home again. He was sick in so many ways that it was easier to list the things that weren’t wrong with him. Just before he passed away, the nurse asked him how he was doing.
“My weeds are whacked,” he said. And they were.
[SIZE=-1]* Name changed to protect privacy.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1]BY RANDY SHORE
From The Vancouver Sun[/SIZE] DEATHS
SHORE—Frank Shore was a logger, potatoe farmer, bartender, fisherman, pipefitter, beer-parlour raconteur and teacher of history and cooking. He will be remembered by hundreds of students for his terse, abrasive lecturing style, deafening sneezes and an unnatural appreciation for Otto von Bismarck and cheddar-cheese biscuits. He was both a free spirit and a homebody. He was a wit, a tuneless singer and an avid reciter of Robert Service poetry.
The oldest of seven children, Frank was born to Lloyd and Lillian Shore in Pemberton, B.C., on October 27, 1927. He grew up hoeing potatoes, milking cows and looking after his younger brothers and sisters in a style that was both cavalier and oppressive. They loved him for it. He married Ruth and had two daughters: Terry and Dawn.
Ruth and Frank divorced some years later. Frank later came calling on his wife-to-be, Barbara, with a raw roast beef in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other and proceeded to prove he knew what to do with both. Frank and Barbara married in 1961, and later that year he went back to the University of British Columbia to gain his teaching credentials. He raised two boys: Gary and Randy.
Frank passed away Sunday evening at Campbell River General Hospital after a brief illness. A memorial service will be held Friday afternoon at 3 p.m. at the Campbell River Legion Hall, because no one could imagine where else Frank would be on a Friday afternoon.
In lieu of flowers, please send generous donations to the SPCA. Campbell River, B.C., Mirror
In the 15 minutes I had to write my father’s obituary, I considered who he was to the people who knew him. It was only in the months after his death that I had time to think about who Frank Shore was to me. Much is missing from that obituary.
Frank was not the type to lecture me on personal conduct. All he ever said was, “You know what to do. Do it.”
He never once told me what that was. I suppose that meant I was to follow his example and if I did that, I couldn’t go far wrong. And if occasionally I did, well, that was okay because he sometimes did, too. In that spirit, I propose to recount what I learned from my father without ever having been instructed. And if I end up writing out of bounds a bit, I think he’d understand.
Actually, it is really that simple.
As one of his eulogists pointed out, Frank was a cowboy, a man with a simple moral code who gave no ear to complaints. About 20 years ago, he gave up a 40-year smoking habit. He was a two-pack-a-day man. Asked how he did it—and don’t forget this was before hypnosis, patches, gum and psychiatric meds were common—his answer was characteristic: “It was pretty easy,” he said. “I just stopped lighting them.”
Solve your own problems.
As a teacher in Campbell River, Frank was often called upon to take on classes that would give lesser men nightmares. Modified English or Socials was for kids who could see no hint of their own home life on The Cosby Show. This may be an apocryphal Frank Shore story, but what is true is that no teacher or school administrator anywhere can remember him sending a kid to the office. I suspect this story is why.
In class one day, a particularly big, muscular and lippy student thought he would try to take over the class by continually disrupting proceedings. When he had finally had enough, Frank told the class to read quietly and took the surly punk down to the boiler room. He took off his shirt and hung it on a pipe, put one hand behind his back and said, “I want you to hit me as hard as you can, and then I’m going to hit you. We’ll keep going until we decide who is going to run my class.”
When the kid started to cry, Frank put his shirt back on and told the kid he had just been deputized to police any further disruption in class for the balance of the year.
True or not, the story gave Frank a visible aura and the respect of the toughest kids in school.
Love animals.
My dad may have grown up on a farm, but he never developed that “animals are just livestock” attitude that allows agrarian professionals to treat animals as though they were not quite human. Frank’s animals were quite human.
His horse, Kane, was a quarter-horse gelding who was bottle-fed as a foal and firmly believed he was human. He was the kind of human that ate spare tire covers, chrome automobile trim and several of Frank’s shirts and jackets—the ones he was careless enough to leave hanging on a fence post. Kane could also grip a beer between his teeth, throw his head back and drain it before you could so much as drop your shovel. He was relentless in his efforts to join the rest of the family in the house.
Kane had a mischievous sense of humour not unlike Frank’s. He once caught me with a shirt full of eggs on my way back from the henhouse one rainy, muddy night. He stepped on my boot and hit me in the chest with the side of his head hard enough to pull me right out of my gumboots and into his personal fecal swamp. Kane also liked to bite, as both my son and my wife can attest, with visual aids if necessary.
Despite their many failings, Frank and Kane loved one another. The scene in so many old movies where the cowboy whistles and his horse comes running right up is not the Hollywood fiction you might assume it to be. Kane loved Frank so completely that the one day I showed up at the Lazy S Ranch to feed him, he took one look at me and became so overcome with disappointment that he dropped to his knees, fell to the ground and lay there as though he had been shot.
There were other horses, too—most of them old, some of them lame. Frank spent all his money caring for them. And there were cats, most of them pathetic acquisitions from the SPCA. And there were dogs, none of whom were ever more than a few steps from him. Even the chickens had names.
Don’t drink and drive.
My father was not a perfect man. He drank. He also drove drunk, and for his sins he was convicted of driving while under the influence. As a teacher and a well-known figure in town, he was mightily embarrassed.
Thereafter, he often drank at the pub just two blocks down the hill, and I grew used to getting a phone call late on Friday nights. My job was to get out of bed and jog down the hill to drive my dad and his car home. For his part, he would buy moderate amounts of liquor for my friends and me to consume, provided I did so in the safety of the family rec room. It must have been a different time, because my friends’ parents seemed to think it was a sensible thing to do. At least, everyone knew where we were.
The boss is the boss.
If you take a job and you like the work and the pay, do as you are asked. If you don’t like it, get another job.
Frank had plenty of jobs in his life. When he stopped liking a job, he quit. I don’t know how many he had, but I know that I have had 26 jobs. So it’s a genetic disorder.
“If you don’t agree with the boss,” said Frank, “make your case, argue it vigorously and then shut up and do as you are [bleeping] told.” And if you don’t like it, see above.
Early in his career as an educator, he rose to the position of vice-principal and then principal, but nothing about administration inspired him. He went back to teaching. According to the teachers he worked with and some he mentored, Frank seldom spoke during staff meetings, though most everyone sought his advice. Young teachers overwhelmed by the complexities of teaching 200 students in seven classes and suffocating in the politics of the workplace found comfort in his homespun wisdom and a pitcher of draught.
Cook well, eat well.
My mother didn’t pretend she could cook any more than she pretended she could fix small engines. Frank learned to cook mainly because he loved to eat and wasn’t inclined to switch wives. No cut of meat was too big for his barbecue, no slab of butter too thick for his toast.
He shared his gift with me, but also with a generation of boys in Campbell River during the ’70s. Ever the pioneer, Frank developed his own basic cooking course for boys, which he dubbed Bachelor Survival. It is hard to imagine anyone else who could have, merely by his presence, compelled teenage boys in a tough, working-class high school—most of them future loggers, mill workers and fishermen—to sign up for home ec, but they did. A few at first, then every one.
Three times a week they would file out of the shop building, their hands stained with engine grease, their clothes covered with wood chips, and march up to the kitchen to learn how to make biscuits, pancakes, casseroles and gravy. A man who can’t make gravy is no man at all.
Pay your taxes.
Okay, he didn’t exactly teach me this one by example. Frank never filed income-tax forms. He didn’t make a big deal of it. It never came up in conversation. There was no railing against the oppressive hand of government reaching into the little man’s pockets—he just quietly ignored the government.
Ten years ago, about the time he retired, the inexorable machine of Revenue Canada served him with a lifetime tax bill. He was forced to take out a loan and make payments from his pension, and when he died in April 2005, he left most of that debt behind. He also left a stack of unopened tax forms, one for every year since Ottawa tried to crush his spirit.
Keep your sense of humour.
It was only in the last few days of his life that Frank realized he would never go home again. He was sick in so many ways that it was easier to list the things that weren’t wrong with him. Just before he passed away, the nurse asked him how he was doing.
“My weeds are whacked,” he said. And they were.
[SIZE=-1]* Name changed to protect privacy.[/SIZE]