My Account
A sharp memory and a talent for story telling ensure there are plenty of laughs for visitors to Frank Smith’s Orewa home. Stories from his childhood, when wagons outnumbered cars on the roads, come thick and fast. One of his favourites is the time Mrs Roach fell into the syrup barrel! Born 100 years ago in Innesvale, in Canada, where he says oil wells have replaced trees, Frank is Orewa Probus Club’s oldest member and a former member of the Dad’s Army wood turning group.
I worked with steel all my life and when I sold my business in Whangaparaoa, Phoenix Engineering, the last job I did was for a lady who asked me to make her a lathe for wood turning. She later showed me something that had been turned on it, and I thought if I made another lathe, I could make improvements so that bigger bowls could be turned. I took a lesson on the proper way to turn from a boy in Whangarei, and that was the start of it for me and a group of my friends. At the time they were clearing the land to build the Catholic Church in Orewa and found a lot of swamp kauri; some of the boys said it would be good for turning, so my son Mickey (Michael) brought his truck to collect it. There was a pile high in the air and we were all over it with chainsaws and he said it looked ‘like Dad’s Army’. The name stuck and at one time Dad’s Army wood turners had 16 members. We fixed things for the community and did demonstrations for local schools. I made three more lathes, so I could turn even bigger pieces of wood. Mild steel is so cold, but wood is beautiful to work with and each piece has a history. I worked with wood that I found on beaches or places like Whangaparaoa Golf Course. I have made small pieces of furniture, including a table turned from a piece of Tasmanian Blackwood. Once I made a bowl from the root of a Pohutukawa tree that I found on the beach near Gisborne. It was dangerous to turn – if it caught, it would fly apart. I am still learning, even though I stopped turning the day before I had a fall and broke my neck at an Orewa Probus meeting in 2011. At the time the doctors told me it was a miracle that I’d survived that C2 fracture – it’s also called a “hangman’s break”.
I came to NZ because my three brothers were here; one came out in 1937 to join the NZ Airforce as a pilot and the other two also came out. On his 53rd op, in 1943, my older brother was shot down over enemy waters. Back in Canada, I tried to join the services in 1939 but the recruitment officer said at 26, I was too old. I said, ‘ok then, I’m not going’. You had to be in an essential industry, so the Airforce had me making railway spikes and bolts and nuts, then tool making and working on Boeing aircraft. When I heard that my brother had been shot down, I tried to join again. I did the basic training and volunteered for the paratroops. They thought I was too old, but I was accepted for training – part of that was giving us a taste of the mustard gas that the Germans were using. I had to put a mask on and march around a small room with the door closed, then take the mask off. I tried to get my fingers under the door to get it open, and the next thing I knew I was in a hospital bed with seven officers standing around it. After I’d spent 39 days in hospital, they said they needed mechanics more than they needed soldiers, so I never went to war. I’d wanted to go, but in a way it was lucky, because only two from the platoon I trained with came back from the war.
After the war I worked on microwave towers for Bell Telephones along the west coast of British Columbia. We set up camp in the bush and would bring the machinery in by barge and tug boats. One day my wife suggested we go to NZ to look after my parents. Dad went to NZ on the Niagra in 1940 – it sunk on the way back. I arrived in NZ on the Canberra on November 19, 1961. It was so cold that I almost went straight back again – I was used to the cold in Alberta, but we had expected it to be more tropical. My brother was living in Auckland where they were all huddling around an electric heater. The weather improved in the afternoon – otherwise I would have gone back home for sure. My son Grant was born a ‘blue baby’ and my wife stayed in Canada with him so he could have an operation. Grant was 11 years old then. They joined me a couple of months later and the first time I ever saw Grant run was as he came down the gangplank on Princes Wharf. My wife Yvonne had a cerebral haemorrhage and died just three months after she arrived. Our money was frozen back in Canada, as she had no Will, so I had to go to work straight away to support Mickey and Grant. I didn’t want to go back to engineering, because I had got metal poisoning in 1955 and had been told to find work outside. For a while I was an earthmover, but it was too hard to manage with the kids, so I became a crane driver on the wharf. They wanted people younger than 45, and I was 47, so I used my brother Lewis’ birth certificate and put my finger over his first name when I showed it to them. Working on the cranes was good, but I couldn’t stand all the hold-ups – to get paid overtime, the wharfies would drag a job out as long as possible.
In the meantime, things had changed in engineering – in the old days you were breathing fumes and someone could be welding right beside you, but there was no protective breathing gear or earmuffs. With more health and safety in place, I got back into engineering and started my own company, Valour Industries, in Wairau Rd, which I ran from 1968–1976. When I sold the business my second wife Veronica and I bought a caravan and stayed at various caravan parks while we decided where to live. We liked the campground at Fisherman’s Rock in Gulf Harbour and stayed there for three summers. Eventually we bought a house in Pacific Parade and lived there for 31 years. In total I have been married for 71 years – 26 years with Yvonne, 20 with Veronica, who died of a stroke, and 23 with Maureen who had a brain tumour. Plus 29 years single in between.
I’ve lived independently, with the support of family and friends, for seven years. I can’t see very well – it’s like looking through thick fog, but I have excellent peripheral vision in one eye. I don’t want to move into a retirement village – maybe when I get older! I have 15 grandchildren, 22 great grandchildren and one great, great grandchild with another due in February. One of my earliest clear memories is going with my mother to meet my father when he came back from the Army. It was late winter and the ground was frozen. I saw a lot of bodies wrapped up lying on wooden trolleys at the railway station and asked whether they were killed in the war. My mother told me that they died of influenza and because the ground was frozen and they were short of manpower, no graves had been dug for them. I would have been five. Even earlier, I remember my mother’s garden, which was next to the bank of the Bow River. I used to steal her peas, and once fell into the river while trying to hide. In the town of Trochu in Alberta there was a general store where you could buy anything from toothpicks to horseshoe nails. A lot of items were stored in wooden barrels – flour, vinegar, molasses and syrup. A brass track ran along the floor by the shelves and a tapered ladder was run along the track to get to the upper shelves, with huge scissors made of wood to retrieve hard-to-get items. Mrs Roach, the storekeeper, was as wide as she was tall. One day a few of us kids were watching her on the ladder reaching for a cardboard box of Kellogs Cornflakes. She lost her footing and jumped down, ending up with one leg in and one out of a big barrel of yellow syrup. The syrup was overflowing and she was screaming. It was the funniest thing – it was hard to lift her out of the barrel and there was syrup all over the floor.
Our farm was in the foothills of the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, near Drumheller in Alberta. We grew grain in the summer and farmed pigs and cattle in the winter. Sometimes you’d get a frost before the grain was ripe, and rather than selling it as a poor grade, my Dad used to use it to feed as many as 200 pigs. Farming is an ‘iffy’ thing – ‘if’ the cut worms don’t get the seed, ‘if’ the hailstorms and frost don’t come: it was always touch and go. I’ve seen temperatures of 45°F below zero at 10am and by 2pm it’s 45°F above. I was once out all night when it was 63°F below zero, and in the same place it could get to 107°F in the summer. If your cheeks or nose or fingers froze on the way to school, forming a white spot, you learned to put a handful of snow on it, otherwise it would turn black and maybe get gangrene.
My Dad, Bert, had a 490 Chevrolet soft top with electric lights – at that time most cars had carbide lights and there were a lot of Model T Fords on the road. He would go to town with a load of grain and people would be passing with buggies and horses, or larger Democrat wagons. You might see one other car and 30 or 40 wagons. Dad worked on the Panama Canal from 1906–11 as an electrical engineer. The canal is a marvellous feat and I would like to go and see it now, because they are widening it. He served in the Cavalry in the war and also worked as a translator as he spoke several languages. Dad didn’t like to talk about the war, but he did say once that the screams of the horses at Passchendale were terrible to hear. When he came back he got a soldier settlement farm – some of the land had not even been broken in and there were buffalo bones and stones rolled smooth and transported there by glacial ice, all over it. The bones and stones were cleared and lay along the fence lines. When Maureen and I visited Canada those bones had been ground into fertiliser and the rocks used in making roads.
