The Tale of My Life

 

A Tale of My Life

By Peter McKenzie-Brown

 

As both reader and writer, the written word has been an important part of my life from an early age. I have been a Calgary-based writer, author, and historian over the last four decades. I worked as an employee in the oil and gas industry and as an independent contractor for a variety of clients, including industry and business publications. I have authored or co-authored seven books, written more than 1,000 articles for magazines and journals, and prepared speeches for oil and gas company executives.

A Brief Biography

The second of four children, I was born in Gravesend, Kent, in the United Kingdom in 1947. My mother was Pamela Lucy Gladys Postle, born in a mining village in the United Kingdom’s Northumbria. My father was John Archibald Brown, a mariner, who was born in Gravesend, Kent. My mother was a nurse during the war, and my father was a captain to the merchant marines which, during those war years, supplied the beleaguered country with food and military supplies from North America.

    When WWII ended in 1945, England was devastated economically and German bombers had bombed its cities. Life was difficult; food, rationed. When I was barely two years old, my parents sold their belongings in the UK and moved to New York City in pursuit of a better life. They bought their first home in a rural setting on Staten Island. Given my father’s working experience, he quickly found employment with Moran Towing Company, whose towboats guided passenger ships to dock, and pushed barges of industrial chemicals out of the harbor and into the ocean. There they opened valves to spill acidic chemicals and other waste into the sea. What intolerable practice!

    To simplify my father’s weekday commute by ferry to Manhattan, we soon moved to a house in the small city of Port Richmond, also on Staten Island. That was the community where his ferry commute began and ended each weekday. Fortunately, it had an excellent school system, beginning with kindergarten. That is where my formal education began. I quickly developed a love of books and reading. My earliest memory of obsessive reading was in grade school, when at about eight or nine years of age I read and reread books by Dr. Seuss: The Cat in the Hat, Green Eggs and Ham, and I am Sam-I-Am, among others.

Years in the USA

My father had a successful career with Moran and progressed rapidly into more senior and demanding roles. Transferred to Mount Vernon, Indiana, which was a port on the Ohio River, he bought a four-acre hobby farm seven miles from town, where we had two horses, half a dozen sheep, pigs, and a chicken coop with more than a dozen hens and a rooster. We knew little about farming or caring for animals; they became our pets. During that time, I was in fifth grade at the nearby two-room Smith School. My teacher was Miss Goldie Churchill, and there was only one other student in fifth grade. I was thoroughly bored and much to Miss Goldie’s disdain I read during her classes.

    The good news was that within walking distance of our farm was a girl my age named Mary Lamb. Her father was a farmer, and her mother was the only white teacher at a segregated school for black students in Mount Vernon. Mary and I quickly became best friends. Unfortunately, her mother passed away, and Mary had to move to live with her older sister in California. We lost touch for years but eventually reconnected. Today we chat on the phone regularly. While our topics of discussion have changed, we still feel like best friends. Time and distance have not mattered.

    As my father’s career progressed, he got a transfer to St. Louis. He commuted to his new office each workday across the Mississippi River from our new home in Alton, Illinois. I traveled a great deal as a youngster and continued to do so during my adult life. As a 15-year-old, my parents sent me to the UK to stay with an aunt for the summer. She introduced me to the wonderful art and culture of London and surrounding areas. During that holiday, my uncle took me to Scotland. I also spent two weeks alone in Paris where I was in awe of everything I saw. A nerdy 15-year-old, I spent two whole days in the Louvre. Now I wonder whether I really understood the marvelous art I saw there. At age 15, I hitchhiked from Alton south to Texas. A year or so later, during the summer break, I hitchhiked from Alton to Los Angeles, then took the coastal highway north to San Francisco where I stayed with Uncle Walter, my mother’s sibling. Of course, those were simpler and safer times, and hitchhiking was often the norm for young people.

A Fanatical Reader

I did well in school and became an almost fanatical reader – starting with children’s books, of course. I gradually shifted my interest to non-fiction – especially philosophy, political science, and history. My reading influenced my thinking and area of studies. I got my BA with a major in philosophy from MacMurray College in Jacksonville, Illinois – just north of Alton. I then went to grad school at Southern Illinois University in the small academic city of Carbondale. There, I studied philosophy and political science and served as a teaching assistant (TA).

    This was the time when the Vietnam War was raging, and opposition was building across the America – especially in the country’s college and university campuses. I was among the many vehement opponents of that war. I drove with friends to participate in the great anti-war March on Washington in 1969. When I returned to campus, I became even more active locally in the antiwar movement. During the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights eras, we in the New Left spelled the country’s name Amerika, harking back to Naziism and WWII.

    The whole affair reached a crisis point in 1970, when Ohio National Guardsmen on the campus of Kent State University gunned down four people protesting the war in Vietnam. The “Kent State Massacre” set off a wave of protests and riots that shut down campuses across the country. In Carbondale, things came to a head when – with anti-war demonstrations taking place around the country – the city mayor tried to retain peace and civility in town. To do so, he arranged a parade of automobiles through the streets. Participants included other members of the town council, university deans, and a variety of other well-known individuals. The contrast between those folks and their audience was striking. Most students in those days were long-haired, wore bell-bottom jeans and, if they were male, grew long beards. I came off the sidewalk, walking into the road within the line of cars and started yelling, “Join us!” “Join us!” My fellow students did indeed join me, and the vehicles of city and campus leaders began to disappear. I presume their drivers sensed trouble brewing. In a moment of inspiration, I began shouting “Two, four, six, eight! Organize and smash the state!” I am not sure where I got that idea, but as the evening wore on, it led to a street protest in which many other students started shouting angry slogans and throwing rocks through windows. Part of the mob invaded the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) facility on campus – a branch of the military which helped train students for military service.

    My involvement did not go unnoticed. My photo was frequently in the local paper as the days went by, and the university closed for the rest of the term. I was still as mad as hell, but there was nothing of a political nature to do, and I had no classes to attend. So, I got into my car and headed north, through the 49th parallel and into Canada. I went to Toronto to visit a friend who had migrated to Canada as a draft dodger. He told me that anyone who wanted permanent entry into Canada and Canadian citizenship just needed to show up at the border with a US driver’s license and $100 in cash. I crossed the US border again, turned around and showed the Canadian border guard my driver’s license and the money, and got my pass. I immediately went to the British consulate with my UK birth certificate to verify my British citizenship. I received Canadian citizenship without formality. Since I could not have three citizenships, this voided my ties with the USA. It also ended my graduate studies but enabled me to begin a new life in Canada.

    I drove down back to the United States to tell my parents and siblings about Canada, and the soon moved here. I briefly worked in Toronto, providing services for publishers (by bicycle) among layout design, printing, and other service suppliers.

Travel, Marriage, and Family

After a year or so I became restless and caught a flight to England. I spent three years in Europe – working for Reuters in the UK for about a year, travelling through Europe to Austria, where I became a Transcendental Meditation (TM) teacher. I then hitchhiked back to the UK through southern Europe (notably Italy and France) before returning to Toronto. For five years I managed the TM Centre there and, of course, continued to meditate twice a day. That is where I met Richard Day, the Canadian whom I have known the longest. He and his wife Rhonda now live in Edmonton, a three-hour drive north of Calgary.

 I then moved to the booming city of Calgary with Jasbir Kaur Gill – a registered nurse who had been born in in India’s Punjab region; she had been one of my TM students. We soon got married and started a family. We had three children: Kabir, Leah, and Rick (whom we adopted). Tragically, Kabir died when hitchhiking with a drunk driver in his early teens.  His death left a huge void in our family and fundamentally changed our lives. He, too, had loved reading and writing. At his memorial service we used a poem he had written, titled Aurora Grass:

In the early mornings of the fall,
I often awaken to the sight of wet grass out my window.
I get dressed and go outside.
As soon as I step onto the porch, I smell the air.
Listening to the daybreak sounds,
I walk through the thick grass.
Autumn’s icy surroundings nip at the lungs.
Looking down,
I notice how every blade of grass sparkles with dewdrops,
glistening in the early sun.
The placid earth is awesome.

 

Jasbir and I separated in 1988 but stayed in touch to the time of her death in 2024.

Writing

I continued to write. I have published more than 1,000 magazine articles over the years, ranging from items on running and triathlons, stories about environmental degradation and climate change, and other topics. My books include Bitumen: The people, performance and passions behind Alberta's oil sands (2017); Footprints: The Evolution of Land Conservation and Reclamation in Alberta (2016, with Robert Bott and Graham Chandler); Barbecues, Booms and Blogs: Fifty Years of Public Relations in Calgary (2008; co-editor and contributor); In Balance: An Account of Alberta’s CA Profession (2000, with Stacey Philips); The Richness of Discovery: Amoco’s First Fifty Years in Canada (1998); and The Great Oil Age: The Petroleum Industry in Canada (1993; with two co-authors.) I began drafting this book when I worked at the Canadian Petroleum Association. It became a Canadian best-seller.

I was coordinator and an interviewer for the Petroleum History Society's Oil Sands (PHS) Oral History Project, which conducted 117 interviews with key people associated with the oil sands; each transcribed and posted on Calgary’s Glenbow archives website. It was through that project that I met my accomplished friend, Adriana Davies, who conducted many of the interviews. For this and my other contributions to its work, which included the donation of many books about the petroleum section, the PHS awarded me a Lifetime Achievement Award (only the second person to receive that honour) and named its library after me in large part because I had donated a large number of books. Two of the books noted above - Footprints and Bitumen - received the society's Book of the Year award. All my books and other writings are accessible via my blog, which is titled Language Instinct. Click on the link to read whatever you want.

One of my contracts was with Amoco Canada. That is where I met my wife, Bernie, whom I married in 1997. Bernie was born in Ireland – a place that will always be close to her heart. I, too, love the place and Bernie’s large family who live there. The other highlight of my years at Amoco was the publication of my second book, The Richness of Discovery: Amoco’s first fifty years in Canada – a history of that company’s Canadian operations. Ironically, Amoco employees received copies of the book the same day British Petroleum announced it was acquiring Amoco.

About that time, I also secured a commission from the Alberta Chartered Accountants Association to co-author, with Stacey Phillips, a book titled In Balance: An Account of Alberta’s CA Profession. It was released in May 2000; shortly thereafter, Canada adopted American accounting procedures.

Early in our marriage, Bernie and I decided to enjoy a Mexican holiday; she was familiar with the country because of travels she had enjoyed during the years she had spent working in the Bahamas, before coming to Canada. Among other experiences, we chose to visit three tourist meccas: Chichen Itza, Koba, and Tulum, which hosted stone structures constructed more than a millennium ago.

In 2003, Bernie and I decided we wanted an adventure and chose to move to Chiang Mai, Thailand, for an undetermined period. We ended up staying for four years. We had chosen Thailand because it was a part of the world neither of us had visited, and it was a central base from which we could travel in the region. We became functional in Thai, a tonal language with alphabetic roots in Sanskrit, and learned a great deal about the Thai culture and its people. We quickly became part of the expat community and, as we mastered the language, met and became close friends with six or seven Thai families. I worked at Chiang Mai University, teaching English to undergraduate and grad students. I later moved to the university’s newly established Language Institute. I developed a textbook titled Teach and Learn: Reflections on Communicative Language Teaching on the job.

During our years in that part of Asia, we went on forays to Burma (now Myanmar) and Cambodia. In all three countries, we visited massive centuries-old temples, and ancient cities that mostly predated urban areas in the Americas by centuries. When we visited Burma, it was mostly peaceful. In cities like Rangoon (Yangon) and Mandalay, we saw remnants of ancient mansions and other reminders of eras preceding its conquest by the British Empire. The military junta that took control have put the icon, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, now an 80-year-old woman, into prison.

The highlight of our visit to Cambodia was UNESCO’s Heritage site - Angkor Wat. What impacted us most in that country were the stories of the mass atrocities committed during the rule of the Pol Pot regime. During that horrific period, the regime slaughtered an estimated 1.5 to 2 million people.

We were interested in birdwatching – “birding,” within birdwatching circles – before going to Thailand. While there, we went on many birdwatching trips and saw unimaginably beautiful and colourful birds. Over the years, I expanded my interests to include other kinds of creatures, including mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and insects. I generated a species list over the years. It includes specimens I had seen in North America, Europe, and Southeast Asia. When we returned to Calgary, we started assisting our friend, Bill Taylor, banding blue birds and tree swallows. This is an important science initiative to track the movement of birds. With Bill’s help, I authored an article about bird banding published in the Globe and Mail.

Leaving Thailand was a difficult decision. Wonderful memories of that peaceful nation, and its people remain with us. But Canada was home, and we were missing it. We returned in 2007.

I restarted PMB Communications and continued to collaborate with former clients. I took on new projects, including writing articles for a now defunct magazine about Canada’s oil industry and The Oilsands Review. Of particular interest, with my friends Robert (Bob) Bott and Graham Chandler I co-authored a book titled Footprints: The Evolution of Land Conservation and Reclamation in Alberta. With Bob, Brian Brennan (sadly deceased), and other Calgary writers, I participated in a writers’ get-together called Beers with Peers at a pub in Kensington. Years later, I became a member of a men’s book club comprised of twenty others who enjoyed and discussed a diversity of books. Unusual about that club was that each monthly meeting had a theme only. At each meeting, five or six members gave presentations on books that suited the theme. I learned about books I would not otherwise have encountered.

Since childhood, I have been interested in serious music – I recall, for example, listening to Beethoven’s symphonies on our family’s old stereo system while doing high school homework. Also, of course, I watched musicals like My Fair Lady, The Music Man, My Fair Lady, and The King and I. By the Millennium, however, Bernie and I had become interested in opera and took a continuing education course with Ken Delong, a professor at the University of Calgary. Ken is an inspirational teacher and lover of opera. For a 2013 event in Edmonton celebrating the centennial of Giuseppi Verdi’s birth, I wrote a piece about the two most different opera composers you can imagine. German composer Richard Wagner and Italian romantic Giuseppi Verdi, an Italian romantic composer whose life – but not his compositional style – paralleled Wagner’s. Wagner created an opera style based on technique known as Leitmotiv. So doing, he transformed an artform which dates from about 1600.

Over the years Bernie and I have built a considerable collection of opera, classical music, and ballet discs. We regularly share memorable evenings with friends with similar music preferences.
Sports

I am asthmatic, but medicines keep it under control. Of course, when I was a boy, the conventional wisdom at the time was that nobody with asthma should participate in sports. When I was in my forties, I had a severe attack that landed me in the hospital. Following that experience, I started to swim, followed by running and then cycling. I ran 10-kilometre races, then marathons, and then set my eyes on doing the Ironman triathlon. I finished 11 Ironman races – one in Hawaii and ten in Penticton, British Columbia. The training was demanding and timing-consuming but competing in those races were highlights of my life. I was not close to being the fastest participant. My goal was to do my best.

I no longer run marathons or do triathlons. However, for about eight months a year, I walk from home around Calgary’s Glenmore reservoir. Twenty-five kilometres in length, those hikes take me through beautiful woodlands and landscapes, over hills and dales. Those are special days.

There you have it: A summary of this writer’s tale.