(IN = CBC interviewer)

IN: Now, Mayor Cates, our time is running out, but I think we’d like another story. CC: Well, I think…. I was very very fond of my father. My father was a very wonderful person and the story that he used to tell about how when he was a little boy – you can see in that picture that old Andrew Jackson wasn’t a very soft man – he was well over six feet in height, a big powerful old man and pretty fierce, I imagine – and my father said that he was going to a school in Ragged Reef, my father himself, and my father always, as long as I knew him, whenever he had a dog he called it Bo’sun. So at the particular time they had a big Newfoundland dog called Bo’sun, and this Bo’sun, he was determined this particular day to go to school with my father. So, my father said, it was deep snow and very, very cold and they finally got to school and in desperation he shoved Bo’sun under his seat out of the way. And Bo’sun was lying there, and something happened, my dad was skylarking around, I guess, and the teacher came down and grabbed my dad by the ear and yanked him out of his seat. My dad said he let a wail out of him, and out bounded this huge dog which the teacher didn’t know was there. With a roar, you know, and the teacher leaped back and collided with the drum stove that was in the middle of the school floor, upset the stove and the school caught fire and burned down. There wasn’t any water or anything – everything was frozen solid. So my dad said he was so terrified over this episode that he sneaked home and my grandmother had a lot of his clothes out on the line and he got a pillow case and stuffed some clothes into this pillow case and walked from Ragged Reef over the Boar’s Back to Parsborough, and there he shipped aboard a ship called the W.H. Weatherspoon , Captain Jim Pentice was in command, and as I said, my dad was eleven years old and he was a young man when he came back again.

IN: I see, so he didn’t finish school

CC: No, he started to sea very suddenly

IN: And subsequently went out west, and founded the tugboat company.

CC: That is right. He worked across the plains on the construction of the CPR and was at the driving of the spike at Craigellachie in the Selkirks

IN: Well, he certainly founded a very successful tugboat company, although I suppose we cannot suggest this as an example, as a rule, for students to turn over the stove, see that the stove is turned over and the old school-house burn down, but it’s a unique story and Horatio Alger should be alive to write about it today.

Well, thanks very much, Mayor Charles Cates of North Vancouver.