Chasing the Comet: A Scottish-Canadian Life

13. Tranquille

Dear Smith, the sleest, paukie thief, That e’er attempted stealth or rief . . . —Robert Burns, “To James Smith” CHAPTER THIRTEEN Tranquille This page intentionally left blank T The day Peggy and I arrived, the weather couldn’t have been more beautiful. Peggy was very impressed with the setting—fertile bench land on the north side of Kamloops Lake. Tranquille was BC’s largest sanatorium in the 1940s.1 Pete Moore met us and introduced us to the doctors and the rest of the staff. We learned they had already fired the man whose job I was taking, giving him two months’ severance pay. I was told only that he’d been helping himself to too much, though for the most part, the people who worked here were described as honest. As we toured the large grounds, we could see the hospital and its support buildings functioned almost as a little town would function. Each building provided some needed service to the people who lived there. The Greaves Building was the most modern and had an operating room on the top, the fourth floor. Men and women patients were assigned separate living quarters, with the women in the Main Building and the men in the Infirmary when they were bedridden. Later, when they were up and about, male patients were moved into the pavilions and the women were relocated to small cottages. The nurses had their own comfortable residence, close to their work. The families of medical doctors, farm staff, and gardeners lived in private homes set back some from the hospital buildings. We were all free to use the hospital store and post office located in the centre of things. The store was Note to chapter 13 is on page 241. 165 necessary because few people working here had cars to take them into town to shop. About a year later, Tranquille became part of a bus route, so the store and its groceries were phased out. On the day we arrived, I remember Peggy was especially impressed with the beauty and the colour of the grounds. The green grasses, crops, and coloured flowers stood out bright against the soft brown sands and pale sagebrush in the surrounding countryside. Unlike Colony Farm, we were told the vegetable gardens here had no patient labour used in them, although patients did do lighter volunteer work in the wards. But the lack of patient labour wasn’t the only thing that was different from Colony Farm. I wasn’t there long until the problems Pete Moore warned me about—plus a few new ones—became obvious. Pete had said, “You’ll have an uphill time, Dave, but I know you can take it.” And he was right. It wasn’t easy at first, because I wasn’t quite sure who to trust. I also knew I had to be very careful in dealing with the unionized workers, who were organized and a force to be reckoned with. The running of Tranquille was costing about $600,000 more than the government appropriated for it, and there were many reasons for that. For example, Pete Moore told me there were far more people working there than should have been. In spite of the money spent, productivity was low. In the Kamloops climate, I knew Tranquille should have been producing three crops of hay a year, sometimes four, but often they couldn’t even get two crops. I couldn’t believe that a farm as big as Tranquille had to buy hay to feed their cattle. For the first three months I observed the hay production process, then I laid off twelve of the men involved. This got the attention of the rest of the workers and most of them knew I meant business. After that, we started cutting the hay when it should have been cut. We’d begin by cutting mostly alfalfa, about the twelfth of May. With that early start we harvested three crops—more than enough to feed our cattle. From then on, there was no more buying hay. Tranquille’s operating costs started to come down. 166 CHASING THE COMET Next, I tackled the problems with the irrigation system. There was plenty of water available, but half the time the men weren’t getting the bloody stuff to the fields. Instead of checking to make sure the...