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Continued from page 43 knew everything there was to know. Instead, he said: ‘There’s an opening for a printer in Vancouver, we’d like you to take it.’ “Nancouver??’ I said. ‘I don’t want to go there. My family’s here!’ “Then you're fired.’ And that was the end of my printing career.” Ironically, the classified section of another local newspaper would guide Don’s path to the future. “I saw an ad in the Oshawa Times, looking for letter carriers. Apparently, GM had hired a bunch of them away and now they were short. I’d done some relief work at the local Post Office as a teenager, so they hired me right on the spot. That was 1965.” “| saw an ad in the Oshawa Times, looking for letter carriers. So they hired me on the spot” ... Don Or Tt was a match made in heaven. “Ever since I was a kid, I had always loved the out- doors — playing in the woods, swimming in the Trent River, hockey, fishing, hunting. So the ‘outside’ part of the job appealed to me. I was young and healthy”. “Plus the hours were good, it meant that I worked steady days, I got to meet people, and it paid more than what I'd been making in the printing business. It was the perfect job for me, or maybe I was the perfect guy for the job!” Don’s days started early. By 6:30 a.m., he’d be in the post office pre-sorting the day’s deliveries. The initial part of his route would go into his bag — 65-70 pounds of it - while the outlying areas would be moved to the green “relay boxes” positioned at strategic points on city streets. Then it was out in the elements. “Bad weather didn’t bother me, but I remember some of the older guys — many of them war veterans in my early time on the job — really laboured on foul days. I did have cold ears on colder days, because we wore peaked caps like policemen. But eventually they gave us beaver hats, and that was better for the rough weather.” Traditionally, territorial dogs represent a greater nemesis to letter carriers than rain and snow. Along a four-mile route, there was bound to be a crabby canine or two. “Don’t get me wrong, three-quarters of the dogs you'd encounter were great. But I can’t tell you how many times I got opened up by one who wasn’t. The small dogs were worse than the big ones — they were brave and fierce, and went for your ankles. You got to know where to look, and we were told never to take a chance and go into a yard where you felt threatened.” Some people, he relates half-jokingly, were a larger Please turn to page 47 44 FOCUS - DECEMBER 2014 Postal deliveryman Don Orr, pictured with a dog in his arms, along one of his routes in Toronto in the 1960s.