I always wanted to be an Artist and I always approached life
like an Artist, it just took me a very long time to figure out what an Artist
was.
After getting out of the Navy I apprenticed as a silkscreen
printer who had moved to Uxbridge making up to 12 colour decals for pottery. It was an arty sort of job and I learned very advanced screening but it paid very little and when he moved to Creemore and was happy to move on. So I
went to Toronto and worked at a silkscreen company. The company was going down and I was promoted to a sales man I manged to get some work from Canada Dry and met a couple of their salesmen. I started spend a great deal of time at the Village Corner and the Yorkville
folk scene. I really started here because of
school friend Muriel Frisque She hung out there when she was at College.
I looked up a friend of hers John Smith and we became friends. John was from
Nova Scotia and billed himself as the dirtiest Folksinger in Toronto and often
sold out the Village Corner mostly sing songs off the Oscar Brand records - (I
had all of them) Through John I met the 'Dirty Shames' Chick Roberts, Jim McCarthy
Carole Robinson and Amos Garrett and many others on the folk scene . I remember at a party with the Dirty Shames
one night I went home and got some booze and went back to Carole's I think, A
girl friend of hers came in from New York and we sat around while she sang a
song she had picked up in New York. She sang 'Girl From the North country' and bowled
us all over.
The Dirty Shames
Jim McArthy Carole Robinson Chick Roberts and Amos Garrett
