Telling Our Stories:

    "Lexlexey'em"

When I was very young, there was Jake and I. Jake was my uncle, but he was my brother mostly.  We grew up as brothers, we were raised as brothers.  And of course Jake treated me as a little brother, being mean to me, making me cry and everything else a big brother did to little brothers.  But really, we were close, in fact so close that people jokingly referred to us as “Rickob and Jicky”.

 But, the one person who taught me the most as I was growing up and was as close to being a brother to me as anyone could ever be was Willy Alphonse Sr.  We didn’t call him Senior back then as he was the only Willy Alphonse.  We also called him, “Wilson”, which was his nickname.  Willy lived next door to us and I was always over their house.  I went everywhere Willy went.  We went fishing down the creek, he taught me how to make a fishing pole and how to fish.  He taught me how to untangle a fishing hook that got stuck under water, how to carry our fish on a willow branch and how to buy the best hooks for fishing from in town.  He taught me how to make a slingshot and a bow and arrow.  He taught me how to find the best rubber to use to make sling shots.  There was just so many things he taught me to do.

 One of the things I smile about today is how Willy seemed to know the words to all the songs.  I remember him as we walked down the road always singing the latest country songs he had heard on the radio.  I don’t know how he remembered the words because there were no tape recorders or cd’s back then.  Even then very few people even had record players.  Thinking back now, I often wonder how people learned songs or tunes.  There were a lot of people back then who sang or played guitar or fiddle.  I’m amazed how they ever learned music when they only heard the tunes on the radio occasionally.

 One of Willy’s first cars after he got finished school was a black 1952 or ’53 dodge or Chrysler.  It had “Lil Darky” painted on the fender and we did a lot of cruising in that car.

 Willy and many other former students from the Mission enrolled in the stationary engineering program run at the Mission.  I think it was funded by D.I.A. and was taught by Bill O’Donovan who was the power and heating manager at the Mission at that time.  Many young men from Sugar Cane as well as other reserves went through this very beneficial program.  I’m guessing that almost all who took the program got their Class 1 Stationary Engineering Certificate.  Willy spent many years after that employed as an engineer at air force bases such as Puntzi Mountain, Baldy Hughes, Holberg, and finally he finished up at the old Kamloops Residential School.  I think Willy finally gave up engineering about 1993 mostly because there was no engineering jobs around Williams Lake.