Lane Changer - Peter Chandler, how it all began for me
Dad - no hill too big to climb
Many times, I find myself telling strangers about my father. Like Jack who first appeared to fix my fridge two years after Dad died. I swear we got together so he’d be connected to my father’s memory as much as anything I brought to the table! That’s what happens when a life involved so many interests, so many shifts.
So when people are surprised at the big life-changes I’ve made, I tell them it’s Dad who showed me the path: Peter Chandler, the original lane-changer. Some inherit money or a business - I’m grateful I got a compulsion to do whatever I want to do, until I don’t. No better day than Fathers Day to reflect on it.
His first significant shift in my memory was in the early 1970s. He was in his early 40s and had accomplished much already: married, father of five, successful dairy farmer, citizen after 20 years in Canada, director on the board of the local credit union, pirate and policeman in a local production of the Pirates of Penzance. It was like he had some mental checklist of what should be done and he’d ticked them all off. I was too busy learning to read and dress myself for school to know what, if any, mulling he did to consider what to do next in life but somehow, getting a pilot’s licence and building an airplane snuck onto the bottom of Dad’s to-do list. Non-sleeping and non-farming hours (the former a physical necessity, the latter economic) were spent stooped over a wooden wing and fuselage on a workbench on the dirt floor of the cellar of the farmhouse, or poring over his ground school texts at the kitchen table. Although he’d left formal education behind at 16, he remembered what he’d learned, and, unlike most of us, knew its practical application. While I was learning trigonometry in school, he was using it to calculate something to do with the plane!
“How will you get it out?” mystified Huron County neighbours asked about what they perceived as a plane-in-the-basement-dilemma.
“I’ll just remove the stones around that window,” he replied, as though he’d had an engineer assess how stable the house would be with a chunk of the basement wall removed. He hadn’t, of course, but he had an innate sense about such things. Or who knows? Maybe he calculated it on a slide rule. Regardless, the house held. Recently, the current occupants of that house asked the one of my siblings whether the rumour was true - did someone really build an airplane down there. I’m sure they’d be equally surprised to learn there was a runway between the house and the road and that in the latter part of the ‘70s, my evenings and weekends were spent with Dad 3,000 feet in the air, keeping an eye out for other air traffic. You can read more about that here.
Airplanes weren’t Dad’s first unlikely intense focus though. He was the son of a doctor in London, England, yet farming was his passion from a young age. After WWII, he hopped on a boat to Canada with neither job nor connections on this side of the Atlantic. He landed in Halifax, took a train to Toronto, and had his pick of hired man positions from the farmers waiting in Union Station. Imagine! No social media, no email, no cell phone. Communication with family back home was by mail. Even in the ‘70s and ‘80s, transatlantic phoning was a Xmas and birthday ritual, not for everyday.
The farming obsession sustained him until, well, until it didn’t. Then it was planes-planes-planes for a decade and then that too gave way to something new. This time - instrument-making. He’d had three violin playing lessons as a kid and then his teacher died (cause and effect? He’d always say with a grin). Although playing was not his forte, the violin had come with him to Canada. He took it apart and copied it, and then made another, and another and another. He was self-taught from trial and error and everything he’d could read on the subject. He’d also talk to anyone who knew anything on the subject (and to a lot of other captive audiences who knew nothing). At 57, he retired from dairy farming to go full-time as a luthier. By his death 20 years later, he’d made 158 violins, violas, cellos and double-basses, sold to players around the world, as well as several harps, a lute, and a harpsichord. He decided to fill a gap he identified in the instrument-making library by writing his own book; my mother still receives royalty cheques for the book he wrote in his early 70s, called “So you want to make a Double-Bass.” He hadn’t written anything other than the credit union board minutes since he left school.
Other than those three violin lessons and a few years of piano as a kid, he hadn’t much musical training. Undaunted by that, though, on each of his last few Christmases he made trips to the pawn shops at Toronto’s Church and Queen where he’d acquire a new-to-him brass or windward instrument and commit to teaching himself to play a few carols by the following December. The flute became his go-to but clarinet and trumpet were also on the “I can play a carol on that” list which already included violin, piano, and double-bass. What he lacked in rhythm and pitch he made up for in enthusiasm. He wasn’t someone who picked up on social cues like grimaces. He was a completionist, not a perfectionist. I got some of that from him too.
And lest you think he did things only on his own, rest assured he involved my mother too. In the late ‘70s, they took up square and round dancing, where they quickly found their groove as a couple. Until my father died in 2007, they taught people round dancing, with Mom bringing the glamour and, initially anyway, the aptitude and passion for dancing. The always-patient teacher, Dad, was behind the mic leading people through their paces.
With him as the example, is it any wonder I’ve switched up my life - changed lanes - as much as I have? And like him, I haven’t given much attention to the rear view mirror. When nostalgic 20-year-old-me inquired whether my father missed the cows he’d left behind on the farm two years earlier, he looked up from the cello back he was smoothing out with his tiny brass plane and relied: “Not in the slightest.” He was always looking forward, eager to find a new challenge to puzzle through - and succeed.
Want more about my father’s life? Here are some previous tributes:
Sawdust, sweat, and skinless airplane wings
Peter Chandler (1928-2007) - a tribute through food
12 things I learned from my eccentric dad - Peter Chandler 1928-2007
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