Wolfgang and Witzke

 I was taking a bit of a detour down memory lane this evening, and I landed on “Wolfgang and Witzke.”

Witzke was a guy who got off the boat and done good. He got into the mink-pelt harvesting. Had a place up near Fergus where he had multiple mink sheds.

He also had a day job, director of “research and development” at a local outfit where they made electrical switch-gear, the heavy-duty stuff you see on hydro poles.

I landed a job at the joint, welding in their fab shop, which was tucked away way in the back, because those aren’t the first employees you want folks to see when they’re coming through for the client orientation tour.

Wolfgang was my cousin. He’d failed two grades in public school, and the aunties had pretty much voted him as most likely to pursue a career in the military. As a private.

Wolfgang had other plans. I used smoke weed and drink beer with Wolfgang and his brothers. Wolfgang gradually eased himself out of the glamorous pot-head lifestyle.

A high-school drop-out, just like me and his brothers, and with a pregnant girlfriend, Wolfgang finished his high school diploma via correspondence courses. Then he got into the engineering co-op stream at University of Waterloo, while his brothers and I were still smoking dope on the factory roof.

Fast forward a year or two, and cousin Wolfgang gets a co-op placement with Witzke, our Research and Development guy, who as far as I’ve ever been able to ascertain, had absolutely no qualifications for that job whatsoever.

Wolfgang’s next co-op placement was at Imperial Tobacco, known far and wide as the best gig in town. 

Long story short, Wolfgang and his engineering degree went a long way at Imperial Tobacco. The guy is only a year older than me but beat me to retirement by ten years. Ya, the guy the aunties thought might have a nice career as a grunt in the military.

As for Witzke, after the bottom fell out of the mink-pelt market and his employer closed shop, I don’t know what happened.