Remembering Onkel Horst

Woke up to find an email from my mother this morning, informing me that her brother Horst had passed.

While the extended family had already sent a few emissaries to America, Horst was the first to make it to Canada, in 1955. Trained as a millwright, he found himself at the newly opened General Electric transformer plant in Guelph, which was at the time known as “Generous Electric.”

Most of my early memories of Horst and his family go back to Elora, when our families shared that big old yellow pile of bricks just south of the train tracks. The house is still there, although the train tracks are long gone. The Packuls had the upstairs, the Neumanns lived downstairs, and the gigantic garden in back was a joint effort.

Onkel Horst was a great story teller. There was always garden-related work to be done that lent itself to the enslavement of child labour. I remember sitting under the giant pines in front of the house, around an enormous heap of peas that needed to be shelled. Horst would press us kids into service, and then regale us with tales from “Die Flucht.” I was always spellbound. I’d actually wish there were more peas to shell because I didn’t want the stories to end!

For a couple of years he tried his hand at running a welding shop in the garage behind the house. I remember him fabbing up a crop sprayer for a local farmer. To my six-year-old eye it looked more like something the Wright brothers might have come up with. I asked him years later why he’d given up that side business. He said he enjoyed the welding aspect, but was spending more time chasing people to pay their bills, which he hated.

The Packuls were a little quicker than we were in embracing the benefits of modernity. They had a TV many years before we did, and we were therefore regular visitors upstairs, especially when the NHL playoffs rolled around.

In some ways they were more the traditionalists, though. I’d marvel at their Christmas tree, a floor to ceiling spruce festooned with real candles, the kind you light with a match! Us downstairs folks stuck to a string of electric lights instead.

Onkel Horst was very generous in using his position at GE to get a whole lot of the extended family in the door there, starting with his brother Werner. By the time he “put in a word” for me it wasn’t known as Generous Electric anymore, but it was still a great gig compared to what’s out there for the working class today. In those days a GE paycheque meant you could afford a house, a car, and you could raise a family.

He had been a welding inspector there, but somewhere along the line he went into supervision. I can vouch for the fact that he didn’t cut me any slack on account of being family. Getting called into his office for a “chat” was known on the shop floor as “getting a load of Horst-shit.” Years later, when I became a welding inspector at Frankel Steel, I made a point of thanking him for getting me into the trade.

Horst stayed in that plant until he retired. Along the way he and Gisela raised three kids who by now have made him a great-grandfather several times over. He was a good man, a solid working-class guy who you could count on.

He’ll be missed. Mach’s gut, lieber Onkel!