Interview with Stanley Milner, on early oil and gas industry in Edmonton

I would like to start with energy sector questions. You arrived in Edmonton at the University from Calgary?


Actually, I arrived here because I was transferred by Imperial Oil. The history of that is if you go back to the World War II when the Japanese invaded the Aleutians. You recall they started a massive military buildup and they built what was called the Northwest Staging. The Edmonton Airport was tremendously active and the US army had a huge instillation here and this was the end of steel, so out of that a huge buildup through Northern Canada and Alaska they built up a so called [? Cannel] project and a refinery that refinery was purchased by Imperial Oil and moved to Edmonton, and I am guessing that the year would be approximately late 40’s. I wouldn’t get to find an exact date. I was a kid, who always lied about my age as I do now, and I had wound up working in a lab for Imperial Oil and so I was transferred up here to this refinery and then I went back to University. That became, if you’d like, the start of the Oil industry in Edmonton. That followed of course because of the Leduc discovery and the Leduc discovery which was picked up with an old type of seismic and the industry when on from there to picking up more reefs, because they could identify them and of course that led to the Red Water Steel, the Bonny Glen and things like that.


Can I ask where you where at the time of the Leduc Strike? Do you remember anything about that time?


Oh yes, I was working at the Imperial Oil lab; and we got samples of oil in.


And where was the Imperial Oil Lab?


In Calgary; we got samples of oil in to test and there was great mystery about it. And of course the mystery led us all to wonder where it came from. Well it had come from Leduc, but we didn’t know that. It was a new find by Imperial and they were keeping it very, very tight but it was a very excellent gravity crude oil compared crude oil it has a different constituency and this was light oil so it was quite interesting. After that the service industry started to develop in Edmonton. All of south Edmonton was sort of taken over even though there weren’t many facilities for it, but this was the closest one to the oil field.


We now consider Nisku the service sector area but can you talk about the early 50’s and where it was then?


Well it was just about where Billingsgate is and all down throughout that area. The industry was rising here quite extensively. The sequence of events of course is that the industry started to expand and the industry had been Turner Valley, which was southwest of Calgary. Which is relatively modest production there was the odd head office in Calgary, but the real push was to establish in Edmonton, and there were various schemes that came along for office buildings. I think in every case they were turned down by the city and then of course that was followed by some very adventuresome concepts like the scheme and everything where only the rig payers could vote. Somewhere in that period of time, Calgary got worked up about this and one of the oil companies, I believe it was Triad, but I stand to be corrected. Calgary approached them on the basis that they would build a building quite far out on 8th avenue which of course now puts it in the center of town, and they gave them various concessions etcetera so they put up a small office building.


The city of Calgary…


No, no Triad...


No I know, gave them concessions and Edmonton did not offer any?


No, Edmonton did not. As a matter of fact, Edmonton at that time was I guess the word is, pretty insulated. I think that was really the start of the slow movement that you’ve seen to date culminated here by the closing of the municipal airport for the transfer of head offices to Calgary and it seems like strategically every move the city made was the wrong one. Well I guess the problem is that they had no strategy and probably people didn’t understand the significance of head offices.


So why did they in Calgary?


Well probably because the people who had gotten involved might have been little less isolated, a little less provincial, a little worldlier because of the dealings with Toronto. After all head office was the best business they could get because that’s where your high priced help is and they support all the community services.


Did it start because of the provincial government was here and perhaps did it have that kind of influence now?


Well you see it’s kind of surprising because up until recent history, which would put you into the seventies, all the land sales were in Edmonton. All the by lands everything had to be done in Edmonton. Conservation boards as we called it was here, the department of mines and minerals was here, and so being in Calgary was a disadvantage, which was one of the reasons that we kept our first company here cause its so convenient to…That was a company called Canadian Chieftain Petroleum’s.


Was it a title development?


Title petroleum’s and Canadians Chieftains Petroleum’s, and those were sold in the early sixties.


Could you put your brothers name on the record?


Joe Milner and Tom Milner.


I like to back to the early fifties before we leave it. I want to know more about the atmosphere in the energy sector in the early and late fifties…Was there an awareness do you think, that this was going to, do people realize, in the industry what this was going to do to Alberta that suddenly it had completely different confidence.


I don’t think that people had that vision I think what happened was that we were basically an agrarian society. If you graduated from the University of Alberta, you went elsewhere for a job. I mean there were no jobs for engineers or anybody, the oil industry, and basically the oil industry as that movement started to Calgary, Calgary became closer to Dallas and Houston, and all of the oil industry of course, was pioneered by the Americans. At one point in time they said that the city of Calgary had the population of about 40,000 of Americans. So almost all of the management, engineering service industries, drilling industries were only controlled by the US, and as they came north they started hiring Canadians and almost all of us got trained through US companies. We sort of switched to quite a boom period, with a tremendous shortage of technical drilling crews, geologists, so the demand really heated up.


Did the training capacity of Alberta, for example did the U of A move to expand its geology training and...


I think the geology was pretty good, they didn’t move to a petroleum engineering course for many, many years, which they gave up so you’ll find that most senior Canadians were trained in the US, in petroleum engineering at Okalahoma or some place else. Generally, the University of Okalahoma had a great reputation in petroleum engineering.


What about technical workers drilling crew, did they just learn on the job?


Well, they basically learned on the job although a lot of the trained personnel came in from the United States, and then quite a few years later that we set up the training, etc and safety became more of a problem. But the rigs generally came up from the United States with crews.


So these people were both as technical and professional, did they stay?


A huge numbers of Americans did not want to go back and eventually took up Canadian citizenship as I understand it, but a lot did go back cause there were pretty good times in Texas and Okalahoma, what have you. A lot did not like the Canadian winters etc…but gradually Canadians took over and of course the first thing they took over was the drilling. So you had to go through some large Canadian drilling companies, then of course you know they moved up through management as you know at least two of the presidents of Exxon have been Canadians, and so they moved on up through the management stream and ah so it was the oil industry that was funded technically and financially by the Americans that basically converted us from the agrarian type society what we are today. And the significance of that change was not envisioned I don’t think, in the city of Edmonton. I can’t talk to you about Calgary, but certainly there was no great encouragement, since normally only the rig payers had a vote and that it was… so you move from into the sixties where there was still a number of head offices here.


What was the one that moved to Calgary that really clinched it?


Well, I think it, of course, when it finally finished the only two head offices here were ... [? unclear] and the Chieftain and there may have been some other small ones that I am not familiar with, but for publicly listed, larger companies we were basically the only two left as time went by. So if you go into the sixties they were still quite a lot of activity here, and as the oil industry spread out which would get you into the seventies, then the service industry spread out, they made quick facilities in Grand Prairie and Drayton Valley ... [? unclear] had been developed, I’d have to get the sequence of the years, all of these different fields came in and foothills developed into plays, and the pipelines came and then in later years I guess the thing that kind of ended the head offices was the closing of the municipal airport. With that you had Alberta Energy who had all their accounting here, and because I was chairman of the Board of Alberta Energy for ... [? unclear] years. Those of us lived in Edmonton fought any move for a long time. [? Peter McDonald] and myself and [? Matt Baldwin] were on the board we in effect wouldn’t let them move. But it just became so horrendous you used to run out to the airport and there were planes back and forth all the time and there was no problem, but after that disappeared and it became more complicated all the time. Then its rather interesting because we helped fund a study by Stanford research on transportation and of course we got accused there was Ron [? Southerns] company and ourselves and I forgot who all put up the money cause we wanted to really find out so we went out elsewhere to Stanford and did research and of course we got the performance of the airport; we got accused of setting this all up so that we could get the municipal airport open and then everybody and all the traffic would go to Calgary and you know all the story that came out of it and I was annoyed because hell when you hire somebody to do research, you know tell me where to build a museum and I don’t know anything about it, tell me about airplanes and I don’t know anything about it. So the net effect was that you eventually had that and then Nova left and Ron Southern took his company south, and AEC moved and we get on down the line and it went like that.


I want to go come to this period because it’s very important but I also want to pull you back into the ... [? unclear] for one moment for an important question. I am interested in lets say by the end of the 50’s you’ve started your company with your brothers and you’re a young player in the marketplace. What was the relationship between the homegrown companies and the social credit government and really between the energy sectors in general and the social credit government. Did you as young entrepreneurs feel that they had an understanding of the wealth potential and did they have a energy development strategy or did the companies just decide it?


No, I think if you look at the history of Social Credit which is basically Premier Aberhart and he was a really very unique individual, he was extremely stable, very intelligent, very disciplined. And he spent and an inordinate amount of time trying to attract capital into Alberta he saw that this was the way of the future for funding of school and hospitals, etc. So some of there policies were designed to encourage entrepreneurship: the holding of reservations of land, the deferment of royalties on natural gas, a whole variety of things were designed to encourage the growth of the industry.


That was under Mr. Manning?


That’s under Mr. Manning. I would suggest that the people that he had deputy ministers like [? Herbert Summerville] and the whole cabinet was really trying to be very helpful to the industry, trying to encourage investment. I think that it wasn’t something that you sort of grew up with the need for capital but I guess it was only as you get older that you realize that capitalism is simply the employment of capital and without capital you can’t do anything. But certainly the Manning government recognized that, and if anybody gave the whole province a boost, I think it was he and his policy. Plus let me tell you they had a scrupulous reputation and I won’t say anything about any other provinces because word got around but this government treated every company exactly the same (the Manning government). And absolutely honestly you knew if you went in to apply for a lease or what have you, it was confidential and etc so the corporate governance was very… a term we now throw about, and the ethics of the government were, I would say very high. I won’t say that about all of the provinces. It was a statement, Mr. Manning would have been premier forever if he wanted to be; Peter Lougheed took over and that was a different thing. The early period, he just had that, he gave you the feeling of civility and you could build around it, you could trust what they said; if they bring in a regulation that was a regulation. They confer with the industry; it was kind of a partnership that he developed. That’s really what gave the push to the development of the industry.


Where they’re any mistakes made in that period of time, in the development of the industry?


Well, its very hard to say because., our enemies were the East and the movement and the movement of Alberta oil, as you know the Independent Petroleum Association set up to try and force Canadian Oil, they had all the restrictions on exports and of course we always felt like we were a colony, which I suppose as we do today. There were such things like you could move crude oil; let’s say you were going to use a train, you could move crude oil through a refinery in the East cheaper than you could move the refined products back. The whole system was designed to move raw material, which included oil till we got pipelines, which included oil. There were constant squirmishes with the Federal government and their policy, which lead as the creation of the Independent Petroleum Association separate from the majors. The fights that we had to try and export oil and a whole variety of things (laughing) I guess it was a case of we versus them. You asked me if there were any mistakes made by the Provincial government, I’m sure there were, but, we were more interested it them and we.


Well, did they, the Social Credit Government at the time could they have lobbied more effectively, or fought Ottawa the way Peter Lougheed did later?


No, no, we did not have. First of all oil was in plentiful supply, natural gas was not even wanted. Investment capital was dominated in the East other than what the Americans sent in. All the [? federal] regulations concerning exports, the Canadian trade were handled by Ottawa, you could not move anything across Provincial boundaries even a pipeline you had to have a it incorporated in Parliament and approved by the Senate. In those days you could hardly do anything; getting anything done was a huge task unless it met with the approval of the majority in the House, which was basically the Liberal government. We went from there, and in our time and the disasters of the national energy program, which almost ruined everything. The province was very low in population; even though we had a boom period there really weren’t many people here and that technical to a large extent was fulfilled by the Americans, who weren’t really interested in the politics. We sort of went from there and as you moved through the Lougheed era you have now got a well established industry, you have got increasing demands, increasing prices and therefore increasing wealth in the Province, and increasing population. So, we started to have some greater influence, which still wasn’t very high. Remember the Social Credit government had come out of, as far as the East was concerned, with the Acts that declared Aberhart … [? unclear] and of course, everyone is desperate and starving to death, so he comes up with this if you had money, which wasn’t a bad idea because people took it but as currency, so you had to put a stamp on it and that basically put the money in and as long as the store would take it, but anyway, all of that was declared 282[ultra], but remember you are the historian so you would remember all of that that went on in the thirties and then the war of course was a different matter.


Why did Edmonton develop as the work engine of the Alberta energy sector, through the service sector refineries, petro chemicals plant while Calgary eventually…head office, you talked about that already and you believe that it was mistakes in the City?


Well we separate the use of the product, obviously the oil was here, so you’ve got the building of the Tran mountain facilities, you’ve got the building of refineries, out of the building of refineries came the fact that a large refinery was more economical than a small one. Imperial Oil, for example, would close its refinery in Calgary because they would have the economic scale of a big refinery here and they could pump the product to Calgary. It was the dominance of the supply of oil that created refining, pipelining, petrochemical industry in Edmonton. Which is quite different than the head office. The head offices would contain the administrative personnel, a geologist, drilling people, all of the accounting, all of the finance; so if you take a company and start out with your finance work your way down to the technical people, and that’s what a head office is, and that is quite different than running a refinery. The head office of Imperial Oil might be in Calgary, the owner of the refinery here, but all of those functions gradually moved.


How did that, in your opinion shape the nature of the two cities n relationship with each other?


I think that lead to the creation of Calgary as a financial center, perhaps not on par with Toronto by in large it is, and of course Edmonton isn’t a financial center. So there is vast interchange between Toronto, New York and Calgary, and you can see that in the airlines schedules. People fly airplanes where there is traffic. Calgary then developed into, I think, it is hard to say because Calgarians always thought we were more the center of culture in Edmonton believe it or not. Some of my relatives heavily involved with the other singers and all of this, always felt that Edmonton had substantially more culture here, now why would that be, I wish I’d knew. One thing I think we had a more diverse ethnic group than Calgary. Calgary would be far more straight Anglo-Saxon, not so much today, it is a bigger city, but is sort of grew up with that. A huge inter-change between Americans and Calgarians and Americans as such in business is very aggressive and very much bottom-lined. With that you attract younger people with more fashion conscious and less of a stable outlook and more of a “get moved, I may go here and I may go there”, more excitement or something.


How would you describe the difference in Edmonton morrow, you believe that shifted in that Calgary and Edmonton are more alike now than say they were twenty years ago?


Well yes because (give me poetic license here) I don’t think twenty years ago you saw any ethnic restaurants in Calgary and you see jillions here and now you see them in Calgary. I think that Edmonton has been more community minded because they felt more isolated and maybe weren’t quite


It would be a bit of a challenge to have a company headquartered in Edmonton operating almost exclusively in the United States. Basically we concentrated on the offshore in the Gulf of Mexico. We had all our administration here and our technical support staff was in an office in Bali tin, New Orleans. It meant more traveling, but in those days you could get non-stop flights out of Edmonton. Now if you are doing business in Calgary, I am back where I started in the sixties, I drive to Calgary. That’s how we started, you used to drive down to Calgary and get a hotel room and come back the next night; and now we are back doing the same thing because it’s almost as easy. By the time you get organized down there, you’re now at Red Deer and now you have got your car down there. You got away from the gates, so many of the little planes, they fly slower and safety, my God, some of them; I know some of them sitting, a lady with one flight, I said “I’m sorry, we’re just sitting here 021[cuddling], that’s all there is to it. She said, “you should have seen have seen the plane I was on before I got onto this one”. If there was ever an emergency there was no way you could get out of those seats, you can hardly get into them. Then you go outside, which is shades of the past. If you are running back and forth in a suit, why not just jump in your car throw your jacket in the back and go; we sort of came to a full circle. Now that, over the years that we ran the last Chieftain International we used to get oil analysts coming in to see us, but in the last few years they didn’t bother. They wondered if we could meet them in Calgary. The financial people only came if it was a necessity, so we have had American stock exchange meetings in Edmonton, bringing in investment people but there isn’t a hope of that now; Calgary is the financial center. With that there will be the flights.


Well, if you look at could it have been different, it depends on your view of strategy and long-term strategy and we are trying to resurrect some of that now but I think it is too late. Once you lost the municipal, the theory is we get more flights, then we started losing the flights, we used to have two American flights a day and two Delta and all of a sudden they thought why not people just get on the puddle jumper and go from there. That basically started working for them, so you started losing the direct flights to the centers you need for head offices, New York, there were still good flights to Toronto we became sort of a spoken in Calgary, exactly predicting what would happen if we didn’t close the Municipal. I feel that that was one of the things that basically ended it, because the financial people that would come up to see you could jump on a flight in Calgary and come up to see you and go get the noon flight back and they were there in half an hour cause it’s a jet. Now it’s a slow plane, three quarters of an hour and you have to go outside in the rain unless you catch the right airplane or out in the snow, and they don’t do it. You have to go up those little steps most of the time and it isn’t exactly a fun thing. So basically, they just don’t come up here. In the last stages we found we had to go to New York, they would not come to us. We gradually had that evolution into a different type of complex, now you could say we didn’t want the head office, I don’t know, I am just saying, I always fall back on the old 075[cobbler] expression, “I don’t like it, but I guess that’s that”.


Speaking of this leads me right into the next question>>>>you were one of the most vocal opponents [unable to decipher the question]


I think that the, I haven’t been president in the Petroleum Association during this era and I often said I was very successful, for successful, whatever you define success as, because I never trusted to the administration and we as a company were doing a lot of work in the Canadian North and became increasingly concerned about the attitude after all this is the only government in history that we know of in western civilization that tore up agreements. And they tore up all the land agreements that they had in the North that everybody had signed so talk about a third world Banana Republic, that’s what they did after entering into setting up regulations and entering into agreements they started to resend them all. So you started to get a feeling of the hostility that existed in the senior civil staff and certainly in the Trudeau administration towards the West, but I guess there were lots of signs and one of the things that saved us is that because we didn’t trust the Trudeau administration we dropped all of our 100 [ ? ] and stopped exploration in the North West Territories and that’s when we first started to establish a position in United States, so we weren’t caught, as such, with huge capital expenditures. I guess it was one of those things if you feel that you were a 106[calmly] that was exploited and that the masters would steal off you, which is how some of the third world felt. I guess we always afraid of that but never honestly believed it would happen and so when they started that massive taxation and movement of capital out of Alberta that ended the Lougheed era and I remember Mark 113[Lalonde] getting up in the house and saying all the rigs working. Yes they were all working till they finished the job that was in the fall when they brought in the national energy program. Everybody got to finish off their winter drilling and then bang that was it.


Could you describe that particular year in Edmonton? Did you meet with colleagues around the city and especially the economic impact …what was going on?


I was just talking to a fellow the other day in an engineering firm, 300 people or something, they just struggle trying to survive something or other because all the projects collapsed and there were many, many service firms went bankrupt around here and drilling companies that went under. The economics were horrendous to anybody that did anything connected to the oil industry and of course Calgary it followed through and bankrupted a lot of individuals in small firms and they went out of business. It was a massive waste of capital because they came up with the idea of trying to transfer some of that money to the North and gave all sorts of subsidies and gave all sorts of subsidies if you went to the North but that was a selfish game too. So… I think it was a nightmare, those of us that went through it and I have talked to people since I mean the one fellow who has been a strong Liberal was in my office the other day and he swore he would never vote Liberal again as long as he lived. I just couldn’t believe it. What happened is all of the projects everything from water, sanitation, roads and all of this sort of stuff that they were involved with came to a grinding halt and so the impact of the National Energy Program has been well spoken of by different people and different areas but financially it was a huge blow. I suppose we had some advantage because we were in Edmonton and therefore we operated in the United States and dropped a lot of our Canadian North stuff, so we didn’t have to be pessimists every five minutes.


Somebody said … [? unclear]I said while we are going north from bankruptcy and we are heading south for prosperity. He said you sound like a preacher. That of course, established us in the United States. When we got into the last company, Chieftain International we had lots of experience operating in the United States.


The many writers that written …taking a blind risk??????


Prior to the National Energy Program we stared to build cash reserves in the Company so we had a large amount of cash in the Company going into the National Energy when it hit. We did not know for sure what they were going to do to us; we just knew it wouldn’t be good. However, the question was how bad it would be. By this time we got out of all our obligations in the north, and of course after they transferred hundreds of millions of dollars there that all collapsed and started to revive again now which is just an absolute waste of money. The government should only spend money on something productive so we can produce something, but anyway that was a complete disaster to policy. We were always very cautious of the debt problem and didn’t expand at the dying stages; we owned a drilling company, a few things like that. We didn’t expand by the grace of God. We were getting increasing nervous about the administration in Ottawa so we getting almost like you are looking out and see black clouds and you don’t know if there is going to be a tornado or what, so you’d better get into the shelter. That is sort of our attitude at that time; that proved to be a very wise one.


Do you think that now when Albertans look back on this experience they blame everything that happened between 81 and 86, 87 on the … [? unclear] when in fact it there was an international decline … [? unclear] Do they confuse these 2 things?


Well what happened is, in my opinion, the National Energy Board was a virus that destroyed our immune system. We just started to get out of the hospital bed an walk around and wham a new virus hit which was the oil prices so you just started to raise your head off the bed and bang, so many companies didn’t have the strength, which means financial strength to go into another period of decreased prices. So it was like you had two depressions in a row. You came out of there much poorer but wiser. I think if you would have had one but not the other… I blame in on the National Energy Board Program because it started it.


Do you believe that Edmonton is as diversified economy as it used to be?


I think the economy is quite diversified. More than at that time 85,86 & 87, let’s try to think that one through; because we were a trading center for the North, I guess we maintained that. I guess in the last year in the [advent] of diamond mining we had a little pick up there. We had the refining of petrochemicals, which sort of expanded a bit; we did have a large injection of provincial funds into medical research. Particularly which led to maintaining of the University of Alberta Hospital as a center of disease research which led of course to our transplant, peds, etc. That followed with increased demand in housing. I don’t know whether to say yes or no whether that led to more diversification, all that I can say in my opinion Edmonton economy is more immune to changes in financial situations than other areas.


In the province?


In the province or elsewhere. We don’t have or haven’t had the violent swings in Unemployment say as Calgary has had from time to time. We have a pretty diverse economy. And of course we built the Research Centers out there and I guess you would have to say yes because if you look at what has come on because of the consumers, if you take the Edmonton common for heaven sakes, why do we need more shopping centers? Obviously these people can do their homework, the outlook must look pretty gook in the economy. Certainly I think Edmonton has been much more stable, we weren’t hit as hard by the National Energy Program as Calgary was or some of the little towns such as Grande Prairie.


Wrapping up here with some questions about the election in October 1965. First of all could you talk to me about you position to run for Mayor?


Well it was obviously a very interesting period. I had been on city council and Mayor Roper was the Mayor at that particular time. He did an awful lot for the city at that time which was incredible. He was the first one to hire a planning commission, he was the first one who started anchoring the downtown on the basis then we lost the tax base downtown where most of your social problems were; you had a real problem. He was a guy with very high integrity and high intelligence. I had worked with him on City Council and it was about that time that the first Canadian Chieftains was coming up for sale and that is an entirely different story, some time when we are not on tape I will tell you why we had to sell. It will confirm some of your worst fears about large energy companies. I must say losing to Bill was undoubtedly one of the best things that ever happened to me because I went from there to set up Chieftain Development and the rest is history. But at that particular time I was just a kid on City Council and got involved because we thought we should do things as a part of civic duty and it was an honor being on City Council. It was a tremendous amount of work and I went through a period of when Elmer had a heart attack and as a matter a fact I had just went in for appendicitis and I became acting Mayor or Deputy Mayor or what every you call it. I remember looking aghast I think it was on Valentines Day, February 14; they had 14 engagements for the Mayor to go to. I didn’t know there were so many organizations it was unbelievable. I’ve always had a great respect for people in public life and the results of that. In any event the question came up should I run again for Council? By this time I was getting busy in other things and I thought I sort of done my thing and I have had been on a lot of community boards.


Didn’t Mr. Roper also insist you be on other boards and commissions, more than … [? unclear]?


Yes he did ask me to go and I can remember meeting with him and he wanted me to go on the Library Board and I said “Mr. Mayor I can’t handle it.” And he said, “ You’ll love libraries. You do nothing but go there and read books and if you like books it’s great.” Well it just went on and all they hype got started as you know and the original Library was basically given to us by Carnegie the City was going to take the property away from us and sell it and Carnegie advised me somewhere in there that the chairman of the board hadn’t signed the documents and Alan McDonald had said “Stan I am sending over some documents for you. You have to sign them.” I said “ Alan I don’t have to do nothing. What happens to the money?” He said “What money, it’s the City money?” I said “ Oh no, no, no.” Carnegie gave us the site, they were going to put up the AGT building and so we got into a real … [? unclear] and I refused to sign until we got a credit for the money so. … [? unclear] was the controller of finance guy so we worked out a deal where there Library would get credit if we could build a new Library so we went from there and that is a long story because remember the Library has a certain … [? unclear] on the tax base and Libraries are always [starved] and that’s how that came about.


In any event the question is I was debating about being Alderman, while there was an organization called the Civic Government Association and we where coming in a month or something before the election and of course all of the adverse publicity was out on Bill. By that time he was out and coming back in and the City and the people criticized Roper for settling. Bill was a really interesting guy, the only thing I can say is that we had some really surprising fun times on the circuit when I was running for Mayor, but that is another story. In any event they came to me to convince me to run for Mayor and I thought well I didn’t realize if you are going to go up against a pro like Bill Hawrelak you can’t do it in a month. Then we got into the campaign and one of the things right or wrong, whether it was Bills fault or somebody else’s, because there was always an element around it; anyone who had ever opposed the civic government be it George Pruden always received threats. And you couldn’t tell how valid the threats were.


Where they by telephone or by letter?


By telephone and also they would Horace you at the meetings and they were some pretty big looking goons.


Did you ever talk to him about that, who are these people?


Oh yes, I won’t tell you what I said to him but I can tell you what his reaction was. So this got pretty serious so [? Fred Sloan], was Chief of Police, and I asked him about it and he said “Carry a shot gun in the trunk.” And I said, “Well what good is that going to do?” I made sure at home I had some protection and then after discussing it further we moved the family out of the city because the threats now where on the children.


Were they telephone calls to your home and what was the nature of the threats?


Just like we are going to get you, they would call the office and home. In any event a part of it was disorganize you for meetings and terrorize you. We had one famous meeting out at Alberta Hall where my guys got me out of a window because the policeman were there and they were terrified, there was a huge crowd of semi goons there and they disconnected the microphone and I couldn’t speak, so one of the fellows that was with me said, “get out of here, it’s getting pretty ugly.” I couldn’t get out the door because it was locked or something, I think we went out the window.


Now tell me about that, was that at Alberta Avenue?


Yes, so all of a sudden we realized this is something I had never seen before and of course I was pretty young however we carried on through it. I guess my greatest concern was I was protecting myself without going into to many details.


With a gun?


I won’t go into details on it; lets say I grew up with enough military training to say I know which end the bullets came out of. So Bill and I would often be on the stage and I’ll never forget he was a wonderful actor that’s the only way I can put, because the one night he read the bible to the group and honestly I was sitting there, just the two of us on the stage, and he came back and looked at me and said, “ How did I do Stan?” I said, “You are unbelievable, you convinced me.” A side from everything else we had some banters back and forth but I explained to him one night when I was really concerned and really mad about children.


How many children did you have?


Two, so I explained to him about children, and I explained to him that there were always consequences when things happen to children and I sure hope all this stuff would end and it did end. That is the last threat I ever received.


Now what does that mean to you?


It says to me he knew a little bit more about it or his campaign people knew a little more about it any way we had a clear understanding so anyway we lost and went have an investigation because of the number of people that voted and the ballad boxes remember they disappeared. [? Bob Matteson] who is still around, [was in the group when all that happened] those were interesting times in Edmonton, something you never realized.


That election divided the City really harshly and in the biography of [Hawrelak] by his granddaughter, she suggests and many people suggest that it became a division in the City by ethnic, North Edmonton and Anglo Saxon, South West Edmonton, do you think that is a fair analysis or unfair analysis?


Well I think if you take it right down divisions and into a segment because I had many Ukrainians and other supporters … [? unclear] many are my friends and are today. I think there was an element on both sides that … [? unclear]. So I think there was a nucleus if that the word, of that division and typified if you like by some of them at the University but not everybody at the University marched and not everybody voted for Hawrelak and not everybody in the North East was opposed to me. You have to look at the polling, the vote at the polling station but certainly for a while it created a lot of tension.


Did it last?


I don’t think so. Bill’s group won and my group some of them thought it was morally wrong and time went on.