How this site came to be

I was born rather uneventfully in Berlin, Germany, on St. Patrick's Day way too long ago. My father was a school teacher and my mother had a full-time job being just that with five kids around the house.

Post-war Berlin was not the most convenient place to be. Even though the wall was not yet built, the city was surrounded by the Communist East. My father always believed the Communists were after him for some reason and decided around the time of my birth to move into West Germany. After inspecting several communities with my mother, they settled on Lüchow in the state of Lower Saxony - more or less midway between Hamburg, Hannover and Berlin.

Back then, the administrative county in which Lüchow is located, jutted into East Germany like a peninsula. Economically speaking, the town had been cut off from its former trading areas on three sides. The county was therefore an economic sleepy-hollows of sorts, which meant that the hustle and bustle of the industrial age sort of just rushed past. The county is still home to the largest contiguous forest area in Germany.

Fortunately, rental accommodation for a family of 7 was scarce and so my parents received public assistance to build a two-storey brick home on a former rye field adjacent to a forest area. This is where I spent my early childhood years and where, through a fluke of fate, I sleep most nights again at the time of this writing.

Between 1966 and 1968 my father held a teaching position at Fu-Jen Catholic University in Taiwan, meaning that we "turned Chinese" for a few years. In fact, the real idea of the exercise had been to immerse the younger kids in a foreign culture and learn a foreign language. Being a kid and living among ordinary folks in Taiwan, picking up the language really didn't take that long. Those two-and-a-half years in Taiwan were full of wonderful memories. The trip home on a freighter was an adventure, too. The Suez Canal had been closed during the 1967 war and we therefore had to take a little detour around South Africa, spending 7 weeks on the high seas and in various ports.

I was thirteen when I settled back into a high school routine. My travel experience, the life in a remote rural area and personal temperament always had me full of dreams about venturing out into the world again, but also staying close to nature. Like Grey Owl in his Hastings neighbourhood and Anhahareo in the area surrounding Mattawa, I spent a lot of time romping around and into the forests - the deeper the better. Then, when I was 15-years old, I went through my older brother's book shelf and found a book with the title "Wäscha Kwonnesin - Der Weiße Indianer". Well, perhaps the perceptive reader might recognize that title as meaning "Wa-sha-quon-asin - The White Indian". Yes, it was a book beautifully and romantically written by a German professor living in Toronto about the life of Grey Owl and Anahareo.

I could hardly put the book down and looked again and again at some of the pictures, with romantic subtitles, such as "Mighty Mississauga - Your Song thunders over Ancient Rocks". My decision became clear right there and then: After graduating from high school, I was going to go to Canada and live in the forests like Grey Owl.

I ended up getting all of Grey Owl's books through the library. And since Grey Owl had extensively written about "The Song of Hiawatha", I got that from the library as well. In fact, because the book was no longer in print, I ended up copying the entire lengthy poem into scores of high school note books.

In the coming years, I religiously listened to the German service of Radio Canada International, held speeches in my high school class about Canada and even tried advertising in the Globe and Mail to find a host family for a one-year private youth exchange. Actually, I didn't just try, I did it. However, my parents drew the line at permitting me to go off and live with some unknown family on another continent.

As high school graduation drew nearer, I needed to think about a career. I wasn't quite as ready as Grey Owl to just move into the forests without some source of income to fall back onto. Since I had got into amateur radio in the meantime, I decided on an education in electrical engineering.

I applied to various Canadian universities and the University of Toronto just happened to be the first to respond, so that's where I enrolled. Of course, being a student, I could not get immigration papers just like that. In those days, you needed at least a job and you had to apply from outside Canada. During my first year, I washed dishes in the New College cafeteria, therefore, for the princely wage of $1,85 per hour.

At the end of the first year, I asked my boss if he could give me a full time job offer so I could apply for an immigration visa. He did. In the summer of 1974, I returned to Germany to apply for my papers. I wrote a long tear-jerk story about my emotional attachment to Canada along with my visa application and within a few weeks, I was asked to go to the Canadian consulate in Hamburg for an interview. The consul at the time, Peter Current (I remember your name, Peter!), looked at my papers, looked at me, asked whether I thought a dish-washing career was what I had in mind and then said: "Well, you have been to Canada - no point fooling around" and placed the coveted stamp in my passport.

So back I went as a bona-fide landed immigrant and could now truly say and feel that I belonged. Unfortunately, student poverty kept me pinned to Toronto most of the time, though I did manage to make a canoe trip to Algonquin Park in the fall of my second year. As I looked at the job posting for a summer job for 1975, my eye caught an advertisement from General Electric. They were looking for people willing to work 6 days per week, 12 hours per day on some generating stations near Thessalon. My heart skipped a few beats. Those stations are right on the Mississagi River. I applied and got the job and had my first chance to visit Grey Owl country. My girl friend came over from Germany that summer and since we could not stay in the motel room with another co-worker, I bought a tent and we camped on a small lake just north of Wharncliffe right up the Chapleau highway. To me, it was a dream come true. After we finished our job in Thessalon, we moved on to the New Liskeard area and carried on there. I camped out on Lake Temiskaming - in another part of Grey Owl country.

Of course, all good things must come to and end and at the end of the summer, I had to go back to university. However, my love for the North had deepened. My ties to my girl friend, on the other hand, went in the opposite direction. She was studying music in Hannover and had visions of living near cultural centres. Eventually, she told me that she could stand a place like Thessalon for at most six weeks. Since I was not about to give up the North, the only logical conclusion she could make was to break off the relationship with me - just like the relationship between Grey Owl and Conny Holmes many years before.

The experience working on the generating stations in the North changed my outlook on Electrical Engineering a little, too. Rather than specializing in electronics, as most of my classmates did, I decided to swim against the stream and specialize in power. The North needs more power engineers than electronics wizards, I figured. Furthermore, since electronics was "sexy" and power was stodgy, I figured there'd be less competition in the latter field. In my last semester, I went for the usual job interviews - among others with Ontario Hydro. When I told the recruitment officer I wanted to go north, he first asked, what I meant by that. I raved about Grey Owl country and he was satisfied. "Most people mean Orillia, when thay say North", he let on. So even though I had been an hour late for the interview through a simple misreading of the clock, he actually offered me a job! Must have been desparate for whacko engineers willing to go north.

With the job offer in hand, I walked into the Bank of Montreal branch on College and St.George and asked for $2000, so I could go travelling. I didn't want to go to the North alone, and being girlfriend-less since the breakup with Karen, I wanted to scout the scene in my old second home of Taiwan. I ended up meeting my old high-school buddy, whose sister just happened to be living with him while attending university in Taipei, and one thing led to another with the result that I got married a few weeks later.

My first posting with Hydro was with the Protection and Control crew operating out of Blind River. For three months, I enjoyed travelling to places as romantic as Wawa and Elliot Lake in white trucks with orange plugs on them. This second immersion in the North was, alas, too short, as my training officer figured I needed some head office experience. For the next six months, I was stuck in that glass palace at 700 University Avenue - the only diversion being the arrival of my wife Yu-Fang in November, after having cleared her immigration proceedings.

I kept pestering my training officer to send me back north until he suggested, he had an opening in Ottawa. I sort of sneered, saying I might as well stay in Toronto then. Ottawa is not the North! Shortly after, Hydro's marketing manager from Thunder Bay, Jim Tarling, happened to be in Toronto and he was looking for fool engineers willing to go north. We met, and he, too, tried to tell me what a terrible place it was - actually he personally loved it, but most others did not. Of course, this was just his way of testing my commitment. When he told me that the bush began just a few km past his front door, he had me hooked.

© Bob Richardson

In May of 1978 we hitched a U-Haul behind our Pontiac Laurentian and made the journey north and west, until we finally arrived in Thunder Bay. Meanwhile something else had happened! Yu-Fang had become pregnant. Somewhere back in the past I had decided that if I was to have a son, his name would be Hiawatha. If I had a daughter, her name would be Fawn Anahareo. Actually, before I had arrived in Canada, her name would have been Dawn Anahareo - but after I arrived in Canada, I found out that the name Dawn was very common, and I changed one letter, to make it a little less common. In the event that a reader has come to this page without knowing much about the Grey Owl - Anahareo story, please be advised that Grey Owl and Anahareo's daughter was named Dawn - Shirley Dawn to be precise, but generally known as Dawn.

Fawn Anahareo arrived two weeks premature and turned out to be a tiny but very pleasant baby, capturing the hearts of everyone around her with her ready smile. Less than two years later, she was followed by Anemone Camellia - a real flower child in name. We bought a house on 204 North Cumberland Street in 1980 and for the next few years, I did not actively pursue the G&A story other than spending a lot of time canoeing and camping in the areas around Thunder Bay. My job with Hydro regularly took me throughout the Great Northwest, from Manitouwadge to Fort Frances and later to places like Winisk, Fort Severn and Big Trout Lake. At that time, I put a lot of focus on building friendship with Taiwan and arranging twinnings and student exchanges with that country. Terrace Bay, Thunder Bay, Dryden and Fort Frances all have twins in Taiwan.

Sometime in 1985, there must have been a short note in the local newspaper about a painter exhibiting some oils in the Brodie Street Library. I cannot recall the exact wording of the note, but I believe it probably mentioned that some paintings related to the Grey Owl story, because I was not in the habit of going to art shows. Turns out, the painter's name was Bob Richardson and I mentioned that the Grey Owl story had fundamentally touched my life. Bob then told me that he had been married to Dawn - yes the very Dawn about whom I had only read in my romantic books. I almost fell out of my suit! I had never met anyone who actually really had first-hand knowledge of the G&A story.

I was even more amazed to hear that Anahareo was still alive and living in BC. I had probably never given much thought to the fact, that such a legendary figure could actually still be alive! I pulled a baby photo of my daugher Fawn Anahareo out of my pocket and asked Bob whether he would give it to Anahareo. I thought she might be tickled to know that a girl in Thunder Bay had been named after her and her daughter. Bob said that he would be glad to. We talked some more and I bought a painting of his showing a scene out of "Sajo and her Beaver People", which has since graced every living room we have lived in.

About a year later, I saw a very brief note in the Thunder Bay paper reporting that Anahareo had died in BC. For the next few years, the story didn't accompany me much as I built my career in Hydro. In 1989, I was appointed Area Manager in Fort Frances. I was very active in Rotary, the local ham club, 1st VP of the Chamber of Commerce, still pursued the Taiwan twinnings, but also started building bridges to the aboriginal people. This was a time of affirmative action and the face of the work force at Hydro did not reflect the high percentage of First Nations people in the Rainy River District. I went out to the reserves and built friendships with local chiefs, enjoyed taking my family to remote pow-wows and increased the native staff complement at our office from one two four.

In 1993 I took a delegation of 30 Fort Frances business people to Taiwan and stopped off in Hawaii for three days on the way back. When I spoke to Yu-Fang on the phone, she told me that Hydro was big in the news: staff levels were to be cut by one third! When I got home, all hell was loose. Incentive packages were offered for people to leave or take early retirement. Retirement was not an option for me, unfortunately, since I did not have 25 years with Hydro. I knew that my position in Fort Frances was very vulnerable and therefore scanned the papers for alternatives. Those came quickly. The Northwest Territories Power Corporation was looking for Regional Managers in Inuvik and Iqaluit. I applied, got the job, and moved my family up to Iqaluit in the summer of 1993.

This was a completely different adventure. Iqaluit was 60% Inuit and the 19 settlements I was responsible for were about 95% Inuit. For us and the kids it was a wonderful opportunity to intimately get to know a part of Canada that most Canadians know next to nothing about. On one occasion, I had a car breakdown in front of Arctic College. Since I was a CAA member, I called the emergency line in Alberta (wrong end of the country, but at that time responsible for all of the NWT), and the lady had absolutely no clue where Iqaluit could be. "What the nearest bigger city?", she demanded to know. Nuuk, Greenland, I replied. How did I drive my car up there? I didn't. I had it flown in! Fun, eh?

One of the neat things about living in Iqaluit in a senior position is the feeling that you watch and participate in history being made. You meet people like John Amagoalik, on one trip we chartered a Twin Otter for a few days and community-hopped around with Nellie Cournoyea, then premier, and in 1994 we met Jean Chrétien and then German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who were presented with a "Game of Iqaluit" by Fawn and Anemone along with other Inuksuk High School student council members.

After my experience with Ontario Hydro and the intensive involvement with the Fort Frances Chamber of Commerce, it became clear in my mind that relying solely on a job for your survival was not the safest thing in the world. I therefore looked at various business opportunities, was within a hair's breadth of getting a Canadian Tire dealership, but the upshot of it all was that I parted ways with the NWT Power Corporation in 1995. By pure accident I ran into a fellow in my old home town in Germany who wanted to sell his shoe repair and locksmithing business and that's how I started into the world of entrepreneurship. The first few years were the usual struggle of a civil servant trying to turn businessman. In 2000 we started recycling toner cartridges and selling printer consumables and the business took off quickly, so that we had to expand our premises twice since.

Meanwhile, I got re-exposed to the G&A story when Fawn's boyfriend Michael invited us to see the movie "Grey Owl" during our annual Christmas visit. Fawn and Anemone were both attending university in Ottawa at this time. Perhaps the following year, I bought some books on Amazon and chanced across a new German book "Anahareo und Grey Owl", by Elmar Engel. It tumbled out of my bookshelf in the late fall of 2002 and as I read it - this time presented more from Anahareo's side - I got back into the story. The book focussed on Anahareo's life with Grey Owl and then had about a half page at the end talking about Anahareo after the Grey Owl era. This made me wonder if there was more information on what actually happened to her in her later life, so I did an internet search and was surprised to find very little information on her in the net. In fact, there are more pages on Google on our 2.5 year-old business Toner Express than on one of the more colourful persons making up the history of Canada.

One of the most recent internet stories was of a trip by the aforementioned Bob Richardson and Anahareo's other daughter Katherine to Lake Ajawaan in 2001. I felt it was unfortunate that there was so little information on this woman, who had so profoundly affected my own life. I then decided to call Bob Richardson in Kamloops out of the blue and found to my surprise that he not only clearly remembered our brief 20 minute encounter in Thunder Bay in 1985 but even remembered which painting I had bought. We had a nice chat and ended up exchanging email addresses and started corresponding by email. As he fed me more and more information on this fascinating story, the idea for a web site grew in my mind, so that as much information as possible might be collected and published, while witnesses who had personal knowledge of this amazing story were still alive to tell it.

A lot of the information you will find here will be drawn from my email exchange with Bob Richardson, as is a lot of the art work. I welcome you to watch and enjoy these pages as they grow.

Gabe Fritzen, Lüchow, Germany, November 2002