So, at deer camp this week the guys were talking and they reminded me to tell the story of the first day I worked at Lovett’s. This would have been around the first week of Sept. 1978.
As it happens, of the four of us at deer camp this year, 2 are brothers. But we all worked at Lovett’s, having met there and remaining good friends over 40 years later. We toasted the father of the brothers, who passed in August this year. He loved going to deer camp, too, and worked at Lovett’s after retiring from his career.
Anyway, back to the story of my first day at Lovett’s. I was a greenhorn, having little hunting experience besides shooting groundhogs on my grandfather’s farm with an old Cooey single-shot 22. But Keith hired me anyway and that first day on King St. W. motioned for me to follow him outside.
We went to the gravel parking lot at the side of the building, where Keith produced a can of gunpowder that he said was old and he wanted to get rid of.
He proceeded to draw a design on the gravel with it, about 12” across, then bent over and touched a flame to the powder. It “whooshed” suddenly and flared right into his face as he was bent over! I vividly remember him just kind of groaning and falling backwards in his hunched over position, his glasses fogged completely white from the powder residue!
I stood slack-jawed, the first thought through my mind being “First day on the job and I’ve killed the boss!’ He soon recovered and I helped him inside.
His wife Eileen was a Registered Nurse, so she treated him, but he ended up with 2nd and 3rd-degree burns on his face. Over the next couple of weeks his face was peeling dead skin and weeping from the water blisters. He told anyone who asked that he fell asleep under a sun lamp.
Of course, myself and the other employees there that day knew otherwise, and someone let slip what had happened. A few weeks later Keith got an unannounced visit from the RCMP to check his powder stores. Nothing ever came of it that I know of.
