Boomers Still Rule. Phone Scams, the Lachine Canal and Living to 110
March 27, 2023 Volume 3 # 49
Boomers Still Rule
Interesting chart. I hate to be a homer but the Prime Minister of Canada isn’t listed. For the record Justin Trudeau was born on Christmas Day, 1971 so he is Gen X.
Population: Canada compared to Africa
Last year Canada’s population increased by a million people for the first time ever, to a total of 39.57-million. It’s the fastest growing population in the G-7 rich countries.
Just the city of Lagos increased by more than a million year over year. The 10 African cities on this list have more people than any Canadian city and the top three more than any Canadian province.
The Lachine Canal
The Lachine Canal was opened in 1825, the same year as the Erie Canal. The Lachine Canal by-passed the shallow Lachine Rapids. At the time the port of Montreal was the farthest an ocean going ship could go. The Canal allowed sailing ships, and later tramp steamers, to going father up the St. Lawrence River and eventually into the Great Lakes. There were other canals on the St. Lawrence: the Soulange Canal (1899) and the Galop Canal (1846) that kept making it easier to get into the Great Lakes.
As you can see from the photos below, heavy industry developed along the Lachine Canal. Today it is a popular recreational area: no railway, only bike and walking paths, and only pleasure boats. The Lachine Canal was replaced by the St. Lawrence Seaway.
This description was something I wrote several years ago:
The reason for building the Seaway was simple. The St Lawrence River between Montreal and Lake Ontario was blocked to shipping by a series of rapids and shallow water that stopped ships from entering the Great Lakes and serving the cities and industries that border them. Before the Seaway was built large ocean-going ships stopped at Montreal.
In the 19th century the solution was a series of canals starting with the Lachine Canal to get past the rapids at Montreal and into Lake St. Louis, in fact not a lake but a wide stretch of the St. Lawrence River. From there ships went through the Soulanges Canal to avoid rapids at Valleyfield, another at Cornwall and just past Iroquois the Galop Canal, spelled with a single “l” and named after the engineer who built it and not a horse at speed.
These canals were constantly being expanded and the size of the ships that could navigate them grew. But the ships were still small and the current was so strong in places that many smaller ships ran aground outside the narrow shipping lanes, as they didn’t have enough skill or power to fight the fast moving water.
No One Answers the Phone
As someone who loves the phone, it drives me nuts that most people don’t pick it up.
This is especially true of younger people, and that means anyone under 55. It is seen as an annoyance. They often tell you to leave an email.
There is a lot of nuance in a phone call that is missing in a text or email. Sometimes all you need is a few minutes on the phone, a lot faster than composing an email.
And the most annoying micro waster of time: “Please listen carefully as our options have changed.” It implies I memorized their last instructions. No one does that.
And the Reason they Might Not Answer
Endless scam calls from the tax man or the woman from Visa. The Toronto Star ran a piece this weekend about how phone companies have actually cut out some fraud calls.
The paper reports that the amount of fraud reported is the tip of the scam iceberg. People are embarrassed to admit they were silly enough to fall for the phishing.
Dumb Scam of the Week
This popped into my inbox from someone named Harold. First off there is a grammatical error in line one. The whole thing is a mess, but then maybe some real life tech Geek flunked grade 7 grammar too.
So I decided to call Harold. He answered on the second ring. English is not Harold’s first language, but then we live in an age of immigration, which is a good thing. But I think this gentleman is calling from a far away sub-continent. So I asked the man on the other end: “Is this the Best Buy Geek Squad?…Yes it is the Best Buy Geek Squad. Where are you located? California. Really. What is the capital of California. An instant reposes: Los Angeles. Sorry, it’s Sacremento.” Click.
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Two Birds of Prey
The Peregrine Falcon and the stealth B2 Bomber.
The Peregrine Falcon is the fastest bird and this is how it streamlines itself for a dive when it has been measured at 389 kilometres an hour, or 242 mph. The photo above is the Peregrine in dive mode. It is about the same size as a crow or even a pigeon.
The B-2 Bomber doesn’t have to fly fast —top speed 630 mph or Mach .95— because it is almost invisible. It ha s a radar profile the size of a pigeon. It looks small but it is a heavy bomber and can carry nuclear weapons or 80 five-hundred pound bombs.
Essay of the Week
Not many people live beyond 110. They are called Super Centenarians. When I wrote this story for the Globe and Mail in 2016 Zoltan Sarosy was the oldest man in Canada: 110. Back then there were four 110 plus people in the country. Today there are nine Super Centenarians There is only one man on the list; he is 111. The oldest person in Canada is Mabel Mah who is 112 and 266 days old as of Sunday. She lives in British Columbia. Mr. Sarosy died 300 days after I interviewed him.
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Zoltan Sarosy was just two months shy of his eighth birthday when Archduke Franz Ferdinand of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was assassinated in Sarajevo, setting in motion the crisis that led to the First World War. The young Hungarian boy was living on a military base on the Adriatic, where his father was a doctor in the army.
"One morning I came out of my room to see my mother packing.
She said war is coming, we have to leave within 12 hours," Mr. Sarosy says. Soon they were on a torpedo boat that took them to a port in Herzegovina and from there to a passenger ship to Trieste and finally to a train to Budapest.
It's safe to say Mr. Sarosy is the only man in Canada who remembers where he was when the First World War started. He's celebrating his 110th birthday on Aug. 23, and while there are no individual Statistics Canada records to point to, that will likely make him the oldest man in Canada. (Wikipedia has a page on Canadian super centenarians, or those 110 and older. It says there are three people in Canada older than Mr. Sarosy, all of them women.)
Today, Mr. Sarosy lives in a seniors' home on Bloor Street West, across from High Park. Though he now uses a wheelchair to get around - at 102, he finally conceded he could use some help and got a mobility scooter - his mind is still sharp, perhaps from a lifetime of chess.
"He remembers the past but what amazes me is his short-term memory," says Elena Yeryomenko, lifestyle program manager at the Chartwell Grenadier Retirement Residence Mr. Sarosy calls home. "It is phenomenal at this age to have such a sharp mind.
He remembers his life as a child and he remembers what he had for breakfast." Mr. Sarosy is still curious about the new. The interview is being recorded on a smartphone, and he wants to know how it works as a recorder. "A marvellous little machine," he calls it.
He has a computer he bought in 1999 to play chess. At the time he played correspondence chess whereby people from around the world would mail each other the next move. Since games could take four or five years, he felt that at 93 he might not be around to finish a game.
Mr. Sarosy was born in 1906 in Budapest, the second capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He started playing chess in public parks at the age of 10.
"I was with my mother and I saw a boy playing chess and I asked, 'What is that?' The next day I was back at the park. That boy's mother wouldn't let me play with him but I found others," said Mr. Sarosy.
He continued playing in school and at university in Vienna, where he studied international trade. He graduated in 1928 and returned to Budapest where he continued his chess career. He was soon a grandmaster.
"In 1943, I played in the Hungarian championship and gained the Hungarian [chess] master title," he says.
Young Zoltan was fluent in Hungarian and German, a skill that probably saved his life in the Second World War. In 1944, he volunteered as a translator when other Hungarian men his age were drafted and sent to the Eastern Front.
At the end of the war he fled Hungary, worried that Russians might have him imprisoned for being a military translator. He left his wife and daughter behind. He later sent for them when he was in Canada, but his wife refused to leave Hungary so they divorced.
Once over the border in Austria, he managed to find a room in Salzburg, then moved to a refugee camp. He then drifted across Europe, ending up in Alsace, the German-speaking province taken back by France after the war. In 1950, he read that Canada was looking for immigrants and he went to Paris to get papers.
He arrived in Halifax on Dec. 27, 1950, and then took the train to Toronto. He soon found a room on Kendall Avenue and work laying tiles on an upper floor at the new Bank of Nova Scotia building at King and Bay in January, 1951.
"I started my career in Toronto at a high level," he jokes.
He didn't like working for other people. "I wanted to be independent, so I started selling cosmetics. Eventually I thought it was much better if I imported them myself," he says.
After several years, he bought a convenience store in the Roncesvalles neighbourhood, which he ran until the late 1970s. All the while, he still played chess. He won his first championship in Canada in 1955 and was Canadian Correspondence Champion in 1967, 1972 and 1981. He is a member of the Canadian Chess Hall of Fame.
After divorcing his first wife, he married Heino Mallo, an Estonian immigrant, in Canada. His daughter from Hungary came to visit him in Canada at one stage with the intention of living here. "She didn't want to stay, silly girl," Mr. Sarosy says.
He and his wife lived on Royal York Road in Mimico, just west of downtown Toronto, a couple of hundred metres from Lake Ontario. His wife died in 1998 and he sold his house and moved into the Grenadier home in 2000. For the next decade he was completely mobile, did his own shopping and walked everywhere.
When he was about 102 he started riding a mobility scooter, and used that until two years ago.
Mr. Sarosy laughs when asked about the secret to his long life.
He has a couple of ideas: He tried smoking when he was a teenager, but he didn't like it so he quit; he was a light drinker, just the occasional brandy. But he still hasn't figured it all out quite yet.
"I'm still working on the formula. However, when I get it, I'll go to the patent office," he says. "I'm like an old used car with rusty body, wobbly wheels but a good engine."