Not Quite Fatherless (June 2005)
At the First "Star Wars" With an Alberta Film Pioneer (May 2005)
Men and Breast Cancer Awareness Month (October 2003)
By Keltie Zubko
Now that there’s no possible way of reaching my Dad with
a card on Father’s Day, I understand the biting loneliness he felt when any of
his five children didn’t contact him then. Some mornings I wake up feeling
I’ve traveled a million solitary miles, and still cannot find him. Lost
opportunities to pick up the phone or visit him, reproach me. After all, my
father visited his mother just about everyday, checking on her as she lived into
her nineties, still in her own home.
I miss him particularly around my own son, who at fifteen,
embodies some of my Dad’s most defining characteristics. It’s like watching
a ghost from the past, superimposed upon the present when my son explains how he
made a certain part, or what it’s intended to do, holding the bits of metal as
he shows them to us, as if they are speaking directly to him, through his
fingertips in a language my husband and I cannot understand. I see my father,
who built Alberta’s first motion picture processing machine out of scrap he
purchased from the Italian government, his own ingenuity and daring, and the
metal lathe that my son now covets.
Having come to this country when he was nine, my dad had a much larger vocabulary in his immigrant’s Russian than in the English that we, his children, spoke. So he was shy and sparing with his words, both spoken and written, but with his hands, guided by a mechanical brilliance, he was certain.
He started out penniless, with no resources from his family, on a homestead in northern Alberta, with only his inborn talent, a desire to create things, respect for hard work, and the never-failing conviction that he could do it. He could fabricate any part, and with his passion for the technology of film-making in its early days, he started his own business. It turned into a world for us, his children, to occupy, built from his dogged persistence, and enormous faith in the ability to find a solution for every problem.
All five of us worked for and with him, at one time, through many difficulties. Three of my brothers still run the company that grew from his, Cine Audio Visual, in Edmonton and Calgary. He was the one to give us whatever tools we needed to pursue our interests. To him, tools were the sacred embodiment of someone’s longing to create. For my brothers, it was the latest electronic, photographic, avionic or mechanical gadgets, and the space and freedom to use them. For me, it was books, a typewriter when I was sixteen, music, and endless faith in me. He was also the one who told me when I complained in later years of “too much work” to be glad that I could work, and that I had work. He spent his retirement years, still coming into the business, helping wherever he could, his quiet interest underscoring everything that happened there. He died in 2000.
My son, just like my father is self-taught, avidly reading technical books as if they were adventure stories, studying the Internet for tips and ideas, and delighting to learn by trial and error. With my son, I make the same sort of expeditions that I did as a very small girl, going with my Dad to surplus auctions, and metal, hardware or tool stores. I spent hours watching him contemplate materials and tools lit by some kind of inner vision of what he planned to build. And then I saw the results.
I’m still doing that, only now with my fifteen-year-old son.
On one such recent trip, as I watched him examine some parts he wanted to buy, the irony of this young man, starting from where his grandfather did, some seventy years ago, caught up with me. As I stood there, overwhelmed with disappointment that these two like souls have missed knowing each other, an older man, working at the store, appeared from nowhere, to ask if he could help us find something. Though I am usually as reticent as my father was, something made me confide to this man, my son’s aspiration to own a metal lathe. That said it all, and he switched his attention away from me, focussing not on my son’s youth, long hair, and reserve, but instead drew out the aspiring machinist, the creator “just starting out,” hungry to learn.
The past merged with the present, and I saw all the young film-makers my father had helped by fixing or modifying their equipment, teaching them the tricks he’d discovered or learned, and just listening to their plans and dreams, encouraging with his benevolent attention.
We’ve made quite a few trips back to that store, to visit this man, who is actually retired, but works there because he knows so much and wants to be around the tools. My son has gone to his home, seen his lathe, sought his advice, and through it, been placed much further ahead on the path to his dreams.
I am reminded of an old business card of my Dad’s upon the back of which he’d written one of his brief, almost cryptic messages to someone who was supposed to meet him at the office: “I won’t be here all day long,” signing it as he always did, with his initials “NJZ” only.
Those words I take to heart. They drive me to appreciate today all the fathers I know, and not just mourn the absence of my own. Though he isn’t here, there are others who recreate and pass on everyday, everything that my father gave me. I think I’ll send the guy at the tool store a Father’s Day card. He won’t be there “all day long” either.
By Keltie Zubko
On May 19th, just after midnight, as I sit in
the darkened theatre with my children and let the trumpeting theme sweep over me
once again, as the last piece of the Star Wars saga unfolds, there will be a
ghostly presence occupying the seat next to me, like almost 30 years ago, on May
25th, 1977, in a near-empty theatre in downtown Edmonton.
These days, after five previous Star Wars episodes in the
double cycle phenomenon of films, it’s to be expected that millions of people
are eagerly awaiting and talking about the unveiling of the last tale. It was
very different 28 years ago.
My Dad, Nick Zubko, was a pioneer of the film industry in
Alberta, who had his chance at Hollywood, but instead opted for the microcosm of
the greater film world that was struggling to exist in Alberta. There he founded
the first motion picture film lab, provided post-production facilities and as a
cinematography adept in his own right, gave advice and equipment, fostering many
young film-makers who had dreams like George Lucas.
In those years, all five of his children, worked with him
in that business. He was the first President of AMPIA (Alberta Motion Picture
Industries Association), had made his own award-winning film, and was a genius
at modifying equipment to do the things filmmakers needed done. He kept current
with filmmaking innovations by reading “American Cinematographer” and the
“Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Technicians and Engineers,” and
maintained many contacts and friendships throughout the film world. In the
mid-seventies articles started appearing about the innovations of Lucas, due to
be revealed in his “Star Wars” movie. Those words at that time had no
meaning to us. It’s hard to imagine a universe like that, now.
We thought perhaps his anticipation was rather out of
proportion for our quiet, unassuming father. Since his first love was technology
in the service of creativity, for months, we heard about an unknown forthcoming
movie, and what it would mean not just in Hollywood, but in Alberta, to the
burgeoning film community of people such as Anne Wheeler, Fil Fraser and many
others. Dad maintained that the work of Lucas’ Industrial Light and Magic, the
remarkable special effects, the revolutionary use of sound and other aspects of
the movie yet to be revealed would have huge implications for those young people
he knew and helped who aspired to make great movies.
May 25th, 1977 finally arrived, just as May 19th,
2005 will come next Thursday, but with quite a few differences. Today my
daughter has her Jedi robe and light sabre ready; we of course have tickets for
the 12:01 am showing, and we’re ready to line up hours before to get the best
seats. On that other day, decades ago, the six of us had to sneak out of the
business, claiming an “important meeting,” leaving it, in the hands of a
non-family member. My father had set the pattern that he was always on call to
filmmakers, to help them with their problems, 24 hours a day. That day, he
couldn’t resist simply walking out for several precious hours, a few blocks
downtown to the old Paramount theatre.
We got there early but there were no line-ups; it could
have been the opening of any film, on any day. Dad was disappointed nothing
heralded what he was sure would be a shooting star on the film scene,
illuminating many things for the benefit of all creators in that medium.
We sat all in a row, in the best seats of the theatre, my
father, my four brothers and me, facing the blank unknown of the pre-Star Wars
era.
And then John Williams’ music took over, the titles
ascended in their peculiar, dramatic manner for the very first time, and we had
the conception of limitless, boundless space before the action commenced.
Enthralled, I saw my father’s expectation rewarded. It was a technical
revolution. I wish my children could experience the same thing next Thursday,
just after midnight, but I know that 28 years ago, we lived through a first that
popular culture has subsumed and moved past.
The Alberta film industry has continued to grow,
integrating the work of George Lucas; my brothers continue in the family
business to be part of it, now with the digital revolution that my father
anticipated. The special effects that held him in awe in the first “Star
Wars” have become commonplace and then obsolete, but keeping my father’s
faith, I know there’s always more to come.
I’ll never forget sitting in the dimness of the theatre
illuminated only by the stars of a newly discovered galaxy as my father eagerly
absorbed the implications of what George Lucas had done, and projected its
possibilities onto the Alberta film scene, finding inspiration for his part in
it all. So this Thursday, sitting beside my children in a theatre far, far away
from the old Edmonton Paramount, as we discover the great mystery behind the
downfall of Luke and Leia’s father, I will feel the presence of my own father,
and know that this is not the end of the saga.
Nick Zubko died in 2000. His sons, Josh, Daryl and Scott continue to run Cine Audio Visual in Edmonton and Calgary. Keltie Zubko lives in Victoria BC and has a son with the same mechanical genius as his grandfather.
(October 2003: The author, Keltie Zubko, is a free-lance writer from Victoria, B.C., and is currently undergoing chemotherapy, following surgery for breast cancer.)
As I lay in my bedroom in the inevitable fog created by the chemo and anti-nausea drugs wafting through the window from down the street comes the usual Saturday argument of some neighbours, she a high-pitched reiteration of his weekly wrongs and he a low, almost inaudible defensive counter-point. Downstairs, my daughter is busy with her best friend, trying on the trappings of adolescence, where it’s safe at home, and my son is out with his father coming face to face with wood working tools and projects at a local wood craft show. I am laying up here almost immobile, while my mind insists on winding backwards delving into the past. I’ve gone pretty quickly through the “why me?” stage, through the despair of “what the hell next?” and “there’ll never be the same normal life again” and now I’m searching for gratitude through the avenues of past influences on my life. I have been remembering the men in my life.
I sent my husband today to a free PSA testing clinic held at a local Victoria mall. During this month of focusing on breast cancer there’s one week set aside for men’s health, and when I consider how generally conscientious women are about their health, and how lax the men we love are, it seems too little. In any case, my husband finally responded to my nagging to just get down there, only to find a line up of about 500 guys (this is according to his calculations, not mine!) one half hour before they closed and now he tells me he will indeed get to his own doctor and have the yearly physical that will cover the past several years and probably a couple into the future. At least our son tells him that he should be smart like me, so smart that my tumor was caught only by a mammogram in fairly early stages, giving hopefully a somewhat better prognosis.
I can’t think of that right now, and instead of the noise from the argument outside, remember the sounds of my childhood, and retreat into memories of the men I’ve met and loved and met and missed loving. The first was a five year old little golden haired cherub of a boy who lived with his grandparents down the street in Edmonton, in the days when there were still neighborhoods there and packs of kids wandered from yard to yard, playing from early morning till dusk and mothers’ voices started hauling them back to their homes. Those days were untouched by sexually correct awarenesses. They were the fifties and both men’s diseases and women’s diseases were still unpoliticized; there was no comparison about the amount of media time or amount of government spending devoted to breasts versus prostrates. Innocent days for a child to expand and grow in, back then.
I was five too, and Paddy held the attraction of not being my brother, of which I had by that time, three, hellions each one of them, tearing through the neighborhood (those that could run) with the avidness of boys, never pausing for girls except to terrorize them, so when Paddy, an only child, being raised by quiet older people came to roost on my front steps, it was a real treat. Almost as delicious as the strawberries his Scottish grandfather would treat me to from his spectacular garden whenever I visited his house. Almost as delicious as the kind gleaming eyes of his grandfather, as he offered me the rare treat of those sweet berries.
Paddy showed me another side to masculinity in those days. Perhaps he was the fore-runner of the “new sensitive male” but I like to think he merely showed me what most men have always contained, somewhere in their souls. He used to sit with me halfway up our tall front steps, right next to me, and actually talk about things, life, what was going on in the street. He never teased me like my brothers did. We’d watch the wild shrieking games, sometimes taking part, and comment. Pretty precocious, I think now. And so did his grandmother, who one day caught Paddy kissing me there on the steps in the bright sunshine, when she happened to come over to get him for lunch. She never called his name the way mothers would, who were usually tethered to their homes by younger siblings. No, she would march down the street, searching with gimlet eyes for Mischief. And I guess she sure found it brazenly open to the purview of the entire neighbourhood that day in our yard, with my first and probably most delightful kiss ever.
I can still remember the gentleness of that little boy’s mouth on my cheek. (See how innocent that was: not on my mouth, even.) But what was infinitely promising was also the end, for before there could be another, he was snatched away and his ministrations to me converted into a sin of great magnitude. He was berated and what we would nowadays call “grounded”, I was shamed and my mother also for not keeping a closer watch. That was the end of any explorations with Paddy, any friendship with Paddy, any more sweet strawberries melting on my tongue, from the grandfather.
And the beginning of revelations about male female relations, that now thinking back, have been continuing, as they do for all of us, for the rest of my life. I wish I could find Paddy Stevenson and thank him for that one exquisite blinding flash of light into the heart of what can exist in (an albeit young) man’s soul, that has sent me searching in appreciation of it for my life since. Although I have no thanks to his grandmother, she too, gave me insight of a different kind, to be vigilant for the men in my life, not to have their impulses toward kindness and love and sensitivity squelched prematurely by women looking for the darkness of their intentions, without giving them a chance to be the heroes they can be.
So I was glad to hear of all the men standing in line to get their PSA tests and I hope that Paddy, wherever he is, has some woman looking out for him, not just in Men’s Health Week, in this Pink Month, but every day.