Crazy Town: The Rob Ford Story Read Online Free PDF

ensure that his children would know it too.
    Doug Sr. was raised in a rundown neighbourhood in the east end of Toronto. He lived in a small house with hismother and nearly enough brothers and sisters—nine—to field a football team. He never met his father. His mother picked up whatever work she could find, usually doing laundry, to try to keep food on the table. It was never enough.
    Doug Sr. was not yet a teenager by the time he quit school to start working. Eventually, he got a job as a salesman. He was a natural. Doug Sr. was charming and warm. His good looks didn’t hurt either. Standing six feet tall, with his chiselled jaw, thick golden hair, and dashing smile, he looked like a movie star. The girls used to giggle when he walked by. He was a longdistance swimmer. In 1954, he attempted to swim across Lake Ontario alongside sixteen-year-old Marilyn Bell. He didn’t make it, but Bell emerged a national celebrity, after nearly 21 hours, 52 kilometres, and 70,000 strokes.
    Doug Sr. kept training, and on the side worked as a lifeguard. It was at the local pool that he first caught sight of a beautiful, blond Diane Campbell. According to family legend, Doug Sr. wooed her with a promise: “Marry me and you’ll be marrying a millionaire.”
    Diane Campbell lived in the north end of the city. Her family was not rich, but it was better off than most. Diane’s father, Clarence, was a manager with a power plant contracting company. A serious man who used to smoke cigars at his desk, he was not at all impressed by the young man who pulled up on a motorcycle to take his daughter on a date. But Doug Sr., the consummate salesman, eventually won the Campbells over too. Diane and Doug were married on September 1, 1956.
    The young couple moved into a modest apartment on Wilson Avenue in the north end of the city near the highway. Next door was another young couple, Ted and Patricia Herriott.Ted had just finished school and was helping set up a Toronto division of the American-based Avery label company.
    Doug Sr. was working as a salesman at a meat packing plant. He would go door to door moving product. And he was good at it, earning Salesman of the Month, month after month. Years later, when Doug Sr. was in the provincial parliament, he talked about those days with a colleague at Queen’s Park, John Parker, the member of parliament for York East.
    Doug Sr. told Parker that he was one of the best at the company. “And he’d say to me, ‘And you know why I was, John? Because I had to be!’
    “Doug took great pride in the fact that he’d pulled himself out of poverty,” Parker said. “He always said he was just a typical guy, with a bit more hustle than the rest of them. A bit more savvy. He got up earlier. Served the customer better. Somewhere along the line, he developed the credo: you’ve got to rely on yourself. The only one you can trust is the guy looking back at you in the mirror.”
    On the home front, the Fords spent a lot of time with their neighbours the Herriotts. Both families had young children. The friendship started with borrowed cups of milk, and soon they were having dinners together. Ted liked Doug Sr.’s spunk. And when a sales job came up at Avery, he recommended his new friend.
    In the early 1960s, Ted began getting restless at work. He was tired of making money for someone else. “My wife and I talked about it. We decided we’d rather be the head of a sardine than the tail of a whale,” Ted recalled. “I asked Doug if he wanted to go it alone—and he agreed.”
    At the time, “pressure sensitive labels” was still a newtechnology. In the old days, you had a company’s logo printed on paper and then someone had to paint the glue on. Avery was one of the first to make the paper itself sticky. And they were making a killing. Avery’s markups were big. Ted was convinced that he and Doug Sr. could offer the same quality for a fraction of the price. And if they were lucky, some of Avery’s clients