If you do your best to excel at the job in front of you, life will fall into place.
That’s the advice of Buddy Hamilton, who retired on June 29 after nearly 38 years with the Insurance Corporation of B.C.
Looking back, Hamilton, a member of Hupacasath First Nation, credits his mother, the late Nessie Watts, for his successful career.
“She raised 12 of us by herself,” Hamilton said. “We were all successful, and for that we can thank her. She said, ‘If you want to be something, get off your butt and do it.’”
Like many of his contemporaries in the Alberni Valley in the 1960s, Hamilton left high school early to work hard, make money and buy the fast car. As a teenager, he bounced between jobs at Somass Division, the Plywood mill and the pulp mill, as well as working weekends at CPR Freight and Woodwards.
Then one day, while pedalling his bike across Kitsuksis Bridge, he had a vision. Well, actually, he watched a tow truck hauling what looked like a wrecked car into the Allan’s Super Service body shop, which was located at the foot of Johnston Road. Curious, the 17-year-old went into the shop, where the owner said he would have the wreck looking good as new in three months.
“That was it for me. I pedalled up to the Port Alberni Library, which was on Argyle, and got myself a couple of books about auto body work and paint work,” he said. “Up at the [Canada] Manpower Centre, they said, unless you can provide us with some pretty good ammunition, you’re going to have a three-year wait to get into trade school.”
With the kind of determination that has since become a trademark, Hamilton approached his managers at Woodwards, CPR Freight and the pulp mill for letters of recommendation, which he provided to Canada Manpower.
“Three days later, they called to say, ‘How would you like to go to trade school in Dawson Creek?’” Hamilton said. “I’d never heard of Dawson Creek. I went up in the beginning of March. When I got off the plane in Fort St. John, it was 42 degrees below zero. I went up there in my T-shirt and my running shoes and my blue jeans, and I thought, ‘What have I done?’ But when I got back, I had three jobs waiting for me.”
He chose Allan’s Super Service, the body shop that had inspired him months earlier.
“It was the height of the Super Car era: the Super Bees, the Challengers, the Roadrunners. I had the pleasure of working on all those vehicles,” he said. Hamilton stayed with the shop when it was taken over by Pollard West Motors, the local Chrysler dealer, and then later by Can Do Auto Body, and was eventually hired away by Don Reid, who owned the top auto body shop in the Valley.
At around the same time, the province had taken the massive step of creating a Crown corporation to deliver auto insurance. It was a controversial move, and ICBC scrambled to find qualified staff that knew their way around an auto body.
“I was painting a Corvette at Reid Auto Body when ICBC called me up to join the troops. It was about six months after they started operations,” Hamilton said.
For Hamilton, the invitation posed a dilemma: on one hand, he was at the top of his game in the body shop and earning a good paycheque, but the thought of trading in his coveralls for a desk job looked pretty attractive. As he often did over the years, he turned to his mother for advice.
“She said, ‘Here you come home every night reeking of paint. Your hands are filthy with paint and primer and thinner. Do you really want to be smelling like that for the rest of your life? Not to mention the damage it’s probably doing to your lungs and your health?’”
It was late 1974. Hamilton made the jump to ICBC, and over the next few years watched as economic conditions in the Valley changed from boom times to bust. He watched as many of his friends, who had bounced around from mill job to mill job, or worked seasonally in the woods, failed to lock up enough seniority to keep one of those high-paying jobs.
For motorists, having a one-stop shopping centre for insurance claims proved to be popular.
“People just loved us to death. They’d say, ‘You mean I don’t have to get three estimates?’ In the old days, when you got the low estimate, that’s where you had to go,” Hamilton explained.
Over the years, Hamilton raised two sons, Randy, now 41, and Aaron, 31, and has served the community in a variety of roles, as an RCMP Auxiliary officer, on the city parks and recreation advisory board and on the boards of the Alberni Valley Co-op and North Island College, to name just a few.
He has also striven to keep up with all the changes in the auto industry, and for three generations of Alberni Valley drivers, he has been the reassuring presence when you wheel your wounded vehicle into the service bay. Back on Feb. 1, he turned 65, and while most people would have been out the door like a shot, he took his time putting the cap on his career.
Nowadays, young people are being warned that they cannot expect to spend their entire career within one profession or industry. Hamilton said maintaining a professional image and behaviour go a long way towards staying employed and making your way in the world.
“You definitely have to have a trade, to start with,” he said. “Politeness brings you a long way. And whatever job you are fortunate to have, excel in it. That’s your track record, and if for some reason that job is no longer existent, you have some good credentials to bring to the next one.”
Hamilton has already fielded a number of job offers, but don’t look for him to hang up the “Consultant” sign any time soon. He and his partner, Shelagh, plan to take to the road in their motor home in August.
“We’re going to be travelling to lots of places and we have no commitments anywhere,” he said.
