Knox — Inheritance reveals different part of dad’s character

Jack Knox is a former Kamloops journalist who somehow ended up writing for the Victoria Times Colonist.

COLUMN — Some people inherit their parents’ fortune. Some inherit their debts.

Some are willed cars, or houses, or family heirlooms.

Ron Hitchen? He got a barnful of sewing supplies.

When Charles Hitchen died this summer at age 87, he left his son the equivalent of two semi-trailers full of the stuff, stockpiled from his long-ago days as a wholesaler.

There are snap fasteners, eyelets, leather elbow patches, maybe a million buttons, enough ribbon to wrap every Christmas present in Victoria — and Ron doesn’t have, ahem, a notion what to do with it all.

“There’s probably 150,000 zippers,” he says, craning his neck at a tower of cardboard boxes kissing the rafters of the Saanich Peninsula barn where all this is stored.

On and on it goes. Lace. Thread. At another site are four to six tonnes of dropped-forge Italian scissors. Ron, down from his home in the Interior town of Armstrong, has found maybe 100 pounds of the metal studs that go in motorcycle jackets, plus 150 pounds of rhinestones.

He has also found that his father, who projected a curmudgeonly exterior, had a gooey centre. Records show Vancouver Island’s charities did well by Charles. And about two semi-loads of sewing supplies went to Esquimalt’s non-profit Compassionate Resource Warehouse for shipment to the needier parts of the world.

Hitchen senior sounds like he was a pistol. Raised in Montreal, he joined Victoria’s Canadian Scottish during the Second World War, and was about to ship out to Europe when his parents grabbed him by the collar and hauled him back. He was only 15.

His parents couldn’t keep him down, though. Charles went in the front door and out the back, joining the merchant marine, where he criss-crossed the Atlantic in an oil tanker. “The war really caught up with him when his ship was sunk off the coast of Africa,” Ron says.

“After eight days drifting on a lifeboat, the sea fog finally cleared and they were rescued. He was reassigned to another ship within 10 days.”

At war’s end, still a teenager, he joined the Canadian Navy, eventually docking at Naden. There, he founded a hobby shop for the sailors, teaching leathercraft and whatnot. It grew into an off-base concern, becoming so successful that the brass finally asked whether he was in the navy or the hobby-shop business, and made him sell the latter.

Ticked off, he joined the Victoria police and — undeterred by a total ignorance of agriculture — bought a 5,000-hen egg farm at Elk Lake.

He got divorced in the 1960s, moved back East, and shifted into the sewing-supply business. “He travelled the world importing pins and needles by the metric tonne and packaging them along with all the other items that constitute a dressmaker’s supply wholesale business,” Ron said.

Charles sold the main piece of the business in 1991, packing what was left into five semis and moving the works back to Victoria where, at an age when most people would be settling into retirement, he bought a little shop called Ardee Merchandise at the corner of Douglas and Discovery. Ron says people remember his dad as the old grumpy guy.

“He was a workaholic. He worked six days a week and worried about the business on the seventh.”

Ron helped his dad pack up the store a few years ago, though Charles was still selling off bits and pieces of his treasure trove up until this spring.

As for the remainder, Ron isn’t sure what to do.

He does see humour in his situation, though, puzzling over 8,000 plastic school scissors and a bunch of boxes marked “bias tape makers.” (Maybe he can get on TV; Fox Business Network is making a reality show called Strange Inheritance this year.)

He’s also left with fond memories of his hard-driving father.

“He had an incredibly sharp mind,” he says. “Looking through the receipts from every charity in the land, I know he also had a soft heart.”

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