I’ll Miss Our Conversations

My dad was an innovative thinker and industry revolutionionist. He was always conjuring up some great new invention from inventing pine tree planting machines to taking a resin operation using hot processes with boilers and complexity, to a completely new process. Something I will always love about him is that he constantly challenged conventional thinking. Stories from my aunt Dot and Cath made it clear that this trend started from way back when he was a teenager! 

As I think about my dad, memories upon memories are awakened. I’ll list a few of them here since I did not have the opportunity to speak to him and let him know that these fond memories are part of his legacy left behind with me.

He worked hard. His first fortune was made by taking over a failing transport company and turning it around by doing the counterintuitive thing and buying new vehicles. Everyone, including my dad’s ex-boss from whom he had bought the company, assumed he would fail. They were wrong and Associated Motor Services went from strength to strength. It was the kind of left-field thinking my dad loved and did in every industry he touched.

I remember him studying for his transport exams when I was in high school, and instead of just studying things about trailer design, like everyone else, he would tell me the design flaws and how he would redesign them for improved efficiency. Later he did exactly that when he ordered trailers for his own companies, instructing the trailer companies on how to build better trailers. And he was right.

In recent years he restarted the resin operation when everyone else thought it was irrecoverable. He was in the middle of the next grand phase of that business, building his own processing plant. I suspect he’s upstairs already expanding operations and figuring out how to tap some heavenly trees.

My dad always said he came from humble beginnings. I can attest to this because I was there. My dad used to refurbish and sell cars for extra cash. One year we left for a ‘holiday by the sea’ in a bakkie my dad had converted for the purpose, putting benches in the back. I remember my dad repairing that vehicle several times on the journey down, once using tools lent reluctantly, and an overgrown and abandoned ramp covered in blackjack weeds.

I also remember stock car evenings in Rhodesia. Mad racing around a dirt track - I can remember the sounds, the smell of petrol fumes, and the tension of competition in the air. Weekends were for racing and weekdays were for rebuilding the cars for the next weekend. I can still remember how the sense of excitement and adventure was palpable on those evenings at the track. He loved it. I loved it when I saw how much he loved it.

My dad also loved to show us interesting things. Like a very large python crossing the road one evening when we were very young. My dad jumped out of the car and pulled on the python’s tail to get it back into the road so we could see it properly. Feeling trapped, I remember the snake turning back to sort out the problem and my dad falling as the resistance suddenly disappeared. He was unphased, popped back in the car and continued the journey with much discussion about that engagement. He looked like a superhero.

When we lived in Gwelo my dad had a bird aviary. One of the things he needed was termites to feed a specific breed of bird. We got those termites by driving his Renault 11 sedan through the bush, sometimes racing through the veld like it was a jeep, chasing something or other. It wasn’t a jeep, but it was a company car which my dad said made it incredibly versatile (if you know what he meant...). The other trick that ‘company car’ could do was open the gates to our yard with just the right nudge from the bumper. The coolest thing ever!

And one last superhero story. One day, coming back from Lake McIlwaine, we drove into our driveway at Lomagundi Road to find robbers cleaning out the place. My dad and my aunt Cathy raced into the house unarmed and confronted the thieves. My dad swung on the security gate and kicked a guy running down the passage but he managed to charge past whereupon he got walloped with a footstool by Cathy - the guy was tough! I can still clearly see that move and green footstool in my mind like it was yesterday. The coolest thing ever! 

In his private life my dad was always the life and soul of any party or gathering. Large in stature and personality, his voice booming, he was seldom far from the centre of attention. And he made things happen. When the Heatonville club closed down, he started a braai evening on Wednesday nights at Intaba Ingwe. He seldom never missed a Wednesday if he was on the farm.

That braai evening soon grew with people coming from as far away as Empangeni and beyond. On some occasions there were fifty or more people braaing, drinking, and generally having a grand time underneath the huge trees and next to the dam frequented by hippos. My dad and his sister Cathy were the stalwarts and core of those evenings. The evenings I joined were great moments of political discussion, commercial debates all with a beer in hand, listening to the hippos belt out their pleas to join our party.

While Dene and Tracey got intimately involved in the family business, I forged a different path in Johannesburg having studied information technology. I did eventually move into the family business for a short time, and that resulted in living on Intaba Ingwe, a few metres from my parent’s house, for 13 years.

It’s funny how you don’t realise as a kid that your parents had hope and dreams too. My dad’s was to be a farmer - something I only found out when I was about 40 and the subject came up for some reason I don’t recall. To fulfil that dream my dad built Intaba Ingwe, creating a game farm paradise and housing development that will be appreciated for generations to come by the families that live there.

Our kids grew up there. We bought the first house he built, with my parents watching as our daughter Dakotah learnt to ride horses, riding several times a day virtually every day she was on the farm. My mom and dad loved to stand on their verandah and watch Dakotah ride and train her two rescue horses, Penny and Blake.

I have nearly 50 years of stories, but I have to end this tribute somewhere. I’d have to write a book to tell them all - maybe one day I will.

I will end for now by saying this. I loved nothing better than to walk up to my parents’ house on Intaba Ingwe, a farm where my dad built his dream we all got to share for a few years, and have a beer with my dad.

We would shoot the breeze, discussing business, politics, sport, and a host of other topics. We didn’t always agree but as we both got older the arguments became debates, and the debates became conversations. I know he loved our conversations as much as I did.

I will miss our conversations.