Sorry this got kind of long, but it's hard to cram fifty years into two or three paragraphs. This is pretty much the bio that was on the personal website I had a few years ago. I don't have that site anymore, so I might as well add a bit about how being a student at Mt. Doug helped shape my life, and post it here.
After high school I had many interests, mainly electronics, computer programming, woodwork, and music. It was hard to decide which career path to follow and I spent about three years trying to figure it out. During that time I started a small company where I built stage lighting equipment, speaker cabinets, audio amplifiers, digital clocks, and various other electronic items. I was with a couple of local rock bands as the lighting guy, and I supplied music, equipment, and DJ services for dances and wedding receptions. I planned to go to BCIT but I ended up staying in Victoria and taking home study courses in electronics and radio broadcasting from private post-secondary schools. I also worked at Don Mee Restaurant delivering food and sometimes managing the delivery department. I even learned a bit of Chinese while working there.
I was always fascinated with Canada's north, so in 1977 when CKRW Radio in Whitehorse was interested in hiring me I jumped at the chance. The station’s format was contemporary pop with more rock music added in the evenings. I did electronic maintenance for equipment in the studios and at the transmitter site. I was on the air a few evenings a week with a DJ show and I eventually became the station’s music director. The experience was great. I saw midnight sun in the summer. Imagine stepping out of a bar at 2 AM and it's broad daylight! Also imagine waking up at noon in the winter and it's pitch dark outside. Or walking home after work in the dark and it's -46 degrees! My summer vacation was a road trip through parts of Yukon and Alaska. I saw Dawson City, which is much the same as it was back in the Goldrush days, and I got to Anchorage, which was trying very hard to look like a big American city.
But I always liked Vancouver, too. So when an opportunity to move there came along about the time my second Yukon winter was beginning, I took it. I was offered a job helping to build one of Vancouver’s first 48-track recording studios, Water Street Sound. It was located on the fifth floor of a heritage building in Vancouver’s historic Gastown district. I began working there at the start of 1979. I did some electronics and electrical work, but mainly it was the start of my professional woodworking career.
Woodworking runs in my family so that’s how I got my passion for it. My father wasn’t a professional carpenter but he was an an excellent woodworker so I learned about building furniture and cabinetry from him. Taking woodshop classes in school helped, especially in Grade 10 at Cedar Hill when I had John Frey as the teacher. His high standards taught me the importance of attention to detail. I was also fortunate to have Bill Myles as the teacher for Woodwork 11 at Mt. Doug. He was a top notch craftsman and I learned a lot in his class. Honorable mention also goes to Colin Quail. I wasn’t in one of his woodworking classes but what he taught me in Drafting 11 comes in handy whenever I design something. I also developed a lot of woodworking techniques on my own. Other than that I had no formal woodworking training. But I always enjoyed building things out of wood, especially furniture, so it was good to finally get paid for doing it.
At Water Street Sound I built all the custom consoles and cabinetry needed for the control rooms and I did the finishing carpentry. I worked there for almost two years, which is how long it took to build the studio. After construction was finished I could have stayed on as a technician or even a recording engineer. However I moved on because despite the studio being state-of-the-art for the time, it became clear it would never really take off due to its poor location and management. The studio went out of business a couple of years later.
I started doing freelance woodworking in 1981. My biggest client was Gastown Productions, a video post-production facility located in the same building as Water Street Sound. They had only been in business for about a year and a half at the time but they already had a reputation as the best post-production facility in western Canada. They eventually hired me full-time and it looked like I finally found my niche. The pay was good, I got along well with the owners and the other staff, and I got to use skills from all of my interests. I was even a guitar player in a few bands other employees and I formed.
I worked on renovations as the company began taking over other floors in the building. I did electronic maintenance and installations. I designed and built custom electronic equipment they needed. I also built all the custom furniture needed for the control rooms, equipment areas, and offices. As they expanded, I moved more and more into just doing woodwork, especially after they moved from Water Street to a big building on West 2nd Avenue.
It’s unusual for a facility like that to have a well-equipped wood shop and a full-time woodworker on staff. Equipment changes frequently in the TV industry, though, and they always needed something new to hold it or even complete rebuilds of the control rooms. Also, the three original owners of the company had strong do-it-yourself mentalities.
The company changed names a few times, becoming Gastown Post and Transfer, then simply Gastown Post. Eventually they merged with the Rainmaker organization and became one of North America’s leading post-production and digital effects facilities for TV shows and movies. But towards the end of 2002, after working there for 22 years, my position was phased out due to management changes, cutbacks, and restructuring and they let me go. In 2007 the Rainmaker organization began breaking up. Numerous media corporations bought and sold Rainmaker’s various divisions and too much re-branding to mention here took place.
In 1992, I teamed up with a long-time acquaintance and fellow wood crafter to form a small custom woodworking company. We both had experience and connections in the audio and video industry so we specialized in building consoles, cabinetry, and other furniture for companies in the audio and video business. This started off as a spare-time activity while we worked at our full-time jobs, beginning when a fellow we knew at the CBC called to see if we could build a custom desk they needed for one of their control rooms. After that the CBC became our biggest client. We mainly built projects for the control rooms at their Vancouver facility but we also did work for them in Calgary, Victoria, Kamloops, Kelowna, Prince George, and even Inuvik.
As word about our services spread throughout Vancouver’s media community we also did work for the National Film Board, the Knowledge Network, Electronic Arts, Rogers Arena, and numerous other studios and editing facilities. We had a small but well-equipped workshop in an industrial complex in Vancouver’s False Creek area.
After I left Rainmaker, I was able to devote more time to my woodworking business. I did that more or less full-time starting in 2003 and we branched out to also do work for customers that weren’t in the audio and video industry.
Also at that time I considered perusing another of my interests, computer programming. I enrolled in a one-year software development and web design program at a private college. After I got my diploma I did a bit of freelance web design work but I ended up mainly using what I learned for personal projects.
My interest in computer programming started with a course I took in Grade 12. Mt. Doug was the first high school in Victoria to offer a computer programming course even though this was several years before personal computers were available. Mt. Doug had the course because it’s close to UVic so it was easy for us to go there to run our programs on their big IBM system. The course was taught by Margaret Parker. She was an excellent teacher who always encouraged her students to do their best. I have her to thank for getting me started on a lifelong interest in computer programming.
The income from my woodworking business could be quite erratic, so in 2006 I joined Hi-Cube Storage Products when offered the opportunity. I worked there full-time and eventually became lead installer. I still continued my woodworking business but it was at a more reduced pace only when interesting jobs came along.
With Hi-Cube I installed high-end shelving and storage systems for hospitals, libraries, museums, schools, universities, colleges, law enforcement agencies, factories, warehouses, automotive dealerships, and offices for the government and private sector. There wasn’t much woodwork and nothing had to be built from scratch, but the installations still required precise work where I got to use many of my skills. There was even some electronics work when installing and servicing motorized mobile shelving and automated storage and retrieval systems. I also got to travel all over BC and even to Whitehorse and Yellowknife to do installations.
In late 2018 I retired from Hi-Cube and my woodworking business and moved back to Vancouver Island. I live on a couple of acres of land a few kilometers outside of Qualicum Beach. The property came with a large building separate from the house which I have converted to a spacious woodworking shop, an electronics lab, and a music room for my collection of guitars, keyboard instruments, and vintage stereo equipment.
On the personal side, I got married in 1986. I'm divorced now. We split up in 1999. We never had kids, but we had lots of cats. Before moving back to Vancouver Island I lived in various houses and condos in Vancouver, Coquitlam, and Port Coquitlam. I have yet to travel outside of North America, but I have traveled to most provinces and territories in Canada and parts of Mexico. I've also been to over half of the United States, including Hawaii and, as mentioned earlier, Alaska.
My career has allowed me to work with some of the latest digital equipment. But I also like restoring vintage vacuum tube amplifiers and building new vacuum tube guitar and hi-fi amps from scratch. I also like to write software for micro-controller projects such as clocks and lighting controls. I have always liked building things. It’s a great feeling to look at something big or impressive and think, “Hey, I built that!” But while I was working for other people I often didn’t have time to build things just for myself. Now that I’m retired and have the best-equipped workshops for woodwork and electronics that I ever had, I can finally just build things for the fun of it.
Mitch, 2025