This is statement was authored for the Company’s 1991 brochure.

 

To Our Customers:

         It is a pleasure to be afforded this opportunity to share a few thoughts with you on the occasion of the 45th anniversary of the Company. While many such corporate essays speak eloquently about corporate objectives, I wish to tell you something about the man and the people who have made Canada Sponge.

 

         My father was an accountant and my grandfather, a magistrate. I graduated a chemist from Louvain University in Belgium. As many young men of my day, I joined the merchant marine to see the world. I had no idea that I would ever come to Canada and there practice the art of my forefathers – sponge merchant.

 

         Like the youth of my generation, I was swept up in the maelstrom of World War II. On my 12th or 13th crossing, my ship was sunk in the North Atlantic by a German submarine. The sub surfaced after the attack and I swam and took hold of its side. A German sailor kicked me in the face and in the ocean’s swell, I grabbed hold of some flotsam from the sunken ship and later reached the sole lifeboat which had survived.

 

          Of the thirty-two men on my ship, less than half made it to the lifeboat. The torpedo had struck at 3:20 in the morning while most men were asleep; they had no chance. We spent 8 days on the open sea, sitting knee deep in water. If it were not for the second German submarine which surfaced and gave us some food and water, none would have survived the ordeal.

 

          During those cold, relentless days on the open sea, I spent a lot of time thinking about my life, my family in occupied Greece and the future and how I wanted to live it. I thought about the sub that sank us, the sailor who kicked me in the face, the second sub which gave us food and water. I thought about the men in the wardroom; I had just stepped out of it bringing coffee to the bridge when the topedo struck. Having been thrown to the floor by the explosion, I had gotten up and had found the wardroom and the men in it were gone.

 

         I know the pain of those days on the open sea. Men that I knew grew tired of life and slipped beneath the surface of that cruel sea. I have often wondered why out of a dozen men, I was one of less than a handful who survived to be rescued by a Canadian ship.

 

         Arriving as I did in Canada, I know what it is to be penniless. Only the charity of one Greek who owned a small diner provided me with one meal a day – a kindness of a fellow countryman. I sat at his lunch counter eating the bowl of tomato soup, thickened with a few crackers and ketchup, which I nursed for while when it was wet or cold outside, though careful never to overstay my welcome. With that one meal secure and only my native confidence to hold me, I knew I could find a way back – and I did.

 

          Having been torpedoed, I had no wish to return to the sea, although I have always since thought of myself as a sailor.  As the memory of the trenches of the First World War were still fresh, I had no desire to join the army. So I joined the RCAF and flew as a navigator, working my way up to the the rank of Sergeant. After the war, I returned to Greece and found the way of life I had known was gone. During the war, Greece had suffered from mass starvation and deprivation which claimed my Father as one of the many victims.

 

          So it was that I turned 'my back up against the past and put my arms around the future' (to parapharse The Moody Blues) in a strange new land whose uniform I wore. In those days, chemists were not well paid and so I went back to my roots to commence business – Canada Sponge – as a sponge merchant.

 

          I married Bernadette, made a home, raised a family. I was a councilman at the Greek Orthodox Church. I have had a rich, fulfilling life. But Canada was a strange, perplexing land. After my discharge from the RCAF, I was on a Toronto streetcar speaking Greek to a friend when an elderly woman interrupted us. She shouted “speak English, you DP, or go back where you came from”. “DP” meant "displaced person" and was an ugly racial epithet of that era. Later in 1951 when I was looking to buy a cottage north of Toronto, I was advised that the area was “restricted” – in that era, “restricted” meant “no Jews” – and was told to look elsewhere. (I was assessed as being Jewish solely on the basis on having a large nose.)

 

          It was years before I did go back to Greece but only to visit. Late one spring afternoon in Athens, I hailed a cab and travelled roads which I had not seen in years. Nearing the old neighbourhood, I chose to walk. There, as if untouched by time, I found the house and the street of my youth. It did not seem that different, save for a fresh coat of paint. The street was empty, clean. The noise of the city was distant. I shared the moment alone with memories.

 

          On the corner was a small shop. The man behind the counter recognized me instantly. We had played together as young boys. His wife and son joined us and we chatted briefly. He had never left the neighbourhood, never travelled, never seen the world beyond his city, his country. He was content.

 

          Although we had grown up on the same street, we had lived the same and different lives. I had spent my earliest childhood years with my family in Russia. It was the time of the First World War, the Russian Revolution and Civil War.

 

          My Father was arrested as a ‘foreign interventionist’ by the Soviet authorities. My Mother feared that my Father would be shot or entombed in Siberia, a nameless number on a list afterwords mislaid.

 

          I remember to this day my Mother going out one evening in search of my Father. I was just a child. But the violence and fear were real. I ran to the window to watch her go away. I pressed my face to the glass where I scraped a hole through the frost. It was winter. Snow was falling. It swirled in the wind around my Mother as she trudged up the darkened street. As the darkness enveloped her, I wondered if she too would disappear. That night has remained with me as the nightmare of my childhood years.