A Historical Companion to John Wall’s Life
John tells his life the way a man tells it from the inside — the heat of the Chaco, the mud of a December building site, the wait for a letter that would let him marry. He does not stop to explain why his Canadian family was born in Paraguay, or why a dirt road opening in 1961 changed everything, or what it meant that a jet could cross a hemisphere in a night. He lived those facts; he did not need to footnote them.
This companion is the footnote. It sets down the history that stands behind his stories — the migrations, the laws, the wars, the economies, the machines — so that a reader who did not live it can feel the ground he was standing on. Everything here was checked against the historical record. Where his memory and the record agree, that is said plainly. Where the record complicates his memory, or cannot confirm it, that is said too. The aim is not to correct him. It is to widen the frame around him, so that a single life comes into focus against the century it was lived in.
A word on what follows. It moves in the order his own story moves — from why the Mennonites were in Paraguay at all, through the colony of his boyhood, the long road north, the golden age of flight that carried him, the valley that received him, the woman he went back for, the trades and farms he worked, and the accidents he survived. Read it alongside his chapters, or on its own. Either way, it is offered in a different voice than his — the voice of the record, not the man.
I. The Stubborn Mennonites: Why a Canadian Family Was Born in Paraguay
John calls his people “the stubborn Mennonites,” and the phrase is more precise than it sounds. It names a specific decision, made by specific families, for a specific reason — and that decision is the reason he was born in the Paraguayan Chaco in 1945 rather than on the Canadian prairie.
The Mennonites who came to Manitoba and Saskatchewan in the 1870s had been promised, in effect, that Canada would leave them alone: their own German-language religious schools, their own communities, exemption from military service. That promise held until the First World War, when a rising Canadian nationalism turned against anything that looked foreign and unassimilated. Manitoba passed a school law in 1916, Saskatchewan in 1917, that abolished private and parochial elementary schools, compelled instruction in English, and forbade religious teaching in the public schools. For most of the country this was ordinary nation-building. For the most traditional Mennonites it was the breaking of a covenant — the deliberate dismantling of the German religious schooling that they understood to be the whole point of having come.
They resisted. They petitioned, they boycotted the public schools, and in return they drew heavy fines and the threat of having their property confiscated and their leaders jailed. Layered on top of the wartime resentment of a pacifist, German-speaking people, the pressure was enough to convince the hardest-line traditionalists — the Sommerfelder, the Chortitzer, some Bergthaler — that Canada was no longer a place they could keep their faith. In the 1920s roughly eight thousand Mennonites left Canada rather than send their children to English public schools. Most went to Mexico. About eighteen hundred chose Paraguay. John’s grandparents were among the ones who went south; his parents made the journey as children. So when he says his people were stubborn over schools, he is describing, exactly, the wing of the community that would rather emigrate to a wilderness than give up teaching their own children in their own language and faith. It is not a colorful family phrase. It is the historical record in four words.
Paraguay was willing to have them, and it made that willingness law. On 26 July 1921, four years before the first settlers arrived, the Paraguayan congress passed Law No. 514 — remembered among Mennonites as the Privilegium, “the privilege.” It granted them full religious liberty; the right to affirm rather than swear oaths; exemption from compulsory military service in peace and in war; the right to run their own German-language schools; and internal self-government, with their own administration of their own affairs. It was the first law anywhere in Latin America written to accommodate people who refused, on conscience, to bear arms. Everything the school laws had taken away in Canada, Law 514 gave back in Paraguay, and gave in writing.
Here the record gently corrects the family memory. John remembers the arrangement as free land, granted for fifty years. Neither half is quite right. The land was not free: a company called the Corporación Paraguaya bought Chaco land from the Carlos Casado enterprise — the first purchase was on the order of 138,000 acres, bought at about a dollar and a half an acre — and resold it to the Mennonites at five dollars an acre. The Mennonites owned their land outright, as a self-governing bloc, but they paid for it. And there was no fifty-year clause. The privileges of Law 514 read as permanent guarantees, not a half-century lease. The “fifty years” in his telling is most likely a memory of some remembered term — a tax holiday, a contract period — that has migrated over the decades into a rounder, larger shape. What matters, and what is true, is the core of it: no army, your own schools, self-rule. Those promises were real, they were in the law, and they held.
One detail in his account is beloved and cannot be confirmed. John remembers that the president of Paraguay learned German at night school in order to welcome his people in their own tongue. The welcome itself is solid history: the first Mennonite group was received in Asunción on 29 December 1926 by President Eligio Ayala, who had studied in Europe — at Heidelberg and Zürich — before his presidency, and who could plausibly have had some German. But every reliable source that records the welcome is silent on the language. The night-school detail traces only to low-quality sources and cannot be verified. There is a likely explanation for how it grew. The people who actually did speak German and English with the Mennonites, in the years of negotiation before the settlement, were the land scout Fred Engen and the American banker Samuel McRoberts, who met Paraguay’s president-elect and foreign minister and helped broker the whole arrangement. “They spoke our language” is a true and moving thing to remember about the men who made the colony possible — and over three generations that warmth may simply have climbed, in the retelling, from the negotiators onto the head of state. The kindness is real. The night school is folklore.
II. The Green Hell: The Founding and Its Cost
The land the Mennonites had bought sat in the central Paraguayan Chaco, and the Chaco very nearly killed the colony in its first two years.
The story that reaches John as inherited family memory — settlers dropped onto scrubland with nothing, no water, no power, oxen and wagons — is the documented founding ordeal, and it was worse than the phrase suggests. The first group disembarked at Puerto Casado, on the Paraguay River, on the last day of 1926. From there the land they had bought lay inland, beyond the end of the railway, unsurveyed. They could not simply go to it. They were stranded at Puerto Casado for roughly sixteen months, waiting, while typhus, typhoid, and dysentery moved through the camps. One hundred and twenty-one settlers died during that wait, more in the interior afterward, and about sixty families gave up and went back to Canada. Only in April 1928 did the survivors finally push inland — the last hundred kilometers by ox-drawn wagon — and found their first villages. Menno Colony, the first Mennonite colony in Paraguay and the one built by these Canadian emigrants, began as thirteen hundred people who had buried their dead and kept going.
They had barely established themselves when a war broke out on top of them. From 1932 to 1935, Paraguay and Bolivia fought the Chaco War over the Gran Chaco — both nations believed it held oil — in what became the deadliest South American conflict of the twentieth century, costing on the order of a hundred thousand lives. It is remembered as “the War of Thirst.” The young Mennonite colonies sat inside the contested zone, amid ground fighting and air attacks. This is the world John’s parents were children and teenagers in: a colony not five years old, in a land that had just cost a hundred and twenty of their own, now a battlefield between two armies fighting over water and rumored oil. His boyhood in the 1940s and ’50s was lived on ground that had been, within living memory, both a graveyard and a front line.
And the land itself asked for all of this and gave little back. The Gran Chaco has some of the highest temperatures on the continent — summer averages near thirty degrees Celsius, with absolute maximums that climb toward the high forties. It is dead flat, an almost imperceptible eastward tilt across hundreds of kilometers, covered in dense thorn forest and open woodland: quebracho, palo santo, cactus, thickets often described as impenetrable. It swings between a months-long dry season and violent rains that turn the only roads to axle-deep, tire-swallowing mud, where a few kilometers can take a day. Fresh groundwater is scarce; only about a third of the region has an adequate fresh supply, and the shallow wells of the central Chaco are commonly saline. The colonies survived by catching rain — a modern survey found tens of thousands of catchment ponds across the Mennonite Chaco. Outsiders had a name for this country, and the arriving Mennonites adopted it for themselves: el Infierno Verde, the Green Hell. When John remembers a boyhood with no running water and no electricity, dependent on the sky, that is not hardship talking. That is a straightforward description of the central Chaco, where the salt in the ground and the rhythm of the rains left a household little other choice.
III. A Map of Neighbors: Who Came From Where
One of the more striking things about John’s memory is how accurately he holds the map of the colonies around him — a set of German-speaking settlements, each founded by a different wave of refugees, each with its own origin story. His pronunciations wander, but the history underneath them is sound, and in one case he remembers something so unusual that it is worth defending against anyone who would assume he had it wrong.
Menno Colony — his own — was the first, founded by the Canadian emigrants who arrived in 1926–27 and built their villages in 1928.
Fernheim, which he renders as “Fahrenheim” or “Farnham,” was the second, founded 1 July 1930 right beside Menno. Its settlers were a different people entirely: Mennonites fleeing Stalin’s Soviet Union, not Canada. And here is the detail that deserves protecting. John remembers that Fernheim’s people came “by way of China.” That sounds like a garble. It is not. Fernheim was settled by two streams of Soviet refugees, and the smaller, stranger one is exactly the one he remembers: a group that escaped east across Soviet Siberia rather than west, gathering in Harbin, in Manchuria — the so-called “Harbin Corner.” The first Harbin transport, 373 people, crossed the frozen Amur River out of the Soviet Union and reached Fernheim on 12 May 1932. His “by way of China in the twenties and thirties” is historically correct. It should not be flagged, softened, or explained away. A man who never had more than a few years of schooling has held, for seventy years, an accurate memory of one of the most obscure escape routes in Mennonite history.
Neuland, which he calls “Colony Island” or “New Land” (the German Neuland means, precisely, “new land”), was founded in 1947, the youngest of the three central Chaco colonies, on land bought by the Mennonite Central Committee. Its settlers were post-war Soviet refugees from the wartime flight west, and it is remembered for a heartbreaking demographic fact: of its 641 original family units, 253 had no father. The men had been killed on the Russian front or sentenced to labor camps in Siberia. This is the colony that arrived without its men — which is exactly what John means when he says “the Bolsheviks took the men, and the families never saw them again.” He is not being dramatic. He is describing Neuland.
Volendam (his “Follendam” — a V is pronounced as an F in his German) was founded the same year, 1947, in eastern Paraguay, from the same post-war Soviet-refugee wave, and named for the ship Volendam that had carried the refugees from Germany. Friesland, founded in 1937 in eastern Paraguay, was started by about a third of Fernheim’s people who left the Chaco — the same Soviet-refugee stock, one step removed. And in 1948 a group came directly out of Canada again: two sister colonies, Bergthal and Sommerfeld, founded by Manitoba Mennonites descended from the same 1870s migration, who sailed — as it happens — on that same ship Volendam from Quebec City in June 1948. That the Volendam appears twice, naming one colony and carrying the founders of another, is probably why the two 1948 arrivals blur together in memory.
John counts “six big German colonies.” A strict textbook count gives seven by 1948 — Menno, Fernheim, Friesland, Neuland, Volendam, Sommerfeld, and Bergthal. But his six is not an error. It lands exactly right if Sommerfeld and Bergthal, founded together off the same voyage, are counted as one Canadian settlement, which is a perfectly reasonable way for someone who lived nearby to have grouped them. He is not miscounting. He is grouping the way a neighbor would.
IV. The World of His Boyhood: Menno Colony, 1945–1966
John was born into a Menno Colony that was, in the years he grew up in it, still living in its own pre-modern era — and he left it, in 1966, on the very cusp of the wave that would transform it. This timing is the key to almost everything he remembers about the place, because the colony he describes is the one that existed just before modernization arrived.
The economy he was raised in ran through the Chortitzer cooperative — a collective structure that had begun informally in 1927, was organized as a committee in 1936, and was formally constituted as a cooperative in 1962. It ran nearly everything: credit, the stores, the buying and selling of animals, import and export, workshops, an electric plant, transport. Governance sat with a colony authority headed by an Oberschulze, overseeing land, taxes, schools, and hospitals; the villages elected their own administrators, and only landowners voted. Around sixty villages made up the colony by 1955, each of twenty to forty families, and Loma Plata — John’s “Lumar Plata,” the administrative center — had become the colony’s hub in 1937.
What they grew, in his years, was not yet what the colony would become famous for. Today Menno Colony is a dairy powerhouse, its Trébol brand eventually controlling something like seventy percent of Paraguay’s milk industry. But that transformation came later — the great dairy upswing was a phenomenon of the 1980s, well after he left. In his boyhood the cash crops were cotton above all, with peanuts and sorghum, alongside subsistence manioc, beans, sweet potatoes, and watermelon. Drought-resistant buffalo grass from North America had only been introduced in 1955, quietly laying the foundation for the cattle industry that would follow. So the colony John remembers — cotton and peanuts, oxen and wagons, no cattle empire yet — is precisely the colony of the years before the boom. He remembers it accurately because he remembers it as it was, not as it became.
The texture of daily life was German and isolated. The everyday, at-home language was Plautdietsch — Low German — which is a spoken tongue, not a written one; the written and church-and-school language was High German. A boy in Menno Colony grew up speaking one German at the supper table and reading another in the schoolroom and the sermon. Healthcare was a single small hospital, built in Loma Plata in 1948 — a building perhaps seventeen by fifty feet, with a consultation room, a lab, a pharmacy, and three patient rooms — chronically short of doctors and hours away from most of the colony. John’s memory of a scarcity of doctors, of physicians brought in from outside, fits the documented pattern exactly, even where the individual names he gives cannot be checked. And running through all of it was the isolation the Chaco imposed: no electricity, no running water, ox-and-wagon transport, and produce that was brutally hard to get to market.
Then came the road. The Trans-Chaco Highway — his “Tanchako” — is the single most important piece of infrastructure in his early life, and its dates explain why he remembers it as such a momentous thing. The Mennonites needed a way to move goods out of the central Chaco; the Mennonite Central Committee contracted for the build; construction began in 1956, and the road was inaugurated in 1961, with usability improving over the following years. It ran hundreds of kilometers, connecting Loma Plata and its sister colonies to Asunción. It was, for its whole early life, an unpaved dirt-and-gravel track, notorious for turning to an impassable quagmire in the rains — paving did not begin until the early 2000s. But even unpaved, it was the hinge on which the colony’s world swung open: travel, trade, mechanization, and outside influence all followed it in. John was a teenager while it was being built. He left in 1966, five years after it opened, just as the modernization it enabled was beginning to crest. That is exactly why his “nobody had electricity or running water then, everybody does now” and his “Loma Plata was two hundred people, now it’s a town of thousands” ring so true. He is not exaggerating the change. He left at the precise moment the change began, and every visit since has shown him a colony transformed.
Two things belong in this frame that John’s own telling touches only lightly. The first is the Mennonites’ remarkable position in Paraguay: fewer than one percent of the country’s population, they came to produce something like six or seven percent of its GDP, with living standards far above their neighbors — a prosperity that has drawn real resentment from other Paraguayans over wealth and hiring. The second is harder, and it belongs in this companion precisely because it does not belong in his voice. John remembers the mission work with pride — “we brought the gospel, and now there are big native churches” — and that is true as far as it goes; large Indigenous churches did grow out of the Mennonite missions in the Chaco. But the fuller record is more troubled. The Paraguayan Chaco was home to some nine Indigenous peoples, and the arrival and expansion of the colonies is also documented as a story of Indigenous land loss — the Enxet especially — of labor arrangements that drew accusations of below-minimum wages and debt peonage, and, in more recent decades, of deforestation reaching into Indigenous and protected lands. Both things are true at once: a persecuted people found refuge and built something extraordinary, and that building had costs borne by peoples who were already there. His memory is his to keep. The record asks us to hold the rest of it honestly alongside.
V. The Long Road North: Leaving the Chaco in 1966
John was not alone in leaving. Beginning in the 1950s there was a steady exodus back to Canada from the Chaco colonies, driven by hard living conditions and by the pull of Canadian economic opportunity — roughly eight hundred people went from Menno Colony to Canada in that wave, with even larger numbers leaving the Soviet-refugee colonies. His family’s 1966 departure sits inside a real migratory current, not an isolated choice.
Getting out was itself a journey. Before the Trans-Chaco Highway, leaving the colony had meant days by ox wagon to the railhead, a day on the narrow-gauge Casado railway to Puerto Casado, and one to two days by riverboat down the Paraguay River to Asunción — a round trip of three weeks or more, longer in the rains. By 1966 the highway had shortened the overland leg, but it was still an unpaved, often-bogged road, and there was one hard bottleneck that John remembers vividly: the river. There was no bridge across the Paraguay River near Asunción until 1978. To reach the capital from the Chaco you had to cross by ferry, and John’s memory of traveling overnight and then waiting until morning to cross “a big river, like the Fraser” is a precise fit for that ferry crossing before the bridge existed. The river was the wall between the wilderness and the city, and everyone leaving the Chaco had to wait at it.
The city on the other side was the only real city Paraguay had. Asunción held just under 290,000 people at the 1962 census, and it was the country’s sole major urban center, its only river port, and its only international airport — which is why a family arranging passports and international travel had no choice but to route through it and stay several days. It was also a city under a dictatorship: Alfredo Stroessner ruled Paraguay from 1954 to 1989, with a cultivated personality cult and a program of highway and bridge building that was, in fact, the very modernization drive the Trans-Chaco road belonged to. For a boy out of a Low-German-speaking colony with no electricity, arriving in a Spanish-speaking capital of nearly three hundred thousand — cars, paved central streets, a working port, electric light — the gap was not just geographic. It was a century.
The money for the journey came through an institution and a tradition worth understanding. John remembers that a friend arranged a loan through the Mennonite Central Committee, and that the rest was borrowed. Behind that is one of the most distinctive features of Mennonite immigration history: the Reiseschuld, the “travel debt.” In its classic 1920s form, the Canadian Pacific Railway had agreed to carry Mennonite immigrants to Canada on credit, eventually extending some two million dollars, recorded family by family in a ledger and repaid, on honor, over decades — a debt “often said with disdain by our elders,” and not fully liquidated until the mid-1940s. By John’s time the mechanism had changed. The body that had run the old system had folded, by December 1963, into MCC Canada, and the mid-century model relied more on relatives sponsoring newcomers and on direct loans than on a single mass railway credit. So a 1966 travel loan “through MCC” is exactly the right institution for the era — the direct descendant of the organization that had financed the Reiseschuld — even if the specific machinery was the later kind. What persisted, and what he carries, is the culture of it: an honor-bound travel debt, to be worked off. His memory of picking berries all summer to repay the loan lands squarely inside that tradition, and inside the specific economy that awaited him, of which more below.
There is also the question of how a boy born in Paraguay was able to come to Canada as a Canadian at all. John’s memory of the citizenship rules is correct in its shape, and the shape is this. The Canadian Citizenship Act came into force on 1 January 1947, creating “Canadian citizen” as a legal status for the first time. Under it, a child born abroad could acquire citizenship through a Canadian parent, by registration of the foreign birth. John (born 1945) and his sister (born 1946) were born abroad to a Canadian-born father, and it was registration of their births that made them Canadian — exactly the route he describes. Nettie, born in 1947, did not qualify by descent, and became Canadian instead by marrying him, which the 1947 Act (eased in 1950) allowed for the foreign wife of a Canadian man. He draws the line at “up to 1947,” and here the record softens him gently: the real reason Nettie could not claim citizenship by descent was almost certainly something about her own parents’ status or an unregistered birth, not the calendar year itself — the year is family shorthand. And there is a quiet piece of good fortune in the timing. Citizenship by descent in that era could be lost at age twenty-four unless the person had established Canadian domicile earlier. John moved to Canada in 1966, at about twenty-one — which very plausibly is what secured his status before the age-twenty-four trap could close on it. Many in similar situations, the so-called “Lost Canadians,” were not so lucky.
VI. The Golden Age of the Jet
John’s fascination with airplanes runs through his whole life, and the history of flight in his era makes clear why the machines that carried him left such a mark. He came from a place where the airplane was not luxury but lifeline, and he traveled, as a young man, in what really was the golden age of passenger flight.
In the Chaco, the airplane was infrastructure. Paraguay’s military ran a scheduled domestic air service — Transporte Aéreo Militar, formed in 1954 with a single DC-3 Dakota and later operating some thirty of them — carrying passengers, mail, and cargo throughout a country whose roads failed in the rains. The DC-3 he remembers is described exactly right in his telling: a roughly twenty-seat aircraft, a type used in the war, of which the postwar market was flooded with cheap ex-military examples. His account that colonists flew out on government DC-3s when the road washed out is entirely plausible and internally consistent — the military air network existed, the road genuinely stranded people, and the colonies were getting airstrips in his era (Fernheim’s Filadelfia had a good strip with weekly service). The cause-and-effect is his testimony, but it sits on solid ground.
The trips that carried him between hemispheres — out in 1966, back for Nettie in 1968–69 — landed in the middle of the jet age’s brief, glamorous prime. The Boeing 707 had inaugurated widespread commercial jet service in 1958; it and the DC-8 flew higher than the weather, pressurized, air-conditioned, and quiet in a way piston aircraft never were. A jet had cut the Rio de Janeiro–New York run from around twenty-five hours to roughly nine. And flying was still rare and expensive, an event for the well-off: passengers dressed in their Sunday best, the in-flight meal was multi-course even in coach, there was full bar service and complimentary cigarettes, and the cabin was thick with smoke. His memory of a roughly ten-hour overnight leg from Rio to New York matches the era’s nine-hour nonstop almost exactly. The carriers fit too: Asunción was served by Panagra, absorbed into Braniff in 1967, which routed South American traffic through Miami; New York’s gateway was the airport renamed John F. Kennedy in late 1963, which older travelers still called Idlewild. And his offhand line that Pan Am “went bankrupt all the time” is folk-memory of that airline’s long, public unraveling — years of financial crisis and asset sales — that ended in a single true bankruptcy in 1991.
There is one more thing the record wants to say about John and airplanes, and it is the tender part. He never flew a real aircraft; his cockpit was a flight simulator. And yet, when he explains how the machines work — auto-spoilers armed before landing that raise themselves on touchdown, autobrake set to a chosen deceleration, an approach speed of a hundred and thirty to a hundred and forty knots, a maximum bank around thirty degrees, tires too hot to touch and smoking an hour after landing, gear that can collapse from a landing that comes in too hard and too fast — he is right, again and again, at a level of detail that checks out against aviation sources. The small things he gets slightly off are genuinely small: the reverse thrust that a pilot pulls by hand rather than the spoilers that deploy on their own; the exact runway designations at Vancouver and Calgary; the fact that the automated system that doomed the two Boeing MAX jets he watched crash on YouTube was a stabilizer-trim system, not literally the autopilot. These are the errors of a man who learned an enormous amount and had no runway to test it on. The honest summary is the moving one: a boy from a colony with no electricity taught himself to fly, correctly, a machine he was never allowed to touch.
VII. The Valley That Received Him
The Fraser Valley that John arrived in during December 1966 was not a random landing place. It was one of the densest Mennonite settlements in Canada, and the timing of his arrival was, in one respect, almost uncanny.
Some twelve thousand Mennonites had migrated from the Prairies to the Fraser Valley between 1928 and the mid-1950s — most of them descendants of the 1870s Russia-to-Canada migration, the same stock John came from, drawn west by fertile soil, mild climate, and community. By the mid-1950s the main centers, from east to west, were Chilliwack, Sardis-Greendale, Yarrow, Abbotsford-Clearbrook, and Greater Vancouver, threaded with a couple dozen churches and a cluster of Mennonite schools and Bible colleges. Clearbrook alone reached around four thousand people by 1967. A Low-German-speaking family stepping off the long road from Paraguay was not stepping into a strange country so much as into a distant room of its own house.
And then the timing. John’s church was King Road Mennonite Brethren Church, and King Road was founded in September 1966 — the very year and season his family arrived — for a reason that could not have fit him more precisely. That autumn, a larger Abbotsford congregation had voted to end its German-language services. Members who wanted to keep worshiping in German, and who saw an influx of newcomers from Paraguay, Germany, and the Soviet Union who needed exactly that, broke away to form a new German-language congregation. Around fifty-five members left; the first service drew seventy-three. So a family that spoke Low German at home and had just crossed a hemisphere walked, in 1966, straight into a brand-new church founded that very month to serve people exactly like them. His later memory that the church-standing letter for his marriage had to come from King Road, and that his social and financial world ran through German-speaking townsfolk, reflects how tightly woven that enclave still was.
The economy that received him is the one his loan repayment ran through. The Abbotsford area was the “Raspberry Capital of Canada,” built on a raspberry-and-strawberry industry that Mennonite families had cleared the land for since the 1930s. The Abbotsford Growers Co-operative, incorporated in 1948, had begun with about ninety members, “exclusively Mennonites,” and in its early decades the picking workforce was primarily Mennonite families. When John says he picked berries all summer to pay off the travel loan, he is describing the regional Mennonite immigrant economy doing precisely what it had done for a generation: absorbing new arrivals into the berry harvest. The money in that world moved through Mennonite institutions too — the Clearbrook credit union, of which more in the next section — and the whole apparatus of church, co-op, and credit union formed a self-contained community into which a penniless newcomer could be received, employed, and financed.
The work he took up outside the berry fields — construction — was also the right trade at the right moment. Vancouver was in the middle of a 1960s housing boom, with British Columbia hitting record dwelling-unit starts in 1964, 1967, 1968, and 1969, and construction companies “popping up all over” to meet demand. This is the era that produced the cheap, boxy “Vancouver Special.” Crucially, the framing method of the day — platform framing, by then the universal standard — was learnable on the job, the kind of work “a carpenter with basic skills could do,” which is exactly how immigrant men with little English routinely entered the trade. The path John took, from laborer hauling sand into basements to framer to running his own crew, was a path the boom and the trade genuinely made possible. It was also, by modern standards, dangerous: 1960s British Columbia construction had little of today’s safety regime — no mandated hard hats, reforms still decades away — and his memory of standing in mud over his ankles, in half-snow, on an unprotected December site, is a fair picture of what those sites were.
VIII. Going Back for Nettie
The 1968–69 return to Paraguay to marry Nettie and bring her to Canada is, in John’s telling, a story of love, paperwork, and a loan. The history underneath it shows how each piece worked — and reveals a resonance he may not have named.
The immigration part turned on a change in Canadian law that had happened just the year before he needed it. In August 1967, Canada adopted its first points system for immigration. It created three streams — independent applicants, who were points-tested; nominated relatives, partly tested; and sponsored immediate family of citizens, who bypassed the points assessment entirely. A foreign spouse of a Canadian citizen fell into that last, sponsored stream, exempt from the points test. This is why the advice John received — that it would be far easier to marry Nettie in Paraguay and bring her back as his wife than to keep applying for her some other way — was not just folk wisdom but sound guidance under the brand-new rules. Marriage to a Canadian citizen made her a sponsorable immediate relative, and landing could be completed at the port of entry. His memory of three failed pre-applications, then an official steering him toward marriage, then the “free to go” moment at Toronto, maps cleanly onto how the system actually functioned in 1968–69.
The loan that financed the trip came from exactly the kind of institution that existed in Clearbrook then. The Clearbrook District Mennonite Savings Credit Union had been incorporated in 1958 specifically to serve the growing Mennonite population, and its membership bond was Mennonite-only until 1970. So in 1968 it was still a Mennonite institution, with Low-German-speaking officers, of the sort that would lend a young member the money for a trip on a co-signer’s word. His memory of borrowing there, backed by a friend, describes that institution precisely.
The delay that nearly broke his heart — the wait for the wedding — was not bureaucratic obstruction. It was theology. In traditional Mennonite practice, baptism is an adult act, and it is baptism, not birth or family, that makes a person a member of a particular congregation; and one marries as a member, within the church. A Paraguayan congregation asking for a written letter of good standing from John’s home church in Canada before it would marry him is entirely consistent with that ecclesiology — inter-congregational transfer letters are a real practice. The wait, in other words, was the time it took for a letter to cross a hemisphere and come back. There is a cruelty in that which the record makes plain: the same slow mail that delayed the wedding was the same slow mail that had strained the courtship across continents in the first place.
Even the motorbike fits the moment. John remembers buying a motorcycle in Paraguay to court across the colony’s distances, and selling it at a loss. Motorbikes are now ubiquitous in the Chaco — a major Paraguayan motorcycle distributor was founded by Chaco Mennonites — but in 1968 that was new. The Trans-Chaco Highway had opened the colonies to motorized transport only a few years before. A young man buying a bike to court in 1968 was riding, quite literally, on the leading edge of the colony’s motorization.
And there is a deeper resonance, offered here as something to notice rather than assert. Menno Colony exists because Mennonites left Canada in 1926–27. If Nettie’s family was of Menno-colony origin, then when John brought her north he was bringing back to Canada a descendant of the very families who had once fled it — closing, in a single marriage, a circle that had opened forty years before either of them was born.
IX. Building a Life: The Trades, the Busts, and the Farm
The long middle of John’s working life — framing, a backhoe business, dairy farming — was lived against a backdrop of boom-and-bust economic cycles and a transforming trade, and the big beats of his memory track the documented record closely.
His pride in the framing trade sits inside a real revolution in how houses were built. The single largest change across his decades was the shift from hand-laid rafters to prefabricated roof trusses — metal-plate trusses developed in the early 1960s that solved a skilled-carpenter shortage and are used by roughly three in four home builders today. A framer who worked from the 1960s into the 2000s watched the roof, the most skill-intensive part of the frame, change from something you cut and raised by hand to something you set. His field knowledge — a 4:12 minimum roof pitch for asphalt shingles is exactly right — reads like what it is: the accumulated rules of thumb of a working framer, mostly dead-on, occasionally a shop rule rather than the letter of the code.
The busts he framed through were real and severe. When he remembers the trade collapsing “at the end of summer 1974,” the record agrees: Canadian housing fell sharply that year, with new multi-family starts dropping about forty percent, inside a North America–wide recession driven by the 1973 oil crisis. This is the exact moment he had bought into a backhoe business — the summer of 1974 — which is why that venture went the way it did. He took on equipment debt of around twenty-seven thousand dollars (something like a hundred and seventy thousand in today’s money, at a time when the prime rate ran near eleven percent) right as British Columbia’s record construction run broke; a subcontracting client going under that fall and the machine sitting idle through the winter is consistent timing to the month. His tax lesson from selling that business rests on a genuine Canadian distinction, too: capital gains tax was brand new, dating only to 1972, and the sale of a going concern with its goodwill was treated more favorably than selling a bare machine. The truly brutal British Columbia bust came later, in 1981–82, when the Bank of Canada rate hit twenty-one percent and average Vancouver house prices fell by roughly half — a downturn he would also have framed through.
His account of workplace safety maps onto a system that was genuinely being built up around him over his career. British Columbia’s Workers’ Compensation Board — renamed WorkSafeBC in 2005 — dated to 1917, but the modern safety regime, including serious fall protection, largely arrived after his early years; fundamental reforms followed disasters like the 1981 Bentall IV collapse that killed four carpenters. His memory of an “A rating” from the board is best understood as his own word for a clean record — the real mechanisms are experience-rating discounts and a certificate-of-recognition rebate for low-claim employers — but the pride is well-founded: the system does reward exactly the kind of safe, low-claim site he ran.
The dairy years, when he left construction in 1985 to run his widowed sister’s family farm in Greendale, put him in the most concentrated dairy region in the province — flat, reclaimed Fraser Valley land that had carried dairy farms since the 1800s, in a Mennonite-rooted community. By then Canada’s dairy supply-management system was well established, dating to 1971, which meant the farm could ship milk only because it held quota and a license from the British Columbia Milk Marketing Board. And the detail he remembers with such disgust — a man walking into the milk-tank room with manure on his boots — lands hard against real regulation. A bulk-tank milk grader inspected the milk before it left the farm and could reject an entire tank; provincial rules explicitly governed milkhouse cleanliness and the exclusion of manure from the milking area. The relentlessness he describes is structural, not complaint: cows must be milked at least twice a day, every day of the year, which is exactly why several years on a small family dairy meant no real days off.
X. The Good Lord Didn’t Want Me Yet: The Accidents in Context
Three times, John’s own account has the world set up to kill him, and three times he walked away. He reads these as providence. The record cannot speak to providence, but it can show that the danger and the rescue were both entirely real — that the margins were as thin as he remembers.
The first, the forage-wagon entanglement, was not a freak event. Self-unloading forage wagons combine moving aprons, rotating beaters, conveyors, augers, and chains, and entanglement in them is one of the best-documented ways farmers die. The related hazard — a power-take-off driveline turning at 540 rpm — can, in the literature’s own words, “pull an arm, leg, foot or hair and wrap it around the shaft several times in less than one second.” Federal estimates run to dozens of such fatalities a year. Clusters of men killed the same way are on record. And the safety trip bar John remembers is a real device, meant to halt the drive the instant it is contacted — a genuine last line of defense. His account that other men died the way he nearly did is unverifiable in its specifics, but the pattern he describes is exactly the pattern the safety literature exists to warn against.
The second, the 2006 fall — a plank to the head, a coma, an air ambulance, and a titanium plate — was survivable because of infrastructure that was real and in place. British Columbia had operated a public air ambulance since the 1970s, with fixed-wing and helicopter critical-care transport. Royal Columbian Hospital, in New Westminster on the Fraser River, was and is one of only two Level 1 adult trauma centers in the province, with neurosurgery on campus — the major trauma referral center for the whole Fraser Valley. And titanium plate-and-screw repair of skull and facial fractures was, by 2006, entirely routine — titanium had become the standard for craniofacial reconstruction. His layman’s memory that “they lifted my whole face to put a plate in” is a plausible description of a craniofacial exposure. Everything that saved him — the helicopter, the trauma center, the titanium — genuinely existed and genuinely fit.
The third, the work-zone crash on his sixty-ninth birthday in 2014, sits squarely in the most common work-zone collision pattern there is: a vehicle stopped at a single-lane closure, rear-ended, and shoved into the car ahead. Rear-end crashes are the most frequent work-zone collision, exactly because traffic stops suddenly at a lane closure. Even the maddening detail — that his replacement-vehicle insurance was set to expire that very night — reflects a real product: British Columbia’s public insurer does offer time-limited new-vehicle replacement coverage that a write-off claimed before expiry can be settled against. The exact dates are his memory; the mechanism is real.
Three times the danger was real, and three times the rescue was real. The meaning John draws from that sequence is his to draw. This companion can only confirm that he is not exaggerating the odds he beat.
A Note on Sources and Method
The history in this companion was assembled from published, checkable sources and set against John’s own recollections. Where the two agreed, that agreement is noted. Where a memory could not be confirmed, or where the record complicated it, that too is stated rather than smoothed over. Nothing here was invented to make the story richer; the richness is what the record actually holds.
The principal sources, by subject:
- The 1920s emigration and the school laws: Pier 21, the Canadian Museum of Immigration (“Mennonites and Canadian Accommodation”); the Mennonite Heritage Village (“Parting Ways”).
- Law 514, the founding of Menno Colony, the neighboring colonies, and the Chaco War: the Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online (GAMEO) entries for Paraguay, Menno Colony, Fernheim, Neuland, Volendam, Friesland, Sommerfeld, and Bergthal; Encyclopedia.com, “Mennonites of Paraguay”; Wikipedia’s Menno Colony, Loma Plata, and Mennonites in Paraguay articles; Britannica on the Chaco War; and, for the Harbin Corner, GAMEO and mennonitegenealogy.com.
- The Gran Chaco environment: Britannica, “Gran Chaco”; and reporting on the “Green Hell.”
- Colony daily life and the Trans-Chaco Highway: the Cooperativa Chortitzer history; Encyclopedia.com; Wikipedia’s Menno Colony and Loma Plata; Britannica and Mennonite archives on the Trans-Chaco Highway.
- The Indigenous history of the Chaco: the Minority Rights Group, Cultural Survival, and Mongabay.
- The route out, Asunción, and the Stroessner era: the Plett Foundation’s “Casado Railway”; Wikipedia’s Asunción and Silvio Pettirossi Airport; Britannica on the Stroessner regime.
- The travel-loan tradition and Canadian citizenship law: GAMEO (“Debts”; “Canadian Mennonite Board of Colonization”); the Mennonite Historical Society of Alberta; and Wikipedia’s “History of Canadian nationality law” and the Canadian Encyclopedia’s “Lost Canadians.”
- Air travel: Wikipedia’s Boeing 707, Pan Am, Braniff, and JFK Airport entries; the Braniff International heritage site; and, for the Chaco DC-3 service, Aeroflight on Transporte Aéreo Militar.
- The Fraser Valley Mennonite world: On This Spot (“Mennonites of the Fraser Valley”; “Abbotsford Growers Co-op”); GAMEO’s King Road MB Church and Clearbrook Credit Union entries; Wikipedia’s Clearbrook article.
- The 1967 points system and spousal immigration: Pier 21 on Order-in-Council PC 1967-1616.
- The construction trade, the busts, WorkSafeBC, and the truss revolution: Statistics Canada on Canadian housing; the Bank of Canada’s historical rate series; the BC Labour Heritage Centre; WorkSafeBC; and Fine Homebuilding on the history of framing.
- The backhoe business and 1974 recession: Statistics Canada and the Bank of Canada.
- The dairy years: GAMEO on Greendale; Dairy Farmers of Canada; the BC Milk Marketing Board; and BC’s Milk Industry Standards Regulation.
- The accidents: the National Ag Safety Database and Penn State Extension on forage-wagon and PTO entanglement; Fraser Health and Wikipedia on Royal Columbian Hospital and the BC Ambulance Service; the Cleveland Clinic on craniofacial fixation; and the Federal Highway Administration on work-zone crashes.
The fuller citations, with the specific claims each supports, are held in the project’s research notes.