The Tom Doornbos School of Frugal Living.
That has a nice ring to it and trust me — old Tom knew all about frugal living. So, with the cost of living constantly going up and with food prices making it hard for people to adequately feed themselves, this would be a good time to start teaching people ways to live better at lower costs.
As an example of this, here is a bush tale I heard years ago. I don’t know whether it is true or not, but it certainly sounds like something that Tom would do:
Tom arrived in Yellowknife on March 23, 1941. He was 50 years old having been born in the Netherlands in 1890. He arrived during the middle of the Second World War, so maybe Tom came to Yellowknife to get away from it all. No one seems to know for sure.
At the time, Yellowknife was a town of tents, shacks, and wooden buildings, without any running water, sewers or much in the way of garbage pickup. Apparently, Tom got a wooden piano crate that someone was throwing out and turned it into a mini-home. He also set up his own water delivery business, using two pails and a wooden carrying yoke.
In those days if you wanted water, you walked down to the lake with one or two pails. You filled them up and then carried them back to you abode. Or you could hire Tom to fetch the water for you.
Since he was delivering water all over what we now call Old Town, Tom got to know the place and people well. One day, he was hired to haul water to the house of the town’s most influential government big wig. The big wig was planning to host a dinner for some visiting bigwigs from Ottawa, so his wife was busy fixing a big pot roast dinner.
As she worked in the kitchen, she piled all the scraps onto an old piece of newspaper. There were peels from potatoes, onions, turnips, celery tops, carrot tops, stems of herbs, and she even trimmed the roast, cutting of some of the fat and gristle. I don’t know whether she offered them to Tom — he might have asked for them or maybe he just salvaged them out of the garbage can, it really doesn’t matter. He took them home and put them into a pot of water and cooked up a tasty, healthy, and nutritious pot of soup, which lasted several days.
People would tell stories like that to illustrate just how weird and cheap old Tom was. But was he being cheap or frugal? He was a salvager who hated to see things go to waste. So, he was ecologically-minded and well ahead of his time.
Tom liked his soups, so he would go into the Gold Range restaurant, order a bowl of hot water which was given to him free and then he would add free ketchup and make a bowl of ketchup soup. People laughed at this, but at home I tried it once and it wasn’t bad. A free bowl of soup. You could even try it with mustard or relish for a little variety.
Tom went to any meeting that offered free food and he also salvaged food that other people were throwing out. It is amazing how much food people and our society throws away or wastes each and every day. It is probably about 50 per cent, so if we stopped wasting it, food bills could be cut in half. Now that is a saving.
Tom earned his money carrying water. He was self-employed and paid his taxes, albeit reluctantly. He lived frugally, saved enough money, and started to buy properties, ideally with structures on them, that he could rent out. So, he was providing affordable low-cost housing.
I got to know Tom in the 1970s, when he was in his 80s. He was a lot smarter and shrewder than most people gave him credit for. He was an introvert who had a sense of humour, and he was a people watcher. Yes, he was a loner, but he was also hard-working, honest and self-reliant.
We need ways to teach people more about being frugal and self-reliant. Stuff like that, they just don’t teach you in our schools, but old Tom was a feng shui master at it.