The Job

by Jacques Poirier
for Vintage Snowmobile

The Cessna was running out of fuel after almost two hours in the air. We still hadn’t located Saint Évariste de la Guadeloupe, the only village with both an airstrip and a swimming pool, "It's my own pool!" Fournier had told me over the phone, "...piece of cake to find it from the air…"

Only the cake was covered in snow, a surprise October flurry not unusual in these boonies we affectionately called “La Beauce”. The young pilot was systematically swooping down over each village main street to spot a hotel or store with the word “Evariste” spelled out on a sign, one eye on the fuel gauge and the other on the high church steeples of the Quebec countryside.

Heck I thought to myself, he could land in any one of these villages and I could locate a snowmobile manufacturer there and get hired on the spot. In 1970, there were 60 of these in Quebec alone, with at least half of them precisely in the area we were criss-crossing in the air. Anyone who had worked at the Bombardier R&D facility in Valcourt during these golden years could expect to double his salary by defecting to the competition. It didn’t seem to matter if the person had pushed a pencil, a broom or a wrench. I had worked on the Elan prototype, a mini-sub, the Olympic, a pedal-boat with a sail, the Nordic, the mini-bike, the dragster, and the first Sea-Doo, mostly deciding where to put the reflectors and other details for the decal companies. But it was happiness… until I had a really bad break: my boss Sam Lapointe, ever anxious to please the Bombardier Family, found out accidentally that I had a degree in architecture. So he switched me to designing a stable for 30 horses, a guest house, an employee recreation center, president Laurent Beaudoin’s kitchen, the new 100,000 ft2 research center, the trade show kiosks and a rear deck for his own house. All that work for $5000 a year. There was no time left to ride the hills on my snowmobile, much less a chance to design one, a fond dream of mine. So I handed in a 24-page resignation letter that Beaudoin kept under the glass of his desk for a long time, they say, just for laughs. I was twenty-five and my main reason for quitting was that I thought that his research center had no research and no center, his company heading for the trash heap of history.

Common wisdom is that an architect is someone that is not ‘macho’ enough to be an engineer, yet not ‘gay’ enough to be an interior decorator. This time around I had hidden that unfortunate diploma carefully to the hiring people, choosing instead to hype my experience at Bombardier’s, especially my hard work on the very successful Elan. That year, Coleman had bought SkiRoule, Bombardier bought Moto-Ski, Conroy had just acquired Sno*Jet while AllSport was buying BoaSki. The latter was located in faraway Saint Evariste de la Guadeloupe, a mouthful for those naïve American corporate types. It needs to be said that by Christmas, like clockwork, Bombardier would have sold out hundreds of thousands of its SkiDoos, its entire production. The pressure to double that number every year was so intense that one of the brothers,  Jacques Bombardier brought a shotgun to work and unloaded it into his mouth, stopping the assembly line for nearly an hour. That pressure-cooker tempo  was spawning companies much like dense galactic gases spawn young stars. Every one of these was at work filling the gaps in the rest of the snowmobiling season.

Only three or four persons were needed to create a new brand, a new company selling JetSki, MotoJet, SnoSki, SnoCuiser MotoSki , SnoJet or what not: you needed a lawnmower guy, a sheet metal person with a 6-foot break, a fiberglass fella with canoe and/or auto body experience. Engine, body, cowling were then their respective areas of expertise. The more sophisticated startups might have had an upholsterer for seats and a financial officer for show, the latter deemed unnecessary because of demand, the giant sucking sound heard from the 4000 mile long North American Snow Belt. It is true that every boat dealer from Alaska to Newfoundland wanted to have something to sell in winter. Anyone without a blue, red, black or yellow snowmobile sign hanging was habitually depressed and out of business for six months every year. It did not seem to matter that most of these manufacturers bought their skis and tracks from the reject piles near Bombardier’s subs and affiliates. Or that some of these machines were shipped without an engine and others with the track installed in reverse. Money and American corporations flowed into the province so fast that Quebec-style colleges started to cancel Latin and Greek to make room for more English and Economics. Engineering followed, but too late, according to some bad gossip from Minnesota. But that’s another story

I liked the salary AllSport had offered me. That morning I was flying to visit the plant and meet local management to show some sketches, 200 miles away. Then suddenly the snow was melting on a gorgeous turquoise rectangle at 2 o’clock. That’s it, this is Saint Evariste, let’s land that bird the pilot had said . The landing strip was equally well camouflaged with snow but the wind sock caught our eyes. At the end of the wiggling strip stood a dark blue Lincoln Mark V, Fournier’s massive limo. After a much needed shot of Scotch from the back seat bar, we headed to the local restaurant for lunch, the car filled with tropical music from an eight-track tape player. Moods of Caribbean Guadeloupe under fresh snow. Prosperity must be fun, I thought with envy.

Waiting for our meal with five rowdy semi-drunk execs, the thrill of the conversation was a bet they had taken with Evariste. Not the saint who gave his name to the village, but Evariste Boulanger, a maple syrup farmer who had invented a new aggressive track and a new slide suspension to match. He was the talk of the restaurant. Rumor had it that he had driven his prototype to nearby Thetford Mines and managed to climb all the way to the top of an asbestos tailing mound. That cone stood 200 feet high with a 40 degree slope, and just after the year’s first snow, Evariste won his bet. Clever ‘Varist’ had made another bet, one that he would fly his plane between the church steeples across the street at precisely 12 noon. The waitress had raised the venetians and the clients were anxiously waiting to see if the farmer could slip his 32-foot wingspan into a 24-foot gap with enough of a bank to clear the ancient steeples. In a loud burst of plane exhaust noise he did just that to the crowd’s delight, later showing up for congrats and schnapps.

These events didn’t detract Fournier from advising me on what was coming. I was to meet Lincoln Custeau that afternoon, the head of research at Boa Ski. With the breath of a Scottish distiller, Fournier’s voice went into a low growl: Be very careful with Lincoln...

I understood pressure. Nothing’s wrong with a drink when you just sold your company for millions of dollars to a faceless US corporation, with final payment due when you deliver a precise number of units to their Ohio distributor by Christmas. Add to that the dilemna that you still have you have no idea on how to get the missing sprockets, chains, headlamps and engines. To get enough, Bombardier had to buy a little-know stationary engine maker deep in Austria, the now-famed Rotax. Chains came from Korea by plane at huge costs, the entire market swarming with orders that no one could fill on time. To compound the problem you also have to know know that Lincoln’s new baby looks like an overcooked marshmallow with a bad paint job. The new owners insisted on hiring a stylist but Lincoln just adored his freaky looking Boa. With his ego the size of a mountain, all the execs sensed that me, the guy sent by the Montreal hiring agency, I had no chance to work it out with their hairy-chested research head with hands the size of shovels. I was too much of a city slicker with my transparent smoked acrylic briefcase full of pretty sketches. I already knew that from the oblique stares and shifty attitude.

Darkness falls quickly in late October. The assembly line that I was being shown was badly lit, sitting inside a 1000-foot long instant steel building, the rusty cylindrical kind. I was dreading the encounter with Lincoln when a sudden power failure stopped the assembly line in full darkness. Freezing rain had downed some power lines. Immediately people went to their cars to get flashlights and gas lanterns. Most employees there were hunters, poachers and woodsmen that took occasional jobs to buy potatoes, gin and tobacco. The assembly line was cranked by hand with a four-by-four and work quickly resumed. Trucks with oily 55 gal drums filled with parts were searched by flashlights, someone having yelled Vite, on manque des 2 pouces 7/16 fil fin pour les moteurs . Hard to attach engines without these fine thread bolts. Soon I could hear the air compressor's tank whimping out. Fournier was now standing on a crate waiving a wad of hundred dollar bills. I will put one of these for your Christmas party for each machine you load in the semi-trailer before the next shift.

The current came back on and Lincoln showed up with a resignation letter written on a tiny square of paper, held up front between an enormous thumb and equally large forefinger. He had learned of my potential mandate to civilize his 640cc BoaSki SS and threatened to quit. All knew that if his resignation was accepted, he would take half the employees with him and start SnoSomething Inc. at the other end of the village. My goose was cooked. I didn’t care for the name either, as BoaSki was coined in a local school contest where the winner was promised a summer job. Some smart-ass kid said Boa was the best name since a boa is strong and goes into the wood, just like a snowmobile. The parents cried with pride and the color chosen was blood red by unanimous consent. Choosing a color that was already used by other sleds was considered blasphemy, unlike today. At Bombardier, I was instrumental in changing the original yellow paint that for years Armand Bombardier had bought second hand from the Highway authorities. They were tired of being called “mustard pots” so we opted to standardize with Sico paint a brighter cadmium yellow that still stands today. Yellow looks good on snow in the bleak winter months. Blue did not fare so well, I thought, not knowing what was awaiting me.

Although Lincoln became a friend much later when we built a racer together, that day I chose to leave that job opportunity to the local talent. Because the pilot had to fly back to Montreal before the onset of the freezing rain, I took a very slippery taxi ride to Thetford Mines and booked into a hotel, hoping to meet the new president of SnoJet. I spent the next two hours making little sketches to show him what I could do for his brand, a high cg racer in the tradition of the "mustard pots" Olympics. Little did I know then that we would become famous for the exact opposite, the low-slong Thunder Jet racing machines that would soon dominate the snow belt. Jose Suys was a steely-eyed Belgian hired by Conroy when they acquired the company from three Quebec businessmen, a former lawnmower repair man, a sheet-metal guy and a canoe maker. I went to sleep, toying with figures : Bombardier was aiming for 600,000 machines a year when I left, earning $6000 a year. BoaSki was aiming for a production of 6,000 machines and was offering me $24,000 a year. Sno*Jet, I had read, was aiming for a production of 60,000 units. Simple maths, tomorrow I would ask for $16,000 , a fine number more in line with my lack of real experience but justified by a great desire to achieve.

Money isn’t everything when you’re young and you like your work. Sno*Jet had a real challenge to offer a designer, something awful and unheard in the entire industry: 5,000 crates containing unsold machines from their last year of operations. Their Sno*Jet Super-Sport had bombed, too ugly, too expensive and delivered too late in the season. It was endowed with cranky Hirth engines, bad carbs and other unmentionables. My first job would be to recycle these into something decent and desirable. Suys gave me the $16,000 I wanted, asking to keep it a secret since the chief engineer with a family of four was earning less. But thank goodness for all those Popular Mechanic magazines I had read, I could speak English to the new owners…and he could not! What a plus that was in our future fights. I was in heaven and the sky was blue, like the snowmobile color I detested but had to live with for four years. And there were no hairy brutes here, just tall slick gentle Mormons who manufactured Glaston Boats in Austin TX, Carlsen cigarette boats in CA and coffee tables in GA. They mostly came and went, leaving the unionized Frenchies to themselves as long as they delivered the goods to all their famished boat dealers in Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, the Dakotas and Idaho.

Since manufacturing and engineering jobs were hard to fill in the then priest-ridden Quebec, most engineering staff had been brought in by Jose Suys from a recent bankruptcy in the refrigerator industry. He was a “fridge guy” himself for the four years since his immigration to Canada. That culture would seem natural for a company called Sno*Jet, don't you think? You have guessed by now that the asterisk placed in the word Sno*Jet is meant to be a snowflake. We at Sno*Jet were very proud of that bit of creativity by the secretary of our Production Chief. until it melted five years later under the heat of a Kawasaki engine. But a lot of glory would come to Sno*jet untill then. In a next issue our story will go to Austin TX, Minneapolis MN, Burlington VT, Japan, Peterborough ON, Thetford Mines QC, Eagle River WI, Tring Junction QC, Kerrville TX and a host of other great places.

So kick your boots into those stirrups as we are ready to roll into the hills. Of course, this is after I’ve had a chance to see if certain characters are really dead. I don’t want to get sued out of my retirement money. I will write next chapters with a genuine zeal, the golden years of Sno*jet and the amazing things that happened within the industry in general. Then later I will revisit Bombardier for more pre-1971 highlights and dark secrets along with post-1971 juicy gossip. You will get to know Henri, Gaston, Tony, Duane, Jim and a host of other colorful and now deceased individuals that I will proudly re-awaken for you.

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You see, I later taught an Industrial Design class at the U. of Montreal., a new department brought about by the explosion of new manufacturing activity in our province. Some of my students went on to work with my former employers, diligently reporting to me every crispy secrets of design, production and marketing flavor. I can’t wait to share these with Vintage Snowmobile readers.