There was a vote. Crowland voted no to joining. Welland then appropriated it.
Memorial School, Memorial Park. The Memorial Medal, Scotlands highest honor,

for love of country and of God, and of Canada and Crowland, who founded it.

Lest we forget.

Lest we forget.

There was a vote. Crowland voted no to joining. Welland then appropriated it.
Memorial School, Memorial Park. The Memorial Medal, Scotlands highest honor,

for love of country and of God, and of Canada and Crowland, who founded it.

I know. We all know. Everyone knows. Who doesn't know?
What everyone says. It won't change and they won't go away.
I am the only political candidate who has stood before all the people of Welland describing a secret society of criminal and political activity. The City of Welland is so widely recognized for this criminal dominance, city institutions and public events are now named "Niagara", still trying to lure outside money.

After the
blood of
the wars to

end all war.

After Welland, after Hamilton, worked harder in the steel mills to begin building Canada's winning war machine.

After Welland soldiers were killed

and wounded in the mind and body.

After the sorrows of Welland women,

with all their factory jobs and trades.

After all the fighting was over.

Police describe Welland as a "nexus of crime", for all the old and innovative political and financial illegalities, and the fact that Welland drugs are distributed throughout Ontario, across Canada and into the States. I think Welland City Hall should not be part of this or promote the business of crime families.

Job History: An Evening Tribune paper

boy from grade four to grade nine,
earning almost $5 dollars a week

for fifty-two deliveries six days

a week. I quit, asked to work

Friday and Saturday night at
The Park Theatre, minimum

wage, $24.75. Free movies,

popcorn, even the manageress

would get behind the counter and
accidentally break open a big bag of chocolates. And
I liked wearing the uniform and working the flashlight

going for tips. I made money, but more than that, I got into something different. The janitor was quiet at first, but when we got talking he turned out to be the father of Mitch, the only at the time called black man who walked around Welland dressed like a rock star,

a subject of conversation for everyone. He'd visit and talk to me there, and gave me more perspective on the adult movies the Park played, a good friend. And on Sunday afternoons they played Italian movies, and it was a real dress-up, after church crowd. That was like an eye into a different culture, seeing what was onscreen, hearing The Farfisa Organ for the first time,

and seeing the audience laughing and talking and enjoying themselves, like the old theatre on King St.

It was such a polite audience I had so much time to watch the movies, sometimes everyone else was quiet, just looking at me while I was laughing.
    Then I saw Jimi Hendrix at Maple Leaf Gardens, the parents of a Centennial bassist friend asking if they could buy me a ticket because they didn't want leave their son in Toronto for the first time all alone.
Jimi Hendrix live? Something any musician should aspire to be. A lefty making it playing a right-handed guitar upside-down, turning the strings around. He built most of his own effects, using his U.S. Air Force radar experience. His studio, Electric Ladyland, in New York, is still an important business over forty year later.... and......eventually.... growing in stature.
     So I left my Toronto university and new Sheridan College art bursary behind, dropping out and getting a job at Atlas Steels. My fiancees father got me in right away, being a superintendent driving me over in his truck. I didn't like shift work. By the time I started being able to get eight hours, I'd be switching shifts.
If I was mayor I'd be more than willing to work to co-ordinate labour practices so that single women working two or three jobs to survive, or anyone who wants a steady shift, could find businesses that could switch employees to accommodate all shift concerns. I would think a reliable pool of experienced workers

could be of better service to owners. Having hours at various job sites would allow disabled to contribute their work effort where and when they can, opening a new job category for the city.
     I was open and honest about my musical ambition when I talked to managers and bosses, being sent around the factory to try me at different jobs, getting into over twenty year seniority work, laying rails for a week with the road gang, pulling and cutting hot steel, and was there when a man one machine over lost his arm, pinched off in a pipe straightener. At the time Atlas was stressing that there weren't any more annual deaths. I was told that if I became union, and got all that training and safety days off, if I quit they wouldn't let me back, so I quit a day before 30 days.

     There was one very important thing that I learned working with veterans. I heard about the war, and the other war, and saw their mental problems. Being told about that was an ordinary part of getting hired there.
Hearing about the lives lost working at Atlas, during the rush of the war years, gave me a new respect for all the men and women and steel factories in Welland.

It made it easy to understand where Roland Hardy, a union rep who became Welland mayor, was coming from, and why political and criminal problems from Quebec were moving to Welland. By the time I was hired, you did what the union rep told you more than the factory boss. That spread to all the factories. It was worst in Welmet, where many workers didn't speak English well. I got in trouble trying to help.
     So that meant life in Welland was getting to me,
so I joined a five piece female vocalist rock band that lost a guitarist, phoning me, my first rock band ever.
The Spartan were playing at Gord's Place in St. Kitts,
and let us use their equipment one afternoon so we could audition for an agent after a week of rehearsal,

and we were gone the next week. Dave Perkins, who became a St. Catharines by-law enforcement officer and owns his own Niagara-on-the-Lake herb farm,
was the keyboardist. When he was fifteen he played jazz drums at Ontario Place with a big band.

     When the drummer quit to play with a band our agents were in, everyone asked me to be leader and I asked Tracy Wallace from Fonthill to try out, hearing her as a folk singer but thinking I wanted to see her standing up while she sang, and she really got into it.
We played around Niagara Falls and St. Catherines until the end of summer when everyone was going back to university. Well, not me.
I went back to Atlas Steels working for the Walker Brothers, doing roofing and glass replacement for ten weeks. I could have stayed as part of the regular crew, but even if it was steady day construction, my hands were feeling it, and it was starting to make me too tired to get excited about playing guitar, so I quit again before I was union.
     Shopping for shoes at Harry Holcomb's with my

father, Harry's saying Mr. Watt, I can take that shy son of yours and make him into a salesman, so my father left me there so I had the job for sure. Harry, a senior Conservative Party member, heard my political talk and set me up in Tillsonburg with room & board,

working in that store for seven months. I started to hang out at local music stores in London and Delhi. One of the biggest London bands was Ash Mountain, and it created some excitement when their manager flew to Tillsonburg in a helicopter, and took me to the most expensive restaurant for a meeting, looking for me, saying he wanted me to visit and jam with the band. He wanted me in. Wow! But I said no to Ashes.

     I went to a car show in St. Thomas and bought a 1954 M.G., a really good deal. It looked brand new, and the hobbyist was asking $1,400. He was startled when I asked him about gas mileage and could I get my license driving it.  Seeing the leather straps across the hood and folding down the window, it was almost the same M.G. used in "Love Story", the biggest love story book and movie for a long, long time. Every-one Tillsonburg wanted a ride in it. I even got to drive around in newer hot rods, changing cars. Yes, that's true, I didn't bother me that much that I didn't have license. Back then the province didn't either, letting you buy a $25 certificate for a year, and it was legal to drink and drive.
     But my biggest Tillsonburg memory is my parents and I hugging and crying, leaving the house for the first time, and I wanted to move back to Welland.
     When I bought the car, I stated visiting Welland on weekends and met Karen Breslaur in Port Colborne

at their first lakeside bandshell rock concert. I was asked by a CHOW d.j. to show up with my flute playing friend, Kelly Blair, and sing some songs while bands were changing. They kept asking us back up and we played all afternoon, and we both got a ride home with Karen and her friends. Karen's parents owned what was known as the German bakery. She wanted to be a stewardess and get paid to travel the world, and after she became a Welland Rose Queen it looked like it was going to happen. But one night, after getting a ride home from an event, her parents found her curled up in a corner of her bedroom, not wanting to talk, and didn't want to leave the house, saying she was afraid of the sun. Her parents asked me over to see if she would talk to me, just a little.

Within months her parents shut down the bakery and moved out west, and Karen became an R.C.M.P. narcotics officer.
I didn't have to wonder too much to figure out why.
       So I went back to Atlas Steels, sub-contracted to Faust Construction. We built the forms and poured the concrete for the newest addition, and installed the sheeting and windows along shipping and finishing,

the front of the building beside the railroad tracks.
      I quit again before I became Union to get back into guitar playing, after getting asked to move into a house in Mississauga to start working with this band writing songs and rehearsing. I think of that summer as when I got into "Pretzel Logic" by Steely Dan, doing my own thing when others were at work.
    
Yeah! If you've read this far it must be getting tiring.
I'm getting tired remembering all this factory labour.
And I'm sure you've got the drift of my lifestyle now,

so here's just a list of other employers and jobs I had.

Union Carbide, twice, five years seniority. When I was

at Page Hersey I worked for a week with my father.
Everyone there liked him, and what everyone was saying they liked about him the most, was that they never heard him saying anything bad about anyone else, always joking around and singing to himself.
I knew my mother was like that at home, but it turns out The Watt Clan is one of the oldest Scottish clans, known for high-jinks and being singers and dancers,

living deep and fa, fa awa, in the Highlands.
     While living in Toronto, I worked as a salary guitarist for Corrado Accaputo, a former Italian opera singer and Canadian Broadcasting System technician,

owning his own recording studio. His son Salvatore was Selvis, the second biggest grossing Elvis act after Douglas, from Niagara Falls, the only imitator to ever appear onstage with Elvis. I worked with Douglas too.
     Seeing me sing some r'n'b during a showband "Blues Brother" set, Taylor-Foates, two Detriot players with an office in Toronto, hired me as a replacement player, getting $450 a week salary. They also danced with me in the office, fun guys getting me into it so much that I spent $125 in 1979 to get Master John to make me stage dance shoes. I got darker beige short fur imitation baby zebra skin. People would ask me if they could feel them after playing onstage.
     Living in Welland, visiting with my parents when I wasn't in a band, I worked at Goodman Brown, built a greenhouse addition for Pioneer Flower Farms in Vineland, my father helping me get out of Welland by driving me back and forth to work, after I was made sick at the Welland Hospital when I was put in the psychiatric ward, 2 South, being called crazy during my first election for calling people criminals, before they became Hell's Angels.
     I was hired by Grisonich Farms one street over,

after their son saw me and knew me from guitar playing. I drove a truck with helpers to sell produce north of Toronto, worked at the Prudhommes stand,
and at the farm itself, and got gigs in Port Dalhousie.
     I worked at three other greenhouses, bought a Volkswagen van, and started doing artwork and signs being self-employed. I can't name all the businesses and owners I worked for, but you can imagine what you could learn working for every kind of business, and every kind of business owner.
     When Leons in Welland won the cross-Canada contest for sales and advertising, it was me who painted the front window backdrop for the summer scene, with employees filling the front with real sand.
    

But more than that have been all the friends I've

made through art and music, playing ball hockey,

attending all the churches, synagogues and temples,

sharing our hopeful and uplifting moments together,

and all the important occasions of our Welland lives.

All that work, all those ceremonies, all the partying.
I like to think I know who the people of Welland are.

If there's one thing I can say about my political campaign, it always attracts very serious legal attention. So I hope legal professionals

get interested in my presentation here. I'm trying to type for the understanding of anyone who can read, so I'm including this piece to illustrate what working of the English language I'm capable of.

When I was a part-time political reporter for The Evening Tribune,
covering Thorold City Council,  I wrote this piece about the word "all" as a joke. The editor liked it, said he didn't even have to edit it, and printed it. Joe! Do you remember that? I'm sure you do. You got really jealous, even upset with me a little. I know I could have been she who must be obeyed, but I didn't want to.

This was handed out about me during the last election.
You didn't read about this in The Tribune.
When the Tribune reporter came up to "interview" me,
the day after I was beaten up going door to door,
when I was sitting painfully in a chair at City Hall election day,
having to be there so everyone could see what happened,

this reporter came up to me laughing, just saying "loser".

Even though that's how he treated a former fellow reporter,
I'm polite to him when I see him shopping in his wig and dress.
These are real libels and defamatory libels. Knowing that papers from The Toronto Star to The Niagara Falls Review had been writing about me before that, more than made up for the little hurt feelings I had when I first read this.

But this was a professional criminal effort, just like having these people show up in your real life is always a sign something bad was going to happen, and it just hasn't stopped.

If everyone else in Welland is having to make resumes to help them get jobs, then I'll try making my first one right here. Jobs? A mayor is a job? That will be news for Welland. But job experience counts the most, so as a candidate I feel you should see mine.
     I just heard some talk about a mayoral candidate I didn't know had quit. The owner of a local pizzeria was saying he was caught stealing at work. That's Welland job experience for sure, especially for City Hall elected officials.
     Don't think I'm disparaging you out of spite, sir, after you were so kind to invite me into your house to warm up and talk, while I was handing out my own political statements after the flyer delivery service got scared away the first day.

Master John, the only cobler with a store on Yonge Street, right there with Sam the Record man, Platinum Records, the hot haircutting places, his store full of pictures of rock stars and dancers with his shoes and boots.

The job of mayor of Welland might mean dealing with the complaints of senior civil servants living in Toronto. Let me explain. A few months ago I was asked to visit an office in Welland so that a provincial employee could interview me.
She told me a story about a Welland city employee who was arrested and convicted for five years. There was a lot of pressure on the provincial employee who made the decision about whether his job should be waiting for him when he gets out. She didn't think he should be working for the city.
Two members of our local crime family visited this employee in her Toronto office, and threatened her if she didn't help out. This caused her to be transferred out west, something her co-workers are still upset about. Obviously, a Welland mayor of open and honest rapport will have to be a lot more diplomatic with such requests. And I wouldn't let him back to work for the city either. It surprised me when she pulled a cheque out, giving it to me, saying the province supported me, I could keep being a mayoral candidate, and I'd keep being subsidized as long as I had to.

This Canada Goose, show life size, can't scan very well. The silver edges must be confusing it.

This jewelry represents my favorite job that I ever saw. I was playing in Cobalt,

and I thought hiking around to see the old uranium mines would be my memory there, but half the city, one side of the street, had burned down not too long ago, and wasn't getting rebuilt. A local real estate business owner who liked the band and heard what I had to say about being away from Welland, invited with to go with him the next day while he made the rounds checking out properties, and he showed me properties around the lake and into forests, two story houses of wood construction like expensive chalets, big fireplaces, private roads, all wired up, selling for under $6,000, with not much interest.
     Cobalt was part of the tri-town area, a political survival mode for three cities.

Some local musicians asked to come to a bar in Haileybury to play a set between another band at their gig. My memory there is the bartender, Lolly Gillan, the most beautiful woman I've ever seen. She could have been a favorite memory for that week.
     But there was a big reservation there too, and I wanted to get some suede moccasins to wear onstage. They didn't make as much noise when you stepped on guitar cords. Jimi Hendrix explained that's what started him wearing them.

     While I was in the store, I started spouting off about my Mohawk and Turtle Lodge friends back in Niagara, and a young man asked me if I wanted to watch him. I followed him into another building that was a cafeteria, and he had a big traveling case he opened up and set up. He had little melting flames and firing pots, with all kinds of enamel paints and bits and pieces. He fired up, pulled out a mould and started working.  

     His other pieces were beautiful, very original creations, with colours that made me ask questions, an artwork he said was only for his brothers and sisters.
He said he had an idea of what might be good for me, after he got me talking about the Niagara Peninsula and the wildlife I saw the most. He explained the colors as how they looked flying up north under the northern lights, and said he had to ask $25. I didn't try to bargain.

    What impressed me the most was just as he thought it was solidifying enough to pull out of the mould, he used a small knife,  pressing in the edges of feathers around the wing, getting 3-D with it.
I still can't get over this expensive Canon scanner, and that's all it does, not being able to capture these colors.

That was in 1975, and this has been my road emblem ever since, stuck in my guitar case. Now that I'm finally finishing my new guitar invention, I'm going to use it on the headstock for a logo.
    This young man didn't think I was a rock star. He thought I lived as freely in my mind and body as he did, respecting my Scottish ancestry, and by giving me his artwork, he made it mine. He talked about his northern life, what it meant to be Inuit, what a southern rez is and what he did to get out of it.  How can you call someone who educates you, impresses you with artistry, and invites you into his world, just an afternoon friend, especially when his words and the sound of his voice, and his Inuit mind, stay with you forever? I know he'd get off on knowing it's graduated from the case to my guitar, and that's only because I said my guitar I built back then wasn't nice enough for it. He also saw my guitar as being a lot of nice maple but without any carving or artwork or my name on it. But when I said that and talked about what my ideal left-handed guitar could be, and what I wanted to build next, he understood, and said if it's not going to be featured on my guitar, just be a guitar case road symbol, he'd knock $1 off his original $25. He wouldn't change his mind, but I was able to give him a ride to the bus station.

   When I see my northern lights Canada Goose, I like to think he's back home, sitting under the northern lights, drawing with colours that only real Inuit can see.
I also wish I could have pronounced his name well enough to remember it for you. I can hear the sound in my mind, but I never could say it out loud.

When I first started having to make up codes to use computers, I was 4chun81, and here's one reason.
My art teacher and English teacher at Centennial both encouraged me to drop out of the education system and keep following my own artwork, even though I had a scholarship or bursary waiting for me.
Mr. Kah asked me to have supper with him at an expensive restaurant in Niagara Falls, to celebrate by treating me to a meal I never had before. I had trout with head on and blue cheese salad, and he bought a drawing I did on a piece of typing paper, of a roadside and field of old cherry trees down South Pelham, the Kendall farm. He gave me $50, big money in '70. Thanks again, Mr. Kah. I still remember our visit in your home and your minimalist poem about a cigarette.

Mr. Hugh Forsythe, art teacher, gave me this book from his collection, knowing I was still going through a Van Gogh phase with my art, and wasn't getting enough, copying artwork and trading for other students.
It says: "To John Watt in appreciation for the many (underlined) hours of assistance in such activities as sets for school musicals, hall displays, programs for presentations in the auditorium, and setting a high standard of workmanship in our art program. Good luck!! Sincerely, Hugh Forsythe. Feb. 18/70.
     As you can see, I was getting into it and having a good time. But the reason I had to start volunteering was because other students not identified to me, just described as having and "influential parent", complained that I was using up too much oil paint with my paintings, and I was going in after classes and drawing and painting. Mr. Krar wasn't happy with this, but he cut me back to one day after classes and suggested I join the art club to get another session. Having to volunteer to get this was just more artwork for me, and it was more fun working with the drama club onstage, while they were singing and dancing.
     I was starting to play guitar around Welland, and didn't like the criminal stress I was catching, so I moved to Toronto to get into playing guitar, when I only my own songs. I missed drawing and painting,

so when I visited the Eaton Center on Yonge I bought that small Van Gogh print in the upper right corner.
The very beautiful redhead who was the salesgirl, said she was new to the job and I was her first sale.
We got talking and when she heard I was in Toronto all alone getting away from my home town, she invited me to have supper with her parents. Her father was an executive for General Electric manufacturing television sets, and used to be a pianist and organist for silent movies. Their big house by Hyde Park was a fun place to visit. Marlene was an allergy research medical specialist working in The Toronto Hospital, working towards her doctorate within a year, and I'd visit her in her lab too. We were friends from 1970 until after 1980, when it just became letters and stopped being that, after I moved back to Welland.
Sometimes it's more than nice what good artwork can do. She proved to me I had psychic abilities.

At the bottom of this page is a flyer that followed me around one day, while I was delivering my own campaign statements after my St. Catharines flyer delivery company was scared away their first day.
I had 22,000 copies donated to me and didn't want to waste them. A lot of people in Welland would like you to think, or at least act, like I'm the person they work hard to make me be. Are you having to take sides? Aren't you voting with heart and your own free mind?

Patience. It's nice when it's working for you. Sometimes a job is just a repetitive effort, no matter what the job is. This panel from a long coat I made out of a suede jacket, a getting old Himalayan fur coat and some leather, was a project that took a long time putting together. The northern trout was copied from a knitting pattern my mother had, and the beads on the right side I put in there to represent dragonflies, and the shapes under the water symbolize the electrical sensory systems fish have for underwater. The panel on the other side looked the same, but had a beading version of Vincent Van Goghs' "Starry Night", by memory.
      Jimi Hendrix sang about "the echoes of glaciers from long ago", and it took a long time for me to understand that.
I thought I did after seeing the striations and fossils, with the bleached bones of failed migrations, at Point Abino, looking up Lake Erie to where you see no land, a ten thousand year view, nothing changed since the glaciers melted away.
      Since then, I learned the Haida on the northern coast of British Columbia have an "oral history", telling stories of the ice age and what it was like before, creating a vision in you.
Seeing Jimi at first was all about the equipment onstage and how he sang and played, but he talked about his Egyptain Nubian ancestry and Cherokee grandmother, who walked "The Trail of Tears". It's always interesting what a serious musician can get into talking about, what makes him play,

and more than that, what music is giving back. No-one, not even science, has the answer to where all this sound goes.
     Bruce Cockburn believes some equatorial birds can move into another dimension, after spending time down there for Amazon rainforest charity work. I  talked to Inca musicians in Port Dalhousie, a band of mountain flute players. They called their chief bird "Quetzoacotl", and celebrated him throughout their artwork and architecture. European society in North America should look up in fear when Quetzoacotl returns to fly again, as his disappearance was predicted too.
This is one big bird that doesn't have to rise from the ashes.
Speaking about the Pheonix and those ashes he rises from,
do you know the difference between Hydro and Hydra?

Aaaah..the non-stop drama that was The Selvis Showband, Mississauga.
It followed you around. Take a close look at this picture. That's Selvis,
making his younger sister do "the bunny squeal". This was supposed to be a serious favor for one of Corrados' good friends, and a Selvis fan.
We met to pose in his bar so he could take pictures of the new band.
This is the same wall he posed for his wedding pictures, a very old bar.
We're having a hard time standing there. Selvis just said "wanna hear a bunny squeal?" and started yanking on his sister. If you notice Wayne,

the drummer in the beige jacket, staring intently at her, with Corrado glaring at him, everyone unable to pose for the camera together,
you'll begin to get it. That's me on the far right, in a nylon hiking jacket,
trying to stare straight up into the ceiling. I was on the dogs' side.
     We were in Brantford, and Wayne was a drummer who just came up from Boston, bringing his big Russian purebred with him. No hotels would let him keep it in his room. He traveled with the band driving himself with his dog in his van the first two weeks. I thought that was okay, thinking he needed quality time with his dog. This is the final day.
     When he asked to bring his dog into the afternoon party, in Corrados' back yard, we all thought that would be a good thing for both of them.
It perked up right away, started snuffling in the air, then went straight for Jane's pet rabbits, in cages in the back yard corner.
It ripped open the first cage and killed her biggest rabbit right away, and was working on another, wounding it, before Wayne could pull him off.

Jane was devastated, sobbing. Wayne had to lose the dog or get fired, and it was a big mess to clean up. Corrado invested a lot of money in the p.a. and lights with a really good follow spot, something we always ran through sound checks for.

Now I know the answer to the question:

"wanna hear a bunny squeal echo?"