Andrew Sushelnicki

Obituary

As written by his first son, Clarence

As read by Wayne Omelchuk, neighbor and friend

​Dad was born on December 15, 1929 in the old Canorahospital south of town.  He grew up near Gorlitz on a farm near the river and learned to work hard at an early age.  He loved to hunt and fish and everything to do with the outdoors.  He was still a small lad when he started trapping muskrats, and learned to skin and stretch the furs from his mother, making enough money to buy more traps to expand his trap-line.  With this income he bought his own bicycle and later saved enough to buy a portable grain cleaner which he would take, by horse, to neighbours farms to clean their grain for spring seeding, often staying overnight with them till he finished and moved on to the next farm.

​Dad went to Anec school near Gorlitz.  He never liked school or books and said he never read a book from cover to cover except one – “Dick and Jane”! The best part of school for him, was recess!  Often coming home from school, he’d stop to pick mushrooms.  At 12 years of age, Gedo took him out of school to help with harvest.  He learned to work hard from his mother’s example and was pitching bundles of sheaves into the threshing machine.  He remembers working 16 hours straight one day, and that year they kept threshing for 20-some days as the weather was good.  He said how sore his shoulders got then.  …which came back to bother him the rest of his life.  

​He also got a portable stationary engine-driven saw mandrel and used it to block firewood, and went to other farms to cut firewood.  He loved working in the bush, cutting trees and splitting wood. Always he took his ’22 with him, and often brought back rabbits or partridges for supper.  Baba was a great cook, and she creamed the game, and the mushrooms and vegetables from the garden.  … Dad loved his cream!

​He was still a teenager when he went to work on the extra gang for the railroad, laying down rail ties.  He remembers the cook there would make baloney sandwiches, and since there was no refrigeration then, he would bury the whole bung in the ground to keep it from going bad.  Dad said it had a greenish tinge to it!  He didn’t last at that job very long.  Too much green; not enough cream!  Oddly enough he still liked baloney (the good stuff) later on in life!  … go figure!

​After Dad left home in Gorlitz he went to work in Toronto and stayed at his Auntie Tillie Rivney’s house. He even made enough to buy his first car and learned how to get around in the city.  Back then he just signed a paper for his driver’s license – no exam.  Then he got a job in construction laying precast concrete floor slabs for a high-rise.  On one occasion, he stepped onto a freshly-painted steel beam, slipped and fell 3 stories and broke his wrist.  He had to have pins and a rod to mend the bone, then had a cast.  Dad had many accidents through his life when he should-have/could-have died, but God had other plans for him.  A few years later, he went to work in Sudbury where he was notified that Rivney’s house on River Street had burned.  Tillie was one of several family members who burned to death.

​When Dad returned to Saskatchewan, he met Rose Chalupiak on a blind date and they married on April 30, 1955.  After paying for the wedding, they moved to Regina with only $100 and rented a small, cold house on the west end of the city.  They had their first son, Clarence, there.  Rent was $40/month and the house was so cold that water froze on the floor when Mom tried to wash it.  Dad went to work for B.C Sugar Co. for 65¢/hour unloading sugar bags from railway boxcars, to the warehouse, then onto transport trucks.  No forklift; just muscle!

​Dad bought his first home soon – a small, cold house on Montegue St. and the mortgage was $40/month.  Allen was born, then another move and another child -  Gayle and the last move in the city, resulted in the youngest child – Darren.  In Regina, Dad worked for Trail Plumbing and later on, with the Regina School Board.  As well as his full-time job, Dad started his own landscaping business - after hours and on weekends,putting in lawns and rototilling gardens.  He didn’t have the ride-on tractors of today.  This was a walk-behind beast that gave him callouses and sore arms.  He would load and unload it,on the back of an old half-ton, with a couple of fir planks.  He “loved to work!” – a phrase he often repeated throughout his life.​

​Dad borrowed some money from his uncle, August Domres, to buy a quarter of sandy land near Bowsman, Manitoba.  Dad remained in Regina and his brother, Nick,farmed the land with Dad paying expenses.  After a few years he sold the land and the house in the city, and bought a farm near Hazel Dell where my Mom grew up.  Mom and Dad were very much a “Green Acres” story.  Dad liked cattle and the whole mixed farming thing – eventually getting 80 head of cows.  He grew grain, kept pigs & chickens, milked cows and shipped cream, until the creamery in Preeceville, closed.  He kept the calves, feeding them to their finished weight of 1,100 – 1,200 pounds, and shipped them under the Beef Stabilization Plan, to Winnipeg or Brandon.  He did quite well then, but a dark cloud was on the horizon.  On October 11, 1984, he was hauling round bales home from the field, and as he lifted one bale with the tractor’s front-end loader, it fell back on top of him, severing his spine, rendering him a paraplegic.  I moved back from Alberta where I had worked to live with my parents.  Dad and Mom separated in 1987.  Mom lives in a senior’s apartment building in Regina, where Allen also lives, in his own house.

​Dad still wanted to stay on the farm despite all the advice to go into the city.  Very soon he learned to hoist himself into the old ’74 half-ton, to drive around his farm.  Winters were tough but he wanted to help on the farm - … however he could. As his combine pick-up was falling apart, he thought he would try to take them part and replace the belting.  It took lots of work pulling the big old staples out, and replacing the belts – but he was determined.  When the old staples were straightened, some broke, so he made new ones out of long cotter-pins.  He was quite proud to refurbish the whole set and when the neighbor came to visit, he wanted Dad to repair his set also.  That was the start of his winter project … for the next dozen years or so!  He had bought an old school house, had it moved to the farm, and Darren made a small wooden ramp with a workbench and an airtight wood-stove for heat in the winter.  He’d stoke the fire and pound all morning.  Preparing meals, now became someone else’s job … and just an amusing hobby for him, now and then.  I would joke later, that his yearly income from the rebuilt aprons was more than he made from grain or cattle sales, (after expenses) - before he had his accident!  It seems when one door closes; another opens.  When the winter got too cold to go out to the shop, he had another project – with an old antique Singer treadle sewing machine, he made leather mitts (with liners made out of old coats and jackets).

​One spring he wanted to pick stones before seeding, so we got him on a tractor.  But soon he was hollering that he got stuck.  He’d gone too close to a low spot.  The reason why? – “…well, there was a stone there!”.  He loved going out driving, by himself, just to see the crop or check on the hay to see if it was ready, or even just to pop off a few gophers with the ’22.  …That old ’74 was his buddy – they’d go out together on the farm, get stuck somewhere, and in a while you’d hear the truck horn!  He would even pull the hay rake behind the truck to rake hay for baling.  Sometimes I laughed – he would be going down the field, pulling the rake, looking like Pa Kettle.  How many miles he must have made on that farm!  When harvest would come around, Dad wanted to combine, so Darren and I strapped on a pair of leg braces to his legs and locked them so he could stand.  We put him in front of the combine ladder, and each took a leg, and pushed him up – while he pulled himself up into the combine, step by step.  Darren had rigged a set of hand controls for the clutch and brake.  … and Dad was happy.

​Every fall, he got a special permit to hunt and shoot big game out of the truck.  He shot many deer, elk and moose… then Darren got to do the rest!  He and Darren would cut up the meat in his workshop.  Then came sausage-making time!  The three of us would make sausage, and Dad would smoke it outside in an old fridge that they gutted.

​In April of 2000, Dad sold the farm near Hazel Dell and bought a grain farm, north of Sturgis.  He didn’t drive much with the truck, as there was no place to hunt close by. One year I was burning oats-straw swaths after harvest, and Dad offered to drive the truck so I wouldn’t have to walk back for it.  As I was walking with the pitch-fork, burning swaths, I turned to see where Dad was.  I was horrified to see him throwing lit matches out his truck window, onto the swaths…and driving away fast! …After that I burned straw by myself!

​At the new farm, Dad took to riding the lawn mower, for cutting grass and the tiller, for tilling the garden.  He always felt a bigger garden, was better than too small.  He would start all his bedding plants from seed … and again his policy was “more is better”.  He liked his garden and would go in and weed with his hoe.  If he happened to get stuck in the loose soil, he’d push his way out, with the hoe.

​This past spring he tilled over the garden one last time, and said that this would probably be the last time he would go on the riding tractor.  During the last ten years he started making bird houses and feeders and a replica of his home where he grew up,out of willow sticks.  

​We had a unique and remarkable man for a farther… warts and all.  And I thank God for him.

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