I emigrated from Hillbrow and Parktown to Welkom, Free State. The joke goes, “I spent a year in Welkom one weekend.”
In about April 1978 Kurt E, optometrist in the city centre near the famous horseshoe – the dead-centre of town – asked me to work for him. Yes, please, I said. In Highpoint Hillbrow Graham B, the known world’s finest optometrist, had said he didn’t have enough work for me – he had “let me go” – so I drove off in my grey-and-grey 1965 Opel Rekord breaker in a south-westerly direction, crossed the Vile river and arrived in Welkom, city of sin and laughter. Where Kurt gave me a warm friendly welcome. introduced me to his friends and ducked off on leave more often than he’d been able to when on his own. A handy trick I would copy enthusiastically decades later.
Got myself a big ole empty flat in a big building in town – my first very own apartment! The Thornes of Barbour & Thorne, estate agents, arranged it all. Father and sons estate agents – who became firm friends. Andy & Evyn, and Dad Wally. They also helped me buy a double bed, a couch and a fridge, you don’t need anything else. I had left behind the lovely communal house at 4 Hillside Road in Parktown and a lovely lady, the delightful Triple-Ess. I was all swoon and sigh, but the Pru in her soon sorted me out and made me realise life moves on! I guess I was “let go” twice that month!
I loved the work – I was much busier than I had been in Hillbrow, doing a far wider range of challenging cases. One of my first patients was a keratoconus patient I fitted with her first rigid contact lenses and she saw beautifully as she hadn’t in years! Another early patient put on his minus fours and said he couldn’t see fokol. I tested him again and he was minus two. I said he should see his doc and he went off pop in a spittle-flecked fury, ranting that I was just trying to rob him and was obviously in cahoots with the GP or ophthalmologist. He knew our types! Dink jy ek is fokkedom?! Luckily when he finally went after passing out at home, his GP instructed him to come and thank me for saving his life – he was a sky-high undiagnosed diabetic one Fanta Grape away from death or losing a toe. Once his sugar levels had stabilised he actually did come in and thank me and say jammer asseblief. Halcyon days.
Being the Vrystaat and late eighteenth century, the practice had a back door and a tiny separate test room for Nie Blankes, can you believe it!? Frontline ladies would firmly instruct darker people to walk down the alley next to the shop to find the back door.
Kurt was a character, Swiss squash champion. He had two mates who were also Swiss champions in various disciplines besides drinking and carousing – cross-country running and skiing, I believe. They would meet annually and be suave, drink and carouse. He had an old Mercedes sedan in mint condition and a beautiful Beechcraft Bonanza India Mike Alpha. He kept a little car at the airport in JHB so when he flew there he had transport.
Winter solstice in 1978 we had a boys night in Kurt’s sauna with Kurt and Johnny H, lawyer and mensch; We sat drinking beer in the heat of the sauna till it became unbearable, then plunged into the freezing open air pool. Then back into the sauna . . It’s good for you, they say . . To this day I believe in the beer part of that prescription.
Kurt once asked me to drive his Merc and a young lady pilot with instrument rating to Joburg while he flew there. She was probably going to fly the Bonanza back at night? The Merc got tired in the metropolis of Parys and we had to spend the night there while the local mechanics got it back on its feet. A few months earlier the Barclays bank manager in Hillbrow had been a ‘barclaycard pusher.’ He’d pressed a credit card on me over my protestations that I didn’t need it. Well, that night I did – I paid for both hotel rooms and the car repair. So where some might have had their first Campari in Benoni, I had my first credit card transaction in Parys. Milestones.
Memories of people: Kurt’s receptionists, Elsabe and La Weez; Yoyoyo lots of make-up; Ralph G, the other optom; Kurt’s lovely wife Barbara; The shapely Maria; The shapely pharmacist Frick; matric classmate Elsie C’s shapely blonde Vrystaat varsity friend; McM the shapely Rhodes University student; The mafia tenderpreneur builder / truck transport brothers who wore matching thick, dark Safilo plastic frames and bought matching yellow Lamborghinis to prove a point. Not shapely. Built like squat double-door refrigerators, but lots of money.
Swanning around in my grey-and-grey 4-door, three-on-the-column 1965 Opel Rekord Concorde, the Welkom ladies must have swooned. Surely. Those days men were men and, like the Lambos, my Opel had a good hard steel dashboard, not soft and airbaggy, and a bakelite steering wheel. A front bench seat. And all the ladies agreed that it trumped the Lamborghinis when they saw my back bench seat!
I was due in the army for national service in July but Kurt spoke to the local Nationalist MP and swung it so I only started in January the next year. Strings. Who said corruption is a new invention? It’s always who you know.
~~oo0oo~~
Around 1967 – long before my time there – the Welkom manne decided that the Welkom / Johannesburg road was too dangerous to travel on, and learnt to fly. Together with his great friends Wally T and Heinie H, Kurt bought a Cessna 182 Skylane, ZS – DRL and operated the plane in an association they christened “HET – Air” – their initials. I got this info off Barbour & Thorne’s website.
~~oo0oo~~
fokol – not much; less than twenty/two hundred; less than six/sixty; Frank Duro would have raised his (were they bushy? were they non-existent?) eyebrows
Dink jy ek is fokkedom?! – think I’m schoopit?
jammer asseblief – my bad
Nie Blankes – Non Whites; Human beings deemed not to be ‘white.’ By highly scientific tests of course
Vrystaat Confessions 