Down the Stretch with Charles Juravinski

By Peter Mitchell

Reporters’ dreams are plagued with nightmares. Their sleep repeatedly shattered by terrifying images of missed deadlines, fire-breathing editors, or the ultimate horror: misplaced notes. That was the nightmare I found myself in when Charles Juravinski called me at home one afternoon. I had interviewed him on what had been a frantic day spent juggling priorities, jumping through hoops, and trying to appear in more than one place at the same time. It was a circus act I couldn’t quite pull off, and my notes from that interview had mysteriously vanished.

“I bet you’re wondering where the hell your notebook is,” he said when I picked up the phone.

I stammered as I teetered on the edge of a very short plank; the word ‘HACK’ emblazoned on my forehead. He let me teeter for a few seconds before reeling me back in. “Well don’t worry. I’ve got it right here. There’s only a couple pages. Between the two of us we should be able to figure this thing out.”

Fortunately the interview had been recorded; but my notes contained points of emphasis and leads to pursue, along with supplementary career advice and potential story ideas that he had offered during our discourse. I was grateful for his assistance, and impressed at his ability to decode my virtually unreadable scribbling.

“Well, there you go. You’ve got what you need,” he said when we had finished, “And I’ve got myself a notebook worth one dollar and nine cents.”

That telephone call, though brief, captured the character and qualities the Juravinskis share with everyone whose lives they have touched –and they have touched thousands. Charles and Margaret have led rich lives juggling the countless balls and jumping through the hoops life has thrown in their path. They have teetered on a few planks of their own but never jumped ship; choosing instead to face their challenges head-on and take control of their journey.

As a result, the Juravinskis possess an appreciation for what it means to be human and, more importantly, what it means to be humane. They firmly believe in the importance of community, and the value of people working together to achieve their goals. While there is always an eye focused on the bottom line, they are keen to lend a helping hand, and that hand is extended with an often self-effacing playfulness that the recipient can grasp without losing face or dignity. Their hands have been extended throughout the region to help thousands of lives:

·         $1 million to McMaster University to establish a Surgical Fellowship Fund

·         an additional $1 million to McMaster’s Medical Centre

·         $2 million to Hamilton Health Sciences’ General Hospital

·         $2 million to the Wellwood Centre

·         $5 million to the Hamilton Regional Cancer Centre which has been named in their honour

·         $5 million to St. Peters

·         $5 million to St. Joseph’s Villa

·         $7 million to St. Joseph’s Hospital

But don't let their philanthropic generosity fool you into thinking the Juravinskis were born into days of wine and roses. They were not fed with silver spoons as babes. In truth, spoons of any sort were a luxury.

Charles says, "There wouldn't be one penny in my father's house that you could lay your fingers on and say 'That's my penny. I own that penny.'" Charles says. "We didn't starve but there was absolutely no money."

His father was born in Blaine Lake, Saskatchewan in January 1898, just two months after his grandparents had arrived from the Ukraine. The Canadian government was trying to tame the wild west by enticing immigrants with tracts of land to clear, settle and work. Many leapt at the opportunity, and Saskatchewan became home to countless German, Polish and Ukrainian settlers who, in Charles words, "helped open up that wilderness."

Life was hard for Charles’ father. His mother died when he was young, so he and his siblings were raised by a father whom ultimately gave up on life and turned to drink. There were no schools in the area and their days were spent trying to scratch out a meager living from the land.

His formal education was regrettably short. Charles explains, “When school finally came to that area he was seventeen years old. He went for half a day. The other kids were little kids, much younger than him, and they laughed at him because he couldn’t speak, read, or write English. He was embarrassed, so he walked out of the school-room and never went back. And he never learned to read or write English.”

“As a matter of fact when I was growing up I actually taught my father to sign his name. When we came to Ontario my father used to sign his name with an X.  I would put a pencil in his hand, then take his hand and make him write Nick or N. Juravinski. I even tried to get him to stylize it as best I could.”

Though he lacked schooling, Nick Juravinski didn’t lack for smarts. He didn’t need his ABCs to master the basics of life: work hard, support your family, and contribute to the community any way you can. These lessons passed from father to son and proved invaluable.
Charles was born on November 1^st, 1929, just days after the infamous Stock Market Crash that dragged the world through the despairing days of the Great Depression. Unemployment was rampant throughout Canada, reaching never-before-seen levels of 30 per cent. Jobs were scarce. Money was scarce. Basic survival was the name of the game. And Saskatchewan was hit even harder during those Dirty Thirties by a drought that made the land virtually barren.

He remembers those early days vividly. His parents struggled to to the best they could for him and his six siblings. There were none of the conveniences we take for granted today: no plumbing, no running water, and no heat. Winters are notoriously brutal in the Prairie Provinces, and the window panes would freeze inside the house. The only light was filtered through the encrusted snow and ice. Only after it melted in the spring were they finally able to see outside through the window.

"The house we lived in, the rent was twelve dollars per month, so you can imagine the kind of house it was." Charles says. "When you went to bed at night in the wintertime, you wore long underwear and you had these great big, thick feather ticks that were light. You would bury yourself under there for the warmth. If you had to take a leak, you had a piss-pot under the bed. You would piss in the piss-pot, but when you got up in the morning you didn't have to pour it out because it would be frozen. Absolutely frozen."

“You had one pair of shoes, and that pair of shoes would last you forever because when they got holes in the soles you couldn’t afford to fix the damn things. I used to pick through the garbage and get Shredded Wheat separators –in the Shredded Wheat box they used to have thick cardboard separators– you would take a couple of them and stick them in the sole of your shoe and you walked on that.”

The entire family worked day and night to keep hearth and home together. Young Charles developed a work ethic he carried with him his entire life, and learned the fundamentals of commerce by peddling poultry for 25 cents a chicken. He also saw first hand, the entrepreneurial spirit his father employed to get by. While the United States government was chasing illegal bootleggers capitalizing on that country’s Prohibition Laws, the Juravinskis were engaged in a little bootlegging of their own –with a deliciously Canadian twist.

“Pasteurization had come in and the government forbid anybody to sell milk straight from the cows because the milk had to be pasteurized. Some people were afraid of drinking the pasteurized milk because they didn’t think it was pure. My father got the idea that if we had a good producing cow, we could sell their milk. So we rented three cows and sold bootleg milk. It was just like making your own booze and undermining the legal people by bootlegging it. We would sell the milk at twelve quarts for a dollar. All that did is provide a stop-gap operation so we could earn enough money to pay for the cows and then pay the general store. All it bought was the staples”

Two events changed Charles’s path; one had global consequences, the other, more personal. The Second World War broke out, and the Juravinski family moved to what they hoped would be greener pastures in Hamilton’s east end.

“It’s a terrible thing to say,” he says “But the Second World War was the best thing that happened to all of us, because it generated jobs. Everybody was hustling for all they were worth, working as hard as they could, and trying to earn and save as much as they could. Everybody was concerned that once the war ended, everything would go back to the way it was during the Depression because the war effort would be over and all the commerce would be gone. When we came to Ontario we thought we had died and gone to heaven because my father had a job as a janitor at Westinghouse. My mother had a job. I had a job. Everybody worked.”

Charles was just twelve years old when the Juravinskis arrived at their new home on Princess Street; too young to join his brothers in the Armed Forces. But even at that young age, he was making adult contributions, by lending his father five hundred dollars to buy their house. He spent his first summer in Hamilton picking beans. Then he became a delivery boy for Polan’s Grocery Store on Ottawa Street. It wasn’t long before people started to take notice of the ambitious delivery boy hustling on his bicycle. Polan’s competitor up the street, Jim’s Fruit Market, made him an offer he couldn’t refuse: six dollars a week as opposed to the four Mr. Polan was paying him. Charles readily accepted and stayed with that job until he was 15 years old.

In addition, the young boy who had repaired his own shoes with cardboard plucked from the trash began shining the shoes of Hamilton’s businessmen to earn an extra 15 dollars a week. He also held a paper route. It would be a difficult workload for anyone at any age, but Charles had inherited his father’s entrepreneurial genes.

“I subbed out my paper route to another kid on a percentage basis so I could maintain the jobs,” he remembers with a chuckle.

His first shoe-shine job was located on the corner of Sherman and Barton. It wasn’t long before the Prairie-bred work ethic again caught an influential eye, and he was enticed to shine shoes at the Royal Connaught Hotel, Hamilton’s crown jewel of the time. However, it wasn’t long before he fell from grace.

The shoe-shine parlour shared a washroom with a barbershop, and part of Juravinski’s duties included whisking off the barbershop patrons’ coats when they washed their hands. Juravinski could keep any tips he earned from shining shoes, but the owner insisted on keeping the tips from his extra duties.

“That didn’t suit with me, and it didn’t take me long to learn how to palm nickels and dimes. If the customer gave me a quarter, I would palm the quarter with some change in my hand, and I would give the owner the dime. He cottoned to it and one day he turned my hand upside down. There was the quarter. The only way I could defend myself was to give him the biggest shove he’d ever got, knocking him on his ass, and run out onto King Street. That was the end of that job.”

The kid from the Prairies was becoming a man in the mean streets of Hamilton, and he wasn’t going to let anyone push him around. He continued to toil at many jobs, gradually working his way into the construction industry and taking a position with Piggott Construction. He was so busy in fact, he didn’t notice Cupid hovering over the steel mills with his bow and arrow raised, waiting for the right moment to strike.

When he was about 16 or 17, Charles’ girlfriend at the time suggested going to the candy counter at Woolworth’s because her friend, Margaret Hudeski worked there. They met, but didn’t think of themselves as anything more than acquaintances. The seed had been planted, but it took a friendly hand to help love bloom. While taking an evening course through Piggott, Charles befriended another employee, Bill McCann –who was dating Margaret’s sister, Kay. It was McCann who eventually brought them together.

Juravinski explains “ He got to know me a little bit, and he used to say to Marg, ‘Listen, this guy, Charlie Jug-a-liquor’ –he used to call me Jug-a-liquor because he couldn’t pronounce Juravinski—‘this guy Jug-a-liquor; he’s a pretty good guy.’ Then he would say to me ‘Listen, why don’t you take out Kay’s sister, Marg?’ Lo and behold, I did take Marg out.”

Margaret too, had known the sting of poverty. She and her two sisters were born in Hamilton to Polish parents during the early years of the Depression. Her father was a butcher by trade and Margaret also remembers growing up with no money in the family. Eventually her father scraped together enough money to buy a home on Bold Street. He later found work reading meters for Union Gas. Years later, when he grew too old to walk around reading meters, he took a job as janitor, just like Charles’ father.

Charles and Margaret married in September 1956; creating a partnership that would carry them through the ups and downs of the next fifty years.

“Margaret has always been a success, and helped make me successful in my decision-making. Yes. She would second guess me on occasion, and being a husband and the type of guy I was, I wouldn’t always listen. But notwithstanding that you might not listen, it’s nice to bounce things off your better half. Margaret has also been extremely protective, and when I say protective, I mean in not wanting me to kill myself by working myself into the ground. And one of the beautiful parts, especially notwithstanding the station of life we might have enjoyed, never said ‘I want this. I want this. I want this.’ She has always been supportive; a true soul-mate.”

“I’m not going to say that everything was sweetness and light. You’re bound to bicker from time to time. But the destructive problems couples have are self-inflicted. If there’s a shortage of money that can create a problem; there’s no question about it. But if you’re going to be a drunk; if you’re going to piss away your money; or if you don’t want to go to work and be a provider, it’s self-inflicted. Look at my mother and father: there was no money. None. But they stuck together for over 60 years. It was the same with Margaret’s parents, and with my brother-in-law, who eventually became my partner in the business.”

McCann married Margaret’s sister, and the two work colleagues became brothers-in-law. They soon became business partners as well; leaving Piggott to form Wilchar Construction Ltd. in 1958. Once again Charles found himself in the centre of a family working together to build a better life. In the process, they built many projects that adorned the region: housing subdivisions, the original Hamilton Teacher’s College, office buildings, Highland Secondary School, nursing homes, the original Wentworth Lodge in Dundas, the swimming pool at Dalewood School. No project proved too big or too small. Charles remembers most of them, but one in particular remains a favourite.

“I think one of the most intriguing jobs we ever did was the Barton Street Bridge at Wellington Street,” he says. “We actually built that bridge and kept Barton Street open because the train still had to run. We demolished the bridge entirely, kept one lane open, built the one lane, and then built the other side.”

Juravinski and McCann originally conceived a fifteen year game plan with the goal of retiring at 45. But in 1971, McCann decided he was ready two years early and they closed the doors of WilChar Construction. McCann settled into retirement and never looked back. Charles found he was not quite ready to go into the home-stretch without a few more laps around the track.

“The first day I didn’t have to go to work, I was lost. I just knew I couldn’t do it,” he admits.

He flirted briefly with politics, and considered reopening the construction business when he met Ray Connell, the outgoing Wentworth North MPP and minister of public works.

“He seeded me with the thought of a harness racetrack,” Charles says. “And I said no because I didn’t know the first thing about it and wasn’t about to learn. But it piqued my curiosity, and I started to research the business. As I researched it, I got more interested and saw the possibilities. The short of it is Flamboro Downs.”

But he found himself facing a new struggle. There were many nay-sayers. Flamboro Downs almost didn’t see the light of day.

He explains, “I went to 42 different individuals/institutions and nobody would take a chance, saying ‘They can’t do it.’ ‘What do they know about running a racetrack?’, ‘They’ll never make it go.’ Nobody would loan us the money. With one exception: the Federal Business Development Bank which was a federal government funded bank for entrepreneurs. We discussed our plans with them and they loaned us a couple of million dollars. At the time it was the second largest personal loan that the Federal Business Development Bank had granted in the Dominion of Canada.”

Three years after the seed had been planted; Flamboro Downs came to fruition on April 9, 1975. It grew into Canada’s premier half-mile track and became home to one of harness racing’s signature events, the Confederation Cup. 

“Of course many people kicked themselves in the ass subsequently. When we got it up and running all kinds of people came forth and said ‘Look I’d like to buy a piece of this.’ I used to give them a big smile and say ‘Who needs you?’”

Like his father, Charles was not going to let his lack of formal training prevent him from achieving his goals. He threw himself head-first into the world of horse racing; learning as he went, and quickly finding himself playing with the big boys in the world of breeding.

“If you want to know what a war is all about; start one and go to war,” he says. “I got involved to learn a little bit about it so I could empathize better with the professional horse people. But the main catalyst came in 1981 with the first major horse I bought –Conquered. I paid $250,000 U.S. dollars for that horse as a two year old and he went on to earn almost a million dollars the next year. Then we sent him out to stud and we syndicated for something over a couple million bucks at the time. Obviously that whetted my appetite and I just kept on going.”

Many horses crossed his path over the next 30 years. A few even trotted their way into his affections. But his absolute favourite was a spirited pacing mare called Ellamony, who, like Charles, came from humble beginnings to take the world by storm; winning an astonishing 53 of her 73 starts, and breaking many records in the early nineties.

“She was really something else. Margaret and I thought if we get down to one horse, it’s going to be her. Her mother couldn’t run from here to the end of the property. She was the laziest thing you ever saw in your life. But we bred her to a horse called Cam Fella, and she threw off Ellamony. That old lady is now about 27 years old. She should be dead, but she’s still alive.”

“I can explain luck in breeding. If you take a deck of cards, the high cards are Ace, King, Queen, Jack, and Ten. When you talk about genetics a horse has only got so many Aces. The trick is to breed and catch an Ace to an Ace. If you catch an ace to a king, maybe you’re going to get a pretty good horse but you’re not going to get the top horse; not the World Champion. But they also have genes that are down to two that will throw off nothing. You can get the best stallion bred to the best mare and you got nothing except a name. I had one. I paid $350,000 US dollars in 1981 and he was so royally bred, the bloodlines were Ace/Ace. But they never threw off an Ace. However, you don’t cry over those things because we’ve had an awful lot of success with the horses we’ve had –more success than we’re entitled to, there’s no question about that.”

Sadly, his favourite Ace was dealt the worst of all possible hands. In 1996, Ellamony suffered a leg injury that led to her death. The Juravinskis were devastated.

“It was terrible. That literally destroyed my want to continue in the horse business,” he admits.

Adding to the loss was the unavoidable fact that, more than fifty years after struggling through the Depression, Juravinski again found himself in the centre of a community struggling through a decline.

“In the late 80’s and early 90’s the industry took a nosedive from which it hasn’t recovered as far as the horse racing aspect of it is concerned.”

Juravinski says a number of factors contributed. The advent of lotteries and other means of gaming provided people with new ways to play the odds. The rise of television brought hockey, football, and other sports directly into people’s living rooms. Most damaging was the fact the original people who grew up with horse racing gradually died. The younger crowd never took to it.

“Maybe we can fault the racing industry because we didn’t do anything to excite the kids,” Charles says. “If you want a future for something it’s got to be for the kids, because they’re the future of anything you’re trying to sell.”

Salvation came with the one-armed bandit. The Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation brought in 750 slot machines, and provided the track with a much needed shot in the arm.

“I would argue that if it wasn’t for the slot machines you wouldn’t have a racetrack going in the province of Ontario today. Horse racing cannot sustain itself on its own by virtue of the cost of the operation and the magnitude of the places they have to have. I question whether there’s a race track in Canada that is making any money by virtue of horseracing.”

Disaster had been averted, but the industry was changing irrevocably and Charles felt it was time to move on. In 2003 Magna Entertainment Corporation bought Flamboro Downs for $72 million, and he finally settled into the retirement he had eschewed thirty years before.

Retirement proved to be a relative term. The Juravinskis are still involved in horse breeding today, albeit on a much smaller scale. Their main efforts are now focused on helping Hamilton’s growing health care industry with donations already totaling $28 million; and the possibility of more to come.

“We knew before we sold Flamboro Downs that we were going to be doing something. We had discussed it and health care always came up. Health is the most important thing to all of us. At Flamboro Downs people would come in and you would talk and find out this guy’s had a heart attack, this guy’s had a bypass, this guy has lung cancer, and so on. When you look at that spectrum, health absolutely rises to the top. And how can people that want to contribute to the well-being of others get a bigger bang for their buck then to know they are contributing to their health.”

Charles is adamant when he says “If more people stepped up to the plate, it just might be a better world to live in. It is so gratifying. Until you get involved in something like that, you have no idea how gratifying it is to help others. With what we’ve given away I could have bought a hundred Rolls Royces. Where would I put a hundred Rolls Royces? I could have probably bought four custom made helicopters. Or a Lear Jet. Or I could have had 20 houses in 20 different countries. But you know what? That would be a pain in the ass.”

He downplays the importance of his own rise to success, but when pressed offers the following advice:

“Number one: you have to work. Number two: You have to invest. You just can’t go to work every day, get your stipend and spend it all and expect to make it. If you want to achieve anything monetarily, you’ve got to invest in whatever; you’ve got to take chances in whatever. Every failure you learn something and you go on to the next thing. And you try again. And you try again. You have to keep trying. It’s like Kenny Rogers said ‘You gotta know when to hold them, know when to fold them, and you’ve got to know when to walk away……’”

It is tempting to segue into an image of these two Aces who gambled and won riding into the sunset with a stoic dignity earned from lives of struggle and success. But life ain’t that purdy, and the Juravinskis are too practical, too self-effacing, and too down-to-earth to be insulted by such cheap literary manipulation.

Far more appropriate is another image from his Depression-era youth. Charles recalls, “In the wintertime, the farmers used to come in to town on horse and sleigh. The horses would defecate and it would freeze. We used to take the horse manure and fashion them into hockey pucks. We would make dozens of them and play hockey with the horse manure pucks. They would disintegrate after a while and break up, and if we ran out of pucks then we would take a horse ball because it would be frozen like a tennis ball and play hockey with that.”

From those childhood games played in the dust-bowl of Saskatchewan comes what is perhaps the Juravinskis’ ultimate secret of success: it’s not the shit life throws in your path, it’s what you make of it.

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Biz Hamilton is published by Town Media Inc.