John Schleimer has been featured so frequently in the newspaper that he deserves a section all his own.
When the Sportsman's Barber Shop closed in 1998, there's John in the North Shore News with his partner, Hans Lattke, who's holding a news photograph of the shop's opening day in 1963. Here's one of John with the puck from the Vancouver Canucks' inaugural game in 1970, a gift from referee, friend and loyal customer, Lloyd Gilmour - just one of the hundreds of heads John trimmed over the years. On Valentine's Day (year unknown), an anniversary photograph of John and his wife Herma holding their wedding photograph was published in the North Shore News.
Born in 1928 in Yugoslavia, now Slovenia, John was first in his family to break away from the family farm, apprenticing as a barber at 13. Conscripted into the Hitler Youth and the German Army a year later, "the Titos," (Yugoslav Resistance under the command of Marshal Tito), made him a prisoner of war when they liberated the area in 1945.
In the chaos of post-war Europe, it was a miracle that John and his family were reunited. With the farm that had been the family's home for hundreds of years gone forever, they made a new life in Graz, Austria. One evening, after a long day scraping a living cutting hair, John offered a young woman a ride home on his bicycle. Another miracle was set in motion on that bike ride, a romance that lasted 60 years.
Jump ahead five years to 1951. "I wanted to go somewhere else to make my life, to America," John recalls. Time passed as letters went back and forth from Austria to family in New York City, but ultimately a former soldier in the Wehrmacht, however unwilling, was not welcome in the United States. Where else?
There was an uncle in Canada.
More letters, dispatched from Vancouver to New York to Graz. The news was good and not so good. Canada would accept John and there was a berth on a ship sailing from Bremerhaven - in one week.
One week gave John and Herma Schafer time to marry, on Feb. 14, 1951, and for the bride to provide her new husband with the fare.
After 11 days on the Atlantic and five more on the train from Halifax, without knowing a word of English, John arrived in Vancouver. "It got colder every day: 40 below in Winnipeg, even colder in Calgary, and the country, there was no end to it. I wondered what had I got myself into? One morning I woke up and I was in B.C. It was so green and so beautiful, I fell in love with the place."
Within a year, John had earned enough cutting brush for BC Hydro to acquire his barber's certificate and to bring Herma and his brother, Henry, to join him in North Vancouver. They enjoyed B.C.'s outdoors to the full, hiking, hunting and fishing all over the province. Most mornings would find John fishing Lynn Creek for steelhead before a day of cutting hair. John wielded the clippers on some notable heads - Senator Ray Perrault, Mayor Jack Loucks, Coun. Ernie Crist - and many a lively discussion (politics, sports, fishing) heated up the Sportsman's Barber Shop over the years.
John gives back to the community and to the province that helped him build a new life for himself and his family. He served on the provincial Sport Fishing Advisory Board for 30 years. He is a life member of Ducks Unlimited, past president of the B.C. Wildlife Federation, Lower Mainland region, and of the North Shore Fish and Game club.
These days, John raises funds to combat prostate cancer, bowls with the North Vancouver Lawn Bowling Club and walks several kilometres every day with Charlie, the family dog, when he isn't fishing the Vedder or Squamish rivers.
Albums of photographs and shelves of trophies are a testament to John's fishing prowess. He may be most proud of the 18-pound steelhead he landed at Little Qualicum River in 1961. The next year Herma caught her steelhead, 19 pounds. Of his beloved valentine who passed away in 2011, John said, "She never let me forget it."
Laura Anderson works with and for seniors on the North Shore. seniorsconnect@shaw.ca
