Fred Gardiner and me
That’s me shaking hands with “Big Daddy” Fred Gardiner at the Canadian National Exhibition in 1959. At the time I was assigned as a police liaison and public information officer to the Emergency Measures Office.
I am pictured here manning an information booth at the CNE where I distributed pamphlets and information including 11 Steps To Survival designed to help people survive a nuclear attack. The array of Geiger counters behind me demonstrate the relative effectiveness of different home bomb shelter building materials including earth, cinder blocks, wood and steel plates used to block the deadly effects of radioactive fallout. We used low-dose radioactive material for our demonstration so I wore several radiation monitors to keep an eye on my daily RADs.
Fred Gardiner was the first chairman of Metropolitan Toronto and was responsible for many major capital works projects in the city including construction of the Gardiner Expressway.