Download The Keith Beedie Story - Beedie Group

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THE KEITH
BEEDIE STORY
“My mom was telling
him that cars donʼt
just move themselves.
I didnʼt say a word.”
PART 1: LAYING THE FOUNDATION
CHAPTER 2: LEARNING THE HARD WAY
turf. “People were looking, and there was a good chance they knew Dad.”
Luckily, using the same battery trick, Keith managed a quick escape. “I
started to wonder if Dad had the car booby-trapped or something!”
Twice burned, Keith took a break from driving the car until he was
confi dent the horn issue was resolved. When the problem was fi nally
fi xed, he felt he was ready for his boldest car caper to date. He really
missed being out on the road, even though he had nowhere specifi c to
go. So, when his parents told him they were heading out for a movie
one evening, he hatched a plan. “Th ey were going to the Park Th eatre,
on Cambie Street. Aft er they left in the car, I found out the start and
end times for the movie, grabbed my spare car key and headed out
the door.” Keith took the bus to Cambie Street and scoured the streets
around the theatre until he spotted his father’s car. He jumped in and
took off on a pleasure cruise while his parents were inside watching the
movie. Feeling confi dent about his plan, Keith kept an eye on the time.
Before the movie let out, he drove the car back to the theatre, expecting
to have it parked, waiting for his mom and dad. It had all seemed
so fl awless, until Keith turned the corner and realized that the
parking spot where his father had left the car was taken. With a
racing heart, he drove around and around, frantically searching
for a spot close enough that his parents might not realize the car
had moved. Watching the clock, he knew he was running out of
time. Th e last thing he wanted was for his parents to spot him
cruising the streets on their way out of the movie. He found a
space one block further down the street from where he’d found
the car, parked it and quickly walked away.
“It was a tense trip home on the bus,” Keith says. “I got back, but
my parents weren’t there. I waited and waited. Oh my God Almighty,
I was terrifi ed.” When his parents fi nally walked through the door,
Keith could hear them arguing. “My dad was insisting that he knew
where he’d parked. My mom was telling him that cars don’t just move
themselves. I didn’t say a word.” Th e debate continued, but Keith was
never a suspect. He was relieved to have escaped discovery, but he felt
uncomfortable about being the cause of his parents’ fi ght. Many years
later, Keith was still bothered by the image of his parents’ argument
that day. As his father neared the end of his battle with cancer in 1975,
Keith could keep quiet no longer. Approaching his sick father as he lay
dying in Royal Columbian Hospital, Keith quietly confessed his role in
the car mystery. “I had to tell him,” Keith says. “Even as weak as he was,
dad slapped his knee and said, ‘I knew it!’ Two days later he passed
away.” Case closed, conscience soothed.
BOEING DAYS AND CATALINA LOVE
From then on, even when Reg was out of town, the car stayed put.
Instead, Keith limited himself to going for drives with his father,
resigned to the fact that he wasn’t the one driving. One day Keith
joined his father on a trip to visit a friend at the Boeing Plant 2 that
was located on Georgia Street. The sight of the operations at the plant
thrilled Keith. He was agog at all the activity. Boeing, the aircraft
manufacturer, had three plants running in Vancouver in the 1930s
and 1940s: one on Terminal Avenue, a second close to Stanley Park
and a third, much larger, operation out at the airport. For a kid who
had grown up building planes out of balsa wood, there was nothing
more exciting than going to the place where they made the real thing.
At that time, Plant 2 was building wings for the Mosquito. Th e planes
were made of wood, which was an unusual choice. As Keith describes
it, “the planes were a half-assed kind of secret,” which only made the
whole operation there more exciting to observe. While his dad chatted,
Keith took in every detail of what was going on around him. “Planes,
planes, planes were all I could think about,” he says. It would have
been impossible for Reg to not notice Keith’s intense interest in plane
construction. In 1942, with Grade 10 nearly done and school summer
holidays coming up, he used his connections to get Keith a job as a
gopher at Plant 3, at the airport.
THE MOSQUITO Some kind of plane/war image -
Can they supply or should we fi nd
stock?
“Planes, planes,
planes were
all I could
think about.”
One of Keith’s favourite planes from World War II was the de Havilland
Mosquito, fi rst introduced in 1941. It was the fastest operational aircraft
at the time (a record it held for two years), with a top speed of 439 mph
and was originally designed to be an unarmed bomber. However, the Mosquito
quickly proved more versatile than anticipated. It was built out of wood,
using advanced construction methods that easily shaped the wooden frame.
It was lightweight and very fast, and was soon performing as a day- and night-time, high- and low-altitude,
tactical and marine bomber. The wooden plane was not picked up by the German radar, making it undetectable.
It famously fl ew over Berlin in 1943, knocking out the main broadcasting station in the middle of a speech by
Hermann Göring, causing his legendary hatred of the aircraft to become even more personal.
The Mosquito proved to be such a menace to the Germans that shooting down a single aircraft counted as
two victories. After incredible success for the Allies in World War II, production on the “Wooden Wonder” or
“Timber Terror,” as it became known, ceased in 1950. The total number produced was 7,781.
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