Thinking Outside the Box

Sequel to Riding in Style; the First Twenty-Five Years. A memoir of a life "thinking outside the box." 230 pages. 42 photographs and drawings. Alan McGowan's stories of solving problems, inventions, daring feats of driving in the North.

Sequel to Riding in Style; the First Twenty-Five Years. A memoir of a life "thinking outside the box." 230 pages. 42 photographs and drawings. Alan McGowan's stories of solving problems, inventions, daring feats of driving in the North. At the end of his first memoir, Alan McGowan was newly married and had moved up to Kitimat to work for Alcan. In this memoir he continues the story from the chaos of those first days, when over a thousand men showed up in the wilderness to run an aluminum smelter and create an instant town.

McGowan stayed with Alcan for more than three decades, raising a family, working in all areas of the plant and learning a lot about smelting and even more about people. With a sharp eye for detail, he writes about the men and women of all shapes, sizes and backgrounds who arrived in Kitimat in 1954: men who ten years earlier had fought on different sides in the Second World War, others who were on the run from trouble in their home country, some who went "Bunkhouse Happy" after too long in the bush, and always those working the angles to get something for nothing from the company.

Over the years, McGowan also learned the value, and danger, of thinking outside the box--whether that meant setting up the Early Riser Cooperative Bus Line, then getting a class one licence so he could drive the workers from Terrace to Kitimat in all weathers himself; or working with colleagues to figure out how to smelt aluminum more efficiently and with less pollution. McGowan also describes creating and launching his own inventions through Alcan and on his own, after retirement, including his most successful invention, the curling aid, or curl stick, a device that allows curlers with disabilities to play the sport standing up. The device is now used around the world.

As McGowan says about his life, "I relished the challenges and thoroughly enjoyed myself." That joie de vivre is clear on every page of this memoir.