Remembering Larry Macknicky
It was a warm early summer night in June 1975 when I first encountered Lorenzo. We were having a party at the Beaver Mansion (1837 Fern Street, Victoria). I had invited Ken Lambertsen and his girlfriend Melanie. They showed up for awhile but were soon replaced by their friend Larry. A group of us were sitting on the porch when we saw him dancing down Fern Street with a case of beer. He danced up to the house, boogied up the stairs, placed his beer on the living room floor then danced until the party wound down about five AM. I don’t think he ever touched his beer nor had a dance partner. After that, we called him the Boogie King. Larry was a superb dancer and often attended dance performances like Martha Graham or the Royal Winnipeg Ballet
He lived over on Vining Street and worked on construction jobs in those days and he and I became solid friends drinking in the wild bistros of Victoria, riding our bikes or walking the urban wilds and just hanging out.
I learned that he had a most interesting life but I was never too clear about the days of his youth. He came from the Edmonton area and had also lived in Wetaskawin. I think his dad had remarried an evangelical lady who was somewhat hard on Larry and he became child of the sixties living in a large hippie house he called “Westrold”. His friend Jim Slater called it “ a home for aging children”.
He and some members of the group went to London then pooled their funds to allow one member of their group to travel as far as they could into the Middle East and Asia. Larry was chosen so he took a bus to Lahore, Pakistan. He was a little short of the details of that trip except that it was really hot and dusty. On the way back to England, the bus pulled into a gas station in a little Iran town. Across the road on a similar bus was a friend from Edmonton that Larry hadn’t seen for years. He always marvelled over that.
At about that point, he came to the coast. He lived on Denman Island for awhile and then came to Victoria where he was to spend the rest of his days. This was about 1973. In Victoria, he took about any job he could get. One time, he worked for a logging outfit in the Queen Charlottes (Haida Gwi) as a choker man – one of the hardest jobs in the woods. He was up there for about a week and was unable to set even one choker. The block he was working on was composed of large Sitka spruce that was landing on soft, mossy ground. The crashing logs dug in and were hard to choke. After tossing the choker cables over the big logs, he had to dig under them to pull the choker through and hook it up. Larry was pretty big but was not in shape for that kind of work. After returning from the Charlottes, he worked mainly on construction jobs. I can’t remember even one of them even one of them but I know he didn’t care for construction work. But he sure loved to read and the ideal job for him came along in the 1990’s: the UVIC bookstore. It entitled him to a UVIC Library Card and liberal access to a wonderful expanse of fine reading material. The job also allowed him to buy a small apartment is the Shelbourne- Cedar Hill area.
I was living in Lake Cowichan then but occasionally visited. His apartment was stacked with books floor to ceiling. He favoured history and biographies and was fascinated with Russian history. He claimed that if Trotsky had prevailed instead of Stalin, we would all be drinking socialist beer now. His politics were left leaning but he was a careful student of capitalism. When he was at UVIC, he became the last hippie on the campus. The school had become quite conservative and many students looked like members of the Young Republican Club. Naturally Larry took the opportunity to make a statement with his long hair and old farmer coveralls.
He came up to Lake Cowichan fairly often in the 1980’s. He would ride the E&N dayliner to Duncan then I would take him up to the lake. We mostly drank beer but would sometimes drive the logging roads to Nitinat or Renfrew. After Barbara and I married in the early 90’s then moved to Chilliwack from 1998 until 2018, I didn’t see much of Lorenzo. His sister moved to Victoria and arranged for him to live in an assisted care home and his health started to wane. He didn’t often go out and I don’t think he had many friends besides those in the home. He passed away in May of 2020.
Goodbye old friend. I’ll miss you immensely.
Peden Lake in the Sooke Hills