Remembering Kelly Bert Manning
My father died four years and three months ago after a struggle with cancer. None of us had the heart to write an obituary in the early days of the COVID epidemic. This is my attempt to tell the story of his life and describe what a person he was. Any one person’s life is tangled up with other people and other stories. I have chosen to leave specific living people out of this story as far as possible.
Early Life
Born in 1954, Kelly grew up in a series of small towns in Alberta and the BC interior such as Ashcroft with his parents and seven siblings. His parents made frequent trips to the beer parlour and the tobacco store, and his father was often unemployed after surviving the wreck of MV Gulf Stream off Powell River in 1947. One winter they lived in a tarpaper shack on railroad right-of-way and the water pump in an outbuilding froze leaving them without running water. As the oldest child, Kelly did his best to provide security and order for his siblings, and took jobs as a dishwasher in restaurants to make sure there was money for clothing and groceries. This meant that he remembered some things differently than his younger siblings remembered them. For the rest of his life Kelly was fiercely hostile of things which reminded him of his childhood, from gambling and marijuana to outspoken Christian belief. I think that many of his quirks and limits came from this time as well. Until shortly before his death he kept a Post Office Box at Hillside Mall and refused to subscribe to newspapers or magazines because he was worried that if he shared his home address, his parents might find it and drop by unexpectedly (he let them have his unlisted phone number and met at neutral places when they visited Victoria). I suspect that his frugal habits came from growing up poor and seeing people waste what little they had. In later life extravagance was going out for dinner at Romeo’s on Hillside Avenue or buying a case of sparkling wine.
Launching
My father was one of Heinlein’s children. At some point he discovered the Heinlein juveniles through the BC Correspondence Library which let people without a local library fill out a mimeographed form and borrow books by mail1. He especially liked the idea of emancipated children in Star Beast and the vision of a world where people valued science and education and improved their situation by hard work. He was a lifelong buyer of Analog, Asimov’s, and the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction although he kept returning to the novels and short stories of the 1940s through 1970s. On the night before he went to hospice he was reading The Long Arm of Gil Hamilton.
His escape began when he turned 16. Ashcroft had no high school, so he talked his guidance counsellor into letting him board seven days a week at Dr. Knox School in Kelowna and receive the $85 cheque for board directly so his parents would not be tempted to keep it. This saved him from having to return to his parents’ house every weekend. He was an award-winning student which made him eligible for university. After high school he took a job as a labourer at Lornex Mine which somebody had found for his father because they had the same first and last name and his father was not eager to do the work. That let Kelly save enough money to head to the University of Victoria in 1972 and put himself a long drive and a ferry away from his parents. He kept the plywood sign from his year living in the dorms for the rest of his life. Victoria at that time was beginning its transition from a faded sealing port and opium manufactory to the wealthy center of education, visual arts, and white-collar work which it is today (Russell Books was founded in 1961, and the University of Victoria in 1963, and locals were pushing a downtown revitalization program which filled empty storefronts and preserved most of Victoria’s pre-1914 brick and stone architecture).
He started his degree in Physics and was active in the Judo club, helping to get it recognized by the University of Victoria Students’ Society. He kept a BC Judo Association medal in his shrine over the fireplace next to mugs from his employers and photos of his children. It might be this time which left his memories of working construction in the heat of a BC Interior summer to pay the bills. Towards the end of his degree he noticed that the graduate students and postdocs from early in his degree were still around and decided to add a double major in Mathematics so he could take more programming classes at the cost of a fifth year as a student. He got started programming by delivering boxes of punch-cards to a server in the basement of the Clearihue A wing (the hole in the ground floor for lowering the server used to be visible and that wing still contains a computer lab). Aside from these skills and contacts, he also picked up a lifelong case of athlete’s foot from the communal showers.
Around 1974 or 1975 he met my mother who was studying microbiology at UVic and also taking programming classes. That story is not mine to tell the Internet right now.
Kelly became a database administrator with special expertise in maninframe and pre-relational databases (one of his posts on the topic is here). He was proud that he paid off his student loans within six months of graduating. He spent most of his career at BC Systems Corp and its private-sector successors and then the consultancy CGI. He seemed very happy learning the intricacies of these old systems and code bases as well as newer approaches. I don’t think he was ever unhappy about work.
As a Person
But of course a person is more than a childhood, a career, and a marriage. Here my words fail me as I try to summon a living breathing person with words like Owain Glendower summoning his spirits from the vasty deep. After undergraduate Kelly completed a diploma in the French language at UVic (1979-1983). He maintained his French with French TV, online news, and more classes at UVic. Knowing French was occasionally useful at work and he sometimes started conversations with anyone he heard speaking French which he was not eager to do with speakers of English.
Much of Kelly’s evenings and weekends went to correspondence and computer games. He hunted spammers and 419 scammers, wrote letters to the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner, posted on technical mailing lists, tried to maximize his score in games such as Starcraft and Lode Runner, and played computer solitaire. I am sure that someone at the OIPC noticed that they had not heard from him for some time and discovered his death notice on my blog. (Kelly commented on this blog as Pen Name).
He kept fit with swimming, bicycling in his florescent yellow jacket (Victoria is a rainy, foggy, cloudy city), and weight training. To my knowledge he did not bike to his offices in downtown Victoria, preferring BC Transit. At some point he picked up skill in woodworking and tree surgery, so he puttered around the garden spraying the trees for caterpillars and making the occasional workbench or shelving unit. Our family still has some take-down shelving which he made for his first apartment in Victoria (flat boards with mitred edges for shelves, and dowels screwed into holes as uprights). When we got an above-ground heat pump and nuts and leaves started to fall into it, he rigged up a double-winged contraption with plastic tubing, plastic mesh, and lengths of nylon cord which blew open when the fan was blowing out hot air, but fell closed at other times to keep debris out of the fan.
My father tended to keep himself at a distance from groups and organizations. To my knowledge he never participated in science-fiction fandom face-to-face, through zines and newsletters, or online. He was attached to work, professional, and academic organizations: he was proud to wear and carry IBM and CGI branded objects, participate in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and scheduled events at the University Club in Victoria. He held leadership roles in the IEEE Victoria chapter, judged the final-year projects for UVic engineering students, and was active in IEEE Security and Privacy events. IEEE events and family gatherings in the BC Interior were almost the only reason he ever traveled outside the Salish Sea watershed. He was not sure he had friends. When he build his children a play fort in the back yard, he put it up by himself using levers and pulleys rather than bringing half a dozen workmates and a case of beer. When he bought a small fibreglass sailboat, he built his own trailer out of lumber and hardware-store parts to haul it behind the car to the lakes on the Saanich peninsula. (I don’t know where or when he learned to sail, but it was probably after he moved to Victoria).
He also tracked quirky films and TV shows and suggested them to my mother. He occasionally went out to see movies, particularly at the University of Victoria Students’ Society Cinecenta cinema on campus.
He introduced me to UVic library back when it still had a card catalogue and told me that the cards would be gone soon. That was my first visit to a research library and to the university where I eventually got a bachelor’s degree. He remembered taking me to Vancouver to see exhibits at Science World and participate in a primary-school geography contest. He also gave me a ride to talks of the Classical Association of Vancouver Island (CAVI) and sat through many of them, even though they vary in accessibility (some speakers understand the assignment to speak engagingly to a wide audience, others deliver more of a conference paper for other people in their specialty).
People who knew Kelly face-to-face saw other quirks. He did not like music so our piano and record player were almost always silent. He hated having to carry a pager for work and refused to get a cellphone or smartphone which could disturb him unexpectedly (a family member believes he was scared that his parents would call him with no warning). He had trouble moving from announcing that he would go out to actually going out. He would escape from visiting my mother’s parents in the Parksville area “to feed the cat” overnight. He also made late-night visits to Hillside Mall to ‘check the post office box.’ He liked to share strong opinions about topics like religion and the routes of Victoria’s new bike lanes. He was cynical about politics and unions, once describing provincial politics as a battle between gangsters. He remembered details of conversations from decades earlier and had trouble understanding that not everyone could do the same. In general his brilliant mind had trouble explaining things in words to other people, even people whose minds were very similar to his. He was not as comfortable with home networking and systems administration as with mainframes and databases. I always had trouble understanding the privacy rules which he wanted us to follow, and a family member had to figure out his system of watering the yard by observation.
Sharing a house with four other people was challenging for my father. I thought he was getting more relaxed and flexible as his children moved out one by one and his career slowed down. With the mortgage on the house paid off, a modest standard of living, and private and public-sector pensions he had no concerns about money. Fate intervened.
Last Years
In 2016 at the age of 62 Kelly almost died and was diagnosed with multiple myeloma (a blood cancer). The disease had destroyed most of his kidney function so he needed dialysis for the remainder of his life in addition to the chemotherapy. The illness weakened his immune system and made him vulnerable to pneumonia and other infections. Public healthcare covered the whole cost of treatment, but he had to take full early retirement to collect disability benefits rather than continuing to work part time from home for a few years. He did what he could in his circumstances, walking, setting up a deer-proof vegetable garden, and playing with new gadgets like a snowblower, an eTrike (no risk of falling!), and a label printer. He also paid more attention to the birds and deer which visited our yard. When he visited the beach he would bring a plastic bag and a grabber tool to collect empty beer cans and bottles. He also posted more on social media after a long period of focusing on mailing lists. In May 2019 he had another crisis and was not expected to live. It turned out to be a reaction to the latest chemotherapy not the cancer and he lived for another year. Physical indignities came and went but I think pain steadily increased. He slept on a variety of couches, armchairs, and beds whichever felt best on his back that night. I last saw him in February 2020 days before flights shut down for COVID. This was a sad time, and one when I was going through my own upheavals on the other side of the world, and I don’t want it remembered more than the rest of his life.
He was very proud of his children and their professional and academic accomplishments.
The IEEE Victoria have a Kelly Manning award for undergraduate engineering students. https://www.uvic.ca/ecs/biomedical/home/announcements/current/bme-capstone-project-wins-1st-place.php
Some samples of his online writing can be found at:
- Advice to someone to ask his union for legal aid https://can.legal.narkive.com/PLpQSF3y/hi-and-help-with-ontario-government-issue (October 2005) “Unions are supposed to protect workers and improve working conditions, at least in theory. Practice sometimes differs from theory.”
- https://comp.lang.cobol.narkive.com/qQUQvBYV/celebrating-the-creator-of-cobol (December 2006)
- Hunting spammers https://news.admin.net-abuse.email.narkive.com/Y4jRLvC5/whining-about-can-spam-canada-has-nothing (November 2008) Warnings about the dangers of tattoos
- 2012 West Coast Ferries Forum on the sinking of the MV Gulf Stream https://ferriesbc.proboards.com/thread/8190/west-coast-steamships-general-thread?page=3
- 21 January 2013 “Writer ignores hazards of coastal navigation” https://www.timescolonist.com/opinion/letters/writer-ignores-hazards-of-coastal-navigation-4575286
- 26 July 2013 “Computer health records have problems, too” https://www.timescolonist.com/opinion/letters/computer-health-records-have-problems-too-4652194
I am not sharing links to his social media accounts here at this time.
(scheduled 28 August 2024)
- I would like to learn more about this program, which may have been part of what Dave Obee calls the Open Shelf program (The Library Book: A History of Service to British Columbia, Vancouver: British Columbia Library Association, 2011; cp. C.K. Morrison, A Book Pedlar in British Columbia, Victoria: Library Development Commission, 1969 pp. 11, 73). Open Shelf ran from 1926 to 1995 and was initially limited to nonfiction and required the borrower to pay for postage (many librarians in the 20th century were terrible moralists). There were also a system of bookmobiles and traveling libraries which mailed crates of books to isolated communities. At least two bookmobiles became bookimmobiles when their host libraries ran out of money for gas and drivers and parked them in a likely location to serve the public (pp. 197, 203). Any help locating the correspondence libraries in archives and memoirs would be appreciated! ↩︎
Thanks for posting this Sean. I count myself as a friend of your Dad – we worked together on a project, I as a consultant, your Dad as a fellow programmer and union rep. After a difficult start, we developed a very cordial and productive relationship and although I returned to Vancouver, we would see each other at monthly tech meetings, and we always talk. I eventually moved on and was no longer attending those meetings, and never visited Victoria for many years, and was saddened to read of hour Dads passing. Had no idea of his traumatic childhood. Wish I had known. RIP Kelly.
He sometimes told bits of the story of his childhood but his way of talking and writing did not really pull the different stories together and explain how they affected his later life
I think he attended meetings of former BCSC staff at the Timmy’s near 4000 Seymour in his later years
Well said, young man.
My maternal grandfather also had a family background he abhorred, in his case in an Irish slum. My parents, who both loved him dearly, could tell me little about his youth because he disliked talking about it.
My father didn’t know his own parents and was brought up by his maternal grandparents. Dear God, I’ve had it easy in comparison. Which I’m confident is what they would have wanted for me.
My wife wants me to write a similar memoir of my father. If you’ve any advice to give, please have at it. And if you don’t – well, I repeat my congratulations.
The two things I had the most trouble with were sorting out details (names, dates, sequences) and telling an interesting story without bringing in third parties. Towards the end he told us how he met my mother but my mother has a say in whether I share that story. Tired.
A very affecting tribute, Sean. What you have written is clearly greatly impacted by what you have not. It is very difficult to sum up a person’s life and contributions, even more so when protecting the dignity and rights to privacy of those left behind. I hope that this has helped you to work through some of those complicated emotions that come with reflecting on relations to our forebears. It is a fine tribute. Take care of yourself Sean, and I am very sorry for your loss.
Oh my … “When … elements such as bringing new gamers into the hobby, promoting games that you like, building a following, or changing attitudes … becomes the focus, the hobby becomes less about sharing your own joy and more about getting responses. If you don’t get the responses you feel your efforts deserve, dissatisfaction and frustration find a way in. Desire wanes.” But what on earth can you do when what you enjoy is helping people with facts and analysis and most people, even people who claim to share an interest, don’t want facts or critical analysis?
[…] July and August I was working on a life of my father Kelly Bert Manning who died in 2020. His sickness and death affected many people. Some other things reminded me of how […]