Our editor at Southern Skies, the Ansett in-flight magazine, was Colin Hogg, who had cut his teeth and pineal gland on rock'n'roll, and was keen to slip some of that into this very mainstream publication. So he leaped eagerly at our suggestion of a regular feature on the eccentric unusual side of New Zealand life. Jono and I called them doozies, but Colin said we couldn't call them that. Fair enough. Gary McCormick would later run a series of television series on these kinds of people, but we certainly weren't the first cab off the rank, Country Calendar had been dipping into this magnificently for decades.
Boy, we had a lot of fun. Jono in fact would get so wrapped up in the doozie he would forget he was the photographer and start asking all the questions.
It was embarrassing transcribing the tape later seeing precisely what percentage of the interview was actually down to me. I exhumed a box of these stories after Jono left, just to check if our memory of these people was even half right. It was.
Noel McGarry and Arnold Divers were two of three ageing skiers who formed the One Ski In The Grave ski club. Jono and I roared up the black ice of Coronet Peak one Friday night in his old Peugeot, to set up the weekend's interview. We found them in a small hut with two bottles of whisky, VAT 69 and Bulloch And Lade. They handed us a glass each and the stories began to roll across the old wooden table. Arnold, a seven times national ski champion and former fighter pilot, DFC and Bar, had the CV: Noel, younger, now the better skier, had the formidable mouth. The minute one went outside to pee in the snow, the other would tell us what a lying swine the one outside was. It was hilarious. By the time the whisky was cut, I had my story.
For months afterwards, I read the Queenstown court news to see if Noel McGarry of Dunedin was in trouble for scything a teenage snowboarder in two, as he told me he would if they ever crossed his path.
Ian Little, originally from here, loved trolley buses. As a child he would stand at his gate waiting for the Lookout Point bus to climb up to his house. He later set up a transport museum in Foxton, 14 trolley buses, including one with a Lookout Point sign on the front, which he drove around an especially-selected route. He was, 'ow you say, an enthusiast. Ian began the interview reclining in a chair and then moved slowly towards the cassette recorder on the table before finishing up with his face right next to the microphone bellowing at the top of his voice.
The Appleby twins ran the book and toy shop in Palmerston, going there straight from school. I asked 57-year-old Des if he had ever had a girlfriend. No, he said, but there's plenty of time to look around. Oamaru bookbinder Michael O'Brien went in search of his birth mother and found she was the Mother Superior of The Blessed Sacramental Sisters of Sydney. Niki Wane answered a sign in London and spent the next two years touring Europe with The American Hell Drivers being shot from a cannon. Neville Brown, another bus driver, had the country's biggest collection of opera 78s, while Ken Liddicoat, a Regent 24-Hour Book Sale regular from Christchurch, bought another house to handle his 50,000-strong book collection.
He didn't read.
So many doozies, so many amazing human beings. Jono talked of getting the team back together, he said there are plenty of doozies in New Plymouth. Of course there are. They're everywhere, they're special.
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
