Mega-developer Nat Bosa owned the Paddlewheeler Pub when Gail Saunders started working there during the heyday of the Westminster Quay in the late ’80s.
He had a tradition of taking employees to lunch in his limo on their five-year anniversary with the pub.
Saunders was just a few months short of the benchmark when Bosa sold the bar, she says, laughing.
She never got that limo ride, or lunch.
But there were some unexpected perks – besides the stunning river view from her “office” – through the years.
Around Christmas one year a customer talked to Saunders about his estranged kids.
Saunders, a single mother of four boys told him, “Life’s too short for that. I think you should keep in touch with them. What if something happens to them and you didn’t get a chance to say goodbye or have some time together?”
The customer looked like Santa with his salt-white beard. He handed her a tip before he left.
“I thought it was a $5 bill. … I looked in my hand, and it was $100, so I went running after him and he was gone,” Saunders remembers.
Another intriguing stranger came into her life through the Paddlewheeler: she met her current partner, Art Quinn, at the bar 13 years ago.
Saunders was sitting down after her shift when Quinn came in for a drink. He asked the dark-haired stranger if she came there often.
“I said, ‘Why, yes I do,” Saunders laughs.
In 1989, Saunders was looking for a serving job with daytime hours.
She wanted to eat dinner with her kids, kiss and tuck them in at night.
The Paddlewheeler Pub offered her that schedule a quarter of a century ago, and she has worked there ever since.
Saunders, a Prairie girl born in Saskatchewan, made ends meet with almost no help from her children’s fathers. In addition to her three biological children, Saunders took in a family member’s son after the woman passed away.
She kept her family afloat by taking in a boarder, stretching her tips, grocery shopping in bulk to keep the bills down and never going out for dinner.
They all shared a hefty paper route – delivering as many as 500 newspapers in a single night.
She found help through a Canucks charity that paid for hockey for the boys. Somehow she managed to pay the mortgage on her Port Coquitlam home.
When her pub family celebrated the 25-year milestone with a party recently, someone mistakenly thought it was her retirement celebration, but at 58, Saunders has no plans to slow down anytime soon.
“I’m just getting started,” she says, her green eyes twinkling.
There have been some health issues over the years. Saunders had a kidney transplant about eight years ago and opted to cut her hours down to four days a week.
What she wants most now is to be a grandma.
“I say to my kids, ‘Don’t you guys ever make a mistake?’” she laughs, alluding to her hope that if she can’t have a planned grandchild, maybe she’ll get a surprise one.
Those boys she raised are all grown men.
Forty-two-year old Darren is a graphic and interior designer, who recently sold his business; Jim, 33, is a computer mechanical engineer; Kelly, 31, has his master’s degree in business; and her youngest Mike, 29, whom she raised after his mother passed, works at the Royal Columbian Hospital. He is a year away from being a doctor.
Follow Niki Hope on Twitter,
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