Bob Mote sits at a desk in a quiet corner. He knocks on the hard surface with one knuckle.
“This was made in the early ’50s,” he says.
The desk looks almost brand new. Much like the desk, Mote is built to last.
Mote is now 86 years old, but he still works each day in the business he built, Jim’s Custom Doors and Windows.
The business now bears the name of his son Jim, but when Bob founded it more than 50 years ago, it was called Custom Cabinet Shop. Mote now works mostly as a locksmith.
Mote’s Flin Flon roots started when he moved here with his family at the age of 10 from Souris, in southern Manitoba. His father, a long-time worker on the Canadian Pacific Railway, had lost his job.
“My mother’s sisters, three or four them, and their husbands were all here,” recalled Mote.
When Mote himself needed a job, he started an apprenticeship in the carpentry shop at HBM&S, now Hudbay.
“I’ve been at it ever since,” he said, referring to woodworking.
Mote’s cabinet shop began as something to do after his workday finished at HBM&S. After 17 years with the company, he eventually left to focus on his shop full-time.
“I was doing after-hours work all the time. Moonlighting, they called it,” said Mote. “I worked every day and every night until 11 o’clock. We put long hours in all the time, and I still do.”
In time, Mote added locksmithing to his duties.
“The locksmith who was here retired and left in the early ’70s, and no one was in town to do it,” he recalled.
“Because I had dabbled in it, it became, ‘Hey Bob, can you fix it? Can you open that?”
Mote takes obvious pride in his work. Fifty-three years ago, in 1963, he installed doors and windows in what was then a new hotel.
“We just last year changed the storm doors and windows on that building,” said Mote. “The storm doors on that building that we built, some of them are still there. Makes you feel pretty good.”
Mote built his business despite health challenges. For decades he has suffered from a disease that causes severe protein deficiency – it has a long and complicated name that Mote himself can’t remember.
He does remember the disease’s effects.
“I’ve been, I don’t know how many times over the years, completely paralyzed,” Mote said.
“Can’t even move my eyelids. I just collapse. I’ve been in the hospital several times and not figuring I was going to come home.”
One of his most extreme attacks came right after his son’s birth.
“I was so ill, they had me make my will out in the hospital,” said Mote, in a matter-of-fact way, like he’s told this story before. “That’s fairly serious.”
That incident happened 66 years ago, and Mote is still very much alive and kicking.
He has also suffered from debilitating asthma, but no longer carries any inhalers or medication. “Just grew out of it, I guess,” he says with a shrug.
“At one time, I couldn’t walk the whole length of Main Street without stopping into a store to catch my breath. My doctor said, ‘Well, you are 47 years old.’ [The doctor] lives in a home now.”
These days, Mote is just barely slowing down. He’s given away the snowmobiles he used so often every winter and doesn’t work on his place at Schist Lake as much as he did before.
“By the time I get home from my shift here at the end of the day, I don’t quite have the same spark I used to,” he said.
Nonetheless, Mote still goes on long-distance canoe trips, although he is running out of paddling partners.
“All the other guys who I travelled with, they’re all 15 years my junior and none of them are going now, either. They’ve all quit.”
More than 75 years after arriving in Flin Flon, Mote has no intention of leaving the North.
“I’ve appreciated my life here in Flin Flon, and I’ve never had any inclination to move anywhere else,” he said.
“And I still don’t.”
