He knew it was time to leave school when the teacher kept asking him questions.
"I guess she thought I had all the answers, so I thought I was good to go," laughed Wilf Peckham, 92, who quit school at 15 to learn to become a printer (known today as pre-press) for The Prince George Citizen in 1939. His starting position was known as Printer's Devil.
Peckham didn't know why the position was called that. He was a good guy.
The only time Peckham left Prince George since moving here with his family in 1930 was during his four years in the army.
Peckham was at work for two years, joined the army for four, and returned to The Citizen in March 1946 and worked there until May 1983, for a total for 40 years.
Harry Kennedy was Peckham's uncle, who worked the press and when the job became available, Kennedy asked Peckham if he wanted to become an apprentice. Kennedy later became part owner of The Citizen, said Peckham.
When Peckham started his job it was a 44 hour work week because they worked a half day on Saturday.
"We got paid $5 a week," said Peckham. "Amazing, eh? We were at the end of the dirty '30s then."
The biggest change Peckham said he saw was moving from hot metal printing using lead to offset printing with cold type.
Peckham is a healthy, spry, humour-filled gentleman and he attributes that to his outdoor life style. For 65 years he and wife Mae had a cabin at Summit Lake and spent their spare time hunting and fishing and enjoying the great outdoors.
"We had a great life together," Peckham said. He lost Mae, then 86, a year ago last January. "We were both ardent curlers and dancers, as well."
Peckham still goes dancing three times a week, enjoys fishing and he does quite a bit of walking. He took up lawn bowling and gave up curling because he gets too cold on the ice now. But there's similar aspects of lawn bowling and curling, he said.
He has a son, Gerald, who lives in Ottawa and a daughter, Marilyn, who lives in Burns Lake and a foster daughter, Charlene, who lives in Victoria. Peckham has grandchildren and great grandchildren who still live here and they are quite close.
All told he has seven grandchildren and seven great grandchildren.
Peckham fondly recalls the latter part of his career. When he was 50 years old he thought it might be time to change it up a bit and asked for something most people wouldn't even dream of doing. He requested a three-day work week for the last decade of his career, something his friends called 'a Wilf Retirement Plan'.
"I worked Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday," said Peckham.
"We really loved the outdoors so Mae said she would do all the housework and gardening on those days and we'd have four days off every weekend. It worked good and eased us into retirement. It was a pretty good deal. Working is over rated as a pastime, you know."
