A Knight’s tale Sir Bill of Winnipeg has had his feet firmly on the flooring for a half-century, much of it on Century By: David Sanderson Posted: 6:00 PM CST Friday, Nov. 6, 2020

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 05/11/2020 (1511 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Bill Knight gets that it is not recommended practice to walk with one’s head down, but when you’ve been in the flooring biz as long as he has, it’s a hard habit to break.

“It doesn’t matter where I go; I can’t help but look down, trying to spot imperfections,” says the silver-haired grandfather of four, who celebrated the 50th anniversary of his namesake company, Bill Knight Flooring & Carpeting, in March. “Even if it’s just a piece of lint or paper, I’m forever bending over to pick stuff up. It’s just the way my mind works.”

Knight, seated in his office located in a back corner of a 31,000-square-foot warehouse and showroom at 895 Century St., chuckles when a visitor inquires about a leather-bound book on his desk titled, All I Know About the Carpet Business by Bill Knight.

“If you flip through it you’ll notice that all the pages are blank,” he says, pushing the tome forward. “My lawyer gave it to me as a gag gift years ago but I told him the joke wasn’t too far off. I don’t have much education of any kind as I dropped out of high school in Grade 11. I learned fairly early in life how to manoeuvre my way out of various situations, and that’s how I got my training. My story isn’t any more interesting than the next person’s. It’s just that I’ve been at it a while, I suppose.”

 

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On Oct. 18, 1947, a twin-engine B-25 Mitchell Bomber took off from Penticton, B.C. with seven Royal Canadian Air Force personnel and two civilians, Mr. and Mrs. Harry Knight, on board. The aircraft was headed to Calgary when it crashed near Mount Plewman, just north of the Canada-U.S. border. There were no survivors.

Knight was six years old at the time of his parents’ death. He recalls being cared for by staff at the Penticton resort his mom and dad owned and operated, while he and his two older sisters, eight and 10 at the time, waited for a pair of aunts living in Winnipeg to arrive by train, to escort them back to Manitoba.

“The day my parents died is probably the day I became what I describe as a pragmatic, realist pessimist,” he says, noting the precise location of the downed plane remained a mystery for five years, until a hunter discovered the wreckage in October 1952. “I don’t get overly excited about too much of anything. I’m not a yeller or a screamer, I don’t lose my temper; I just take stuff as it comes.”

After arriving in Winnipeg, the Knight children moved into a home in River Heights with an aunt and uncle who’d never had kids. It was a pleasant enough setting, Knight says, but the moment each of them was old enough to live on their own, they were “out of there.”

A Royal Canadian Sea Cadet from the age of 11, Knight headed to the Maritimes to join the navy at age 17. Following an 18-month stint at CFB Cornwallis, he hopped on a bus bound for Los Angeles, where one of his sisters lived after getting married. When he wasn’t painting fences “under the table,” he was hanging out at a drive-in restaurant near Newport Beach where every evening was like a scene out of the coming-of-age film American Graffiti — all fast cars and rock ‘n’ roll.

Lacking the proper documentation to remain in the States, he returned to Winnipeg in 1961. He moved into a room at the downtown YCMA, then he landed a job with a Portage Avenue savings and loan company. His task was to reproduce thousands of ledger cards that had been water-damaged by fire crews’ hoses after a blaze swept through the building the previous year.

“I had a big, flat table in the basement with a box of ballpoint pens. I sat under a single lightbulb for hours on end, trying my best to read through all this blotched ink, as I rewrote each card, one by one by one,” he says, shaking his head.

In 1962 Knight caught on as a salesman at Stern GMC Trucks, where he peddled three-tons, grain trucks, logging trucks… a wide range of vehicles. Things were going along swimmingly until a disagreement arose with Cyril Stern, one of three brothers who ran the dealership. Stern invited him for a bite at Oscar’s Delicatessen on Main Street to discuss the impasse and during their meal, well, why don’t we let Knight tell the story?

“I remember it plain as day; I lost my job at Stern at 1:10 p.m. and by 2 that same afternoon, I was selling carpets.” – Bill Knight

“He was mad at me about something, I can’t even remember what it was, and after about 20 minutes of going back and forth, during which neither one of us was prepared to say we were wrong, Cyril said, ‘That’s it, you’re fired,’” Knight says.

“I got up from the table, asked one of the servers if I could borrow a phone and called a buddy whose dad owned a flooring business called Wright Carpets. He’d talked to me before about coming to work for his father so I asked if that offer was still on the table. I remember it plain as day; I lost my job at Stern at 1:10 p.m. and by 2 that same afternoon, I was selling carpets.”

No hard feelings: in 1980, at a party at the Fort Garry Hotel toasting Knight’s 10th year in business, Stern showed up with corned beef sandwiches, coleslaw and dill pickles from Oscar’s, calling it the lunch he and Knight never got to finish.

Knight, a quick study, enjoyed working at Wright Carpets and could have stayed there “forever.” Except the opportunity for advancement wasn’t available — “I wasn’t one of the sons, so a salesman was all I was every going to be” — so he struck out on his own in 1970, opening a tight, 750-square-foot outlet at the corner of Fife Street and Admiral Avenue. The first year he was Bill Knight Flooring’s lone employee. In Year 2 he hired a secretary. And in 1972 he brought in an installer, putting a halt to a schedule that had seen him working 18 hours a day, six days a week.

“By the end of our first decade in business, we had expanded to Edmonton, Calgary, Regina and Saskatoon, as well as moving into our present space,” he says. “Then, in the early ‘80s, when interest rates climbed to 22 per cent and the bottom fell out of the housing market, we were forced to close our stores out west, while maintaining our presence here in Winnipeg.”

Knight, the 2004 recipient of the Association of Fundraising Professionals’ Outstanding Philanthropist award, figures it was around 1984 when he, his wife Patricia and his two sons from his first marriage were in Fargo for the weekend, along with another couple and their kids. One afternoon, while the women and children were at the mall, he and his male companion found themselves at a medieval theme bar and grill.

In the parking lot was a three-metre-tall knight in shining armour made out of fibreglass. After “one too many cups of tea,” Knight shouted to a manager, “Hey, how much for the knight?” The fellow replied the statue wasn’t for sale. Undaunted, Knight handed over his business card, stating, “If you ever change your mind, gimme a call.”

Almost a year to the day of that exchange, Knight was in his office when the phone rang. He picked it up and the voice at the other end said, “Hey, are you still interested in that knight?” The next morning, Knight sent one of his drivers to Fargo with a flatbed truck, to retrieve the figure that, through the years, has become a veritable roadside attraction.

“I don’t know how many times I’ve looked outside to see a family gathered around the knight, getting their picture taken,” he says. “A few years ago a guy driving a garbage truck knocked it over accidentally, resulting in it being out of commission for a few weeks while it was being repaired. I swear, more people called that week to ask where the knight was than called about rugs or flooring.”

“I tell people all the time how I’m semi-retired, now that I’m only pulling 50-hour work weeks.” – Bill Knight

Knight says it’s like comparing a 1929 Ford Model A with a 2020 luxury Ram pickup when asked how flooring options nowadays match up against what he was selling 50 years ago.

“When I started it was floor tile, followed by vinyl linoleum, followed by shag carpeting, which installers loved because they could make a bad seam and who would ever know?” he says, mentioning he was forced to close his showroom to the public for almost three months earlier this year, owing to COVID-19.

“Now we have thousands of different products, and we have to know how to deal with each and every one. Luckily, I have my two sons, Perry and Wylie, working with me, and if there’s any question I can’t answer, they can.”

One more thing; with an 80th birthday on the horizon, we felt we’d be remiss if we didn’t bring up the “R-word”; that is, has it ever crossed Knight’s mind to permanently park his measuring tape and put his feet up — the same, two feet he finds himself staring down at, day after everlovin’ day — once and for all?

Uh, no.

“I tell people all the time how I’m semi-retired, now that I’m only pulling 50-hour work weeks,” he says, leaning back in his chair. “Seriously, though, what am I going to do if I stay home? Watch TV all day? My wife and I got a new puppy just the other day but there’s only so many times you can take it for a walk. This is what I do. This is likely where you’ll find me, till you can’t find me anymore.”

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca