FERGUS – “I’ve had an extremely interesting life, and I survived it,” said Peter Gendron.
“I saw a lot of things. I could have got killed,” but “I wasn’t afraid. I was just doing a job; never considered myself in danger.”
The Fergus resident wrote his first book, Born Fearless, for his family.
As a pilot, Gendron spent his life travelling, meaning he wasn’t able to spend a lot of time with family.
He started flying in 1966 when he was 20 years old.
“I was always coming and going,” he said in a phone interview. “So my family didn’t really know me.”
He decided to write about his lifetime of exciting adventures “because I wanted my family to know who I was.”
Now 77 years old, Gendron reflects back to his youth, when he “decided to be a pilot even though I had a really hard time” with schoolwork, in part due to having attention deficit disorder.
He said the book is titled Born Fearless because “I was fearless as a child. I wanted to jump off buildings,” like Superman, he said.
“If somebody challenged me, I would say ‘okay.’”
This fearlessness continued into adulthood, and Gendron said when he was in Africa, “I was told ‘don’t go here, don’t do that,’ but I went anyway.”
His career as a pilot includes surveying for minerals, fighting forest fires, and transporting (but never dropping) bombs. His work brought him to Africa, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Ireland, and California to name a few places.
“I kept going on to different things,” Gendron said, noting he worked for many different companies throughout his career.
He said he has lived in Montreal and Newfoundland, but ended up deciding to settle in Fergus because it’s an easy drive to the airport.
“If you ever show up late, you are fired,” he said with a laugh. “I’ve also lived in Alma and in Kitchener,” and was “always bouncing around.”
He said he was able to write his memoir thanks to the careful notes he kept in his log book over the years.
“I’ll forget your name in two minutes,” he chuckled, but when he reads through his logbooks, all the details of his experiences come flooding back to him.
Though the book centres around his career as a pilot, it includes other notable moments in Gendron’s life.
For example, “When I got my pilot license, my mother had just died in a fire,” Gendron said.
“My father and I came out of the hospital and there was fireworks” in the sky in front of the Ottawa General Hospital, and his father asked if the fireworks were because his mother had died.
He said as he was writing the book he would send three or four pages at a time to his boss, who said it felt like a cowboy movie where you are desperate to know what happens next.
Gendron said his boss kept saying, “‘I can’t wait to read the next page.’”
Gendron started writing the book 10 years ago.
“I really just thought it would be a story for the family,” Gendron said, adding his “sister-in-law put it into a binder” and sent it back to him.
“He was never going to publish the book,” said his wife, Joanne Power-Gendron, adding he wrote it “for himself.”
But then, “Somebody approached him – an older man who had written three books, said ‘I would like to publish this book for free because it’s interesting. It gives me something to do.’”
His name is Bill Jenkins, and he’s “over 90 years old,” Gendron said, noting when he tried to offer some compensation for his work, all Jenkins would accept was enough to cover the cost of gas to visit their home in Fergus.
“That’s how it got published,” Power-Gendron said. “Because we never would have afforded it.”
Gendron said the book was published “a couple months ago” but is still being updated. “We are going to change the back cover and front cover,” he noted.
Gendron said the hardest aspect of the process is “going around saying ‘can you buy my book?’
“I’m not a sales person but I force myself to go out there and say, ‘Hey, do you want to read my book?’”
Born Fearless is available to order from Amazon at https://a.co/d/biPtOPH.
