We built a small pink runabout in the garage at home from printed plans and fitted an inboard Ford 10 motor which gave us greater mobility. The pink colour was visible a long way out to sea, I had a 100 mm. telescope for star gazing. When Ruth was not with us in the boat, she found it useful to locate the little pink runabout and time our return.

As the children grew older of course they wanted to water ski and the four meter runabout was not powerful enough. Then we were offered a 4.9 meter high speed boat by one of our customers, Lincoln Laidlaw. It had hit a rock and had sunk and then been salvaged. The price was only $300. The transom had been pulled out and the V8 motor had been taken to pieces to eliminate salt water damage. After repair and new electrical gear and battery, 'Skidaddle' proved to be a splendid water ski boat- Two of the boys and Lyn would take off from the shore. They would ski close together. Lyn would then drop one ski after the other while she climbed on to their shoulders to form a pyramid, Bruce was our best skier, he could use just one ski and then managed bare foot skiing, Algies Bay provided weekend and holiday fun of a high order for the family and our friends for many years. I found water sport a tremendous relaxation from the pressure of business.

As the printing business increased we needed still more space and modern automatic machinery. We decided to extend our Broadway building to cover the remaining area of our land. Bill Lloyd was again our builder. For a while we had a shoe shop on the road frontage. We called it Miles Footwear. It was not a great success so we sold off the goods and opened a stationery shop operating under our registered name of Cooper Brothers Ltd.

We had so much work on hand that we could not afford to create new business. Our Sales Manager, Jim Dawson, therefore did not have enough to do. One of the directors of Olympic Stationery Ltd, came into my office one day to sell some of their surplus paper. He mentioned something about an agency for school stationery. I immediately called Jim into the office and asked if he would like to sell school stationery.

This led to a school supply business which grew rapidly. We employed two more salesmen and bought a second hand Volkswagen Combi. The Combi was turned into a traveling showroom with shelves, filing cabinet, table and seats for the salesman and the client. We imported books and school equipment of all kinds including sports gear, projectors and screens. Head Teachers would come out of the school and into the van to do their buying. They were not interrupted by staff or phones. Head Teachers loved the arrangement and so did we,

We endeavoured to make it easy for Head Teachers to do business with us- A letter would be sent to schools with the photo of the salesman on the top left "and comer. It would state that Mr. Saunders would be calling on or about (a given date) with the latest books and equipment etc. When the salesman called he would immediately be recognised and often find a list of their requirements waiting for him. Every order was dispatched promptly with a packing slip and a prepaid order card enclosed. It meant that Head Teachers did not have to write 'please supply' letters; just fill in their orders and post the card to us. The system brought improved sales and built goodwill.

Our packer and delivery man was a dear old man always known as Mac. His wife had walked out on him while his three children were quite small. He brought them all up by himself. He cooked, cleaned, washed and repaired their clothes throughout their school years. Mac was an honest and kindly man who loved the horse races. When he won everyone would hear about it but not a word if he lost.

We needed someone to sweep and clean the factory during the evenings. An advertisement brought a full blooded American Negro to the office. Phillip was a Fullbright scholar who was studying Geology at the Auckland University. He wanted evening work to pay his way. During University recess times he worked full time for us. Phillip was a sensation when he delivered goods to schools. The children would suddenly freeze in the middle of their play then run towards him. At that time most children had never seen a full blooded Negro-Phillip was a great success. He was known in Newmarket as Brother Chocolate.

School business led to the New Zealand agency for The Education Laboratories of America's speed reading equipment. We also acquired the agency for Everest typewriters and adding machines. Our business was dividing itself into two sections of printing and retailing of school and office supplies. Each section was complementary to the other. We started a magazine called "Vicwpoint" which was distributed to each school teacher in New Zealand. It included articles of interest to teachers such as how to build a weather station or set up a sun dial. The main object, of course, was to advertise the products we sold.

The printing side of the business was growing. We bought a new linotype machine for type setting and then a second one. A new subsidiary company was registered called Lino Ludlo Ltd. We sold some of the shares to Percy Salmon Wills and Granger Ltd. and did the typesetting for both firms. By this time we had twenty four employees working for us.

Temple St. was where our family grew from children into adults. Our home was only a short walk from the tramway terminus at Meadowbank. We had easy access to the city and shops. When we first lived there we had a fowl run and a garden but that did not last long. The fowl house was used as a shed for various things. It was located at the back of the section and was disorganised most of the time- I built a small swimming pool for the children. Some of them learned to swim there. We also built a separate shed which would hold four cars. It became very useful for parties and dances. The boys were given dancing lessons. Lyn learned from the boys, and with her natural rhythm became a good dancer,

It was while we lived in Temple St. that I became interested in sculpturing. I went to classes at Elam School of Art for a while and later took private lessons with Molly Malcolm Ruth joined me at private lessons at Epsom. We formed an armature out of wire on which to place the clay. Week by week, we built and formed our art objects then covered them with damp material to keep them moist until the next lesson.

When the work was completed to the teacher's and our satisfaction, we made a mould of coloured Plaster of Paris, divided into two halves. The clay was removed, the mould soaped to prevent the next plaster mix adhering to the mould. The two halves of the mould were then tied firmly together and filled with good quality dental plaster. At the next lesson we chipped off the coloured plaster mould, repaired any imperfections and painted our masterpiece. We found sculpturing very relaxing. There is a direct physical contact with the creation without any intermediary. I derived a similar satisfaction when sailing. The control of the boat and the manipulation of the wind was directly under one's hand,

1 used part of the large area under the house to make two additional bedrooms to give the children a bedroom each. We took soil out from under the house, laid a concrete floor and made a storage area for paper and a little workshop where 1 put a small lathe for the children and their friends. Later, after I had sold the stationery and printing businesses, I added a small office for myself downstairs.

Temple Street was where I learned how to wallpaper. I took our daughter Lyn to Newmarket where she chose a vine patterned paper for her room. It was only when the job was almost finished that I realised I had hung it upside down. However it did not look too bad and Lyn was pleased. I will never forget arriving home one day to be told that Lyn had been a naughty girl and I should see her in her bedroom, Lyn was sitting on her bed with her head held down. She caught my eye and slowly turned her head to look at a hole she had kicked in the plaster wall. It was so funny I burst out laughing and that was the end of the matter. A piece of board behind the hole and some plaster made it as good as new again.

The Auckland University was offering lectures on astronomy by Mr. Beaumont of the Auckland Astronomical Society, I needed to broaden my understanding of the universe which God was supposed to have created. So I went along for the whole series of lectures. I discovered the absolute limitless vastness of the ever-changing universe where stars were born and die. I became convinced that there are no limits, edges or boundaries to time or space. I argued that for every inner area there must be an outer area. There must always be something before and after and something beyond. With my limited understanding of cosmology, it became inconceivable to me that either time or space could have a beginning or end. Much later I read what Professor Stephen Hawking (arguably at that time one of the leading astrophysicists) said in 'A Brief History of Time', page 116. "--the possibility that space time was finite but had no boundary, which means that it had no beginning, no moment of Creation," Professor Carl Sagan had this to say in his introduction to 'A Brief History of Time' "Hawking is attempting, as he explicitly states, to understand the mind of God..., the conclusion of the effort, at least so far: a universe with no edge in space, no beginning or end in time, and nothing for a creator to do."

The modem theory (not yet proved) states that our universe started with the Big Bang. It is thought that all the material in the universe comprised an extremely hot compressed gas in a primordial fireball known as a point-like singularity. This is what is said to have exploded in the Big Bang. The question is where did this compressed fireball material of the universe come from? There must have been the nucleus of a universe already there in some form and the activity of change occurring, otherwise there could not have been a Big Bang, Was it the compressed remainder of a previous universe?

Professor Hawking tells us on page 120 "Some of the heaVicr elements produced near the end of a star's life would be flung back into the gas of the galaxy, and would provide some of the raw material for the next generation of stars- Our own sun contains about 2 percent of these heaVicr elements because it is a second or third generation star, formed some five thousand million years ago out of a cloud of rotating gas containing the debris of earlier supernovas." Richard Gott of Princeton University suggests that, like bubbles on a head of beer, an infinite number of universes were formed. Just as the kitchen waste buried in the garden will become fertiliser, everything, geological or biological, has continuing cycles of existence followed by periods of decay. The nutriments or ingredients of that decay provide the enrichment or building blocks for new and totally different forms of existence. This is a basic evolutionary process of all of nature including celestial objects and mankind.

Astronomy gave me a new and grand foundation of understanding. There never was nor will be a beginning or end of time or space. Therefore there never was a need for a creator because a universe in some form of structure always existed,

About this time the American evangelist Billy Graham came to New Zealand. With thousands of others I went to the Domain to hear him preach. There was beautiful music, a male soloist sang with great feeling, the song 'How Great Thou Art'. What I saw was mass hysteria and the use of the fear of hell to persuade people to believe in Jesus. There was plenty of emotion but no evidence of fact. I could find no unshakeable basis for religious belief.

It will be obvious that I was sincerely looking for a logical foundation on which to rest the Christian faith to which I had committed myself. I could not accept faith without reason. My mother's death triggered the first serious doubt about a God. Another major plank in my reasoning came when I studied astronomy. The study of the mind and hypnotism also provided additional answers concerning the human tendency to be deceived by apparent magic. My greatest difficulty with Christianity continued to be ethics. There were many other smaller steps taken before I cleared my mind of confusion. The time had now come, the final decision must be taken.

In less than a week after listening to Graham, the realisation burst upon me that I had lost all faith in God and the Christian religion. Somehow I needed to dramatise my decision to free myself from this false thing by a physical and emotional act of defiance. I needed to express my total disillusionment with the Christian philosophy. So I took one of my well studied Bibles down into the garden and ceremoniously burnt it in an old incinerator vowing never again to be submissive to its superstitious doctrine. I was challenging the mythical God. If he was real, my actions were inviting his retribution. But God was dead, there was no response and the fire ate up the supposed 'word of God' like any other combustible material. I could not accept faith without reason, I came to believe that philosophical truth must agree with all other truth. I could not find that harmony in the Christian religion, particularly on ethical grounds.

After years of working happily together, I bought my brother's shares in the company and renamed it Cooper Equipment Ltd. To pay for Edwin's shares I reorganised the company assets, I sold the stationery and school business to Clarke and Matheson Ltd. but retained the projection and Everest agency business. Edwin went with the stationery business as shop manager. The printing plant was moved to a rented building on the comer of Broadway and Great South Rd. Finally, I sold the printing and linotype businesses to Percy Salmon Wills and Granger Ltd. and put the Broadway property up for sale,

I continued selling typewriters, adding machines and projection equipment. Les Mason was employed to manufacture the daylight projection screens. The four car garage became his temporary workshop. Shortly after this, the Italian owned Everest typewriter company was amalgamated with another Italian company and ceased producing Everest equipment. So the agency lapsed.

By this time Victor was coming to the end of an engineering apprenticeship and was ready to join me in manufacturing our own projectors as well as screens. Arrangements were made to assemble the Australian projector we had been importing. Later we got our own castings. We named this new business Audio Visual Equipment Ltd.

When we first started manufacturing we were buying our lenses from Germany. I decided to see what Japan had to offer and arranged a combined business and holiday trip there, I employed a full time interpreter who had worked for the American occupation forces, Eddie was good company and took me all over Tokyo looking for projector lenses, fractional electric motors and office equipment. It was often difficult to find an address as the numbers in the streets were not consecutive. The first house built would be numbered one; the next, perhaps some distance away, would be numbered two. So we often had to ask directions from the locals- I noticed that Eddie always asked the women and questioned him why. "Because Japanese women are always anxious to please the men." Eddie would arrive at my hotel in the morning with a bunch of flowers to brighten up the room. We would work out a programme for the day and call a taxi.

I was about to ascend to my room by the lift on the day in 1963 when President Kennedy was assassinated. A tall American soldier stepped in after me. I said "I am sorry to hear the news about the President," "What news would that be?" "About his assassination," He had not heard the news and was visibly shocked as I am sure the world was. I felt very sorry for him.

Eddie had given me a good time and a taste of the culture. Japan was a lovely experience, I could have happily lived in their orderly and safe country. From Tokyo I did a three day bus tour through the country, past Mt. Fuji to Kyoto. I sailed from Tokyo to Hong Kong and flew back home by early December.

Vic, our eldest son had joined me in the business of Audio Visual Equipment Ltd. He developed a variable speed tachistoscope attachment for our projectors which would display reading from fifty words a minute to a thousand a minute. The object was to encourage speed reading. Most people can pick up five digits at one hundredth of a second. Vic went to Sydney to study speed reading. We learnt a great deal about the art of reading. Later he designed and built a very clever variable pitch propeller for my new yacht ‘Tearangi' and built up a business in that field. In time he became a design engineer using computers and modern machinery. He is a capable person who is always easy to work with.

One evening some years before. Vic arrived home from a dance to announce that he had met a "stunning young lady" In time. Vic and Carol Kearney got married and produced a beautiful happy family of two girls, Tania and Kiri, and an adopted son, Jason.

Our daughter Lyn was the first to leave home. She became a nurse. After graduating she went to Australia with her nursing friend Bev Crooks and met Bev's brother Ron. She followed Ron to New Guinea, married him and returned to Auckland, Ron became a retail manager for a paint firm and finally went into business trading as Auto Paints Ltd. Lyn and Ron had two lovely children, a son. Mark, and a daughter, Joanne. Both are doing very well in life.

Bruce our second son had entered the building trade and later went to University to study architecture. He has been his own master for most of his life. I have enjoyed working with Bruce. After I retired I gave Bruce a hand when he needed extra help. We worked well together.

There was a yacht offering for sale in Wellington which I wanted to see. Ruth decided to come with me to look at it. In those days the airport was at Whenuapai. We were driving there on the main highway at about I20 km. per hour when suddenly a car appeared from the left crossing the highway in front of us. He had not even looked to see if he needed to give way to oncoming traffic. I swerved to the left in an effort to come behind him. The end of his car clipped the side of mine bending the drivers door post and flinging me out of the car on to the centre of the road. The car was now heading for the bank without a driver. Ruth found the brake and stopped the car. When she looked back she saw me sitting in the middle of the road shaking my fist at the driver of the other car. I had a hole in my suit and a raw patch on my behind. The car was driveable so we went on to Whenuapai and Wellington. We bought a new suit, inspected the vessel and returned to Auckland the same day. Our offer was declined. I think that was the beginning of my back problems.

Bruce built a block of four single bedroom flats for me. They, in turn, were sold to finance the commercial investment in Highbury which the company still holds. Bruce married Glenis Clough. She became a loved daughter-in-law- They had a boy, Craig and a girl, Kylie, As a builder, Bruce has had a series of new homes. The family moved to Australia where the children finished their education,

Ruth and I had four children, Victor, Roselyn, (always called Lyn) Bruce and Ross. During twenty three years together we had our share of struggles, disappointments and economic difficulties. There were also many times of fun and happiness. Looking back with the wisdom of hind-sight, I was perhaps too anxious to provide economic security for my family which, rightly or wrongly, I felt that my father had deprived me of. He had placed us in an orphanage and spent all his time and assets on religious propaganda-Yet I must acknowledge that the orphanage experience was the very thing that gave me the strength and determination to change things and succeed in life,

Don't get me wrong, I loved and admired my parents. My father was a good and kind man but he did sacrifice the economic security of his family for his religion. Apart from a load of worn out hand operated machinery, which came back to us from the Stewards Trust, Edwin and I inherited nothing. But then, that old machinery did give us a start in business.

Perhaps I allowed the business and religious activity to interfere too much with my home life, especially in the early war years when I was working long hours. My brother and I started with very little help or capital. I had a wife and four children to support. It was not always easy. Like my father, I seemed to be loo busy, I suppose in a way, we are all victims of our own anxieties and circumstances.

Similar to all parents, there were times when I failed to be sensitive enough to my family's needs. In no way do I have feelings of guilt. I have always done what I considered was right and honourable at the time. My children and grandchildren have returned to me a great deal of love and joy. They all married good partners whom I also find easy to love. I am proud of them and the nine beautiful grandchildren they have given me.

Years earlier, Ruth and I had become interested in psychoanalysis. Ruth was the first to see an analyst. Over five or more years, at considerable expense, just about all of the family went to see the analyst. Our firm, Cooper Bros. Ltd, was receiving publishers catalogues for our school business, I ordered some of the latest books on psychology and analysis and became very interested in the subject. By reading and personally experiencing psychoanalysis, I felt that I had gained a valuable tool for the understanding of myself and others. One would have expected that religion would have come into my therapy but in fact the subject never arose. The reason was that I was well on the way to becoming a declared atheist.

I suggested to my brother Edwin that he could benefit from psychoanalysis. He replied that if there was any possibility of losing his faith, he was not interested. He was not able to question his religious faith or put it to any test. Was it fear or uncertainty which held him back? I suspected that both these reactions were present. Fear has always played a huge part in religious belief.

It is amazing the subtle power a strong religious upbringing has on one. The truth is that I had been brain washed with religion from the cradle. Somehow it blinded me from seeing the fallacies and myths which pervade the Bible. Even though I had argued and rejected religious doctrines, I did not reject the basic Christian concept for many years. I was living with uncomfortable disagreement and at the same time trying to reconcile opposing thoughts. Eventually and fortunately, reason and reading did win out- After a painful struggle over many years, rejecting one more religious concept after another I finally threw the whole lot out,

Sir James Frazer in the "Golden Bough" points out that first there was magic which slowly gave way to religion then religion has slowly given way to science. Religion retained a great deal of magic as indeed science has not yet freed itself from religion in many peoples minds. My research convinced me that the God of the Bible was nothing more than an invention of superstition. The so called 'Word of God' was unreal, contradictory and socially harmful. I concluded that it is impossible for the human consciousness, beliefs, memories or attitudes to continue to function in any way after the body is dead. There can be no rewards, or punishments for our deeds or misdeeds after death.

I rejected the idea that there exists a God, a heaven, a hell or that there was an eternal soul in mankind. My father often, in his prayers, thanked God that he had "not been brought up among heathen ignorance and superstition". He never imagined that his second son could ever come to regard Christianity to be 'heathen ignorance and superstition',

What a tremendous relief flooded over me! It is difficult for anyone who has not been subjected to the pressures, fears and anxieties of intense religion to realise the wholesomeness of being completely free of it. For me it was like walking out of a polluted hothouse into fresh country air on a sunny day. This is why I took one of my Bibles and ceremoniously burned it. Tearing out handfuls of pages I dropped them into the flames declaring that I would never again be inflicted with its ignorant superstition. The whole world took on a new beauty,

I had been taught that faith in Jesus made us 'Children of God' or special people. Instead it created elitism very similar to racism. Now that terrible isolation has gone. Every man and woman is my brother and sister. I discovered that I had my own sense of right and wrong. I now had inner unity and self esteem and could be true to myself. By so doing, I would be true to others. For me, the Christian religion had become a false, inhibiting and anti-life doctrine. As I arrived at those conclusions other things also began to change. I became unhappy with my marriage. We were moving apart. My change of direction would affect almost every activity, interest and goal in my life. Old church friends disappeared from Vicw without a word of interest, as if by an unannounced mutual agreement. I longed for the kind of marital harmony I had seen between my father and mother. The gap had become too great so I finally separated from Ruth. That was a very difficult time for both of us- I had started marriage determined to fulfil the dream I had had at Mr. and Mrs. Fan-brother's home while I was still a child in the orphanage. I had not succeeded to fulfil my dream. I now felt an utter failure. I drove out in the car and wept like a heartbroken, disappointed child, I had done my best but could not see a possibility of restoring unanimity, I was not happy enough. No one voluntarily walks out of a truly happy home or relationship. The future was an unopened book, I had no certainty of a happy future relationship but I felt I could not turn back. That was when the decision was made to start again.