| Last updated at 10:50 AM on 13/10/07 |
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In less than a year in office, Georgetown Mayor Peter Llewellyn has been pulling out all the stops to help prop up his town. Llewellyn is working to convince residents to share his view that the municipality has a wealth of untapped potential. Guardian photo by Jim Day |
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Getting it done 
JIM DAY
The Guardian
Peter Llewellyn covered his share of fascinating territory to end up where he started.
The Georgetown mayor and local artisan talks candidly of growing up in, leaving and returning to Kings County’s capital — a municipality that is home to a little under 700 people living on a scenic coastline of eastern P.E.I.
Llewellyn, who turned 51 Wednesday, recounts his early hardships matter-of-factly.
His father, the late Jim Llewellyn, was a lobster fisherman with a bad drinking problem. Dad did not interact well with Peter or the six other children (an eighth child died as a baby) who grew up in a home that overlooked Georgetown harbour.
“We were a poor family,’’ he said. “We struggled as kids.’’
Llewellyn’s mother, Eleanor, would make eight loaves of bread every day. He recalls going to school with lobster meat, which was far from a pricey delicacy at the time, crammed between thick slices of homemade bread.
He and his siblings were industrious. They were young entrepreneurs out of necessity. Peter Llewellyn, for instance, would sell pop and other items at a healthy markup to workers building a fish plant.
He was buying his own clothes by the age of 12 and paying rent a year later.
While he was a top student in the school of hard knocks, he was, by his own admission, a “terrible’’ pupil in the classroom.
“I literally used to soil my pants in class when the tests would come around because I couldn’t read,’’ he said.
He packed it in after Grade 8. He would later upgrade his education and go on to embrace literacy, both as an advocate and as a businessman.
But when he made the decision at age 17 to follow several friends into the navy, he could barely write his own name.
Llewellyn hopped on board the navy with more than low literacy skills working against him. He had already developed a “full-fledged drinking problem,’’ noting his father’s alcoholism was a significant influence.
At 18, while very drunk, Llewellyn had a large ship tattooed on his left arm.
He also had his share of drunken brawls.
“I jokingly say there are happy drunks, there are sad drunks and there are mean drunks,’’ said Llewellyn, who took his last drop of alcohol at age 22. “I was a mean drunk.’’
His drinking problem and his chronic seasickness were not enough to keep him from advancing up the ranks to leading seaman. He did his job of looking after underwater weapons systems with sober professionalism.
After six years, he decided to return to P.E.I. with his wife Gayle to take over his father’s fishing fleet. Two seasons was enough.
He then got into dockside grading to help improve the fishing quality on P.E.I.
His lengthy career in management followed, starting with running the show before the age of 30 for seafood plant North Ocean Enterprises in Souris.
From there, he and Gayle moved to Canso, N.S., with a young family. The couple’s daughter, Jocelyn, is now 25 and working in customer service in Halifax, while 24-year-old son Jonathon is getting set to spend one year teaching English in Korea.
Llewellyn worked for two different fish plants in Nova Scotia, with the second, Clearwater Fine Foods, seeing him travel to Portugal, Spain and Europe.
The downside of his travel and long hours at the plant, he said with obvious regret, was missing his two children growing up.
He accepted a transfer with Clearwater to take the helm of a major clam operation in Grand Bank, N.L., overseeing a $14-million rebuild, an offshore boat and 250 green employees.
“This is a little guy from Georgetown with Grade 8 education and I was working for a company that only cared about what you did,’’ he said.
The company grew to $20 million in sales over its first four years in operation. Llewellyn, though, was most proud of the company’s strong community involvement, supporting businesses, building a youth centre and spearheading development.
He also spent many years helping clean up communities in P.E.I., Nova Scotia and Newfoundland working alongside police officers during his run in the RCMP auxiliary.
Llewellyn has also helped people learn to read. He started a literacy business in Newfoundland with two partners. The business opened three schools to teach adults and children how to read.
“That was tremendous,’’ he said. “We were literally changing people’s lives.’’
After a few years, the partners sold the business to a local college. The business is still operating today.
Llewellyn had a few more stops before finally returning to Georgetown. He worked for a year in Ontario, managing two metal manufacturing plants, one staffed by Amish workers (who came to work on horse and buggy) and another plant comprised mostly of immigrant workers.
The company went bankrupt, and, after working for the receivers for about one year, Llewellyn returned to Newfoundland to manage another seafood plant.
He came back to P.E.I. in 2004, working for Ocean Choice, the company that bought the failed Polar Foods. After two years, he decided to wash his hands of the management lifestyle.
He certainly shifted gears after returning to the family home in Georgetown.
Llewellyn — a man long known for a lack of artistic talent (he could never sing, dance or even draw a picture) — turned his attention to becoming an artisan.
Today, he is in his workshop/store next to his home from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., seven days a week, making jewelry out of sea glass and carving sandstone and soapstone.
He has the touch. His jewelry was rated by a lifestyle magazine as one of the top 10 souvenirs in the Maritimes and high demand for his pieces has him constantly scrambling to keep his shelves stocked.
His shop often doubles as an informal mayoralty office.
“He never takes off his mayor’s hat,’’ said Patsy Gotell, the chief administrative officer of Georgetown for the past 20 years. “Business meetings are held down in his shop.’’
Llewellyn said he ran for mayor in November, feeling he could lean on his passion for Georgetown and his business background to drive the town forward.
“In all the years that I’ve been away from Georgetown, I’ve always had a vision for the town,’’ he said. “The biggest challenge that we faced here was our own attitude. We didn’t believe in the town.’’
Llewellyn, though, sees immense potential for his municipality. At his first council meeting as mayor, he hauled out his own list of a whopping 58 opportunities that he had identified for council to pursue to benefit Georgetown.
In less than a year, the town under ‘Mayor Peter’ has had a small white-sand beach created, a local drug dealer curtailed, secured an international ice golf tournament and landed several Charlottetown Abbies’ games. Llewellyn is also aggressively pursuing the revitalization of the old ferry that connected Georgetown with Lower Montague.
He wants to draw more tourists and residents to the town.
“He’s a doer,’’ said Gotell. “I tell him all the time he’s a force to be reckoned with.’’
Perhaps Llewellyn’s greatest mandate is to have all the locals buy into what he sees as the boundless potential of their town.
“There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that within the next two to three years, when people talk about P.E.I., they’re going to talk about Georgetown because this will be the place.’’
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