Longtime retired president of Local 9 of the Pulp, Paper and Woodworkers of Canada (PPWC) union, Len Shankel was born in Liverpool, Nova Scotia in 1937. Len and a fellow hunting and fishing friend Jim Smith left their hometowns back east and eventually ended up in Prince Rupert in the 50s. Len arrived in 1956 and worked as a longshoreman on the docks in Prince Rupert. It was a point in time when the hiring procedure for casual workers went like this: the dispatcher would stand on a table and look down over the crowd of people looking for work and randomly select what he thought would be a good worker and Len got the job loading and unloading ships docked at the port.