Don Litchfield almost never made it as a businessman.

The Port Coquitlam owner and operator of Litchfield & Co. Demolition and its subsidiary company, Simply Wood, which re-mills and sells timber salvaged from demolition sites, had gone “belly up” back in 1959, some three years after leaving his one-dollar-an-hour job as a bulldozer operator to start his own wrecking company.

“The economy took a turn for the worse and everything went in the toilet. I couldn’t make the payments on the equipment so I did what I had to do,” recalls the 72-year-old Litchfield with a sly grin.

With bailiffs looking to seize his bulldozer, Litchfield took the big machine, along with the rest of his equipment, up to his friend Andy Andrews’ cabin and hid them in the forest. He then made his way over to the Queen Charlotte Islands to work as a logger.

Eighteen months later, he had earned enough money in the woods to pay off his debts, clean off the bulldozer and get back to building up his company by knocking things down.

Walking through Simply Woods’ office and showroom (located at 3046 Westwood St. in Port Coquitlam), Litchfield uses various pictures mounted on the walls — decades of them — to recall the various demolition jobs he built his company around: the Capital Theatre; Saint Mary’s Hospital; a bridge at the Coquitlam Watershed; the deepest excavation site in Vancouver’s history, an 80-foot deep hole at the corner of Dunsmuir and Burrard.

And in every picture Litchfield looks at, or in every story he tells, there are also the people who have worked for him over the years. Many of them have stuck with the company for decades, while others have moved on, with Litchfield’s blessings, to start their own companies.

“I have worked with a lot of great, great people over the years,” Litchfield says. “We’ve had a lot of fun. It’s one of those jobs where you never notice what time it is while you are working because everybody is having such a good time.”

Part demolition man and part salvager, Litchfield noticed that many of the buildings he was knocking down had valuable old-growth Douglas fir wood in them. After years of selling the wood to millers, who were simply cutting the good parts of the timber out and reselling it at a profit, Litchfield decided to open his own re-milling company.