By OREN ROBISON

The seven-year-old boy walked alone down 2 1/2 in lies of bush road to get to Waterview School. Sometimes - lots of times - it was scary.

"There was a spruce bluff half a mile north of our place," Ted Azevedo recalls. "As I went through it one morning, there was a herd of elk in there, ramming around and making noise."

The frightened child hid under a fallen tree until the animals went away.

"I ran back home and told my Dad. He got on horseback and got me up behind, and took me halfway to school."

Nowadays, Ted Azevedo may often be found striding fearlessly down other corridors, where creatures of a different sort are ramming around and making noise - it may be the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa, or a provincial legislature.

He goes wherever he has to, to champion the cause of senior citizens in particular and downtrodden humanity in general.

"I've given hell to a lot of Prime Ministers and Premiers." Ted chuckles.

It's quite a road that he has traveled.

His dad, also known as 'Ted", crossed the river at Nipawin to take a homestead in 1919, when Ted was about three.

"We came up from Strasbourg with two teams of horses. One wagon was a rack. The other was probably a grain box. I remember a bunch of cattle tied behind the hayrack."

There were hardly any open fields north of the river; most of the countryside was solid bush.

Ted Sr. cleared his land by hand, eventually constructing a big two-story house of hewed logs right on the old Fort a la Come - Cumberland House Trail.

Young Ted started school at age seven and he remembers that for the younger, smaller kids, school itself could be a bit scary.

'There were a lot of big fellows, 14 and 16 years old, almost full-grown, and they were pretty hard on the teachers.

One of the teachers, a man who habitually wore a big hat, "packed up and left" after the big boys threw him out the window - and sailed his hat out behind him.

"Miss Alfretta Schell [later Mahoneyl was my second teacher - they didn't chase her out of there, but she could tell some stories!"

'They weren't bad kids - just full of hellery."

Ted's formal education ended after Grade 8 at Pinehurst School. He started Grade 9 by correspondence, but "I didn't finish because I had to work in the bush in winter and work in the fields in the summertime - times were tough then".

The kid was tough too. While still attending Waterview School in 1924, he was injured during a game of anti - I - over.

"I was standing there watching the ball come over the roof. This guy had a bat. He swung at the ball and knocked my eye out."

The horrifying accident happened during morning recess, and some of the kids ran to get Ted's dad.

"He came with a team and wagon and we started for Nipawin. I was wrapped in blankets and laying in the wagon. There was just the two of us, and Dad kept talking to me - 'just hang in there boy, hang in there'."

"It was late at night when we got to the ferry, and Dad had to holler for the ferry-man."

There was no hospital, so they went straight to Dr. Archie Kiteley's office.

The child's eye was out of its socket and his cheekbones were smashed. The adults discussed removing the eye, but then "Doc" said he would "just push it back in".

"Dad had his knees on my arms and held my head while Doc pushed it back in. There were no pain-killers in those days, and Jack Robertson, who had a fur trading post, said later they could hear me scream all over town."

The broken facial bones were also simply pushed into place and left to heal.

Ted had lost his vision in that eye, but didn't let that faze him.

Years later, when he was about 22, the first of several unusual physical manifestations in Ted's life occurred.

He suddenly was able to distinguish between daylight and darkness with the injured eye.

"Now, in the last five or six years, I can see better with it than with the other - it's kind of a mystery to me, because all of a sudden when I closed the 'other' eye, I could see shadows, distinguish movement, and it just kept getting better."

"I can read with it now, but I see in sort of a tunnel with it" - he lacks peripheral vision with the left eye.

By 1933, Ted had taken a homestead of his own in the Torch River district, and he continued to help his dad farm.

In 1936 he became a partner in a sawmill and in 1938 got a mill of his own.

"In 1939, I tried to join the air force. Doc Kiteley got me in, but when they found out I could only see with one eye, they kicked me out."

"It took them a month to catch on. I could shoot through the neck of a beer bottle at 50 yards with that one eye."

After his discharge, Ted went to Fort William to work in an airplane factory, then returned west to put his crop in.

I started farming again and got my sawmill going, and I've been doing that ever since."

About 1946 Ted and his wife Elsie [LaRose] rented a house in Nipawin, and in 1950 he bought a planer and sawed lumber for Bill Botting.

Then I thought maybe I'd get out of the lumber business, so we might as well build a decent house while we've got the lumber."

Ted and Elsie moved into their new home near the CPR bridge in 1966 - a year that was to be pivotal in their lives.

In October that year, Ted was diagnosed with terminal cancer.

"The doctor said I had two months to live, but if I had an operation I might have six months."

He rejected the operation, "because even if it extended my life for a few months, probably most of the time would have been in the hospital, anyway.

Ted's health failed rapidly. He dwindled to 160 pounds from his normal 215. He couldn't eat or even swallow fluids.

Then, his friend Norm Perry came to visit and told Ted and Elsie about "a Chinese cure, a brew made from white Sweet clover.

A friend shipped some clover from Florida, but it rotted en route. But Bob Mitchell had more than 5,000 clover bales on his farm and was sure they could find what they needed.

With Ted virtually helpless at home, Elsie took the truck across the bridge to Mitchell's, returning with a couple of bales.

She spooned the brew into Ted's mouth. He couldn't swallow it, "but it sort of soaked in. After a few days I could take it, and after a month I had gained five pounds."

Six weeks later, he returned to a clinic for tests that showed "my blood was perfect. The doctor said, 'those pills I gave you really worked.' I gave all but three of the pills back to him - I had only ever taken two, and one was thrown away".

Surgery was again suggested, but Ted again refused.

"I told him I have too much to do. I came home and never went near a doctor again for five years. The doctor who told me I only had two months to live was dead and gone by then."

"I still take the clover treatment."

While he recovered his strength. Ted began to accompany Elsie to meetings and club visitations she was making as a director of the Pensioners and Senior Citizens Organization of Saskatchewan.

His own interest was piqued, and by 1974 he was president of the organization.

In 1981 he became the charter president of Saskatchewan Seniors Association Inc., serving in that capacity until 1989.

The following year, Ted was elected president of the National Pensioners and Senior Citizens Federation of Canada, a position he relinquished in September 1995.

As its leader, he was spokesman for associations and clubs representing more than 750,000 members.

"When I got into it, I didn't know how much time I had [because of the cancer diagnosis]. I was just looking to do the most I could, for the most people, in the shortest amount of time," Ted says.

That mission has led to interminable dealings with politicians and bureaucrats.

Stymied at first by a cold and reluctant Pierre Trudeau, Ted eventually won spousal survivor's benefits for seniors from the Conservative government of Joe Clark. Ted speaks fondly of Clark and his health minister, David Crombie.

He has represented seniors' interests on many fronts, including home care, pensions, preventive health, activity centers and housing.

And when he confronts the bigwigs, he doesn't want sympathy or platitudes - nothing less than action satisfies him.

"When I go to see them, I have my homework done. I don't deal much with figures, because they can twist them around to say whatever they want."

"I deal with the issues, and the results if you do one thing, and the results if you do an-other."

"In the early years, times were tough and you had to make your decisions based on what would happen if you did it this way or that way - that's what decided whether you came out ahead or behind."

"Real-life" experience and common sense are key weapons in his arsenal, and he has no sympathy for "suits" with gold-plated pensions, who feel immune from reality.

At one meeting in Ottawa, a Reform MP called seniors "greedy geezers".

"I told her she didn't have a goddamn clue about the real world, and stormed all over her," Ted recalls with a laugh.

"At the end of the meeting, the secretary told me he couldn't record my remarks… he didn't want to repeat the language I used. He was laughing too."

An uppity bureaucrat got a similar message - "I told him, you don't know a thing about the real world, but in spite of your big paycheque and pension, you also don't know the day and the hour you may be forced to join that real world - think about that!"

The former homesteader moves comfortably among the mighty.

"I look on Trudeau and Mulroney and all the rest just as ordinary people - I feel as good as they are, and they're as good as I am. I talk to them one on one. Joe Clark said he wouldn't have it any other way, that some people make a lot of fuss over nothing."

Fuss is something Ted can do without, although he does admit that he was "cheesed off" the time he was summoned to Ottawa three times in one week for meetings that could have been scheduled better.

Including air travel, he estimates that he averages 100,000 to 120,000 miles a year, most of it on behalf of seniors.

"I generally have a suitcase that's not empty yet. If I'm needed in Ottawa, I leave here at 3 a.m. for Regina and fly out of there at 8. I'm in Ottawa by 1 o'clock, will have meetings till 5, then maybe a supper meeting and an evening meeting. Then there'll be a meeting the next morning, and in the afternoon sometimes. I get on the plane at 5 p.m., get back to Regina and drive home by midnight."

If such trips are made at the government's request, the government pays. Sometimes, the national seniors' association pays.

And sometimes, "I have paid my own way, if I felt we needed to be represented there and the organization didn't have enough money".

If it seems incongruous that an organization with three-quarters of a million members can't pay its president's airfare to meetings, Ted shrugs it off

He doesn't want to hoard his money, anyway, he says.

But the travel "is starting to tell on me. When you get over 80..."

"I don't have much time to do my own work, and I'm tired of traveling."

My shop's full of lathe work that needs doing; we're getting ready to saw logs again and it'll soon be time to put in the garden. Then, there's always the museum…"

"When I quit this work, maybe I'll catch up on my own."

Then, reflectively, he says, "my main issue is the human suffering that's going on, and which will increase".

"I'm still an advisor to the national and provincial [seniors'] associations, and their newspaper, so I'm plenty busy."

It's clear that he foresees battles yet to be won.

"You know," Ted says, "you've got to live a life that means something."

"It's a privilege to live in a place like Canada, but it also carries an obligation…"

"I've had 30 years that I never expected to have, and I've had a lot of fun."

"It's been too exciting a life to remember it all."