STRATHCONA

    I barely recall the house I lived in after we left Mill Creek but then we weren't there very long.  Somewhere above Mill Creek but not as far South or West as the district of Strathcona, we lived for a short time in a small stucco house. (89 Ave. near 100 St. ATMS*.) I think it was about the only house we lived in that dad didn't do any work on.  At least I don't remember packing boards or nails.  From the time I was old enough to walk I helped my father in any way I could, including cutting trees.

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 SIS, MOM, DAD, & I, EDMONTON, ALBERTA, CANADA
Aprox. 1955 This picture may have been taken in that house.

    Each Christmas our family would go out of the city for a day.  With axe and toboggan we would trudge through the snow and bring back a real tree for the front room.  This is about the only memory I have, or don't have of this house, as I was too sick to go on our tree hunt that year.

    Mumps. I had them.  Both sides at the same time.  My mother wrapped me in blankets and laid me on the couch so I could watch her and my sister trim the tree.

    I remember more about the next house we lived in, 10114 86 Ave.  For one thing I was a little older and for another we lived there longer.  In fact we lived in that house longer than any other while dad was alive, about three years.

    I recall the big brick school and the crossing guards who used to catch me when I would `J' walk.  They would explain to me the proper way to cross a street and make me do it twenty times. 

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  (Photo `04)  King Edward School  8530 101  St.

     I have no fear of crossing streets, my mother taught me how to do it safely.  One had to learn how to gauge traffic in the city, especially before buses were common.  When we would go uptown we would ride streetcars that ran on rails and couldn't pull to the curb when you wanted off.  They would stop in the middle of the street. You had to be sure there were no cars between you and the sidewalk before you jumped off.  And jump is what you did because for a five year old it was a long way to the ground from that bottom step.

     Further down the block where we lived, in the opposite direction from the school, was a wooden building where they would show movies.  We weren't allowed to go see the scary ones.  There are only two that I remember, one was called the Black Doll, where the bad guy left his calling card, a black doll, pinned to his victim with a stiletto. 

    The other movie I remember seeing, I saw it more than once, was a special from Coca Cola.  Each year, before school started, the coke co. would play a film that told how their company started.  Then they would give us free: book covers; erasers; rulers; and pencils. Things we would need for school, everything bearing the Coca Cola name and logo.

    Of course that was the days when `Coke` tasted good. When the stores sold `real` Coke.  Not the watered down crap that they try to pass off, nowadays, as `Coke Classic`.  If you travel to Cuba or South-Eastern Mexico you can still get the `real thing'.

    On the other side of the hall was a large oval area surrounded by a high wooden fence.  In the winter it would be flooded with water.  At the far end was a building similar to the theatre building.  Here there were stoves to get warm around and benches to sit on while we put on our skates.  People nowadays will go to a dance and the males will ask the females to dance.  We would go to the rink on a chilly evening, and ask girls to skate. 

It doesn't matter whether it is Centigrade or Fahrenheit, -40 is -40 and -40 is, in Edmonton during a normal winter, only considered chilly,

    I don't know the names of any of the pieces of music that were played.  There was a scratchy sound system with speakers on poles high above the ice.  People would be bundled up with scarves and toques.  Mitten covered hands would hold each other as couples swirled around the ice. 

    That was probably the only classical music that I was ever exposed to during my youth.  I recall mother having the radio on during the day before I was old enough to go to school and now when I listen to Frank Sinatra era music the tunes will be vaguely familiar.  In the evening our radio would be tuned to educational programs such as the `The Shadow' or `The Inner Sanctum'.

    Strathcona is where I learned to chew Indian gum, shovel coal on a train, and smoke, at least I don't recall smoking earlier.

    Indian gum, I don't suppose the Indians had ever seen the stuff, on the other hand I had never seen an Indian, though I was to meet more than my fill.  The front of our yard was bordered by a carriganna hedge.  Under the carriganna grew a short broad leaf plant.  My sister would pick a leaf and strip the stem.  In the stem was a long green string that we would chew.  We called it Indian Gum.

     One of the things children, in our era, were always taught was to come straight home after school and change their clothes before they went to play.  This was easy for me as our house was between the school and the playground.  However, past the playground, and visible from the school, were grain elevators, these are tall wooden structures to hold grain.  Every now and then train engines would come, with empty box cars to be filled with grain, and to take the loaded ones away.

    When I would come out of school and see that train, there was no stopping at home.  Straight to the elevators.  The engineer would help me up into the cab and the fireman would, with great reluctance, and after much coaxing on my part, lend me his shovel and allow me to shovel coal.

    To put the coal in the firebox you stepped on a pedal near the floor.  The door on the front of the firebox would split in half, the two halves would swing out of the way, exposing the roaring fire beneath the boiler.  The door was operated by steam pressure. 

    The first time we did this I went with a school chum and the fireman told us that if we stepped on it too many times the engine would explode.  My friend kept stepping on the pedal and I was trying to pull him away so he wouldn't blow us up.  I imagine the fireman and the engineer had a good laugh about that.

    Needless to say when I would get home, still in my school clothes, I would be black from head to toe and mother would tell me never to go there again.

     My father was pretty tight with his money but I always had a supply of comics. I grew up on heroes such as `Superman'. My favourite was `Captain Marvel'.

He didn't have any super stuff like x-ray vision but he didn't have any vulnerabilities like Krypton. He was invincible, unless you caught him when he was Billy. 

    Another favourite was `The Blackhawks'.  I would sit for hours on the swing my father had hung from the big birch tree in the back yard.  Pumping up to the sky I would day dream that I was flying a fighter plane, an important member of the `Blackhawks'.

    My parents never smoked, well, father smoked a pipe, and never drank, except at Christmas, though mother made wine every year.  I have no idea how or why I started smoking or where I got the cigarettes or the matches.

    Down the alley behind the ice rink was a playground where there was a set of swings.  These swings were visible from the balcony on the back of our house.  Mother came out to shake the dust mop and she saw me sitting on the swing, smoking.

    Mother very seldom punished, instead, she would tell father.  Mother came down the alley, pulled me off the swing, and dragged me home.  I spent the rest of the day in mortal fear, I knew I was going to get `the BELT'. 

    Knock me over with a feather, my father found me in my room and told me, "You shouldn't smoke.  You're too young".  End of case.  But not the end of smoking.  My parents never found my little fortress under the back porch where I kept my matches and cigarettes. 

    I probably learned to hide from my mother, not hide from my mother, but hide, from my mother.  What I mean is that my mother taught me to hide.  Certain days of the week my mother would take me into the basement and teach me to stay out of sight and to be quite.  The reason was that she didn't want the Chinaman, that word was politically correct then, now I believe the word is Asian, to know we were home.

    Once a week, down the alley, would come this old horse and wagon.  The back would be filled with fresh vegetables.  When my mother didn't want to buy anything from the man, see how I got out of that, she would pretend she wasn't home.

    The front of the house was a different story.  We were never awake when the milkman made his rounds.  In the winter he would leave the milk on the front steps and when we went to get it, later in the morning, it would be frozen solid. 

    Because milk is mostly water, the rest is mostly cholesterol, but we continue to subjugate our children with it, it would expand and of course the bottles would break.  Thinking back, it was probably half frozen before the man put it on our stairs, the wagons wouldn't have been heated in those days.

    Later in the day we didn't have to hide.  We were always home for the breadman and the iceman.  While they were making their deliveries we would pick grass and feed the horses.  On a hot summer day we would go to the back of the ice wagon and chip off some chunks of ice to chew or we would lie under the wagon and let the drops of cold water fall on us.

   
    Idyllic days spent in an Idyllic city.  I have a photo of my father sitting in a police car talking on a radio, they didn't have CB style microphones but used a hand set similar to a telephone. 

    Warm days in the spring we would go to the country and pick: blueberries; chokecherries; nothing was finer than mother's chokecherry jelly, spread over peanut butter, on toast; and dandelions for mother's home made dandelion wine.

     In the summer I would wander around an old van parked on the side of the road, what they called a panel delivery truck, while my father would change, or pretend to change, the tire. Like my father, dressed in plumbers garb, and the ladders and pipes on the roof of the van, I was part of the window dressing.  Sometimes a kindly motorist would slow down and honk and dad would wave that everything was all right.  Others would actually stop and offer assistance.

     Every now and then a motorist would go flying by, spraying dust and gravel.  Father would go to the back of the van and talk to the man inside, giving him a description of the vehicle that had just passed.  The Mountie, Member of the R. C. M. P., inside the van, would then, using the radio in the back of the van, call ahead to a marked police car, describe the car that had passed and give it's speed, as estimated by the equipment in the back of the van. 

     I say estimated because the early equipment was not all that accurate and more often than not the officers would end up in court trying to justify the ticket.  Heaven forbid a motorist should ever admit that he was speeding and recognize that the officer was trying to save his life. 

     Human nature is so strange, the lengths a person will go to refusing to admit they were wrong.  They will always blame others for their mistakes, especially when driving a car.  Of course the cop is the easiest target; he got the wrong guy, he was just trying to earn his pay cheque, the government needs the money, anything but own up to the truth.

     In the fall father would take us to the North Saskatchewan River and teach us how to pan for gold.

     And we would travel, to British Columbia.  In those days, before they built the Pine Pass, there were only three ways to get from Alberta to British Columbia by road.  One could drive South into the United States, the United States of America, not to be confused with the United States of Mexico, then west, and then North into British Columbia, we would use this route in the spring and fall when the other two routes were still closed by snow.

     In the summer we would use the Crowsnest Pass which went through the Rocky Mountains just north of the U. S. boundary, through the giant boulders of the Frank Slide.  The town of Frank was buried by the collapse of a mountain, only one baby survived.

     Or we could use the Kicking Horse Pass which went through the Rockies West of Calgary.  You can see the Rockies from Calgary on a clear day, and most days are clear in Alberta.  The huge towers of rock spring straight up from the prairie soil.  As you drive West they get closer and closer and then all of a sudden they are on both sides of you.  A solid wall with only two gates, then, four now.

     The kicking horse pass started at Golden, British Columbia and took some eight hours to navigate.  This road has been replaced by the Roger's Pass which only takes an hour and three quarters The old road was known as the Big Bend Highway.  The Big Bend part is easy, it was shaped like a horseshoe, curving up through The Boat Encampment and coming back down to Revelstoke.  How it ever got called a highway I'll never know.

     I remember leaving Calgary one time with three spare tires.  They were all flat by the time we got to the Boat Encampment.  There was a restaurant and a gas station but they didn't have any tires.  We managed to buy two from a logging camp nearby and that got us to Revelstoke the next day. 

     My sister slept in the back seat of our car.  My mother had the front seat and father and I curled up in sleeping bags under the car.  And I mean in, not one part of you could be exposed or you would get eaten alive by mosquitoes.

     On the roof was two mattresses, rolled up, they didn't have air mattress in those days.  In the back was; a tent, stove, and food.

     Quite often we used to camp in Kelowna, we had friends who owned property next to Gyro park so we were of the privileged few who could camp on the beach in town. 

     One morning my mother awoke, she is a very light sleeper, to the smell of smoke.  One of the tick mattress was starting to burn.  Father kept the naphtha, gas for the camp stove and lantern, in a one gallon, clear glass, vinegar jug.  The jug was sitting outside the tent and acted as a magnifying glass with the angle of the morning sun, burning a hole through the tent and into the mattress.

     Another time we were camping in a roadside picnic site in Banff National Park and my mother thought she heard dogs in the garbage. I remember hearing her get up and shoo them away. The next day she told us that she had gone out of the tent and thrown a rock at them, that's when she realized they weren't dogs.

     The bears left our area and went across the road to another picnic site. I saw the back of the `56 Chev.  The people had hidden a roast of beef in the trunk so animals couldn't get at it.  The fender of the car was scarred by huge scratches from the bear's claws.  The trunk lid was ripped off the car and the roast was gone. 

      One of our last camping trips took us to Enderby, B. C, the second smallest city in Canada.  We went with a real estate agent to Grindrod where we got in a boat and went down Mara Lake to a little town on the Trans Canada Highway called Sicamous. 

     Shortly after this, we went camping in the house we had bought on the shore of Mara lake, about a mile and a quarter south of the town.  I call it a camping trip because we lived in the house, using our camping gear, until our furniture showed up, about the time I got my next set of stitches.

* ATMS - According To My Sister

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