LIFE OF MY FATHER - 20

GRANDVIEW STREET

My Mom and Dad often went out on Saturday night, leaving Suzanne and me with an older lady to babysit. I've forgotten her name, but remember those nights quite vividly. Foster Hewitt would be on the radio announcing the hockey game, and my father would be whistling while getting ready to go out. I don't think I liked the babysitter very much, as I was unhappy anticipating her arrival and remember lying in bed unable to fall asleep.

My parents' best friends were Irene and Bill Stickney and Kay and George Kent. We usually had Christmas with the Stickney's. I remember envying their son who was about my age for the interesting gifts he would receive. On Christmas Day, he and his father would construct wonderful things with a Mecano set, for example, and I would wish girls could play with such things.

Bill Stickney had been promoted to an executive position with HBM&S and so was entitled to live in a company cottage. This was a mark of status in the town. When I was nine or ten, the Kent's also moved to a company cottage. My mother was unhappy about this. I think she felt my father had let her down by not getting a similar promotion. I remember her saying that the reason for his failure in this was his lack of ability to socialize and his refusal to join the Elks or Lions or to play golf at the Company golf course.

There may have been some truth in this, and with her two best friends living in company houses, I can understand her disappointment. On reflecting about it, I realized that my father was always a bit of a loner. I think he loved Flin Flon in the early days, when it was a rough and ready place with the many challenges a new town would have provided. As the town matured, however, the type of corporate life that likely developed within HBM&S would not have suited him. As well, company towns are notorious for being inward looking.

When I was older, my father expressed to me his disapproval of class privilege as it existed in Europe. Certainly, his life as a child would not have prepared him for the competitive life of a large corporation or given him the self-confidence and desire needed to succeed in that type of environment. He was not materialistic in the sense of needing possessions to enhance his self-esteem. Except for a big car, he lived very frugally.

It was important to my mother, on the other hand, to have a nice house and attractive furniture. She was not at all superficial, though. On the contrary, she was a very good person, strong and serious, always encouraging Suzanne and I with our school work and music lessons. However, social status was definitely important to her, perhaps because her grandfather who she loved dearly was a respected leader of Edmonton's French-Canadian community. Growing up in his house, she may have become accustomed to a certain level of social status.

It was about this time that my father decided to build a house in the new neighbourhood of Willowvale. My memories of my father before moving to Willowvale include him taking me on the mile-long walk to Phantom Lake. I felt it a great privilege to be going there alone with him. On another occasion, before I knew how to swim, he persuaded me to go down the slide on the dock, saying he would catch me before I reached the water. Then, to my horror, he let me go, intending I'm sure to cure any fear of the water I was in danger of developing. Of course, he was standing right there beside me as I landed in the water, but nonetheless, I got a huge mouthful and was very angry.

He would sometimes take me on a search for interesting rocks. Once we found a good-sized beautiful piece of quartz. He would pick up a rock and describe all its various components.

He was often moody, though I don't recall him ever raising his voice in anger. When he was in a bad mood, everyone became very quiet. He believed strongly in good manners, and would threaten my sister and I with being sent to a finishing school if we didn't improve our behaviour. We didn't know exactly what a finishing school was, of course, but we knew it must be very horrible.

When I was nine, my father bought a car and took us on a vacation. We went as far south as Salt Lake City, Utah, then to Vancouver for Uncle Albert's wedding. I didn't see Uncle Albert very often. He was a chemical engineer who worked all his life for Imperial Oil and lived far from us first in Port Moody near Vancouver and then in Sarnia, Ontario. I remember him being very warm, friendly, and easy to like. I loved his Christmas gifts, especially a beautiful Parker pen and pencil set, a lovely wooden pencil case, and the book Anne of Green Gables.

In the photos are:

1) Visiting Aunt Jacqueline and her children on our 1949 vacation: left to right are Aunt Jacqueline, Claudette, John, Madeleine, Suzanne, Annette, Mom, Dad, and Don.

2) Suzanne and me at Athabasca Falls on the same vacation.

3) Suzanne and me on a mountain outside Yellow Stone Park.

4) Uncle Albert with his dog.

5) My parents having fun.

6) My father with friends, or co-workers.

7) My father and me.

LIFE OF MY FATHER - 17

LIFE IN FLIN FLON - FROM A CHILD'S PERSPECTIVE

As a child growing up in Flin Flon, my life would not have been very different from the life of any other child. My father went to work at the plant every day, came home each night, rarely went out on his own; my mother did the usual things, cooked and cleaned, made clothes on her sewing machine, read fairy stories to me, listened to the radio, picked cranberries and blueberries, went out to shop and visit her friends, and had a new baby, my sister Suzanne, when I was five.

What made Flin Flon different was its lack of road access, and its rocky topography. Getting away from the town meant taking the train, which my mother did almost every year to visit her family in Edmonton. As there was no bus service and few cars, children beginning at age six walked to school even in the depth of winter. The bedrock on which the town was built meant no gardening, sewer boxes built above ground, and the scarcity and expense of fresh fruit and vegetables especially in winter.

Children had a freedom that would be virtually unknown today. There was an outcropping of bedrock in the backyard of the bigger house on Grandview Street that my parents bought when I was two. This rock flattened out before descending to Ross Lake some distance away. At quite a young age, I was allowed to roam freely though this area, fortunately never falling down and injuring myself, though on one occasion being reprimanded for ripping a new dress.

I often went to a small stream of running water where a few willows and blue bells were growing. This became my very own secret place that was never mentioned to anyone. It was especially precious in that it was surrounded by acres and acres of bedrock. In summer, all the kids on our street played outside together. We had a game called Aunty Aunty Eye Over that involved, as far as I can remember, hurling a ball over a roof, then racing around the house trying to be the first to find it.

It was very cold in the winter, and the Northern Lights made beautiful shimmering patterns in the night sky. In the evenings, we took our sleighs, which had steel runners and a wooden cross piece for steering, up to the top of Hillcrest Avenue and sledded down in the dark and cold under the Northern Lights.

Because there were no telephones, I had to take a note to the babysitter on my way home from school when my parents wanted to go out for the evening. On one occasion in Grade One, we were doing splatter work which involved a tooth brush, a screen, some paint, and with the brush trying to splatter the paint through the screen onto a piece of paper. I was so involved with this that I failed to notice that Miss Dunning had come and taken my note. Later, in a panic I went up to her desk to tell her it was lost, only to be reprimanded for having had it in the first place as she returned it to me. Oh, the injustices of childhood!

Another incident involved two sisters, Carol and Joan Kent, daughters of my mother's friend Kay Kent. Their father was also an HBM&S engineer. We were at the Kent's cottage (my parents weren't there) and were given pumpkin pie for dessert. We would have been perhaps five, six and seven years old. Joan and I hated the pie, but Mrs. Kent made us sit at the picnic table until we had eaten all of it. To this day, I have never been able to eat pumkin pie.

In the photos are:

1) Carol and Joan Kent with me in the middle on a day when we had obviously been very naughty.

2) My sister, Suzanne, and me, aged 2 1/2 and 7 1/2.

2) The coat with fur trim which is my first memory.

3) My parents first house on Callinan Street.

4) My parents and me in front of the Grandview Street house.

5)My Mother with me as a baby.

6) My Sister Suzanne and me in 1946.