Manitoba was secular, so we grew up together with members of all faiths. The building consisted of four rooms built in 1909 and a further four added in 1920. When my mother taught in Rivers before 1920 her classes were held in a small nearby building, which later became the Roman Catholic Church on the corner of 5th Avenue and Main Street. later. At this time the student population was about 250. The rooms were large, with very high ceilings; there were tall windows all along one wall and large chalk boards along the front and one side wall. There was a cloak room located behind the front chalkboard. The teacher was furnished with a small desk, a chair and a bell to ring to get our attention.
About the time I started to school we had moved from the small bungalow on 2nd Avenue to a large two-storey house on 5th Avenue. This move was done mainly to give more space for our growing family, (our brother Bill was born in that house, Dec. 2nd, 1927). The house was close enough to the school that as a teen-ager I could wait to hear the commencemnt of the third morning bell at 9 a.m., jump over the low front hedge and by running get there just as the bell stopped ringing. Such was the delight of youth in delaying until the last moment, to relish the cries of an anxious mother, and still get there unscathed!
Getting back to Grade 1, one final thing I remember was a small reward which I got for coming out at the top of the class for some important test. Our teacher, Miss Mitchell had a set of rubber stamps bearing the images of animals, birds and goblins which she regularly used in our scribblers to mark our exercises. It was the same sort of thing where teachers in other grades gave us stars. To come to the point, my specidsl rward was to be allowed to use the teacher's box of stamps and ink pad to make all the pictures I wanted for most of an afternoon!
This is a good time to mention our main working medium throughout elementary school. This was what in England would be called copy books, but in Western Canada were just called "scribblers", although they were marked "exercise book" on the front cover. A popular brand was "The Excelsior" which was put out by Eaton's and another was called "The Sunrise". They cost all of 5 cents, but even that was at times avoided when my dad made us some scribblers out of spare paper he had stapled to a plain brown paper cover. In 1929 each student got a lovely free scribbler coutesy Western Motors in Brandon which showed a color picture of the new "bigger and better" Chevrolet on its cover. No angle has been missed in our lifetime to imprint the automobile on our minds. A car for most of our families was at that time unattainable - in fact my dad and mother never owned one in their whole life. I have still got that free scribbler, but have spent at least $60,000 on cars in my life so far!
The school reader series mentioned above was published in England by Thos. Nelson and Gage's and they were used in all four western provinces. As they were only loaned to us by the school I was not able to retain a copy as a keepsake. It was therefore a pleasure to be able to look through the copy of the Grade 3 Reader whcih Jean Trowbridge brought to our memoirs class. Reflecting on where they were published and the times there was a great deal in them reflecting on the British tradition and history with emphasis on the Empire) which was still quite a big thing in those years.
My Grade 2 teacher was Miss Annie Mcfadden, the daughter of a well-known farming family just south-east of Rivers. In my later teen years I worked part of one summer for her brother, Chester, who was at that time running the farm. Miss McFadden was a dedicated, serious teacher from whom we learned much. Aside from the formal classes I remember one day when she called us all to the window to see a full threshing outfit, complete with steam tractor and bunk wagons going down the street en route to its next farm for threshing. She said we might not see one again and she was right. Farmers wqere prospering in the 1920's and were buying their own outfits including gasoline tractors which they could use for ploughing and cultivation during the whols season. Even as early as the 30's Benny Nunn, a farmer south-west of the town had bought a combine. However, in spite of this advancing mechanisation, the farms on which I worked in the late 30's were still using horses to pull the hay racks full of sheaves in to where the threshing machine was located, and also for taking the wagonloads of grain to the local loading siding or grain elevator. To-day our Canadian farmers only keep horses as pets.
My chief memory of Miss Miners is that of a sincere, dedicated, level-headed person with salt and pepper hair tied in a classical crown roll style. (It was not considered appropriate in those days for teachers to dress too stylishly).
She taught us our arithmetic most throughly and drilled us unmercifully on the multiplication tables. I can still see her standing with her pointer at the blackboard with a portion of the class on their feet facing her as a drill group. She had a clock faced prop on which she could move the two hands with her pointer to get any sum from 1x1 to 12x12. She could fix each one of us in turn to give the correct answer based on what the hands indicated without mumbling. She so throughly fixed these sums in my mind that I have been able to use them mentally all my life! I wonder now if the hand held calculator has done away with all that disciplined drill?
We also had a great deal of spelling and reading. Ivy would stage spelling bees where she would pit the girls against the boys. The girls I'm sorry to say nearly always won, but I remember one shining day when I was able to hold out against the girl champion, Ruth Muirhead and win for the boys who then gave me a great cheer. If you look in that copy of Jean Trowbridge's third reader you will still find a poem entitled "The gingham dog and the calico cat". It came Fred Beever's turn to read and he began with "the gig ham dog and the cackley old cat" which produced so much mirth from the rest of the class that it took some time for Miss Miners to restore order so that poor Frederick might continue.
I'm happy to say that Miss Miners did recover from her nervous breakdown and taught many productive years thereafter. At retirement she was honored at a gathering of town officials and many former students. While I was living in eastern Canada at the time and not able to attend I was at least able to write a letter of appreciation to be read at the dinner.
During our time with Miss Sharman we continued to receive good teaching and advanced in learning as well as stature. Boys and girls at this age (10) were all becoming interested in sports as well. We had all learned to swim (at the place on the Little Sakatchewan River called "the tents") and also to skate. We learned to skate on the river when it first froze and before the snow came or we learned on the ponds which formed from the melting snow in the spring but always froze hard at night.
It was on such a pond near our home that I learned at age 6 using bob skates as they were called. Perhaps this name devolved from the fact that these double bladed skates resembled bobsleds in their general design. Once we had graduated to regular skates we were then able to go to the rink as well as continuing to use the ponds and the river when they were available. While learning on the pond we young bumblers were resented by the older boys who wanted to play hockey. On one occasion one of the older boys said to me "if you can't keep out of the way get the hell off the ice". I, who had not yet reached the age where I was used to this sort of rough approach that most rural youngsters get to know, burst into tears. Unfortunately for him he was overheard by Arthur Johnson, one of our Sunday School teachers, who not only upbraided him on the spot but mentioned the incident in Sunday School. Swearing in public was much frowned upon by Sunday School and day school teachers as well as by most parents in those days.
In winter, during recess and noon hour the girls would play a type of tag called "fox and geese" on a large circle tramped in the snow while the boys played a rough form of soccer which we called football.
In summer both boys and girls played softball. Our schoolyard and adjacent vacant land had ample space for several ball diamonds, an outdoor basketball court, a merry-go-round and swings for the younger children. The swings were very rugged having been built by Chas. Nowe, the caretaker, from 4" pipe set in concrete. Both the swings and merry-go-round are still there even though the old school building itself has long since been torn down and replaced by a new one.
In Grade 4 we finally gave up on the morning song sessions such as "Here we go round the mulberry bush" and "this is the way we brush our teeth". (Some of the health practices we take for granted to-day were only then being introduced in rural Manitoba). Instead of the singing Miss Sharman would read us a chapter from a book. I remember listening intently each day as we worked our way through such wonderful stories as "Black Beauty", the Little Knight of the X-bar-B" and a wonderful story about the life of a grizzly bear. Children like us would only get books of our own as birthday or Christmas presents. Even our school readers were only loaned to us by the school for each year. Taxes were low and school costs had to be minimized.
Entering Toronto was another new experience; hardly any large industry existed on the prairies, here we passed what seemed to be miles of brick works and other factories on the walls of which familiar advertised brands could be seen displayed. Even Peterborough had its fair share of factories the way most Ontario cities do. There was the Westclox factory, the Quaker Oats company, General Electric, Peterborough Canoe and the company that made outboard motors. Even Uncle Cliff's employer, Barrie Furs was a small manufacturer with a whole floor full of stitching and cutting machines run by women working for wages. As Cliff was building superintendent and lived in the building we and his children could enjoy riding tricycles on the factory floor on weekends and riding up and down in the elevator.
For me the best remembered highlight was going to the Sunday School picnic on the steamboat "Stoney Lake" which operated via the Trent Canal up to Stoney Lake where the picnic was held. It was by far the biggest boat we kids had seen up to that time and moreover it had to go through the remarkable lift lock just outside Peterborough. This engineering marvel lifts (or lowers) the ships by over 60 feet and it's really like a gigantic toy with two bathtubs full of water balancing each other at all times so not much power is required to lift the ships.
Also, during the two weeks we visited, dad and Cliff saw that I got to go to the excellent pool in the YMCA where they had instruction classes. Whereas all I knew from the old swimmin'hole in Rivers was the dog paddle and the crawl here we were taught the back stroke, the breast stroke, the side stroke and two different kinds of crawl. We were also taught the proper type of kick to use. While I have not ever become a first class swimmer I have always appreciated the instruction I obtained that summer and still try the different strokes each time I go for a swim.
On returning home and on reflecting on the overall benefit of the trip I ecognised that it gave me a much better feel for the tremendous geography and variety of Canada than I had ever gotten from geography classes and looking at maps!
Our teacher, Mr. Mervyn Henderson had been in the school for many years and was loved and respected by all. He was very even tempered and I only saw him lose it once, when a boy who was getting too big for his britches had to be asked to leave the classroom.
Mr. Henderson had a very down to earth approach to things. He had served in France during the war and had taken a bullet through his cheek. When we came to discuss World War 1 in our history course he closed the book and said, "forget all that, I'll tell you all about what that war was really like to a soldier in the trenches". He told us quite a number of tales and said if you stayed in the trenches you were safe from rifle fire but not bombardment. However, if the enemy were to capture a portion of your trench you might unexpectedly meet him coming around a corner and you'd have to be quick with your bayonet before he used his!
The only other occasion that I can recall seeing men in uniform during the years between the wars was one time as young boys we went over to the livery barn because a small contingent of soldiers were said to be there and they had some nice horses. While there were some cars in town during this era we boys had still some interest in horses. When we saw the men who were dressed in WWI style khaki we saw their brightly polished shoulder badges which said L S H and we naturally asked what that meant. After the usual joking replies such as "ladies stop here" we were eventually told it was the Lord Strathcona Horse. This regiment was originally privately funded, at least in the time of WWI, but I'm sure that this practice had pretty well ceased before WWII when increasing income taxes meant the government paid for it all. The amazing thing was the extent to which the country was able to raise a fighting force of a million during the 5 years of World War II!
I was so enthralled by the things we were seeing that I spent most of my allowance (50 cents) to buy a high quality tourist picture book put out by CNR. I bought it from the News Agent who travelled on all long distance trains in those days, selling magazines, candy and various tourist and other nick-nacks such as travellers might need. It showed wonderful pictures of things we would see, particularly in B.C. and it also had a large complete map of the whole CN system showing all the stations. It showed a picture of Mount Robson, where the train stopped for 5 minutes for the passengers to view and also the Bulkley gates which I managed to glimpse from the train windows. Somehow or other I had developed a special fascination for these gates while looking at the picture in the book; what had caused these huge vertical formations to stick out and abruptly narrow the flow of the river? The Prince Rupert line was something of a turkey trail during the depression, suffering from minimum maintenance and they only allowed smaller, lighter locomotives on it. We just had a ten-wheeler which really had to work hard to move the heavy tourist laden train over various mountain grades. I can recall lying awake at night in the tourist berth and hearing the beat of the exhaust through the open window with its cinder screen; going downhill the engineman would go as fast as the track would allow, gaining momentum for the uphill section to come, where as he neared the top of the grade the exhaust would slow down and become quite laboured so that I feared the train would stop altogether. Years later, as an engineering student at University I learned that these sort of momentum grades were designed into railways on purpose with the object of minimising the amount of cut, fill and curvature and hence the expense of building the line. In later years, as a transportation engineer working for CN I learned how to use the formula to calculate the additional tonnage which could be handled by a given locomotive over a given short gradient on a momentum basis as compared with a drag basis from a standing start.
Upon reaching Prince Rupert we embarked on the CNSS Prince Rupert for our trip down the "inside passage" to Vancouver. The ship was a big thrill for us with a stateroom and meals in the sumptuous dining room. Our feelings of self-importance were further enhanced when the ship published a booklet containing the names of all the passengers, including us kids. While the weather was not of the best we did learn how to play shuffleboard, but when it got rough in the section where we were exposed to the main Pacific for a few hours my sister Mary got seasick and I felt woozy, but only avoided the same fate by falling asleep. I will have more to say about the "mal de mer" later in this chronicle when we get to talk about wartime naval experience.
Another part of the voyage which grabbed our interest was watching our ship loading paper at Ocean Falls. It was raining but the stevedores all wore slickers and we were told that was normal as it rained nearly every day on this coast. It was hard for us prairie dust bowlers to quite accept that any place could get that much rain, but later in life we have come to understand and even live with it!
Vancouver was at that time a city of about 200,000 and was still smaller than Winnipeg. However it was charming with its location between the sea and the mountains and mum and dad had obtained light housekeeping digs for us within 3 or 4 blocks of English Bay. We throughly enjoyed swimming in the ocean, which dad with his own childhood memories of swimming in Galway Bay said was the only way to go. When I saw a man floating on his back reading a newspaper dad had to explain that this was made possible by the increased bouyancy afforded by salt water. We enjoyed romping up and down the beach and especially the slide into the water. When Fran and I arrived here to live, (over 50 years later) one of the first satisfactions for me was to see that the English Bay slide still existed.
Dad was always impressed by the huge ocean liners, witness the fact that a picture of the SS "Olympic" (a sister ship of the ill-fated Titanic) on which he went overseas in WWI hung on our dining room wall in Rivers as long as he lived. Thus it was no surprise that he took us down to see the mighty CPSS "Empress of Asia" tied up at Pier D. Though he was not abel to get us aboard as visitors I can still recall looking up in awe the the huge white painted hull with its buff colored funnels and dreaming what it would be like to journey to Japan on board.
Having thus found my way downtown, I ceased spending all my time at the beach but walked 12 blocks or so to get downtown 2 or 3 times during our stay.Among other things I discovered a travel agency that had a complete rack of North American railway timetables in which I of course was interested. When the agent saw this he very kindly let me pick out a few to take with me. I was able to get the Great Northern, the Northern Pacific, the Burlington and other great railways I had hardly even heard of up to that time.
One other notable excursion was a visit to the Capilano Canyon and its famous suspension bridge. I enjoyed looking down at the tops of trees said to be 200 feet high and also to making the bridge jump and sway, much to the terror of sister Mary. As a special holiday treat mother suggested we eat at the adjacent first class restaurant where she and dad ordered roast chicken. They were disgusted when we kids didn't eat all of ours because the cost of the meal was the princely sum of $5.90. To give perspective to this money value you must realize that full course meals could be obtained for 25 cents at the Bluebird Cafe on Portage Avenue in Winnipeg or for 60 cents at the top level Olympia Cafe in Brandon! When mum murmered about our wasting good food which had cost so much we kids ungraciously said we would have much preferred some chocolate bars and a soft drink at much lower cost. And it was not that we did not understand the value of money, which was constantly drummed into us as that dear mum and dad contrived constantly to stretch the $100 per month which was dad's railway salary. An example, which also occurred while dad and I were walking in downtown Vancouver he gave me a $2.00 bill to see what I would do with it. I was so in awe of this amount of cash (inasmuch as he had never given me more than a dime at any one time before) that I only spent 20 cents on a little toy car and returned the rest to him.
But all too soon we were back on the train, completing the third leg of the triangle tour, Vancouver to Jasper and thence home to Rivers. We had had a most magnificent holiday which as in the case of our earlier trip "down east" gave me the feeling of better knowing the geography of our country together with having learned many other interesting things.
The mill has lasted until the present day (Jan. 1996). It ran full blast during the years of WWII but has tapered off since as the milling has been taken over by larger mills. Even these have not survived in the west because the "crow" freight rates on wheat were so low that western grain could be cheaply sent to eastern mills in large population centres and to ports for export.