Before You Were Born

Here is just what you need... another old timer telling you what it was like when he grew up in the dark ages. Most of these kind of articles list things that were remembered, like Hopalong Cassidy movies, iceboxes, radio shows, and the 5 and 10 cent store. Let me take a slightly different approach by telling you about my life as a kid... are you game? I wish teens and 20's would read this, but probably it will be mostly the ones who can say, "I remember that."

I was born during WWII. When I was one year old, Canada began rationing sugar, tea, coffee, then meat, tin, and petrol. Families received coupons to be used when purchasing these items. This went on until 1946 when I was 5. A few unused coupons lay in a drawer for a long time.

I went to Kindergarten at a school where boys and girls played in separate playgrounds and entered the school through separate doors. In class we were together. Outside the boys saw lots of fights, but we had unwritten rules... no kicking, no punching a kid with glasses... usually it was wrestling to the ground and twisting appendages. I was a top academic student, but I had about 5 or 6 fights a week, unlike top students today. On weekends there were no fights. We played baseball and floor hockey or road hockey and went fishing. In the winter we often used frozen horse buns for pucks in road hockey. They were plentiful because bread, milk, and ice were all delivered from a horse-drawn cart. Bakers, dairies, and ice-makers all had stables of horses for their delivery carts. That was a different time, and you would occasionally see a horse start running, get badly injured, and then be shot and killed where it lay.

Inside school there was a big emphasis on grammar and spelling. We had pencils and erasers, and an ink well at the top right corner of the desk (I guess they didn't care about left-handed kids). We filled our own ink wells with blue ink, and you can imagine how many times someone would spill a puddle of ink on the floor. Everywhere there were stains. Our pens were a stick that you could push a pen nib into. You dipped the nib in the ink and wrote a few words, blotted it with a blotter, dipped again, and kept going until you finished. A major breakthrough happened when a pen was invented with a little balloon inside. You pulled a lever which squashed the ballon, stuck the nib in the ink, and sucked as much ink as possible into the balloon. You could write a lot more before getting a refill. Years later, when I was in Grade 11, the ball point pen was invented, and red and black inks were also used. Trouble was they leaked, funny... they still do. Kids these days might be surprised to learn that we weren't given many projects in school. That was because we had very little information about anything... no internet, no television, no magazines, very few people had encyclopedias, and we knew just about nothing about other countries of the world.

Let me tell you about my house. It had 3 small bedrooms, a living room, a dining room, and  a kitchen with the tiniest bathroom off the kitchen. The bathroom had no shower, but we did have hot water. One oil stove in the living room heated the whole house in the winter. The bedrooms, kitchen, and bathroom were always cold in the winter. I remember having 4 blankets on my bed and putting my clothes on the stove every morning before I put them on. The kitchen had one sink which was like a laundry tub, a stove with an oven, and an icebox to keep milk and stuff cool. Every few days we got a block of ice from the iceman. Milk was in glass bottles with cream floating on top. A glass of milk always had lumps of cream in it... gross to me. My favourite cereals were Sugar Crisp and Frosted Flakes and Shredded Wheat. Our entertainment was a radio for music and radio shows like The Shadow. These were stories with different characters. We became very good listeners. We also had a windup record player for 78 rpm records. When I was in Grade 7 we got a television set. There weren't many shows, so programs were on for only a few hours a day. The rest of the time you saw a test pattern. I remember watching boxing Friday nights and hockey Saturday nights in the early years of tv.

In high school I got $5.00 a week (that's about 30 kr to my Swedish friends) for bus fare, lunches, and a movie. I lived a long way from the school, but I often walked to save my money for other stuff. Movies cost 10 or 15 cents. Popcorn and a drink were 10 cents. In high school they taught instrumental music, and that's when I became a drummer. Before that I took piano lessons, and after that I learned to play guitar. The most important things in my life then were music, sprinting (I discovered I was a faster runner than every kid in my whole city), basketball (my favourite sport), and girls to dance with. We danced a lot. Another great one was water skiing. I loved that.

So... I've given you a glimpse of my life in the 40's and 50's, and I still have another 50 years to tell about. I find this stuff really interesting, but young people, including my grand-daughters never ask questions about it.