Mitchell Family History

(This autobiography was written by Earle in 1996 when he was 76 years of age.)

About a year ago our two daughters suggested that as I was the oldest remaining of our family (except Mother at ninety-nine years young but with failing memory) I should write down a record of our life.  They thought that this might be of interest to them and possibly to future ones of the family.

After making a summary of all these events as I could remember them and only filling about two pages, I decided that this would be a recollection of my life from the age of three and a half until now.  This of course will include our family life, but I have noticed that in talking to different ones, memories of past events seldom agree.

I especially noticed this in talking with Norman who was three and a half years older than me.  His memories of past areas and events hardly ever agreed with mine.  What brought this to my attention the most was the year Evelyn and I made a trip back to our old homestead in Drayton Valley, 1979, after forty years.  Norman and Mother had been back two or three times since the small village had changed to a city, and couldn’t find our homestead.  Yet as soon as Evelyn and I had checked into our motel, I managed to drive us right to where we had lived.  All that was left of buildings was the old barn built by Dad and us boys in 1932.  Evelyn took a picture of me standing by it, which our daughter Sherry painted a picture of a few years later.  The things I noticed which had changed so much was the way trees had grown along the fence lines, the little old creek and swimming hole was nothing but a weed-filled ditch, and most of the roads were in different places.  I don’t think a person should ever go back to recapture old memories, because most times you will be disappointed.

I don’t think a person should ever go back to recapture old memories, because most times you will be disappointed.

Through the years, for some reason or other, bits of family history have drifted my way:

• The ‘Pugwash History’, where the first Mitchells had settled in the early 1800’s.
• The ‘Foley Trail’ (Volumes #1 and #2) which is a history of the area where we lived for quite a few years.
• A written record made by one of Dad’s brothers.  Uncle Joe made a trip back to the area in Northern Ireland to which the Mitchells had emigrated many years before from Scotland.  He did quite a bit of research on this and wrote up a record of the family from the early 1800’s to the late 1970’s.
• My Mother’s written recollections of her life as she remembered at the age of eighty.
• Family albums with pictures of most of Dad’s family and pictured events of our life from Nova Scotia to B.C.

Dad never talked a great deal about his life or family, so except for a few things his growing up years were probably the same as most young people of that time.  He talked a bit about his dad, who according to reports was a very innovative person.  Amos is listed in the ‘Pugwash History’ on page 171 at the age of 17.  Apparently he took over the family farm about that time.  He built a huge windmill that was used to grind grains, mill timbers, make water pipes, etc.  It was still standing there when I visited in 1942 but was not in use.

In the period 1900 to 1908, Amos bought five different farms in the Pugwash area, which were probably given to his sons and daughters.  He was manager of the new Farmers Co-op Store, which opened in 1908, and he bought in 1910.  It burned to the ground in 1928 resulting in financial ruin for Amos.  He died two years later.

Dad and I worked together quite a lot when I was young, cutting logs, working in sawmills and lumber camps.  Spending any time in bunkhouses gives you a pretty good idea what most men are like.  Lots of BS, etc.  I always thought that Dad was well received, not given to boasting, excellent sawyer and millwright and better than average poker player.

I think some of the Amos innovations showed up in Dad as he could turn his hand to almost anything and was the only sawyer who would tally the daily mill cut as he sawed.  It was just a simple pegboard device and I used the same thing when I started sawing.

Dad felt badly about not being able to join the Services during the First World War, owing to a growth the size of a grapefruit on the inside of his right leg, just above the knee.  While working in the hay fields at the age of 14, he slipped through a break in the bottom of the hayrack, which cracked the bone in his leg.  The growth was nature’s way of healing and strengthening the crack.  He enjoyed outside curling in the winter, and owned a racehorse, which he used to drive around the district, pulling a small two-person buggy.  He belonged to the Oddfellows Lodge and there met mother through the ladies part of the organization.

Mother was born at Harbour Grace, Newfoundland, June 19^th, 1896, nee Morris.  Her father had a sail making shop there, and died suddenly when Mother was four and a half years old.  Life was very hard for the family of three girls and one boy, so after a year and a half, Mother and her sister Jesse were put into an orphanage in St. John’s.  Sister Belle was left with her grandparents, the Stephenson’s, and brother Bill went to Nova Scotia with their mother to keep house for a widower named Robinson who she later married.

Sister Jesse died from diphtheria about two years after they were put into the orphanage, and when Mother was eleven years old her mother came and took her to Nova Scotia.  The next seven years were far from pleasant, as her stepfather had little love for her and she was used mostly as a hired hand.

Bill ran away from home at the age of fifteen and never returned.  He led quite a colourful life, joining the army, spending time in the trenches, and near the end of the war joining the famous ‘Dumbells’ (note- a singing and entertainment group of the time).  From then until the crash of ’29, he was a very busy person playing in all the best places from Toronto to New York.  I can remember a newspaper clipping of the ‘20’s with a picture of Uncle Bill proclaiming him as the second Caruso.

I think he must have been popular, because last year just after he passed away at 101, I received a telephone call from a lady in Parksville who had noticed the obituary in the paper.  She said that she was 97 years old, but remembered so well ‘Billy’ seventy years ago when she attended a concert somewhere near Toronto, and how impressed she had been with his singing and his manner.

Mother and Dad met in 1914 and were married on June 7^th, 1916.  Norman was born in June 1917 and Elwin in November 1918.

This was the year there were not enough men left on the prairies to harvest the crops.  A ‘Harvest Excursion’ was set up by the government to bring men from other provinces to help.  Dad joined one of these, and harvested in the Glidden area of Saskatchewan.

In 1919 Elwin was quite sick with pneumonia and Mother was showing signs of tuberculosis, so in August they sold everything and headed for Saskatchewan, taking her sister Belle with them.  The year I was born they bought a place of their own which they farmed until the summer of 1923.  Howard had come along in February 1922 so now there were four boys in the family.

Nineteen twenty-three becomes the time of my first memories, hauling water with Dad with a Model-T truck Dad had and then the cyclone which we always claimed blew us out of Saskatchewan.  It was just getting dark and as I looked out the kitchen window I saw our outhouse dancing across the yard.  Dad told Mother to take us four boys into the cellar, which was just a hole in the ground under the kitchen floor.  I don’t know how many hours we stayed in the cellar but I can still remember how light it was from the flashes of lightning.  In the morning when we looked out everything except the house and small granary were gone.  The crop had been pretty well destroyed so, packing up again, we headed for Alberta.  The only thing I can still remember of that trip is of staying in a hotel in Edmonton, where us four boys were put into one bed, two at each end.

From Edmonton to Reno where Dad had taken out a homestead, was about a hundred miles straight west.  We stayed in a house belonging to a Hadley family that fall and winter.  ‘Old Bob’ Hadley, as he was called, owned and ran a small sawmill where Dad managed to work that winter.

About Christmas time Old Bob fired one of his employees for some reason or other.  This man went home, got his gun, came back and killed Old Bob.  Two of Bob’s sons, Ray and Bill, in their early twenties, got their guns and went hunting.  Nothing was ever proven or taken to court but this man was found the next morning shot dead at his cabin.

Uncle Lawrence spent quite a bit of time with us that first summer on the homestead.  He was a very good hunter so we didn’t want for fresh meat.  All of his life he had a great love for his beer, and if there wasn’t a barrel of mash working somewhere, there would be bottles of beer stashed here and there.

One evening Dad was out milking our cow and as the mosquitoes were quite bad he set fire to a small fire of brush to make some smoke.  I was standing close by the fire when two bottles of beer exploded, almost blinding me.  The cow kicked Dad and the milk over and took off.

One day us boys were playing in the clearing by the house climbing up and jumping off the many stumps around.  I picked one that Norman happened to be chopping on, and as I jumped he came down with his ace right through my straw hat and into my head.  There was plenty of blood, but apparently no permanent damage.  I did get even with him a few years later when I accidentally cut him quite badly on the back of his hand when we were cutting wood.

We hear and read a lot about accidents in early childhood affecting your later life.  Two things that happened that year seem to bear out this belief.

One day we were all about half a mile from home, putting up some hay for winter.  I asked if I could go home, and when I got there with no one around to watch me, got into one of the foods I just loved – dry oatmeal.  Getting some in a tin cup, I went out to the outhouse to eat it.  Somehow or other I managed to drop the empty cup down the hole, and not being able to retrieve it had to take my punishment.

A short time later I was left at ‘Ma and Pa Neighbours’ (F.T. #1012) (W. M. note- I assume that this is an abbreviation for the ‘Foley Trail’ book page number) for the night.  They had several boys and one ten-year-old daughter living at home.  When it came bedtime they asked me whether I would like to sleep with the boys or with Alice.  I picked Alice and could always remember how soft and cuddly she was to snuggle up to.  To this day I still enjoy cuddling and have never been able to eat oatmeal.

The winter of 1925-26 we left the homestead at Reno and moved to our first ‘tarpaper shack’ as they were called.  Ours, of which there would be five in the next ten years, were always the same.  Fourteen feet wide by thirty feet long with a shanty roof, one ply of shiplap covered with tarpaper to keep the wine and rain out.  A partition across one end at eight feet for Mother and Dad, including a crib for Olive when she was born in 1930.  Sixteen feet in the center for a table, two chairs, two benches, small airtight heater and a Winnipeg couch which became Gerald’s bed at night.  A partition across the other end at six feet making two spaces, one for the kitchen and one in the living room, and one window in the living room.

The move that winter to Chesel Hadley’s place at Styal was a cycle year for the snowshoe rabbits.  Before leaving the homestead in January, I can remember a dry well in the yard about eight feet deep, and loosely covered with poles.  It had filled right to the top with rabbits, falling through the cracks and not able to jump out again.

One day as we were out playing not far from the shack, we heard a lot of yelling and shooting.  Down the trail to the shack came Uncle Lawrence and Herschel Neighbour on two horses like two wild Indians (had probably been into Lawrence’s home brew).  Anyway that night, being bright moonlight, they took us all out to show how they could shoot rabbits with those six-guns they were packing.  When we got back to the shack and us boys put to bed, they set up a block of wood against the back wall and had some target practice.  Probably why I required hearing aids at age fifty.

That summer we built Shack #2 across the creek from where the Palmers lived (F.T. #53) and close to the Hoople mill (F.T. #855).

Norman, Elwin and I started school that year at Imrie School (F.T. #818).  Most of my memories of school life seem to be of fights I got into and usually not of my making.  This first year Oliver Brooks (F.T. #852), about two years older than I, started mixing it up one day after school by the mill.  I was getting the best of it until his mother, who was rather a large lady, came along.  She picked up a piece of a board and gave me a good whack across the rear end, finishing my first fight.

Gerald was born that fall, and having eczema from head to foot, and asthma, our living room always seemed to be more of a sick room than anything else.

The winter of 1926-27 we moved into Shack #3 up in the Niton-McKay area near Edson.  Just another Hoople camp where Dad was the sawyer.

In the spring, one day while playing by a small stream, we were jumping across a narrow place, and I didn’t make it.  The stream carried me along to a large pool where I hooked up on some tree roots.  The rest of the kids had run home as soon as I fell in and Mother managed to come and pull me out.

We moved back to Shack #2 at Palmers later on in the spring.  One thing of interest until fall was a twenty-four inch snowfall on Easter and a visit from our cousins, Charlie, Jessie and Effie Day from Saskatchewan.

One day in the fall Doug Profit (F.T. #849), a close friend of the family, asked if he could take me with him to the store that was about a mile north of where we were living.  When we got there it was getting dark, and at that time a lot of forest fires were burning all around, which created an eerie sight.  Doug came up to me, gave me a pat on the back, and informed me we wouldn’t be going back to the house.  I think that was the longest mile I ever walked, three quarters of it through the muskeg, the fires all around on the horizon and, I felt sure, a bear behind every bush.

We moved to Entwistle in 1928 to a small house (on the other side of the railway tracks).  I put them in brackets because in the three or four years we lived there we didn’t seem to be accepted.  On reading the Foley Trail history, I came across a school picture where almost all of the children were listed except Elwin, Earle and Howard Mitchell (F.T. #121) names unknown.  One boy at that school didn’t like me at all and was always pestering me to fight.  He always had the best of me until I could get hold of him, throw him down, sit on him and promise to leave me alone.

Every summer we lived in Entwistle it seemed we would be under quarantine for something.  We had mumps, measles and chickenpox.  In those days they posted a sign on your house and you weren’t supposed to go anywhere.

One day Ray Hadley and his son Buster came and said they were going to take us picking raspberries.  As we lived near the bush on the southern edge of town, Ray managed to sneak us around the town to an old abandoned railway grade about half a mile north of town.  The patches of raspberries along the grade were fantastic and it didn’t take long to fill our pails.  In all the years we lived in Alberta I never found raspberries growing except there.

Ray had a neat way of making sure all these small boys would pick berries.  When we arrived at the patch, he produced a brand new package of gum.  Five sticks of gum and five boys, and if you were chewing you weren’t eating berries. As we hardly ever got gum to chew it was quite a treat.

Many years later, reading the Foley Trail history, I found that this old railway line was built from Edmonton to Jasper in the early nineteen hundreds and torn up during World War One and early nineteen twenties.

The other summer treat for us boys was going swimming in the Pembina River, which ran between the two villages of Entwistle and Evansburg.  As we couldn’t mix with the other children at the village swimming hole under the railway tracks, die to the usual quarantine and the fact that we didn’t own bathing suits, Ray used to take us up the river about a mile where he had found a nice place for children to swim.  Several nice pools and sand bars, and far enough away from the village that we didn’t require suits.  Ray was no swimmer but he did teach us all how to do the dog paddle and a bit of a sidestroke.

As we had very little money the four of us used to do any odd jobs we could find and one summer we made $10.00 with which we bought a wagon to play with.  That wagon is in the picture taken in 1932 in front of our log house on the homestead.  We had a paper route for a while, which we all helped with.  I think we had about thirty customers and we could sell any extras for five cents each.  We bought a second hand bicycle that summer for $15.00 but I think Dad paid for about half of it.

The year we got the wagon we took a contract to split and pile a large bunch of wood for a next-door neighbour, for $2.50.  The four of us worked the whole Easter holiday, which was about ten days, to get it done.  He felt a bit sorry for the time it had taken us to do this and added another fifty cents to the price.  I think that was the year that Dad gave us each ten cents for cutting up a large pile of railway ties to help our winter fuel supply.

With four boys in the family able to work, I can never remember Dad ever helping with the wood supply.  From the time I was six years old until leaving at sixteen, we four boys took care of the job.

We moved to the bigger school in 1930, the year Olive was born.  Norman had been attending this school from the time we moved, and had already received the nickname of Windy Mitchell.  One boy, Elmer Messenger, who was a bit bigger, and a bit of a tough kid, liked to get Norman down and sit on him, making him cry.  I got quite a kick out of this until one day he told Mother about it.  Mother pointed out to me that I should help my brother in times like this.  Well, that sure scared me, and I could just imagine what this larger boy, three or four years older than I, was likely to do to me.  Anyway, the next morning at recess Elmer grabbed Norman and threw him down, sat on him and had him crying.  I jumped onto his back and started hitting him on the head, making him jump off.  Well, he never bothered Norman again and seemed to be scared of me.

That winter Norman and I had the job of janitor for this school.  Sweeping the floor each day after school, and having a fire going in the big heart in the center of the classroom each morning.

In the spring, Ray Hadley and Dad had filed on a couple of homesteads at Drayton Valley, about thirty miles south of Entwistle.  Both quarter sections had fairly large patches of spruce timber on them, so we built two log cabins to live in that summer.  The size of these houses was almost the same as the tarpaper shacks, but we did make some jack pine shingles for the roofs.

Missed a couple of days of school one time owing to having to work on the log houses.  When I came to school the next day I found that Norman and Elwin had arranged a fight between Donald Fitzgerald and me.  Donny was a bit bigger and older than me, and you can bet that I sure didn’t want to fight with him.  After school that day, all the kids gathered out on the road to see this fight.  I’m still trying to talk my way out of it until he picked up a small stick, and set it on his shoulder, daring me to knock it off.  I guess my aim was bed because I pasted him right in the nose.  End of fight, and we got along fine together after that.

This was the summer Dad took his first contract to clear land.  It was about three miles north of Evansburgh, the other side of the Lobstick River, and about ten acres of brush and small trees.  Ray Hadley, his son Buster, Norman, Elwin and I set up a tent and stayed there until the job was done.  As there were no large trees, it was just cutting brush and grubbing out the small poplar trees, piling it up and burning it.

One evening after supper, Dad told us to go to a farm, which was about a half mile from our camp, and see if we could get some eggs.  The road led through a bit of muskeg and had been built up with slabs and sawdust.  On the way back we noticed that there were a lot of garter snakes along this road, so we decided to take a couple back to camp to play with.  Dad and Ray weren’t there at the time and didn’t return until almost bedtime.  We were just getting settled into our beds when we heard an unearthly yell from Ray and Dad.  One of those darned snakes had crawled right into their bed.  I don’t think they ever knew how it got there, which was probably very good for us.

Another night we had one of the worst lightning storms I have ever seen.  For a while you could have read a paper inside that tent, and I can still remember the ground shaking.  The next morning we found that lightning had hit a tree just ten feet from our tent.

The winter of 1931 was back to Reno to shack #4 right next to a house where Doug and Mamie Profit were staying.  Doug had a small mill there and Dad was sawing for him.

had three and a half miles to walk.  Mother was sick quite a lot that winter with pleurisy, and I was in bed for two weeks with a kidney infection.  We had no doctors out there so Mamie Profit took care of us.

One morning the roof on our shack caught fire where the pipe went out.  That sure was a scare for us kids, but luckily the men ran up from the mill and had it out before it could do much damage.

One day Doug Profit asked me if I would like to take his .22 rifle and try to get a partridge or a rabbit for supper.  I didn’t like to tell him that no one had ever shown me how to aim a gun, so I headed out into the bush.  It wasn’t long before I found a nice partridge sitting on a limb quite close to me.  I put a shell in the gun, cocked it and got the front sight centered on his breast and fired.   That partridge never even moved, and after about five shots was still sitting there.  No one had ever told me about using the back sight too.  I had to go home and tell them I had never found any game.

I have never told this story before, but somewhere along the way I did learn.  The winter I was in Camp Petawawa in Ontario, we did quite a bit of rifle range shooting.  We had been issued with nice new LeEnfield rifles, which were far superior to the old Ross rifles we had on the coast.  It must have suited me, because they suggested that I move to a sniper role in the infantry.  Some say it was probably my unusual way of shooting with both eyes open, a method I had adopted one winter shooting squirrels for their hides.  If you hit them anywhere but the head the price per skin dropped quite a bit.

About late March we packed up again and headed for the homestead in Drayton Valley.  It was still pretty cold with quite a bit of snow around.  It seemed ages before we had that log house warmed up.  I went out that first evening and set some snares for rabbits, and next morning had a couple for the pot.  That seemed to set me up as the meat provider for the family for the next few years – partridge, rabbits, prairie chickens and my first deer on my fourteenth birthday.

These years on the homestead stand out in my memory as very good, and I feel sure that the lifestyle would be much better for a lot of people today.  Barefoot from the time the snow went until it came again.  Mother made most of our clothes from flour sacks.  Our bread was made from wheat that we had ground at a small local mill, and you could usually find a bit of straw in it.  Eggs were five cents a dozen and we couldn’t afford to buy them.  We did have a few chickens and got some eggs from them.

One spring us boys made a pet out of one of the chicks.  We called him Pete and he would follow us all around the place.  Because he was so tame, he kept getting picked up by the chicken hawks, and three times that spring he was carried away.  As he was quite large even when young, the old hawk couldn’t clear our small field and we always managed to rescue him.  His back was sure getting in bad shape from those hawk claws though.

One night his luck ran out, due to another chicken thief we had there.  A big old skunk got into the barn, and all that was left of Pete in the morning was a leather strap we kept around one of his legs.  The skunk had crawled into one of the mangers to get Pete but couldn’t get out again, so we all decided we would trap him.  We sawed a hole in the far end of the barn, where we set a steel trap.  Then we sawed another hole in the manger so he could get out.  He came waddling down the length of the barn, took a look at us standing in the doorway, and went over to the hole where we had set the trap.  He must have had some experience with traps because he just took one front paw, reached into the trap springing it and not getting caught.  We figured that being so smart he deserved his freedom, but our dog Lad had different ideas and nailed him as he went around back.  That was sure a vile smelling dog and barnyard for quite awhile.

Lad was a mixture of Shepherd and Husky and a fearless fighter.  I think his biggest weakness was porcupines and it seemed that we could never get through a summer that we didn’t have to wrap him in a gunny sack, get out the old pliers and pull quills.  The worst episode was the day he ran across a mother porcupine with two small ones.  I guess Lad thought the little ones were rabbits.  I think we must have pulled about a thousand quills, even back as far as his throat.

The next winter, someone gave me an old Cooey .22 rifle.  They said it wasn’t much good but I could probably get a few rabbits with it.  I knew how to aim a gun by this time but couldn’t hit a rabbit.  Someone had told me that the end of a gun barrel wears out in time and will cause this problem.  I took it into the woods behind the barn and nailed it to a plank between two trees, set up a target about fifty feet away and started firing.  Every shot would go to a different place and would be about a foot high, low or wide.  I went back to the house and got Dad’s hacksaw and took about an inch off the end of the barrel.  Every shot after that went to the same place.

Now that I had become a full-fledged gunsmith, I decided to change the sights on the gun.  It seemed to me that they were too low and tended to blur when aiming.  I got a couple of copper rivets about one inch long and made up what I wanted them to be.  That little gun served me well for the next three or four years.

To get a few dollars for food in the summer, as the small mills didn’t usually work at that time, Dad would take contracts to clear land.  I believe we used to get about seven dollars an acre.  This worked very well with a family with four boys to help, piling up the brush in piles and tending the many fires at burning time.

One summer we had a job to clear ten acres about eight or nine miles west of home.  We set up a tent and used to stay there from Monday to Saturday.  This job took us about three weeks, and as it had some larger trees on it we had to take dynamite and blow out the stumps.  Dad showed us how to set the sticks under the stumps, set the detonator with fuse, light it and then run like hell.  That was some fun.

One Saturday after supper we were on our way home.  It was just a wagon trail through the woods.  I was walking ahead of the others carrying Dad’s rifle, when a big black bear came out on the road ahead of me.  Dad yelled, “Give me the gun” but before he could take it from me that old bear was tearing through the bush at full speed.  I think he was more scared than we were, but I can remember hugging the opposite side of the road for quite a ways.

School at Drayton Valley was that regular one room school that you read about.  Our teacher was a young just out of normal teaching school graduate from the city of Edmonton.  We all liked Miss Monaghan, and I think she did a good job of looking after and teaching grades one to nine to as many as fifty children at times.

One episode at school one day that first year must have been hard for her to live down.  Farm and rural living children were regularly exposed to the mating habits of most animals, and it wasn’t unusual to see a couple of dogs at this ritual.  This day just at lunchtime it happened behind the school and as these animals always end up in a back-to-back position, someone ran in and told the teacher that some of us boys had tied their tails together.  Miss Monaghan came storming out there demanding that we untie them immediately.  All we could do was stand there and giggle, which only made her angrier.  Finally one of the older boys picked up a board lying nearby and gave the male dog a whack with it, which did the trick, but she kept us in for an hour after school trying to find out who had done this.

At this time there were only about three families living in the village by the school, and all the students came from four directions from distances of up to four miles.  We lived one mile west and one and a half miles north, and our road had over twenty children.

One day Howard and I found a new two or three pound tin of Rodgers golden syrup on the side of the road.  We were pretty sure we knew who it belonged to, but as the only syrup we had at home was from brown sugar and water, we hid it by the creek so we could spice up our lunches each day.  After two days guilt feelings got the best of us and we retuned it to the old bachelor who lived up our road.  He was very glad to get it back and gave us about a quarter of the tin to take home.

It wasn’t too long before my brothers were getting me into trouble again.  Remembering how well I had done in Entwistle, they soon had me set up to fight Fred Urchystyn.  Fred was a Ukrainian living on our side of school and older than me.  He didn’t know anything about fighting and I was having the best of it until he finally got hold of me and threw me down.  He was sitting on me with his fist raised as if to strike me in the face.  I said you wouldn’t dare, which I guess was the wrong thing to say, because he hit me as hard as he could right on the nose.  That was the worst nosebleed I ever had, and it sure ended the fight.

Things were quiet on our side of school until the Mastre family came along.  Their homestead was right next to Teddy and ours, and they went to school each day with us.  He was the last of the family to attend school, as his four brothers and sister were quite a bit older.  It was his idea that the five of us could dominate everybody on our road so we set up for a confrontation one day after school.  We would probably have carried it off if they hadn’t brought in an import.  Alex Starling was a big Welsh kid about 150 pounds and two years older than me.  With that and a long lecture from our teacher about fighting, things went well from then on.

The rest of my schooling there was pretty uneventful, and except for the time someone caught us in the little swimming hole, mixed skinny dipping, things moved along very quietly.

There was one boy living on our side of school who had about four miles to go so rode a horse each day.  Most children after the age of six seemed to be able to ride in that area.  None of us boys had ever been on a horse, so one day he asked if I would like to ride the last half-mile to his corner.  I of course said yes, so he helped me up, handed me the halter rope, as he didn’t use a bridle, and asked if I was ready.  At my nod he gave a wild yell and gave the horse a whack across the rump.  That horse took off like a scared rabbit, and as all our riding in those days was done bareback, all I had to hold onto was the halter rope and some mane.  For the first little ways I was a very scared boy, just hanging on for dear life.  All of a sudden that horse’s gait changed, and it almost felt like I was sitting in a rocking chair it was so smooth.

I now started to worry about stopping at the corner where our ways parted.  I tried pulling at the halter rope to no avail, so when it slowed down to make the corner I jumped off.  That boy was sure angry at me because of the three miles he had to wal, and he never asked me to ride again.  Nevertheless, I did become reasonably proficient at riding during the next five years.

I sometimes wonder if there is anywhere that people still pick wild fruit the way we did in those days.  Starting about May were the thimbleberries that we found in the spruce forests.  This was a single berry, much like a blackberry on a single plant about six inches high.  It was very tasty, but as there weren’t many of them Mother usually made a bit of jelly.  Next came the strawberries in June, and they seemed to grow everywhere.  Our best patches were in Sammy Dunn’s clover fields.  With four boys to pick, we used to get a lot of them, and it was said that one summer Mother canned 100 quarts.

July and August brought more berries.  Black and red currants which seemed to like the cool areas of the spruce forests, with loads of high bush cranberries growing on bushes three to eight feet high.  Lots of Saskatoons on the banks of the North Saskatchewan River and chokecherries closer to the river.  Mother used to make a bit of jelly from the chokecherries for our pancakes, but we never cared for it too much.  As Saskatoons weren’t well liked as a preserve we would only spend about a day picking them.

In September came the blueberries in an area about fifteen miles west of the valley and past the Pembina River.  Families that made the trip to this area usually joined with others to make up a wagonload.  The area we picked in was quite flat with lots of open spaces around small groves of jackpine and poplar.  What we called a huckleberry grew on a bush about six to ten inches high with one cluster of berries on the top with two to ten berries.  These were very easy and fact to pick, also a great favourite of the bears who at that time of the year were stocking up for their winter’s hibernation.  More than one person, while picking with someone, would ask how they were doing and find that they were talking to a bear.  I never heard of anyone having trouble with them though.  There was another type of blueberry growing in the same place, which while very difficult to pick was much more tasty.  It grew on a low bush with the berries right around the bottom on the ground.  You almost had to pick them one at a time and we would only pick enough for the odd pie, which was really a taste treat.  In this same area there was another berry growing which we called a cranberry.  It grew on a bush similar to the kinnikinnick plant, which you can find almost anywhere.  There weren’t many of these but again made excellent pies.  The last year I was picking berries we found that the muskeg areas were an excellent place for the Christmas cranberries.  I can still see them growing on the big tufts of moss as if somebody had spilled them there.

I finished school the year I was fifteen as grade eight was as far as you could go in a small country school.  Have always been able to boast that I was second in my class that year.  Evelyn Neff, the only other person in my class, always did better than me.

Ray Hadley was having the timber on his homestead cut that summer so got a job driving a team of horses skidding logs to the mill.  I was using a set of tongs for the larger logs and one day got my leg caught in them, taking a nice chunk out of it.  After about two weeks I went back to work in the mill as tail sawyer.  As Dad was the sawyer it was a good way to learn.  During the next few years it seemed to be the job I was always doing, until I started as a sawyer in ’39 and ’40.

Dad took a job that winter cutting logs at a mill about a mile and a half from home.  As he and Norman didn’t get along too well together, and as Elwin never became very good in the woods, I was the one chosen for the other end of the crosscut saw.  This was too far to walk twice a day so it was decided that we would sleep in the camp bunkhouse, Monday to Saturday and eat our meals at the cookhouse.  We were getting ten cents a log and we paid one dollar each per day for staying in camp.  Our average cut was about seventy-five logs each day.  Some Saturdays Norman and Elwin would come over to do some bucking which helped.

I have often thought that the way my life developed probably started that winter.  Evelyn and I often joke about the way TV announcers will talk about the competitive nature of some ball player or golfer.  Are you born with this or do you develop it?  If you are born with it, then I guess I was naturally competitive most of my life.

If you aren’t born with it, I started to learn it on the other end of that crosscut saw.  You always have to pull as hard as your partner because you can’t shove the darned things, and you have to keep up or ahead.  Then I would try to limb the trees as fast as Dad or faster.  Being quite small at about eighty-five pounds and Dad twice as big, I’m sure he did a lot of extra work, but being shoved into a grown-up environment like that must change you.

I have had people tell me that I show an unemotional type of nature.  That is also something that can be developed from a lifestyle.  I can remember days that winter that I was so cold that I would be crying.  But didn’t dare let Dad see me because I knew that he would probably laugh at me.  You can learn to do a lot of crying without showing it.

This was my first experience in camp life, which in those days was quite primitive.  The bunkhouse was usually a shanty type shack wide enough for the bunks on one side and enough room on the other side for tables, benches and a heater in the middle.  Bunk areas were just two platforms, upper and lower with sleep areas divided with boards.  We did have straw to spread the blankets on.  Food was usually good but nothing fancy.

At night at the bunkhouse there was always a poker game going, which Dad always joined.  He was better than the average player, but stakes were usually small so you couldn’t win or lose too much.

There were of course the joke tellers and I was all ears for this.  The jokes didn’t seem to be as gross as the ones you hear today.  Travelling salesman jokes were making the rounds about that time and one I have always remembered is where the salesman stopped at a farm one night asking for a place to sleep.  The farmer told him that he could sleep with Billy or bed down in the barn.  He said that he would sleep in the barn and next morning on arising met this beautiful young lady in the barnyard.  He said good morning and asked who she was.  She said they call me Billy, who are you?  He replied ‘I’m the darned fool who slept in the barn last night!’

They say that some people are blessed with a sixth sense that tells them of danger.  I think that Dad must have been like that.  One day the tree we were felling hit an old snag, breaking it into about three pieces.  One piece was falling straight for Dad who hadn’t seen it happen.  I tried to yell but couldn’t make a sound.  Just as that piece of tree was about to hit, he jumped to the side and it landed right where he had been standing.  I have often thought that if I had yelled he would have been killed.

A few years later, a similar thing happened with me, so maybe it runs in the family.  I was standing in front of my tank, just past Bergen Op Zoom in Holland, taking to a new gun recruit who had just joined our crew.  The next thing I knew I was flat on my stomach just under the front of the tank as two shells landed about twenty feet in front.  Neither of us had heard them coming and fortunately for him the ground was very soft, which made them explode upward, saving his life.

We finished cutting logs just after Christmas, so I got a job in a planer mill that was only a mile from home.  As workdays at that time were ten hours each day, I had to leave home in the dark and come home in the dark.  I was making ten cents an hour and dinner at the cookhouse.

March and April of that year I worked on a small dairy farm about five miles from home.  The two Miller men were bachelors about my parents’ age and lived with their mother.  They had about a dozen cows, which we had to milk twice a day.  Any time that I wasn’t required around the barn was spent cutting their next winter’s wood.  For this I was paid ten dollars per month plus room and board.  I was very glad when spring came and they didn’t need me any more.

Spent some time at home helping the rest of the family clear about ten acres on the homestead and then away to work for Art McLaughlin, about fifteen miles south of the valley, driving his team of horses, hauling stumps and roots from fields he was plowing for the first time (called ‘breaking’).

Art had an awful time with stomach ulcers and one day he was feeling so sick he decided to let me drive the tractor.  Riding around with me for a few rounds he showed me all the proper things to do.  One thing of great importance he said was to keep a close eye on the oil gauge.  You can imagine the thrill of a young sixteen year old driving a big tractor plowing new land.  Everything was going well, but after about an hour I could feel a vibration on the floor where I was standing.  I stopped and mentioned it to Art, and of course I had forgotten all about the oil gauge and burnt out two connecting rods.

There were no garages or mechanical shops to do repairs in most areas in those days.  Repairs would be done right where you happened to be.  Connecting rods required draining the oil, removing the rods and pistons, heating up some bobbit to rebuild the burnt out material and putting it back together again.  It took us about a day to do this and you can bet I kept a close eye on the gauge from then on.

I worked for him about three months at fifteen dollars per month and gave it all back to have him come and break the ten acres we had cleared on the homestead that spring.

When we were finished south of the valley and ready to move things back he asked me to pick up about a thousand BM of lumber he had bought and with the horses and wagon haul it home.

About three miles from home there was quite a deep coulee to cross with a narrow bridge at the bottom.  As it is very difficult for a team of horses to hold back on a load I figured we would be at full gallop by the time we reached the bridge.

Being an avid western story reader at this time and having gone through two or three Zane Grey books on how the old pioneers took big loads down steep hills, I decided to put a brake on the wagon.  Took some extra rope I had, tied one end to the load and the other end to a spoke on the back wheel.  The first foot we moved broke that spoke out of the wheel as slick as a whistle.  I had tied it to a spoke close to the hub of the wheel.  My next try with the rope tied to the rim worked perfectly, and the horses had to pull that load all the way to the bridge.  Nobody ever noticed or said anything about that missing spoke, and I sure never told anyone.

One of the horses on this team was a mare called Jean, and I was warned when I started driving them to keep a close eye on Jean because she had a bad habit of biting.  One morning as I was feeding them I noticed out of the corner of my eye, Jean was just about to take a chunk out of my arm.  I managed to bring my other arm around quickly giving her a good solid whack under her chin.  She never tried to bite me again.

Another problem I hadn’t been told about was that nobody had been able to ride Jean.  One Saturday after work, I asked Art if I could have Jean to ride the two and a half miles home.  I put on her bridle, led her out of the barn and jumped on.  I said giddup Jean, but she didn’t move.  I spoke again and touched her in the ribs with my heels and she just exploded.  Fortunately I landed on my feet so decided to try again.  Same procedure except I landed on my head this time so put her back in the barn and walked home.

One day a young RCMP was in the village and being an experienced horseman, asked if he could try and ride Jean.  He got on and was riding around with no trouble.  Suddenly he touched her in the ribs with his heels and a few seconds later was laying on his back in the yard.  I never heard of anyone ever being able to ride Jean.

That winter Dad took another contract for cutting logs about five miles from the homestead.  As this looked like a full winter’s work, we built our fifth and last tar paper shack and moved there about November.  Just before Christmas the sawmill decided to run two shifts, and needing an extra sawyer hired Dad.  As this was the best paying job in those days Dad figured it was better than cutting logs and Norman and I were able to get other work around the mill.

The power for this mill was an old 150 Case steam engine and one of the engineers was a young fellow about twenty-two.  He took a liking to me and decided that it would be a good idea to teach me to be an engineer.  In the evenings I would read the books he had with him on engineering and any time I had the chance would go to the mill and work with him firing the boilers, oiling, etc.  Oh yes, I had to learn how to chew tobacco also because he said all good engineers did that.

About the end of February it was decided that I knew enough to write for my exam, so we applied for an application.  I had just turned seventeen that month and was duly informed that I could try when I was eighteen.  Oh well, I really didn’t like chewing tobacco so dropped the idea of being an engineer and started smoking cigarettes.

The family moved back to the homestead in April but I stayed at the camp for a couple of months working at odd jobs.  One night we saw a big black bear around the cookhouse and decided it would be fun to catch it.  Built a nice big trap the next day from some two-inch planks, ran a line from the sliding trap door into the bunkhouse where it was fastened to some tin cans.  Sure enough, about midnight we were rudely awakened by the tins so got dressed and headed out to the trap.  I think that bear had been in there no more than fifteen minutes and had almost chewed his way through those planks.  We sawed a hole in the top so that we could get a rope on him.  Managed to get it around his neck but he got all tangled up and hung himself.  I often thought how lucky we were that happened, because if we had managed to get him out there sure would have been some casualties around there.

Bought my first car that spring, an old Model T Ford truck someone had at the camp that cost me fifteen dollars.  Drove it up to the valley by a back road one day as I had no license on it.  On the way back to camp I got stuck in a big mud hole so sold it right there for the same price.  Never owned another car until 1949, when I was given an old Model A Ford that our construction company, Mitchell Contractors, had when they went out of business.

Dad decided that he would cut our parcel of timber that year so went back home about June to start the cutting of logs.  As this was our own timber he decided that we should all help so Norman and Elwin were put to work helping with the bucking up of the trees we fell.

One day a tree we were falling hit an old snag, which started falling towards Norman and Elwin.  Norman jumped out of the way but Elwin just started running.  Well, he made it but the top of that snag almost got the back of his shirt.  Dad was so scared and angry that he sent him home and wouldn’t let him into the bush again.  When we got the mill in to saw the logs, he let Elwin pack the slabs, which was the safest job on the mill.

About the middle of August, Norman and a couple of other fellows we knew decided they would like to go to southern Alberta for harvesting.  Norman was afraid to tell Dad that he wanted to quit as were just in the middle of sawing our lumber, so they decided to take me with them so I could tell Dad.  In looking back on that incident, I am amazed that Dad took it as well as he did.  His favourite son walking out on him, as well as meaning he would have to hire a tail sawyer and trim sawyer to replace us as well as pay them full wages.

There was no doubt he was angry, because he told us to get out right there and never come back again.  I never went home for about a year, and I don’t think Norman ever did to stay until we all got together in B.C. in 1939.

We headed for the harvest fields the next day after quitting, in an old Model T Ford truck that belonged to one of the fellows.  I can remember our trip between Edmonton and Calgary, 200 miles that we did mostly at night.  We had no tail light on the truck so someone had to take turns holding a flashlight out the back.

Went as far as Parkland and Cayely, which was about forty miles south of Calgary.  We were living in the jungle (a term for where the men who rode the freight trains stayed) while we scouted around for a job stoking.  I got quite sick with a cold and fever, and during this time they picked up a contract to stook the wheat on a large farm east of High River.  They picked me up and we moved to the job.  After about three days I was able to go to work and the job lasted for about two weeks.

Back to the jungle again to look for a threshing crew to get on with.  Wages that fall were $2.00 a day for stoking and $3.00 for threshing.  The two older boys with the truck got on a crew right away as they were both a bit older and bigger than us.

Some farmers would come to the jungles if they needed help.  One afternoon one came needing two men to start the next morning.  Norman and I jumped right up and said we were available.  He took Norman but just gave me one look and said, “Hell, you couldn’t even pitch feathers.”  This farmer was about the toughest looking man I have ever seen.  Big and dirty looking in fact for the thirty days we worked for him.  I don’t think he ever washed or shaved and ate all his food with his fingers.  Anyway I came right back at him and said just give me a chance and I’ll show you.  I guess it must have surprised him, a seventeen-year-old kid weighing about 95 pounds soaking wet talking back to him like that, and men were not hard to find in those days.

Took us out to his threshing set up, gave us each our team of horses and bundle wagon to start the next morning.  As most farmers couldn’t afford to buy a threshing machine, the ones that travelled around doing the work were quite mobile.  Cookhouse and bunkhouse on wheels as it wasn’t unusual to be moving each day to a different farm.  This was a good-sized outfit using seven bundle wagons, two field pitchers who worked in the field all day topping up the next loads to go into the machine.  Two spike pitchers who helped pitch bundles into the machine so that there were always three or four men feeding it.

I had to learn about pitching bundles and loading but I was fortunate in that I knew how to handle a team of horses.  The man ahead of me got his wagon stuck near the machine with his first load.  That old farmer came screaming out to where he was stuck and chased him off the place with a pitchfork.  I was sure scared, but managed to get my load around him and up to the machine as if I had been doing it all my life.

Got along fine at this job and learned the meaning of an old saying, “When you go to harvesting you trade your blankets in for a lantern.”  Workday was from 7:00 am to 12:00 pm and 1:00 pm to 6:00 pm, which meant we started in the dark and finished in the dark.  If you drove a bundle wagon you could add almost two more hours to that taking care of your team of horses.  That fall was an exceptionally good one and we threshed thirty days without a stop.

The second week the old farmer came and told me that one of the older men who was spike pitching would like to have my team and that I could be a spike pitcher.  I liked that job because you were always pitching the bundles down or on a level, and about two more hours of sleep each night.

They really feed you good on these outfits, with three excellent meals and a big lunch halfway through the morning and afternoon.  I gained fifteen pounds that fall.

The machine was not allowed to stop when the lunches came out, and the spike pitchers just had to work a bit harder while the teamsters ate.  It sometimes took quite awhile for me to have my lunch, but I noticed that the older spike pitcher would just stay and finish his lunch before going back to work.  One afternoon I decided to do the same thing and was just starting on my second sandwich when this old farmer saw me.  He came right over and told me to get up on my load.  I said that I would as soon as I was finished.  Never did figure out why he hired me and at this time didn’t fire me.  He just turned around and walked away.  Anyway the next morning I found that my spike-pitching job was gone.  He put me out in the fields doing field pitching.  As you only get to load the top bits of each load it is very hard work.  Had about then days of this and my hands were so blistered I could hardly stand to wash them.

As Norman and I had become separated from the other two with the truck we had to find our own way home.  We had heard that the large freight trucks hauling between Calgary and Edmonton was the best way to travel.  We went to a warehouse where they were loading and asked a driver about this.  He said no, they were not allowed to carry riders but if we were standing at a certain place on the outside of town that evening about dark, for $2.00 each, he would take us to Edmonton.  From there to the Valley was no trouble, as we knew truckers hauling on that route.

Went to work in the camps again and except for two months shooting squirrels for their hides, stayed around the camps most of the next summer.  Dad got back with the family that summer for a while.  Now that they had some lumber, Dad decided to build a proper house.  It was about the same size as the log house but had a proper-pitched roof with shingles and more windows and doors.  As soon as they could move into it, they burned the cabin down.

In the fall of 1938 I went harvesting once more with Andrew Johnston, a little older than me but my best friend for the next three years.  Andy, or ‘Swede’ as he was called, was about six feet three inches high, wore a size twelve shoe, chewed snuff continually and never spat.  Travelling with him on the harvest fields was ideal because as well as owning his own car, anybody would hire him and take me too.

We had a good harvest again that year, working for a large family between Stavely and Claresholm.  Wages were still the same as the previous year so with fifteen days stoking and twenty threshing, made about the same amount of money.

There is never anything of much interest happening during harvest.  At ten to twelve hours each day, seven days a week, there is little time for anything else.  I can remember starting to smoke a pipe that fall.  Bought one of those big turned down stem type.  It held about a quarter pound of tobacco with each filling.  As I was driving bundle wagon I could light up while coming from the field to the machine.

Back to the camps again after harvest.  I sometimes wonder what we would have done in the hungry thirties without the many small mills and camps.  At that time there seemed to be patches of timber everywhere.  Today it is all gone and the areas cleared for farming.

Dad and Mom decided to give up homesteading that summer, so had bought a small lot in the village close to the school where they built a small house.  As Gerald was sick most of the time and Olive was only eight it made more sense to get them to school.

Spent that winter back in the Reno district on a small mill, $30.00 a month and board.  The morning Swede and I took off from the Valley in his car was in November.  The roads were covered with snow, but it had rained a bit in the night making them very slippery.  At one place on the road there was one of these coulees with quite steep hills on each side and a narrow bridge at the bottom.  Swede was a good driver but about halfway down our side the car started sliding.  We made three complete spins ending up on the bridge heading the right way.  If we had missed the bridge we would probably have been killed or very badly hurt.  As I had a small camera at that time there are two or three pictures in our album of ‘Hystads’ mill and bunkhouse that winter.

We missed one day’s work that winter because it got so cold.  Our thermometer at the camp registered 60 degrees below zero.  We don’t know if that was a true reading but the radio reported it as 50 degrees below zero in Edmonton seventy miles east of where we were.  I can remember that it hurt you to breathe if you went outside.  Forty degrees below zero was not unusual and didn’t stop us from working.

After spring breakup we headed back to the Valley.  It was a very dry spring with a lot of forest fires.  Spent some time fighting fires close to the Valley and then in May went with a group about forty miles southwest into what was called the Brazeau area just below Rocky Mountain House to fight a large fire.  As there were no roads into this area we had to go by packhorses.  It took almost three weeks to clean this one up and we got back to the Valley about the first of June.

Gerald had been very sick that spring with his asthma and a bout of pneumonia.  The doctor said we should really try a different climate for him.  An older couple that had a farm close to the Valley, and who us boys had helped a few times digging potatoes, told us we should by B.C.  They had made a couple of trips west and said the only to go was Vancouver Island.  We made a small trailer to pull behind our old ’27 Model T Ford, loaded it up with our blankets, dishes and Mom’s old sewing machine which she had brought from Nova Scotia and headed west about the middle of June.

That was quite a load for that poor old car.  Mom and Dad, six children and pulling a trailer.  The second day we burned out a connecting rod between Clareholm and McLeod.  Pulled off to the side of the road and about three hours later were on our way again.  Stopped at Lundbreck Falls that night as it was starting to rain.  It never stopped raining for three days so we stayed there, but found that just a few miles west past Frank it hadn’t been raining at all.

Dad’s brother Lawrence was living at Spirit Lake, Idaho, so we stopped and visited with him for about a week.  He had a nice little place right on the lakeshore where he raised a few mink for a living.  The first day we were there we noticed an odd thumping noise coming from his well by the house.  He told us by luck he had hit one of the few places in the world where a Ram pump would work in a well.  They have been used in small water supply systems, where they are set up by a small stream or dam.  By having water that can run through them an action is set up by valves, etc. to pump water to a higher elevation.  As long as there is running water the pump keeps working, making the thumping noise we heard.

Our next stop was a small motel in a Bing cherry orchard in Wenatchee, Washington.  The cherry-picking season was pretty well finished so Dad asked the owner if we could pick some.  He told us to just help ourselves as long as we were careful with the trees.  You can just imagine six children who had never seen a cherry tree or tasted a Bing cherry, given an opportunity like that.  The amazing thing was that none of us got sick so next morning we took off on the last lap for B.C.

Got to Vancouver in time to catch the last ferry for the Island, landing at Nanaimo about eight that evening.  We decided to drive south towards Victoria, and as it was just starting to get dark when we got as far as Saltair we found a cabin on the beach belonging to a Mrs. Thicke.  Most of the family stayed in Saltair until 1942 when they moved to Victoria.

Work was just as hard to find in B.C. as it was in Alberta.  Norman and I drove around to all the big mills and lumber camps that we could find.  Alberni, Sproat Lake, Great Central Lake, Youbou, Chemainus, Straits Lumber at Nanoose, but always got the same answer.

They were building an addition to the hospital in Chemainus at this time so Dad, Norman and I used to go each morning and sit around for a few hours, hoping they would need someone.  Dad finally got hired for about a two-week stretch but Norman and I weren’t so lucky.

Salmon fishing was pretty good at this time so we decided that we should pool what money we had left and start trolling for salmon.  We had met an old fisherman from Ladysmith who offered to help us find a boat and to rig it up properly for trolling.  We found the ‘Lucky Star’ in a little harbour out in Esquimalt at the foot of Head Street.  It was thirty-two feet long, a double ender, which Dad immediately liked, being an old Nova Scotian, and powered by an old Pontiac car engine.  The price of $200.00 was just right for us so we took off for Ladysmith.

There had been a real bad wind in the night and a heavy sea was still running off the breakwater at the mouth of the harbour.  To make matters worse, one of the big ferries was just coming in as we were going out.  The two bow waves we saw coming must have been about eight feet high and I could see the sudden end to our fishing.  Well, the book took it very well even though we got soaking wet.  Our problem was that we hit the bottom of the trough with such a band that our motor stopped.  We were now sideways to the heavy waves and drifting towards the rocks.  Luckily we found that shock of hitting that wave had knocked the ignition wire out of the coil.  Got the engine going again but the water pump wasn’t working so I had to get down almost in the bilge and suck on a pipe to get it started again.  Down on my knees in a badly rocking boat, and a mouth full of seawater didn’t do much for my health.  The most of the day is a bit of a haze, although it was a nice smooth trip after we got past Oak Bay.  Made it to our cabin at Saltair about ten that evening.

Went out in the bush the next day and found two nice cedars for the boat fishing poles.  By the time we had the boat rigged and fished a bit from Porlier Pass to Gabriola Island it was getting into August.  Salmon prices that year were three and a half cents a pound ‘round’ and five and a half cents ‘dressed’.  I was easy to see that this wasn’t going to be any get rich quick scheme, so Norman and I decided that we should head for the harvest fields once more and leave the fishing to Dad and the rest of the family.  Just had enough money left for the ferry to Vancouver, Patullo Bridge toll, and hopefully enough for gas, so Mom put up enough food for about three days and we took off.

The roads in those days were all just gravel but it was a nice time of the year to travel.  There was no Hope-Princeton highway so you went up the Fraser Canyon to Spences Bridge, came down through Merritt to Princeton.  Down through Keremeos to Osoyoos along the border to Grand Forks, make a large circle up to Rossland.  Here we had our first flat tire and while we were fixing it a fellow came along and asked where we were going.  He told us a Ford car like ours had used up all their brakes on the long steep hill to Trail from Rossland and then crashed.  We made it all right but my ears were so plugged for about two hours I could hardly hear.

We found out in Trail that we would have to take a paddlewheel ferry across Kootenay Lake, and as we hadn’t known about that, needed some more money.  We had a good pair of tire chains that we managed to sell for enough money to pay the ferry and another tank of gas.

Coming out of the Crows Nest Pass we noticed that we were running out of gas again and weren’t going to get to Stavely without selling something else.  Stopped at a gas station in Pincher Creek and told the people our problem.  Norman had a nice topcoat that we offered to leave with them for enough gas to get to Stavely and we would come back later and get it, and pay for the gas.

When we got to Jorgenson’s place at Stavely that afternoon we were amazed to find my old partner Andrew (Swede) Johnston there.  He had arrived the day before and we had not been in touch with each other since early spring when we left the lumber camp.  Mr. Jorgenson had hired another man to work with Swede, but when he saw me he let the fellow go.

We filled the car up with farm gas and Norman took off to look for a job, finding one the next day.

It has always been easy to remember the day we drove back to Pincher Creek to pick up Norman’s coat.  On the way back we stopped at McLeod for a bite of lunch and we heard on the radio that we were at war.  We sat around that table for about an hour discussing what we were going to do so that we wouldn’t have to go.

Within the next ten days all the jungles were empty, jobs were easy to get and wages went up $1.00 per day.  Had a good run in the Stavely-Clareholm area and then moved up to Carstairs, north of Calgary about the first of October where the harvest was a bit later.

Worked for another fifteen days on a threshing rig until the morning of the 20^th.  It was snowing and blowing that morning so we collected our wages and decided to head for Edmonton.  By the time we got to the highway it was blowing much harder and getting very cold.  We put a blanket over the radiator so it wouldn’t freeze but about Ten miles from Olds the wind and the snow were blowing so hard along the road we froze the motor up anyway.  We managed to get to a farmhouse about a quarter of a mile from where we had stopped.  They had a phone so we phoned for someone to pull us in to Olds.  By now this was a real bad prairie blizzard and with tow trucks already getting busy, we never got one until about suppertime.  Sat around in the garage all night and took off again at daylight.

It was still snowing but the wind had gone down.  Was pretty slow travelling so didn’t get to Edmonton until about suppertime, which was about thirty-four hours without sleep.  Norman and I decided that we would see a show before we went to bed but Swede wouldn’t come.  When we came to our room about nine we had to get the manager to let us in because we couldn’t wake Swede.  He was sure tired.

Worked for a month for the Hystads Mill north of the Valley and then we moved over into the Breton area on the east side of the North Saskatchewan River.  This was only about ten miles from the Valley but as there was no way to cross the river at that time as ice wasn’t solid enough, we had to go around by Edmonton.  This made a trip of about 160 miles to get 10 miles.

About Christmas time they decided that they should keep the mill going twenty-four hours a day so that the engine didn’t get cold and slab fires would be kept burning.  Swede was learning to be a sawyer but got a very bad case of the measles just at that time.  They gave me a few days’ practice and then put me on the night shift.  I was now a sawyer getting $60.00 a month instead of $30.00.  Worked the night shift through January, February and part of March.  They then sent my crew and me back to the Valley to do some custom sawing around the district.  Worked at this until about the 10^th of May when I decided that I really didn’t like being in charge of a crew of men, so quit and headed back to B.C.

There was still some snow on the ground when I left the Valley, and when I saw all the flowers in bloom on the Island, I have never wanted to go back to Alberta again.

Dad was working in a sawmill at Leechtown for Cameron Brothers, so I decided to get the old Lucky Star ready for fishing.  Ran it into the little creek cove at Saltair on a high tide and put it on the beach.  Spent about a month painting, caulking and getting it all ready.

Norman came back to the coast about the first of June, so we decided to go try fishing again.  Prices had gone up to five and a half and seven and a half cents a pound but around the middle of June the fishermen went on strike for higher prices.  We were fishing in the area between Porlier Pass and Gabriola Pass so tied up at a fish wharf at Gabriola Island in a beautiful little bay just past the pass on the north side.

Never knew that this bay had a name and there was no evidence of anyone living around it.  I was quite surprised when about fifty-three years later Evelyn and I had a motel room for a night on Gabriola Island where Vicki and Mitch were starting their house.  This motel was at Silva Bay but what a difference time had made.  The shoreline was covered with wharves and buildings, and the bay was almost filled with boats.  It seemed to be a much nicer place in 1940.

There were quite a few Japanese fishing along the coast at that time, mostly for cod, and they would have nothing to do with the strike.  It lasted about two weeks and salmon prices went up to seven and a half and nine and a half cents a pound, which was quite an increase from 1939 prices.

There was a lot of talk at that time among the fishermen about what Japanese were doing or were going to do to us.  We were shipping them our scrap metal to make arms, the fishermen were mapping our coastline for future take over, and most of the money they made went right back home.  It is easy to see why they were treated badly when they attacked in December 1941.

Norman and I were never very good fishermen and only managed to keep gas in the boat and get enough to eat.  One day while trolling along by Valdes Island we started catching dogfish.  We didn’t know what they were and had about a dozen in our fish tank when we got back to the fish wharf at Porlier Pass.  You can imagine the way we were laughed at when we tried to sell them to the fish buyer.

There was an elderly lady living right beside the fish wharf who wanted her house painted.  Norman told her that we were experienced painters so she gave us the job.  The only painting either one of us had done was on the boat so knew almost nothing about it.  She had gallons of exterior marine white enamel and when we were finished it looked pretty good.  We left fishing shortly after that so never did know whether it fell off or not.

It was hot and dry that summer and one time when we happened to be home we got nabbed for fire fighting.  Took a bunch of us on a bus as far as Lake Cowichan and then we got on ‘speeders’ and went by rail about ten or fifteen miles past Mesachie Lake on the east side of Cowichan Lake.  Spent about two weeks fighting that fire and when we got back to Saltair, Dad said he would like to see if there was any work at Nanoose so we took the boat and headed up there the next day.

They hired Dad right then but there was nothing for Norman and I.  We stayed in Nanoose Harbour that night and on the way back to Nanaimo the next day had some heavy seas to contend with because of a strong east wind that had come up.  Made Nanaimo by lunchtime so decided to tie up and have something to eat uptown.  When we got back to the boat we found it about a quarter full of water.  The rough seas that morning had worked a big chunk of caulking loose.  Luckily we found it right away and plugged the leak.  When we got back to Saltair we ran it into the cove again and sold it.

A logging outfit called Robinsons were logging on Mt. Brenton that summer and I got hired on one day as a chokerman.  The only reason I got the job was the day before one of the chokermen got caught in the ‘bite’ and had his head taken off.  This was considered to be a very dangerous ‘show’ as we were sky lining logs from a ‘cold deck’ up on the side of the mountain to a loading site below.  I had always been quick on my feet and except for almost getting killed one day when the ‘whistle punk’ blew a go ahead signal while we were still not clear of the load, made out all right.

The ‘hooker’ who was probably in his fifties was a very nice person and didn’t seem to mind showing me all the things I needed to know.  One day we broke our five-eight inch haul back line and as a good hooker had to be able to splice cables, said that he would show me how it was done.  Told me to run down to the landing and get the ‘wire axe’ for him.  Right away I figured that I was being picked for the old joke where the new man was asked to get a ‘left hand monkey wrench’.  I went all the way to the landing, came back and told him I couldn’t find it anywhere.  He gave me a funny look but instead of asking me again, sent the other chokerman.  Back he came with an old broken-handled double bitted axe that you stick in a stump, and in conjunction with a small sledgehammer, cut the cable where you want.  It took him about an hour to have that cable as good as new.

Now that I knew all about setting chokers and wire axes, headed up to Leechtown and got a job in the bush for Cameron Brothers.

One day we had a near disaster when our crew had been sent out to rig up a new tree on a small show about two miles from camp.  As the donkey engine yarder was not there yet, it was decided to get the tree ready using a bulldozer with a cable winch at the back.  Everything was going fine and the fourth and last guy line had been pulled up and fastened to the top of the tree.  The rigger hooked the line to his belt and gave the signal to lower him to the ground.  The Cat operator put the winch in reverse to lower him, but somehow the pass line got pinched on the drum and instead of lowering him it started taking him up.  We all started yelling at the operator but he couldn’t seem to grasp what was going on.  In a few seconds the rigger had been raised up to the block at the top to the tree and he wrapped his arms around the tree because now the tree was being pulled over.  At about eight or ten feet off perpendicular the pass line broke, leaving the rigger right in the air about sixty feet from the ground.  We all watched in horror as he came tumbling to earth and certain death.  Lady Luck was with him that day because about twenty feet into his fall he landed on one of the slack guy lines leading out to their anchor stumps where they hadn’t yet been fastened.  He managed to slow his fall enough so that when he wasn’t able to hold onto it any longer he was only about fifteen or twenty feet from the ground and far enough away from the tree that he landed in a pile of brush.  His only injuries were some cable burns from sliding down the guy line.  Nobody in that crew felt like working any more that day so we all walked back to camp.

Spent most of the winter setting chokers and about one month whistle punking, which is the lowest paying job in the bush.  Didn’t like it much because you just stand around all day sending the ‘hookers’ signals to the yarding machine.

In February I became 21 years old and decided to join the army.  Howard had joined up a few months earlier so decided to go into the same outfit, the 17^th Search Lights, which was a part of the Coast defense.

Training camp was at Fort Rodd Hill, near Victoria, where they had two of the searchlights.  I enjoyed the early training and had an excellent old Sergeant Major working with us.  Became proficient enough to be picked as one for the special firing party for a big Regimental funeral in May.  Gun carriage, slow march, firing the final shots at the gravesite, etc., quite an affair.  I was surprised years later while having a game of golf at Gorge Vale Golf Course to find the cemetery right on the course between the twelfth and seventeenth fairways.

During that summer I took my leaves with Howard and we would usually go up to Saltair.  Dad was working as a carpenter on the army camp in Nanaimo.  He fell off some staging that fall and broke a leg so was off work for quite awhile.  Elwin had joined the army earlier and was up in Scotland with the Forestry.  Olive and Gerald were attending school in Ladysmith and Norman had headed back to Drayton Valley.

Travelling with Howard didn’t last very long, as we didn’t have much in common.  He loved to hitchhike and play the slot machines, which were legal at that time in Esquimalt and Victoria, and didn’t drink.  I had started going to beer parlours with Norman when he became twenty-one.  It was kind of amusing because they would come and ask him if he was old enough and never bothered me at all.

Met a fellow at Rodd Hill who I palled around with until the end of the war.  Willard London, about a year older than me, had come to the coast a few years earlier.  Rode the freight trains all the way from his home in New Brunswick, working wherever he could get a job.  We both enjoyed going to the beer parlours, but were not very heavy drinkers.  Spent a lot of our time playing snooker, bowling five pins and playing poker wherever we could find a game going.  We were also a pretty hard pair to beat at a game of bridge.

There were two or three private men’s’ clubs in Victoria who would admit members of the services.  There were no beer parlours in Victoria at that time so the private clubs were the only place to have a drink without going to Esquimalt.  They always had a poker game going on in the evening, run by the club with a dealer at each table, who would take the club cut from each pot.  London and I found that we could usually sit into a game, play recklessly for a short time, and then leave with a few dollars for something else.

We played a lot of bridge, even getting into a tournament in Ottawa while on a leave.  This was in the days before Goren and Culbertson’s bidding systems started.  London and I had worked out our own bidding system, which worked very well for us.  Two officers who we used to play quite often with while on maneuvers in England said that if they had their way officers would be picked according to how they could play a game of bridge.

Moved over to Duntz Head, again near Victoria, in the fall where they had two searchlights.  As this was a navy barracks and completely fenced all around, you had to have a pass to get in or out through the gate.  Some of us found at low tide that we could get around the fence close to the famous ‘End House’, which was a beer parlour right close to the fence.  After December 7^th and Pearl Harbour it became a little too dangerous to be sneaking around in the navy yard so trips to the End House pretty well stopped.

Mom and Dad had moved to Victoria that fall to an old place on Graham Street.  Dad got a job working in the shipyards, which he did until the end of the war.  Gerald also worked there for some time in 1944 and ’45.

It was a scary time on the coast that winter with blackouts in effect all over, and expecting the Japanese to attack us at any time.

Moved over to Albert Head in the early spring where I stayed until catching an overseas draft in the fall.  Pretty uneventful summer except for the night the Japanese shelled the lighthouse at Estevan Point.  We were out all night patrolling the beaches expecting them to land at any time.

Mom and Dad moved that spring to a house on Banks Street in the Oak Bay area.  Norman and Ada were married that summer.  I had managed to pick up a Trades pay rating for running the diesel electrics which supplied the power to our searchlights, also got my first promotion and was a Lance Bombardier which gave me a stripe to wear.  These two things gave a little extra pay, but had to give it up when London and I made the draft that fall.

A few days after we had been accepted to join the 19^th Field Regiment which was on its way east from up around Prince Rupert where they had been sent because of the Japanese threat, we were taken over to Gordon Head to have one of the new fangled ‘I.Q.’ tests, to see what they were getting I guess.

We never went to bed at all before the test, just sat in the canteen taking and drinking beer.  After finishing the test, London was told to wait for a few minutes, but the C.O. wanted to see me.  He asked me why I was only wearing one stripe with an I.Q. rating suitable for an officer.  When I told him that a grade 8 education was all that was available where we lived at the time of my schooling, he said that this would be the reason but if I were to see action, promotions could come very fast.  It did work that way, because from June 6^th, 1944, until January 1945, I went from a Lance Bombardier to a Master Sergeant.

They put us on the regular passenger train from Vancouver to Jasper where we joined the troop train coming down from Rupert.  Two days later we arrived at Petawawa, which was a large training area for many different groups in the Services.  Travelling across Canada on a troop train is an experience you never really forget.  I think they must have gathered up all the old cars that no self-respecting tourist would ride in and gave them to the army.  Petawawa was a pleasant change for us with lots of good canteens, Salvation Army, Red Cross and a picture show every night if you wanted to go.

In November, London and I took a two-week pass to visit his home in New Brunswick where we did a bit of hunting, and then I went on to Pugwash to visit with most of Dad’s family.  They were very good to me, as they had been to Elwin two years before, but I was glad to get away again.  It seemed to me that no one smoked or drank anything, which seemed pretty dull to me at that time.

Met up with London in St. John and then spent a couple of days in Montreal.  The weather was pretty bad at that time of year so was glad to get back to camp.

Had one more leave that winter which we took in Ottawa.  It was bitter cold weather so never saw a great deal other than the Parliament Buildings.

Camp life in the winter gets pretty dull, with endless lectures and gun drills, which we were able to do inside.  Had a bout of pneumonia, and was in the camp hospital for almost two weeks.  I enjoyed that because there was no K.P. or lectures, etc.

Took a course on truck driving just about the time they decided to change us over to tanks, which we trained on until June when we went to England.  The ‘S.P.’ or ‘self-propelled’ artillery was just coming in and as we were the first in Canada to get them it was very exciting.  Ours were 25 pounder guns mounted on a Ram tank but when we got to England, changed over to a Sherman tank with a .45 Howitzer gun.  It was learning all over again, because all figures and calibrations were in metric.  The idea at the time was if you lost any of your equipment in battle you could take some of the enemy’s stuff and use it.  The engines in these tanks were the Wright Whirlwind aeroplane motors and as such required a very high-octane gas.  Every time we were filling up the two fifty gallon tanks you had to stand there with fire extinguishers at the ready.  It was always a very comforting thought of what was going to happen if a shell hit one of those tanks of gas.

Took a short leave that spring and went back to Victoria for a few days.  I had started growing a small mustache because my friend London had always worn one.  When I got on the streetcar downtown Olive happened to be on the same car.  She didn’t recognize me until we both got off at Bank Street to walk home.

In late May, London and I got a pass to go to Toronto.  Spent about a week seeing the sights and then deiced to desert the army, join the Merchant Marines, get to England and join something over there.

Went downtown and bought some civilian clothes, which we put in our kit bags, and then took off hitch hiking to Ottawa.  It was easy to get rides when you were in uniform so made it to Ottawa in a day.

Put on our civilian clothes and checked the uniforms in a locker at the railway station.  Hitch hiking in civvies was much different and it took us two days to get to Montreal.

Made the rounds of all the hiring places for the Merchant Marines and got the same reply.  Glad to sign us on but they couldn’t promise when we might get a ship.  As we were running low on money at this time, decided we might as well go back to Petawawa.  Spent the last night watching a game of hockey at the Forum between the Canadiens and the Bruins.

The next day we decided it would be better to take a bus rather than try hitch hiking in the civvies again.  The big problem was that we didn’t have enough money left to get two tickets to Ottawa.  Had just enough to buy two tickets to Hawksbury which as half way.  When the bus stopped there, we just pretended we were asleep.  As soon as we hit the outskirts of Ottawa we got off and walked to the railway station to pick up our uniforms again.

We had only $1.00 left in our pockets by now so went downtown to a flophouse where you could sleep for 50 cents a night.  It was in a room with about six other men, which was all right.  A slight problem came up as soon as the lights were turned off because the place was crawling with bed bugs.  I was always the kind of person these critters loved ad they would crawl over somebody else to get to me.  They weren’t bothering London at all, but after an hour I told him I was leaving.  He decided to go with me and we slept on a bench in the park for the night.

Hitch hiked back to camp the next day getting there just in time for supper, and finding that our regiment was busy packing to leave for England.  As we had only been AWOL for two or three days our C.O. on hearing our story didn’t even give us any detention.

Put us on another of those beautiful troop train, or maybe it was the same one we came from the coast on, and took us down to Halifax, to get on the Queen Elizabeth.  I think there were about 5,000 troops on the ship, so that every available space was pretty well taken up for sleeping.

Our sailing was delayed a day because of a heavy fog that had settled in, and on the first night a group was called together from our outfit to act as Military Police.  They gave us all one of those billy clubs that policemen carried and told us that our main task was to stop the Regiment Charldiers, who were threatening to walk off the boat because it was so crowded.  After seeing us at all the exits, they decided not to make an issue of it, which sure made me happy.  That was a tough bunch of men.  In France shortly after D. Day we had to take them out of action for a while because they didn’t believe in taking prisoners.

The Queen Elizabeth made the trip from Halifax to Scotland in just 48 hours.  As soon as she cleared the harbour it was full speed, complete radio silence, and a change of course about every ten or twelve minutes.  It was figured that no submarine would have time to get her with a torpedo, and she made many trips like this.

As there was continuous movement of people with this many on board, it seemed like you were in a big hive of bees.  The kitchens were serving meals all the time and you could have as much as you liked.  The loud speakers never stopped.  “Keep to the right and keep moving” and be sure you have your life preservers on.

Our Battery, which is about one third of a Regiment, was taken to an old unused castle about twenty miles from London called ‘Titsey Place’.  It was a lovely old building with beautiful grounds, etc.  There was one old copper beech tree that we used to have lectures under, large enough to conceal about fifty people from the air.

Spent the rest of the summer there and move to Bournemouth just before Christmas.  A few of us took a course that fall called ‘Driver Op’ which was learning how to send and receive on radio, drive a tank and motorcycle, and deactivate the different types of mines in use at that time.  I refused to ride a motorcycle but had no problem with the rest of it.

We had several opportunities to go on leave so saw a bit of London.  Went up to Glasgow, Edinburgh and Inverness where Elwin was stationed with the Forestry Corp.  Really enjoyed the museum in Edinburgh because of their fine display of steam engines.

Our favourite place to take a leave was Manchester, up in The Midlands.  That area made the finest ales you could find in England and the famous ‘Long Bar’, which was said to be the longest bar in the world, was our favourite hangout.  Dancing every night with good live music.  I think the biggest attraction in Manchester was the many breweries they had there.  They seemed to be short of help at any time and we would work in one of them from 7:00 to 12:00 for ten shillings, and all the ale you could snitch.

Some of our maneuvers took us to Salisbury Plains and our camp was set up about one-half mile from Stonehenge.  There were quite a few rabbits along the hedgerows in that area so I told my crew we would get some to eat.  Picked up some signal wire from Signals, and set my snares along the hedges.  Those rabbits didn’t look any bigger than the old snowshoes I used to snare in Alberta, but any snares that caught one was broken, so no fresh rabbit for us to eat.

Bournemouth was a nice old seaside city and the climate is almost identical to what we have here on the Island.  One of our favourite spots in Bournemout was the ‘Bath House’ where for a nominal fee you could rent your own little bath cubicle to soak as long as you liked.  As most of the places we were billeted in didn’t have much in the way of hot water, this was a real treat once in awhile.

In the spring we were moved to an area closer to Southampton getting ready for D. Day.  Had two or three trips out to sea with landings on beaches up towards Wales.

It was about this time that my two immediate officers decided that I should be promoted, due no doubt to the excellent bridge games London and I used to have with them while on maneuvers.  They applied to have me made a Sergeant but were duly informed that you couldn’t give three promotions at one time, so once again I became a Lance Bombardier with one stripe.  I wore this proudly until D. Day +1, when I got nicked by a sniper from a church tower behind our gun.  Our Sergeant had his chin strap cut by a bullet from the same sniper.  The people of that little town weren’t too happy with us when we turned our tank around and blew about the feet off of their nice church steeple.  Anyway, while getting my hand dressed at the first aid station, I found that almost all the casualties were people wearing insignias of rank.  Until I left in January it was unusual to see anything worn showing your rank.

Spring was lovely in the south of England and a bunch of us got to spend about ten days at Camp Bisely range.  All we had to do was eat, sleep and wander around the camp.  I think most of our outfit was on some special maneuver, and they wanted us out of the way.

Nobody knew that we were going into action until we got on the L.S.T.s at Southampton.  It was carried out as just another exercise.  As soon as we pulled out of the harbour we were issued some French money and told where we were going.

There is no shortage of literature, pictures, etc. of D. Day so can’t add much to it.  Our job was to start firing at the beach as soon as we were in range, which was just at daylight.  We kept firing until we were unable to fire over the front of the L.S.T. or the gun ahead of us.  At that time we turned and headed out to sea again, letting the infantry move in to mop up the beach area.  Approximately two hours later we landed to take up positions for firing again.  There were still snipers in high buildings and scattered groups in trenches on the outskirts of the small town of St. Aubin Sur Mer where we put in.

One group of five Germans had a trench in some bushes just in front of our troop of four guns that was taking position.  They had a large machine gun and rifles and could have probably killed most of us if they had opened fire.

That evening just before dark we had moved about a half mile inland to take up our position for the night in a wheat field.  Our fighter planes had all been painted with three white stripes under the wings for quick identification.  I was lying on the ground behind our tank enjoying the last of the evening sun, and watching two fighter planes flying along our line at about a thousand feet.  All at once they turned into a dive towards our tanks with machine guns going.  I rolled under the back of our tank just as a row of bullets plowed up the ground where I had been.  We had some Bofors near us and they made two quick kills as soon as they realized that they had used white stripes to get so close to us.

Most servicemen, talking or writing about the war, will tell you which Division they were a part of.  1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd, 4^th, or 5^th Division to indicate what action or theatre of war they were in.  Our regiment could never do this because being a highly mobile artillery unit with our guns on tanks, they called us Army troops with the result that when a Division got a rest period they just moved us to some other action.  We fought with the British Army, the Americans and Poles at Falaise and the different Canadian Divisions.  From D. Day until the middle of January I had been out of action about three days.

The Falaise Gap was probably our most hectic time of all our actions.  From the start of the big push about the 7^th of August until around the 21^st there was so much change in battle lines from hour to hour that quite a few horror stores have been written about it.

We moved into our forward firing positions in the dark after midnight.  After about two hours of steady firing we were having a break when a large section of our lines were hit by our own bombers.  Later in the day our troop was strafed by American Typhoons and blew up one of our ammunition trucks.  That evening just at dark we were setting up for the night when an Infantry Captain came and asked if we could pull back a bit as we were ahead of where they were taking up their night positions.

The next day they decided to send us north of Falaise to help the Poles who were trying to cut off one of the German escape routes and running short of ammunition, etc.  To get to where they were we had to make a run through a narrow area still held by the Germans.  Luckily all we encountered was small arms fire.  When taking up our gun positions with the Poles, it was the only time in the war that our target was a full 360 degrees.

Because German planes were hardly ever seen due to our air superiority it was decided to use some of the Bofor anti aircraft guns as infantry support weapons.  This didn’t prove popular with our medical groups because of the amount of casualties they started getting with fine pieces of shrapnel in them from the Ack Ack shells.  Four of these Bofors had moved on to our gun position which was lucky for us because one morning a German half track with seven officers came charging right through the middle of us making a try for escape.  One of the Bofor gunners happened to be sitting on his gun and he sure made short work of that half-track.

In the next few months we did a lot of moving all the way from Falaise up to Nejmegen on the German border.  Except for a couple of weeks helping clear the Schelde so that ships could get into Antwerp our actions were spotty.

I was now a full Sergeant having received my three new promotions after Falaise.  This was really nothing to boast about because we had lost so many Sergeants in the push from Caen to Falaise that someone had to fill the gap.

The Germans used to say that if you would give every Canadian soldier a motorcycle they wouldn’t have to fight them.  This seemed to be true for our outfit because with the exception of the Sergeant of our own gun crew who got hit at Caen, most of the Sergeants were killed or seriously injured riding motorcycles.  They still hadn’t talked me into driving one and if there was some place to go with a motorcycle a dispatch rider had to take me.

One day we had a move of about sixty miles or more to go and early in the morning we threw a bogie track wheel.  They left us a dispatch rider to show us the route to go as soon as we could repair it.  Took about two hours and then away we went at full speed which was supposed to be about twenty mph.  Most of our drivers had fixed the governors on the motors so we sometimes got as high as thirty.  That’s pretty fast for over twenty tons of steel.

Anyway I had to drive this day because for some reason or other we were short of drivers.  As I wasn’t in a line of tanks, and travelling fast, I took off my driving goggles for a clearer vision.  We got into the place where the outfit was camped just before dark, and I don’t think I can remember having a worse night.  My eyes felt like someone was trying to burn them out with hot irons and the bed just kept rocking all night.

Being a Sergeant didn’t change my life much in action.  There was no special Sergeant’s Mess to go to and the extra pay didn’t mean much.  I did get to wear a nice little side arm and received a bottle of Scotch once a month.

During November-December and January we were more or less in a holding position, moving back and forth beside the River Maas.  One place we were at for about ten days was in the direct flight path of the Buzz Bombers the Germans were sending to places in Holland and England.  As we weren’t very far from where they were being launched they were still quite low as they passed overhead.  They had a very loud distinctive sounding motor and when it stopped you knew it was coming down.  Whenever we heard one coming, someone would jump to the top of the tank and act like a traffic cop waving it through.  Two close calls, with one behind us one day and another right over our tanks.  Fortunately it was going fast enough to land in front of us.

We were in position near ‘sHertogenbosch in January with the weather quite cold with ice and snow.  Once a week we would give our tanks a run to be sure they wre ready for action.  The day it was our turn I decided we would take a run back to a small village where we had spent Christmas.  We were moving along nicely at about ten or fifteen mph on the icy road where we met a truck coming towards us.  I touched my driver on the right shoulder to move over and give the truck lots of room to pass, but as soon as he touched the tiller bar we went out of control plowing head first into one of the large trees growing along the side of the road.  That twenty tons or more of tank never moved the tree but we sure stopped all of a sudden.  Outside of quite a few cuts and bruises and one broken finger, I was the only one to be seriously hurt with scalp wounds and a broken neck.

I was conscious but completely paralyzed so wouldn’t let them move me until they had medical help.  Sent a call out on our radio and while we were waiting, my crew knowing that I wouldn’t be seeing any more action, started dividing up some of the special things I had as #1 on the tank.  My nice little 9mm Browning revolver, special watch, all my cigarettes and about one-half bottle of Scotch.  The gun and watch probably came back to Canada as souvenirs.

Due to heavy German activity in the air at this time because of the big battle with the Americans in the Ardennes I wasn’t able to get air lifted to England for about five days.  They sewed up my head wounds but there was no way they could get me comfortable.  With no x-rays in the field they had no way of knowing what was wrong.

One hour after admission to hospital at Basingstoke they had x-rayed me, came and took my pillow away and brought around a patient wearing a cast from the top of his head to just below the hips, with holes cut out for him to see and eat.  He explained to me what it was like, having a large cast like this applied to so much of your body.  As they don’t cut the holes for your yeses and mouth until the next day and only two tubes through the cast for your nose it is a very scary procedure and some patients have to be heavily sedated, because they think they are going to die.  In his hand he was carrying about six tongue depressors all taped together making a stick about three feet in length.  He explained that you get very itchy under the cast and that is the only way you can scratch.  The Doctor told me that if you had enough willpower to keep from scratching it was far better.  It was very difficult at times, but I never scratched once during the three months I wore that cast.

Basingstoke was an excellent hospital where most spine, brain and burn patients were treated.

My refusal to ride a motorcycle made me feel good while I was there.  There were a lot of head injuries due to riding them, and almost every night there would be some patient getting out of his bed, starting up his bike and riding around the wards.

Howard came to see me in April on his way into action, as he had joined a draft fro the Canadian Scottish.  He saw a bit of action in Germany just before the end of the war on May 7^th.

By this time I was in Shaughnessy Hospital in Vancouver waiting to be discharged from the Army.  I was in the Army camp at Little Mountain so finally had a few days getting my meals at the Sergeants’ Mess.

Dad, Mom, Olive and Gerald had moved to Qualicum Beach by this time and Dad was again sawing lumber in a small mill for Art McLaughlin, and carpenter jobs whenever he had the chance.

Deciding that Qualicum Beach was a nice place to live, I put in a bid for a block of eight lots on Rye Road, north of Mill Road.  This was still Crown land at the time and could only be purchased in full blocks.  They accepted my offer of twenty-five dollars per lot so now I was a landowner.

The doctors told me that I would probably never be able to work again like I used to, also they suggested fusing my neck, because I was having troubles with headaches, etc.  On finding out that after fusing I would not be able to turn my head again without turning my body and no guarantee that it would help that much, decided to stay the way I was.  Went home, bought an axe and Swede saw and for the next two months worked at clearing some of my property.

By winter time I was almost as good as new again so worked for Herb Welch for a short while as a watchman at a railway crossing at Horne Lake and then sawed ties on Art McLaughlin’s small mill in the same area.  Elwin was working in a sawmill out on Jack Ass Mountain near Nanaimo and got me on with him for a couple of months that winter.  We boarded with an elderly widow just across the street from St. Andrews Church.

(Earle’s note:  Evelyn just asked me if I could give her a hand to knead a small batch of bread she was making as her polymyalgia and osteoporosis made it difficult to do.  At no time since my accident in 1945 have I ever done anything that wiped me out so quickly.  Approximately six minutes and I had to get horizontal because I could not hold my head up.  So much for the easy life of the housewife.)

Came back to Qualicum Beach in the early spring and was helping Dad on some small carpenter jobs, when we decided that we should go into the construction business.  We hired a lawyer and drew up all the necessary papers for a family partnership called ‘Mitchell Contractors’.  This should have been an ideal business, with Dad who was quite a proficient carpenter and five boys with varying degrees of expertise.  I was to be in charge, because it was felt that my brothers would take orders from me much better than from Dad.  Our first mistake and probably the main reason that we broke up in 1948 was in not hiring a knowledgeable accountant to keep our books.  Dad said he would look after that part of the business and while he may have been able to understand them, it was not done in the proper manner.

We built several houses in Qualicum during the next two years.  Our first contract was for a nice big house for the local butcher E. Sanders.  As we had very little money available and needed to buy enough material to start we went to the main merchant in the district, Craig Reid, and asked him if he would lend us $500.00.  He gave us the money but made us promise that we wouldn’t tell his wife or she would likely kill him.  We paid Craig back the $500.00 from our first payment on the house and presented him with a nice big bottle of Scotch.  I found out a few years later that our bid on that house was $1500.00 less than the main Construction Co. in the district.  As we were able to keep our labour cost low because of family we made out all right.

That fall we started doing a few ‘cost plus’ jobs for H.R. MacMillan on his two farms near Qualicum.  We never met H.R. at that time but did all of our business with his son-in-law John Leckie and farm manager W. Bill Horsland.  One of our first jobs was putting in a new floor and lining up the inside of an old log house with plywood, beside Little Hamilton Swamp, which at the time was part of the farm.  The swamp is now an 18-hole golf course and the log house is part of the Pro Shop.

We completely rebuilt an old house on the farm that next summer.  Built two other houses for the hired hands, and installed equipment and duct work to the large hay loft so that green or wet hay could be put in at any time without the danger of instantaneous combustion, which has been the reason that so many barns burn down.

That winter of 1947-48 it was decided by the farm to go into the business of raising turkeys.  This was going to be quite a large undertaking with up to 5000 birds, and from egg to table they would never touch the ground.  First was a large brooder house that was finished in time for the early spring chicks.  Then on the very extensive rearing pens, which at their lowest point were six feet above the ground.  None of this work required expert carpenters, but we did have to use quite a few people to get it ready in time.

H.R. used to come around once in awhile to see how his new project was progressing but I never met him until the job was finished.  When Dad sent the final bill for the job, he got a call asking Dad to meet him at the farm and to bring his account books.  I went with Dad this day and we happened to meet H.R. at the gate.  He said hello and then said “Mr. Mitchell, do you have your accounts with you?”  Dad said no, and before he could add anything else, H.R. said “Until you have your accounts with you, we have nothing to talk about.”  He then got in his car and drove away.  I don’t think Dad was a dishonest person, but perhaps ashamed to show a man like H.R. that his bookkeeping might be amateurish and hard to explain.  Anyway, this final payment was over $3000.00, and as the family was not getting along too well together, we decided to dissolve the partnership.

I went to work for H.R. almost immediately and in my many conversations and dealings found him to be a very honest but ruthless person, used to having his own way.  He was a firm believer that the best way to see how a job was being done was to talk to the person doing the job, and he was just as apt to talk to the lowest person as to the highest.

This was a busy year at the farms with four new houses for hired help and other construction jobs.  One day Bill Horsland decided to repair the foundations on one of the sheep sheds at #2 farm.  We were getting it ready for a concrete foundation when H.R. came along to see what we were doing.  When explaining to him that some form of foundation was required as the original cedar one had rotted out, and we were going to put a cement one in, he said “Earle, what do you think a poor farmer would do in a situation like this?”  I told him that the farmer would probably go to the bush and get some cedar logs for the job.  He immediately called a halt to our work and the next day we received a bunch of old telephone poles that were being replaced on the highway next to the farm.

The engineers for H.R. MacMillan’s plywood mill in Port Alberni were trying to devise new ways to make more markets for their products.  In the following three years or so they came up with many different schemes from Prefab houses to grain bins and even farm silos.  It was at #1 farm they decided to build the first silo, so sent over all the materials and plans for us to do the job.

Everything was going fine, with foundation in, all the wooden hoops made up ready for us to start putting the plywood on.  With great difficulty we managed to nail on two sheets when H.R. came along to see how it was going.  I told him there was no way we were going to be able to apply this plywood because it was just straightening out the hoops.  After a few unkind words about his engineers he asked me what I would suggest as this silo was needed for silage ready to cut.  I told him that if he could get us 3/8 inch plywood instead of the ½ inch they had sent we could have the silo ready in 24 hours.  Within two hours we had received the 3/8 inch marine grade plywood and they were putting silage in it the next day.

At #2 farm it was decided to go into the new advanced method of dairy farming.  Twice a day at milking times the cows moved through what was called a ‘milking parlour’.  As this only required a narrow building approximately ten feet wide, the grain feed supply area above had to overhang it about five or six feet on each side.  As this resembled a large mushroom, the architect had applied wing walls at each end to make the building appear normal.  As we were putting in our forms for concrete one day, H.R. came along and as usual we would have a chat about these wing wall at each end and inquiring as to their use.  I explained to him that I presumed they were there to make the building appear normal. When he asked if they were necessary and I said they weren’t, he told me to leave them off.  He said “You know Earle, things like this make me wonder what people are trying to do with my money”.

After our construction business had folded in 1948, Dad and Mom built a nice house on Sunningdale Road.  Gerald had a local taxi business.  Elwin had re-enlisted in the Army.  Howard was married with one child and Norman was dabbling around in some little sawmill venture.

Evelyn and I were married on May 1^st that year and after a week in Kelowna, came back to our new house.  We had taken out a $750.00 mortgage to have it all plastered inside but we had no cupboards or finished floors.  One door only at the back, no exterior finish and no steps.  We used a plank catwalk at the back for quite a while to get in and out.

Our only heat in the house that first winter was our kitchen stove and a small airtight heater in the unfinished basement.  That winter was the start of several very cold winters and one night the water jacket in the kitchen stove froze and broke.  We used to warm our bed with a hot water bottle before going to bed and kick it out before going to sleep.  In the morning it would be frozen solid.  We managed to stay healthy until spring when Evelyn suffered a miscarriage.

While Evelyn was still in bed recuperating I was taken to the hospital in Nanaimo with a perforated ulcer.  While I was in hospital, Evelyn moved to her parent’s home where she stayed until I came home.  As this was just about garden time, our Knights of Pythias friends came and put in our garden.

After Dad and Mom had moved into their new home the previous summer they took a trip back to Nova Scotia to visit with their friends and family in Pugwash as it had been over thirty years since they had left.  When they came back to Qualicum, Dad went up into the interior of B.C., working on different construction jobs, and then on to Edmonton.  It was while he was there that he told Mom to sell the house and join him.  After selling the house, Mom, Gerald, and his wife Maureen moved to Edmonton.  Norman, Ada and Gerry also sold their place and moved to Calgary.

When Dad left Qualicum for the interior, they decided that Evelyn and I could have the old Model A that we had used in our construction business.  It was an old two-seater that had been cut in two and made into a truck.  A plywood cab with no curtains or windows.  We now had wheels but they used to say that the only way it could be stopped was by dragging your feet.  Anyway, it sure beat riding Evelyn’s old bike to the farm each day.

At the time I was taken to hospital, I was building a large house on Judges Row for Gordon Southam, one of H.R.’ sons-in-law.  As none of my crew was knowledgeable enough to take over for me on such a complicated building, Qualicum Construction put one of their foremen on the job to finish it.  I never went back to work for H.R. again, but started with Qualicum Construction when I was well.  The twenty-five years I worked for Don Beaton, the owner of the business were good years.  I was usually working as a foreman or superintendent and spent the last nine years as Manager of the Builders Supply that the business had turned into.  Took an I.C.S. course at one time on House Planning so used to do quite a bit of the drawing of plans and estimating.

1999- It is now three years since I got to the place in my autobiography where Evelyn had her miscarriage and I was in hospital.  Have tried at different times to get it going again but find it much more difficult to write about events and people that are more recent.  With the knowledge that it can be only my and Evelyn’s memories I am writing about now, will try to finish it.

The past fifty years have been very good to us and we have been blessed with a family to be proud of.  There seem to be long periods where nothing changed much, but I guess that is to be expected.  We know a lot of the following will be about Brian, and that won’t be because he was any more special than Blair and the girls but the circumstances of his life made it that way.

From 1950 when Vicki was born, and Sherry in 1953 until 1959 when we decided to adopt a boy, were busy years for Evelyn and I.  With our garden, trying to make the house more livable and the many organizations we belonged to didn’t leave much time.  Evelyn belonged to the Pythian Sisters, the Church Choir, very active with the Church Ladies catering to the different things almost every week, the P.T.A. and of course all the committee work.  At one time I was Chancellor Commander of the Lodge, on Village radio and TV.  Along sometime in this period we decided to give up everything but Legion for me and the church work for Evelyn.  We still had the children’s sports that we took an active part in and collecting for the different charity drives.

In 1951 Evelyn had another miscarriage and we started building the big high school in the fall.  During the summer we made a visit to Bob, Evelyn’s brother, and his wife Teddy, where they were living near Chilliwack.

By the fall of 1952 we pretty well had the school finished.  Evelyn and I had bought a second hand Vauxhall that summer as the old Model A gave up the ghost.  With Dave and Rae Hillier we took a long weekend that fall and drove down to San Francisco.  The Vauxhall created lots of interest, as most people hadn’t seen a car like it in the States.  Gas, oil and a car wash in Portland cost us the grand sum of $28.00.  I think that was the nicest vacation we ever had and we still get a few laughs thinking about it.  We did ‘China Town’, dinner or supper at ‘Aliottis’ on Fisherman’s Wharf, saw some parks and did the ‘Mason Strip’ the Sunday night we got to ‘Frisco’.  The Strip was closed down a short time after that, as it was a bit wild.

When Sherry came along in the fall of 1953 we were pretty sure we had all the family we were going to get.  The doctors advised Evelyn that it could be dangerous for her to have any more, because of the two miscarriages and two ‘C’ sections.  We were completely happy and it wasn’t until 1959 when the girls were 6 and 9 that we started investigating the possibilities of adopting a boy.

From 1953 to 1959 are probably our favourite time for memories of the girls.  Birthday parties, piano lessons, starting school and trips with our trailer camping.

We traded the Vauxhall in for a Pontiac, because we almost lost Evelyn one day from the Vauxhall.  The doors opened the wrong way, and Evelyn noticed her coat caught in the door.  We were travelling about 50 mph and without thinking she opened the door.

In the spring of 1956 we moved to Ladysmith for a few months where I was building a school.  The girls will probably remember the big old house we lived in near the school.  Vicki had her sixth birthday there and Sherry was just learning to ride a trike.  She used to tear around that old house like a maniac.

Evelyn’s cousin Roy Parker got married that fall and Vicki was flower girl.  After the wedding we took a train trip back to Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, where Dad, Mom, Gerald, Maureen and family were living.  We stopped about an hour in Calgary to say hello to Norm, Ada and Gerry.

Vicki started school in September and that winter we built a small plywood travel trailer in the basement.  Had the trailer finished for the 24^th of May and with the McMillans and their trailer, took a trip to Long Beach near Tofino.  As some of the trip in those days had to follow logging roads and after 5:00 pm, we only got to the top of the pass the first night.  Down to the beach the next morning and for the two days that we were there didn’t see more than six people.

One incident on the second morning that was scary for the participants.  Evelyn, Gayle and Sherry were heading to the water’s edge to retrieve a glass float they had seen.  Just as they got there the water started to rise and chased them a very long way up the beach.  Luckily they managed to keep ahead of it and it wasn’t until we got home that we found out that it had been a tsunami from an earthquake in Alaska.

For the next few years we used the trailer a great deal with one trip to Washington and Oregon.  We also made trips to Quadra, Denman and Hornby Islands, as well as Goldstream, Ladysmith, Qualicum Falls, Miracle Beach, Rathtrevor, etc.

Sherry started school in September 1959 and Vicki was in grade three, having advanced two grades in one year.

It was at this time we decided to adopt a boy for our family, and it took about a year before they found Brian for us and we picked him up in Vancouver at one year of age.  Although he was given a clean bill of health by the doctors, the first night at our home could have been a warning of what we would have to suffer for the next twenty-four years.  We had him in a basket in our bedroom and about daylight we became aware that he was having great difficulty breathing.  We phoned our doctor who came right away and set him breathing properly.  He said that cases like this were not unusual, moving to new surrounding, etc.

That fall Brian developed an abscess on the side of his face and we had to put him in the hospital in Nanaimo.  Of all the years we spent with Brian in hospitals, we think this was the worst.  To walk from his room at night after visiting hours, and see him there with his arms out crying for us to take him with us still brings tears to my eyes when I think about it.  After some time at Nanaimo and being told by the doctors that they didn’t know what to do as the abscess would not heal, we brought him home.  We think that is what saved his life at the time, because of being with the family that cared for him and he healed up in about a month’s time.

That Christmas we accepted an invitation from David and Rae to visit them in Whittier, Los Angeles, California.  Decided to make the trip by train, and while it was an interesting trip, it was not that comfortable.  It seemed to us that they were doing everything they could to discourage people from riding trains, and the closer we got to Los Angeles the worse it got.  We had an enjoyable time, Disneyland, Mattick’s Farm, downtown Hollywood, and one day we decided to go to San Diego to Marine Land.  It got so foggy we ended up at Capistrano which ws nice and we came back to Whittier by the coast route.

Home again for the next three years, nothing of much interest.  We sold the trailer and bought a tent, but after a few camping trips decided that it wasn’t for us.  Traded the Pontiac in on a nice second hand Impala that did us until we started buying Toyotas which we still drive at this time.

The construction company built ‘The Most Fabulous House in Canada’ in 1962-63 at Comox for a Mr. Filberg.  This was about the time Arthur Erickson, who designed the new courthouse in Vancouver and Simon Fraser College, was just starting.  We built a couple of places for him and while he had some interesting ideas he wasn’t blessed with too much common sense.  It seemed that we were doing a lot of travelling in those years.  A school at Tsolum, past Courtenay, some extensive farm buildings at Oyster River and some work on Hornby Island.  These jobs made for long days.

It was in 1965 that Brian was taken to hospital in Nanaimo again.  After a couple of weeks we were called in and advised by his doctor that they really couldn’t figure out what was wrong with him but all indications and tests seemed to indicate that he didn’t have long to live.  They said that our only hope was to have him admitted to the Children’s Hospital in Vancouver, where doctors were in touch with all hospitals in the world such as Mayo, etc. so the following week we took him to Vancouver.  This became the start of about seven years of trips to Vancouver having Vicki and Sherry to look after things at home on weekends along with Blair who we adopted in the summer of 1965 when he was two and the grass was green.

Just before we took Brian to Vancouver, we had applied for the new medical coverage that was just getting started in B.C.  Before this we had a plan for our family under Fraser Valley Medical.  We have always been so thankful that we made the change when we did, because we think F.V.M. quit shortly after.  The first two years that Brian was in the Children’s Hospital, we received slips showing what it cost for him.  These two years were about $75,000.00 and until he came of age for assistance would probably been close to half a million dollars, which we would have been liable for.

At one time we asked the Government for some assistance as we had adopted him through the Government.  They politely refused and said we could give him back if we felt that he was too much of a burden.

The first stay in hospital, Brian lost his bladder and was now an ileostomy patient.  The bags and attachments were quite crude to start with, but did improve a lot in the next few years.  During the next few years, Brian developed abscesses on his lungs, liver and, later, his brain.  As any operation he had would not heal readily, he was always in isolation and ended up with some hideous looking scars.

The doctors kept thinking that he or some of us had been out of the country and picked up some tropical disease.  It was only after years of research that they came to the conclusion that a very special gene was missing.  Whenever he contracted a bug of some kind his immune system would move it to some part of his body to destroy it.  As the missing gene was not there to complete the process, an abscess would start to grow until an operation was necessary.

During all of these years the doctors kept trying stronger and stronger antibiotics with the result that by the time he was only twenty-five his kidneys were pretty well gone.  Being on dialysis twice a week, and with no chance in his case of a kidney transplant, he just gave up.

For a few years after Donna, Brian’s wife, had left him, he became quite despondent and tried to commit suicide three times.  The last time we had him committed to Eric Martin Pavilion in Victoria.  When he was told that he was going there he just took off at a dead run.  We managed to catch him but he was most unhappy.  It turned out to be a very good place for him to be and while there he met another young man with an incurable brain tumor.  Rick Hammer and Brian became very close friends and for the few years that they had left spent a lot of time together.  They became active in Toastmasters, making numerous friends in Victoria and Alberni, which was Rick’s hometown.  Rick was with Brian at his death and delivered his eulogy at the memorial service.  I think Rick succumbed to his problem about a year later.

At Christmas time the fist year Brian was in hospital Evelyn and the girls went to Vancouver to pick him up and bring him home.  When they got there the doctors said that he was not well enough to be moved.  Evelyn phoned me at the store that I was managing at the time about 11:00 am that we should probably spend Christmas with him in the hospital.  I told Evelyn that I would be over later in the day to be with them.  As this meant that Evelyn’s Mom and Dad, Maude and Fred Bagnall, would be all alone for Christmas, I decided to take Christmas to Vancouver.  Phoned the 2400 Court where we always stayed, I reserved two cabins, loaded up a Christmas tree, all the presents, and headed over with Mom and Dad Bagnall.

Got to the 2400 about six or seven that evening and leaving them to set up the tree etc., I headed to the hospital to see the rest of the family.  When I got there I found that Vicki had left for Qualicum to spend Christmas with her grandparents so that they would not be alone.  I guess you could say that this was a well-intentioned idea that backfired.  Managed to get through to Vicki later that evening at home and she was a most unhappy girl.  I had even taken her special Danish wine that she used to have a small drink of at times.

A few years later, after Vicki and Blake Chesterton were married and Brian was about ten or eleven, we came home one evening to find a note from him on the table saying he had left home and would be back when the time was right.  We phoned the police and all started searching in places that he might be.  It was a long night and I can remember walking along the river from the trestle to the beach at daylight, calling his name because we used to go fishing there.

Got a phone call about 10:00 am from the police in Vancouver, telling us that Brian was there and okay.  We phoned Evelyn’s brother Bob who picked him up and put him on the ferry back to Nanaimo.

Brian had decided to go visit a boy he had become friends with in the hospital.  He packed a small packsack with bit of food, his ileostomy equipment and hitch hiked to Nanaimo where he managed to buy a ticket on the late ferry to Vancouver.  On the trip over he was noticed by an elderly couple who happened to be building a new home at Eaglecrest.  Jack and Doris Miles, whose home was in Vancouver, started talking to him and somehow or other got him to go with them for the night.  The next morning they heard on the radio about a young boy missing from Qualicum and they phoned the police.

The last episode with Brian was after his brain operation and not long before he and Donna were married.  While in hospital in Nanaimo he met a man who was in his forties and a very smooth talker.  The medication he was on required caps of morphine which he was able to get somehow or other in fairly large quantities.  He didn’t require this all the time so would sell the extras for some spending money.  He talked Brian into moving to Victoria with him and he started using him as his pusher.  Brian was picked up the first time he tried it by the Drug Squad and put in jail.  He didn’t let us know but we saw it in the paper, so went down and bailed him out.  His good friend stole his car, which we found later, and he flew the coop.  We never did find out where he got to.

According to Brian, the word on the street was that if you needed a good drug lawyer you had to get Owen Flood so that is what we did.  He put a young attorney named Christopher Considine in charge.  We notice in the news these days that he has become quite prominent in some fairly large cases, and he did a good job for Brian and us.  We gathered together several good letters from friends in the district, but we think the main reason that the judge gave him a suspended sentence was because of the Golf Pro from Eaglecrest Golf Course.  Jon Leyne came to court the day of the trial and gave a very personal and moving report on Brian.

In 1963 it was pretty well decided that the construction business would close down and the Builders Supply part would carry on.  It was also decided that I would be the new manager, so I took an I.C.S. course on store managing.  Mr. Beaton had some people come over for a few days to give three of us some extensive tests to see just what we were qualified for.  After three days of answering numerous questions they decided that while I wasn’t highly qualified I wouldn’t hurt the business too much.  Their only conclusions from the tests were that I probably would have been a good minister.

The nine years that I was in charge of the Builders Supply were not my happiest years, as it wasn’t the type of work that I enjoyed doing.  Joined the Builders Supply organization which entailed meetings in Victoria and Vancouver and Evie and I got to go to a few conventions which were fun.

I could see as soon as I started that an independent business was going to find it hard to survive, so was instrumental in joining the Irly Bird chain.  Doing this and changing the store around to what I thought it should be is what kept me going.  In 1974 Mr. Beaton sold the business, which gave me the opportunity to resign.

I had noticed in the business for the last couple of years that prehung doors were starting to take hold, and I was even doing a bit of it myself in our carpenter shop at the store in my spare time.  When leaving the Builder Supply we built a workshop in our backyard and for the next nine years carried on a prehung door business.  This was the perfect business for us as I could keep the type of hours that suited us, and Evelyn often worked with me on installations, etc.  We hoped the boys would work into it and though they both had the natural ability, Brian was not strong enough and Blair was just not interested.

We bought a 14-foot aluminum boat about 1968 and during the twenty years of more that we had it we enjoyed a lot of good fishing and boating.  We started with just the boat and 7 horsepower motor.  Would put the boat on the top of the Impala and the motor in the trunk.  This allowed us to go to a few places that we wouldn’t have gone with a trailer.  Took the boys to some of the small lakes, which was enjoyable.  When we got a trailer we pretty well stayed with the ocean.

These were the days the boys were a bit active in sports.  Brian was handicapped with his bag and took up golf.  Blair was an enthusiastic player in all sports but never seemed to stick to any one.  Evelyn and I always seemed to have a job of managing or transporting the kids around.  Blair had the strongest pitching arm I had ever seen and it really hurt to play catch with him because he threw so hard.  He could kick a football farther than any of the other kids, but it didn’t matter which end his goal was, he just kicked.  We started him playing a bit of golf when he was about fourteen and he swung a club just like John Daly.  The Golf Pro at Eaglecrest was quite impressed with his ability but Blair wasn’t really interested.

The years seem to flow together about this time in our life.  Vicki had finished school and was working at different jobs in the district.  Decided that she would like to go to a girls school called Patricia Stevens and when enrolled went to Vancouver.  When Sherry finished her schooling in Qualicum she took a course in Art at Nanaimo.  She has carried on with artwork throughout the years and we wouldn’t be surprised if she ends up as another Emily Carr.  Blair quit school in grade nine and worked for the Builders Supply for a while, and then to other truck driving jobs, which seems to be the thing he likes to do.  (11:00 am 17/3/99- Just had a phone call from Sherry and she tells us that her submission for the design of the banners for Victoria streets in 1999 received unanimous vote from the four judges from a field of over thirty submissions.  A goodly sum of money went with this and there may be more spin-off results.)

Vicki married Blake Chesterton in 1970.  This was the first of three marriages for her, and if you believe in third time lucky it sure applies here.  We like Blake and I think we liked Brock, Alexandra’s father even more, but when she married Mitch Levine we think that she really hit the jackpot.

Sherry didn’t shop around much, but right in our own family.  My brother’s second son Warren has been a good son-in-law and despite a few marital problems along the way, have raised two fine boys who have been a joy to Evelyn and I.  Some of our family was not too happy about Sherry and Warren getting married, but it is not the first time it has happened and if you look at our family tree you will see that their great-great-great-great grandfather David was married to his cousin Margaret in the early 1800’s.

Brian married Donna Gurk and had a couple or three years together before splitting up.  Blair married Janet Butler and had a son, Brian, who was born prematurely and with quite a few problems.  Janet took Brian and walked out as soon as she came home from the hospital.  Blair is now living with Linda Garrow and they have a fine young son Tyler.  We like Linda very much and feel that she has been good for Blair.

A lot of our life has seemed to center around Brian and we guess that is always the case when someone is sick a lot or different.

My mother and dad had their golden wedding anniversary in June 1966 and Evelyn’s mother and dad in 1973.  Outside of funerals, these occasions seem to be the only times that families get together.  Dad died in 1967 and Elwin succumbed to cancer of the lymph nodes in 1969 after a very short time in the hospital.  There are no records, but it was rumored that as Elwin was one of the Canadian soldiers sent to New Mexico during the atom bomb testing, he had been exposed to radiation from the blasts.  Howard and Gerald passed away in 1982, also Evelyn’s mother.  Evelyn’s dad had passed away in 1979 and Norman in 1994.

Evelyn and I made a couple of trips to Puerto Vallarta in Mexico, and would go there again if we could drive or walk.  Made one trip to Hawaii and once to Palm Springs where we stayed with Bob and Betti Bagnall, who were renting a nice place there.  The last three or four times we got on a plane something seemed to go wrong- a bird in one engine, a drop in an air pocket, and a wind at Palm Springs that nearly blew us out of the sky, so we decided to quit flying.  Got a dog instead and in the three years we have had Bif he has put over 1200 kilometers on us.

During the 1960’s, Evelyn and I joined square dancing and spent a few enjoyable years with it.  I took up calling and for a couple of years Evelyn and I taught square and round dancing through a night school program.  When we started square dancing there were thirty basic movements and by the time we quit it was up to seventy-five.  I think there are more today.  Not much fun.

In reading over the last sixteen pages or so, it seems that not much has been said about the most important part of our family.  Maybe it is a reluctance to boast, because some of their natural talents were probably inherited.  Nevertheless they have worked hard at what they both excel in.

Vicki’s needlework, sewing, making dolls, etc., is as good, we think better than, most of what you will see today.  She still maintains a desire to learn and is usually taking courses or upgrading her knowledge.  She and Mitch sing in the Malaspina Choir and both do a bit of acting.  Vicki never was an expert in any one sport, but took part in everything and played field hockey with a team at one time.  She was one of a group of high school children chosen by the local Rotary Club to make a trip to Ottawa.

Both of the girls, like their mother, are excellent cooks and have carried on Evelyn’s habits of gardening, putting up preserves or freezing things for the winter.  I know that we would not have fared so well many times if not for this very desirable trait.

Sherry, like Vicki, does very nice sewing and needlework, but most of her spare time is devoted to her art of painting.  She was a manager of an art framing store for a few years, but since quitting has had more time to spend on gardening and other things.  Sherry’s sport activities were about the same a Vicki’s and she played a bit of basketball in high school.  Can remember one time, when she brought a whole visiting Port McNeill team to the house for an after-game party.  Evelyn and I had the dickens of a time finding soft drinks for them because all the stores were closed.  Sherry was quite good with the hula-hoop when she was young, and won a contest one summer at Qualicum.

In the years to come they may add to this autobiography things in their growing up years that we have forgotten or didn’t notice, but nothing will change the fact that we have been exceedingly lucky to have had such fine daughters and sons.

Our main extra curricular activity these days besides gardening which we still dig by hand is the odd round of golf.  We do not belong to any club course but usually take a winter membership for six months.  This is a nice opportunity to meet some interesting people from the colder areas of Canada.  There are usually about forty who come for two or three months and we always finish up in March with a nice little tournament.

It was because of Brian that we started playing golf and it is a game we still enjoy, especially with Warren and the two boys who we started in the game while they were quite young, and living in Williams Lake.