At first, as Daddy played the piano that had only one key missing, people just tapped their feet, while the more musical ones snapped their fingers, but in the middle of the second poem a few people began to hum, and by the time the dewy-eyed widow, Mrs. Beatrice Ann Stevenson, began the third poem everybody was ready to sing along, and did.
‘Oh, I love to see it lap the miles and eat the valleys up …’ sang about seventy people and a couple of dogs, including my old soup-hound, Benito Mussolini.
As my daddy said on the way home, the widow, Mrs. Beatrice Ann Stevenson, didn’t know whether to pee or go blind. But when she was finished, instead of two or three of her friends from the Fark Sewing Circle and Temperance Society applauding, the whole seventy people burst into applause, cheers, and whistles, while Benito Mussolini and his friend howled along.
The audience, for the first time in history, demanded an encore, and when the widow, Mrs. Beatrice Ann Stevenson, repeated her performance, they sang along lustily, to all three Emily Dickinson poems, which, though they hadn’t realized it, they knew by heart from hearing them so many times. Then everyone called for an encore of the encore, and all seventy people sang louder and stomped their feet harder, and even the young people who had been engaged in serious body touching in the cloakroom, stuck their heads around the corner to see what was going on, while Daddy played the piano more emphatically but with no more ability, and the widow, Mrs. Beatrice Ann Stevenson, eventually stopped reciting altogether, and just stared at the audience in a truly bewildered manner.
When the Bjornsen Bros. Swinging Cowboy Musicmakers emerged from behind the ragged blue curtain at the back of the stage, fully fortified with raisin wine, dandelion wine, homemade beer, and Heathen’s Rapture, they had their work cut out for them to recapture the stage from Daddy, and the widow, Mrs. Beatrice Ann Stevenson; Earl J. Rasmussen and Little Grendel Badke having completely missed their turn to provide an entertainment.
Sixty miles away in Edmonton, though my daddy said it might as well have been six thousand, there lived a mythical man named John Ducey. John was pronounced Jawn, and rhymed with yawn, and he was an American, and a promoter of baseball, known to one and all as ‘The Raja of Renfrew,’ because Renfrew Park, down on the river flats, was the place in Edmonton where professional baseball was played. John ‘The Raja of Renfrew’ Ducey, while not a wealthy man, had more money than most, because he had married into money.
John Ducey, before he was known as ‘The Raja of Renfrew,’ had married into a family who owned a successful inn, known as the New Edmonton Hotel, located on 97 Street in Edmonton, a section of the city my daddy said could not be compared with Fifth Avenue in New York City, or with any street in North America where rich society types might meet.
‘During a depression, cash is king,’ my daddy often said, and, immediately after he said it, lamenting his own lack of cash, often for a considerable length of time. The New Edmonton Hotel, which was not large, three stories of red brick, and had never been elegant, was successful because it had a very large bar, which was patronized almost exclusively by Indians, who, even at five cents a glass, consumed enough beer to keep John Ducey, and John Ducey’s in-laws, in money through the Depression. And there was even a fair amount of money left over, with which John Ducey promoted baseball in Edmonton, and thus became known as ‘The Raja of Renfrew,’ Renfrew being the name of the baseball park down on the river flats.
On a Sunday afternoon in 1945 or ’46, no one can remember which, John Ducey took his wife, the wealthy hotel owner’s daughter, on a drive into the country, where they stopped for a few minutes at a sportsday at a town on the banks of the Pembina River, where they watched a few innings of the final game of the day between the New Oslo Blue Devils and an all-Indian team from the reserve near Lac Ste. Anne, where they saw Truckbox Al McClintock hit three of his five home runs, two into, and one clean across, the Pembina River.
Most of the years while I was growing up, there was a war on, and all of us knew it, though it was about as far away as it could be, Europe and the South Pacific and all. Europe and the South Pacific and all, being several thousand miles away, one in one direction and one in another, were pretty hard for folks in the Six Towns area to visualize, for about two-thirds of the folks in the Six Towns area had never been as far away as Edmonton, which was approximately sixty miles, but might as well have been six thousand.
Several, four I believe was the exact count, boys from the Six Towns area had joined the Canadian Army, and one, a Rose from near Sangudo, was rumored to be fighting in Italy, which most all of us knew was shaped like a boot and was where the pope and the real Benito Mussolini lived, but not much else. And, we all knew, the orphaned genius electrical engineer, Arthur Bozniak, who was married to a local girl, Edytha Rasmussen, had been one of the first Canadians killed in World War II, a story I’ll get around to later.
The reason I mention the war at all, is that it turned out to be the underlying reason for the baseball game between the Alberta All-Stars and a team of genuine Major Leaguers, featuring Bob Feller, Hal Newhouser, and Joe DiMaggio himself, at Renfrew Park down on the river flats, in Edmonton, Alberta, summer of 1945 or ’46, no one can remember which. The Americans were building something called the Alaska Highway, which I guess ran from Edmonton to Alaska, though I wasn’t much good at geography then, and have never bothered to improve myself on the subject. To this day, I don’t understand why they were building it, or what it had to do with the war in either Europe, or the South Pacific.
But build it they did, and there were many thousands of American soldiers stationed in Edmonton during the war, which was exceptionally good for the economy, because American soldiers had money and were willing and eager to spend it on almost anything, no matter the price. The city of Edmonton took on itself a nickname: ‘The Gateway to the North,’ it called itself, a nickname that stayed around until oil was discovered south of Edmonton at a place called Leduc, which translated from the French, means The Duke, and Edmonton decided to call itself ‘The Oil Capital of Canada,’ a nickname it still uses.
Apparently the Americans thought it was important to build the Alaska Highway, so it didn’t matter what anyone else thought about it, and to build that highway they sent thousands and thousands of troops to Alaska, and all of them, at one time or another, passed through Edmonton.
There was something else that the Americans thought was just as important as building the Alaska Highway, or winning the wars in Europe and the South Pacific, and that was entertaining the troops. Apparently American troops didn’t build good highways, or fight successful wars, unless they got frequent and good quality entertainment.
Many names, that those of us who had radios, would readily recognize: Bob Hope, Jack Benny, Phil Harris, Dennis Day, the McGuire Sisters, The Ink Spots and The Mills Brothers, to name a few, were flown into Edmonton, some on more than one occasion, to entertain the troops.
There was usually some spillover. Those stars, after they had entertained the troops sufficiently, so the troops could go back to building good solid highways, and fighting successful wars, would often put on a show in the city of Edmonton itself, having performed the original entertainment in a hangar at Namao Airport, north of Edmonton.
There was a place, which my daddy had seen, called the Edmonton Arena, sometimes called the Edmonton Gardens, which the radio said could hold five thousand people. I liked the name Edmonton Gardens better, because I could picture marigolds, petunias, red geraniums, and tall hollyhocks surrounding this white frame building, where five thousand people could go to hear Bob Hope, Jack Benny, Phil Harris, Dennis Day, or the McGuire Sisters.
My daddy said that the year after I was born, he traded a calf and two suckling pigs to an itinerant peddler for a radio, and, once word got around, our house was overflowing for several weeks, as everyone who didn’t have a radio, which was most of the people in the Six Towns area, came by to stare at the large, cathedral-shaped box and the yard-long battery that powered it. There were many dire predictions concerning the radio, not the least of which was that God would strike radio owners dead on some preordained day; some of the old-timers, especially those from Europe, believed it a tool of the Devil, and that the voices that came out of it were actually