Another Chaplin businessman owned a truck that he used to deliver gas to farmers. He was also the owner of the only funeral parlour in town. One day while delivering gas, he found that one of his customers had died. He put the body in the cab of the truck beside him and headed for town. Along the way he picked up another farmer hitchhiking. The dead man sat in the middle. When they arrived in town the hitchhiker commented, “That feller in the middle was sure awful quiet.” That was one of many stories my dad told about life in rural Saskatchewan.
By many accounts, I was a strange kid. To say that I was “different” would be putting it charitably. For example, I had unusual ideas about dressing for school, lighter clothes in winter, heavier in the spring and summer. Chaplin School was so much larger than our one-room schoolhouse on the farm. Some kids were mean. They used to mock a girl who sometimes had epileptic fits—the kind of cruelty that only kids can inflict without any thought for how it affects the poor victim. One day the school caught fire, and there was a lot of smoke. The teachers ordered us to close the windows and evacuate, but my older brother, Bob, said some of the older boys ran around opening the windows, hoping the school would burn down. It did not.
Life in Chaplin was good for me as a kid but challenging for Mom and Dad. They had to send Bob to relatives in Manitoba because they couldn’t afford to feed all of us. I really missed Bob. He was always my big brother and to this day is one of the gentlest, kindest guys you will ever meet. Our family went through the same things as all the others in town—measles, mumps and chicken pox. Our house was often under quarantine with a sign on the house warning visitors not to enter. Somehow we got through it. My only medical problem aside from those diseases was having my tonsils and adenoids removed. That wasn’t bad. It meant a bus trip to Moose Jaw with my mother!
Summers were spent on the farm, staying with my grandmother, Della. To us she was just Grandma Garrett, but she’d had an interesting life. Born in Kentucky, she married a man named Tamblyn and had a family of five, including my Aunt Lucille. After Tamblyn passed away, Grandma married a man named George Garrett, who had come to the United States from Ireland. It must have been about 1864. Family legend has it that his name was really Gariety but the US immigration official in New York said, “That’s too hard to spell. Your name is Garrett.” In any case, my grandfather joined the Yankee Army during the US Civil War as either a drummer boy or a bugle boy. Little is known of his life except that he died in an Old Soldiers’ Home in North Dakota. What is known is that he married a woman named Ruth in the 1870s and raised a family of four boys and one girl. He married a second time to my Grandma Della, near the turn of the century, and had three children. They were my father, Peter, born in Brainard, Minnesota, and his sisters, Della and Alice. Grandpa died when my dad was just a boy of thirteen. It fell to him to look after his mother and at least one of his sisters. His sister Della went to live with wealthy relatives in the United States. After my grandfather’s death, Grandma married a man named Shea. A new member of the family came along, a little girl named Josie. We always referred to my dad’s mother as Grandma Garrett, although her married name was now Shea. Some said Josie was Shea’s child from a relationship with a maid. In any case, it was Grandma who raised her, and to our family she was always Aunt Josie.
Another favourite was Aunt Lucille, Dad’s half-sister. She was a no-nonsense, large-framed woman who could and did work like a man. In her younger years, she married a man named Tim Trusedale. The marriage soon broke up and each lived alone on separate farms. I loved to visit Uncle Tim. There was always a pail of jam on the table, and he had one of those old gramophones—an RCA Victrola—that played cylinders with the famous “His Master’s Voice” logo. With a cigarette holder clenched in his teeth, Uncle Tim used to say, “If you were my kid, I’d turn you over my knee”—meaning I would have had a spanking. He never did; nor did my father. Tim had once owned an old car, probably a Star, but it lay rusting in his farmyard atop a hill on the lonely Saskatchewan prairie. Playing in that car all by myself was pure heaven.
Many years later, married with three young children, I drove in my nice new car out to the farm to show off my wife, Joan, and the kids to Uncle Tim. He wasn’t home, but I knew he sometimes worked for the neighbours to the south, the Records. At their farm, I was told that Tim was out looking after the cattle and he would be easy to spot because he was on horseback. Sure enough, we found him easily. Tall in the saddle, he rode up to the fence near my car. I got out and said, “Hi Uncle Tim. It’s me, George, and this is my wife, Joan, and these are our three kids, Linda, Lorrie and Kenny.” His response was, “Howdy.” “And this is my new car,” I added. “I see that,” said Tim. He was a man of few words. Yet a couple of years later, when I took my family to Moose Jaw for Christmas, it was old Uncle Tim who showed up at the railway station early on a cold winter morning to see us leave for the West Coast.
Aunt Lucille was the go-getter of the two. She owned her own horses and worked for a grouchy old farmer named Jack Douglas, the one I had pestered with too many questions. He was a brother of Bill Douglas, the farmer my dad had fought with over cows. Aunt Lucille often came over to visit her mother, my grandma. Sometimes Lucille would take me along on trips to town in her Model A Ford. I must have been quite a chatterbox. At one point she told me, “I do believe you’ll be a preacher—you talk so much.”
Chapter 2
The Big City
Our family moved to Moose Jaw in 1943 or 1944. Our rented house was at 1201 Langtry Street, out on the prairie on the outskirts of the city and not too far from the CPR railway tracks. I remember a large wooden bin in our yard that was full of empty wine and liquor bottles. My dad and his friends contributed a bottle or two to the collection. I went to school at William Grayson School, a fine brick building on Caribou Street. I was a little intimidated, coming from the small town of Chaplin, but the teachers and kids were fine. Caribou Street was the main route to the Rosedale Cemetery on the west side of Moose Jaw. It was common to see funeral processions pass the school. We had strict instructions from our teachers to stand at attention and remove our hats when funeral processions passed by.
Although we didn’t hear much about the war, we saw signs of it in the city. Moose Jaw was selected as a site for the Commonwealth Air Training Plan. It trained pilots from throughout the British Empire or Commonwealth. Walking past its repair facility on the way downtown, we would see lots of airmen. In fact, my oldest sister, Muriel, once had a date with an airman from Britain, who came to our house to pick her up. I was quite impressed. One of our neighbouring families, the Karzas, was devastated by the war. They lost two sons, both killed overseas. I never really understood what it was all about when I played with their youngest son, just a couple of years older than me. I do remember that his mother cried nearly all the time. They were a family from the country then known as Czechoslovakia. The family’s English was poor, but they were able to make themselves understood. One day I helped Mr. Karza plant potatoes by leading his horse, which pulled a plough that he steered with handles. I guess I couldn’t walk a straight line because every so often he would say, “To you horse, George.” It was his way of saying I should straighten out and pull the horse toward me—to the left.
As a kid, I was always a bit of a free spirit, venturing off downtown on foot at first and later by bicycle. I wanted to know every corner of the city, every nook and cranny. I remember walking down High Street when I was very young and saw that a fire hydrant had been broken off, hit by an old Model T Ford. Water was spraying everywhere and the old car was damaged a bit, but Model Ts were made of durable iron, almost indestructible. It was the first time I had ever heard about a drunk driver.
In the spring of 1948, we kids had a wonderful time in Moose Jaw after a great flood happened when the snow melted. We played in the puddles and even made a raft out of lumber and floated it in the creek. Sometimes we played Three Musketeers. At times we pretended we were pirates using wooden laths nailed together and with sharpened points as swords.
My springtime fun came to an abrupt end while riding my bike home late at night. Racing a bus on a parallel street, I either fell off or was knocked off the bike. Neighbours found me lying in a ditch bleeding, near my damaged bike. I woke up in the hospital and spent part of that glorious spring confined to a hospital bed. I