To say that I was a risk taker would be an understatement. When we lived on Langtry Street in Moose Jaw, our nearest grocery store was across the CPR tracks on South Hill. I used to crawl under the boxcars to cross the tracks because it was too difficult to climb up over the couplings between the freight cars. I recall once or twice that the boxcar would start moving while I was crawling underneath. I learned to move quickly! It was a wonder I wasn’t killed. However, one of the rewards of going to the store for Mom was an occasional treat. I can still taste the Mackintosh’s toffee as it melted in my mouth. Sometimes I would run errands for my dad. One day, he asked me to go to the hardware store downtown to buy a light socket. Our lights were the kind that hung from the ceiling on a braided cord. I knew we had cheap brass sockets, but I bought a more expensive porcelain one. Dad was not pleased. Money was very tight.
About a year after living on the “flats” on Langtry Street we moved to the Westmount District on South Hill. Our address was 1597 Coteau Street, the last house of the last block on the outskirts of Moose Jaw. Looking to the west, you could see nothing but prairie except for the huge government grain elevator a couple of kilometres away. To the north was an abandoned vehicle bridge and the CPR tracks below it. The old bridge was dangerous but a great place for a boy and his dog to play. There were often hobos around the tracks. Several men showed up at our house looking for something to eat. Dad never turned them away. I would talk to the men down by the tracks but I never came to any harm.
Moving to Coteau Street meant walking to a new school. It was called Westmount School, located several blocks from our house, much of it across open prairie. There was the main brick building and three cottages to accommodate different grades. They were heated by a coal- and wood-burning stove. One day one of the boys threw a .22 calibre bullet into the fire. Bang! The teacher, Miss Green, was not amused. Nor did she appreciate it when we put our bikes below the window and used them to climb out the windows. I was given the strap several times by Miss Green for bad behaviour but learned that if I pulled my hand back, the teacher would hit herself on the leg. Not a good idea. Miss Green sent me to the principal, Mr. Lowick, for further discipline. I remember a few of us lined up by Mr. Lowick for our punishment. He said, “Hold out your hands and leave them there.” Whack! Whack! That hurt!
Despite being a brat at times, I was a pretty good student. In fact, our school was crowded and there were too many kids going into Grade 7, so I was allowed to skip Grade 7 and go directly from Grade 6 to 8. Academically it was a success. My marks were good and I did well in Grade 8 and beyond. The downside was the social aspect of being so young. It didn’t help that I was born in November and started school at only five years old for the first few months. As a result of skipping Grade 7, I was only eleven years old for the first three months of Grade 8 and fairly small for my age. I was never a gifted athlete, and the age difference made it worse when it came to sports. I can still remember how bad it felt when teams were chosen for any sport. I would always be the last one picked. The older kids would say, “You take Garrett.” The other team would say, “No—we had him last time. You have to take him.” Not good for the ego.
One of the fun games to play in spring was marbles. We couldn’t wait for recess to draw a circle in the dirt and play. The best players wound up with the most marbles.
Likely because it was wartime, we had an army cadet unit at school. I joined and can still recall the thrill of wearing that khaki uniform. We didn’t hear much about the war, but I vividly recall seeing my first banner headline in big bold type. It read, “D-Day.” It was, of course, the big Allied invasion of Normandy, June 6, 1944. I was nine years old.
Moving on to high school was somewhat intimidating. I asked an old friend to go with me on the first day at Moose Jaw Technical School, known simply as Tech. Once again the teachers were excellent and the other kids fine. I’d had nothing to worry about. However, there were some challenges. It was a long way from my house to Tech, located on the east side of the downtown area. In winter I took a bus but in summer I rode my bike, even coming home for lunch because we had an hour and a half. Tech was known for its technical courses such as woodworking, sheet metal shops and motor mechanics. I chose commercial subjects including shorthand and typing, becoming very proficient at the latter, which helped me throughout my career. I used the Gregg shorthand to some advantage as a reporter, but to be honest, I forgot a lot of it. Moose Jaw Tech’s metal shops were very good. With a teacher’s guidance, one class made a remarkable statue of Winston Churchill, Britain’s wartime prime minister. The statue is still there on the school grounds to this day. It meant something special in wartime.
Once again, I did well in school. I enjoyed the commercial subjects and even the mainstream subjects like history, called social studies. That course was based on a textbook called Modern Europe. The text book gave me an interest in history and geography and probably helped me later in life when I travelled to many foreign lands.
Tech was also a good school for sports and other extracurricular activities. Our girls’ basketball team was called “The Shmoos” after a character in Al Capp’s Li’l Abner cartoon. We had a glee club that I was able to join; one of our best songs was a traditional African-American spiritual called “Ezekiel Saw the Wheel.” Our principal, Mr. A.E. Peacock, was a gentle and kind man. I was often in his outer office because I was frequently late for school and had to get a late slip from Mr. Peacock’s secretary, Bea Flett. She was a lovely woman and I got to know her quite well. One of our teachers, Miss Seed, was also a gracious woman. When we graduated she rode with us in the cab of a coal truck owned by the father of one of my classmates, and we went to a little party. I guess I have always had an affinity for teachers. My mother was a teacher in a one-room school in Shaunavon, Saskatchewan. Our daughter Lorrie wanted to be a teacher from the time she was a little girl. She has now been a Grade 1 teacher for more than thirty-seven years. She is an excellent teacher; her kids adore her. Lorrie’s daughter, our granddaughter Lianne, graduated from the University of Victoria in 2012 with a bachelor of education degree. Yet another teacher in the family—my pride may be showing!
Throughout my school years I had chores to do at home. My dad always kept a milk cow, and I was the designated milking kid. My brother Bob was in Manitoba and my older sister, Muriel, had left home at a young age so I was the oldest kid left. I had to milk the cow each morning before going to school. If I missed squeezing the teat into the pail it would go on the leg of my pants so I would just rub it in. I’m sure that after a week or so my pants smelled to high heaven—especially in a warm schoolroom in winter. As well as milking the cow, I had to tether it out on the prairie, then bring it in for milking and for a drink of water at the well. In winter the top layer of the well water would freeze so I would bang the water pail up and down to break the ice before I could get water. I recently returned to my roots. I wanted to see where Mom and Dad had tried to make a living on a small farm owned by an older man and his wife who lived in nearby Chaplin. When I returned to the area in October 2015, I found there was nothing left of the house or any of the buildings. I remembered that the barn had burned down. The house was torn down years later. Standing where the farm had once been, I let my mind wander back to my recollections of the early 1940s and of the owner, Mr. McKibbon.
He would drive out to check on the farm in one of two Model A Fords: a nicer brown one in the summer, and a blue one in fall and winter. He had one set of wheels that had to be moved from one car to the other. To put it mildly, Mr. McKibbon was a frugal Scot. My dad found he could not make enough money from Mr. McKibbon to feed his wife and five kids. That’s why he moved us to Chaplin.
On my sentimental journey to revisit my childhood a kindly farmer named Darwin Glass told me to jump in his truck. He drove me over the prairie hills through pastures and fields until we came to my favourite boyhood spot. It was my grandma’s place, where I’d played by myself hour after hour, sometimes in the shade of a birch tree my dad had planted when he was a teenager, probably in about 1918. The tree was still there but everything else was gone. The ground where the house once stood is now just a shallow depression in the prairie soil. It had been the cellar for the house. Nearby were the remnants of a rusty old stove. It had been Grandma’s stove on which she had cooked so many delicious meals for an always hungry kid.
As I stood gazing out at the prairie landscape