I Was a Little Canadian Girl - What Happened?
I have unearthed my puberty in Edmonton - when the world was changing, even at the highest latitudes
I WISH I had a hometown.
I always wanted a place I could look back and say, “I saw it all!”
No, I didn’t grow up in a military family. I grew up with a mom who thought the grass was greener on the other side. I went to 10 schools in 13 years. Even spending two grades in one place, made a tremendous impact on my social psyche.
One of those lucky spots was . . . Edmonton, Alberta. —My mother’s biggest leap of all.
And if your first thought is, “Where’s that?” — it was also mine. I had never heard of the place when we packed our bags and set out from Los Angeles in our 1963 VW Bug.
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You know how Americans say they are so fed up, after every election, and swear they are going to leave the country?
Well, Mommy did it. Vietnam, the assassinations of Kennedys/King/Malcolm, it all set her on fire. I think she had her own demons pushing her, too. But isn’t moving always like that?
I lived in Edmonton between 1970 and 1973. I have never been back, but the city haunts me like only extreme conditions can. My first winter in Edmonton, it was 40 degrees below zero for 30 days straight.
I had never seen it snow before. And these were the days when girls wore DRESSES to school, no question. It was pre-polarfleece.
Garneau Junior High was the tiny school I hiked to, beside waist-high snow banks, every day. Our entire grade was maybe 30 kids, and my puberty-soaked memories recall each and every one of them.
My own family life was cratering, and my new Canadian friends were my salvation. They happily embraced me once it was clear, that if anything, I was more anti-American than them.
I was not bullied for being a bookworm — everyone reads books in a place where it snows 10 months out of the year. I wasn’t a pariah for being a smart mouth — talking well and off the cuff was considered a gift.
I’ve always wished to know, “What happened to my Garneau pals?” I left for LA in ‘73 to live with my dad, and after a year, poof, I’d lost the thread. The only way to stay in touch in those years was letter-writing. It cost a fortune to “phone Canada.”
I have finally learned, thanks to journalist and fellow Garneau alum, Matthew Hays, where to look for my past on 87th Avenue. He pointed me to, naturally, a Facebook group for Garneau grads. The yearbooks are on the Internet Archive.
I learned just yesterday, with great sorrow, about some of my classmates who died quite young.
Did we lose more than our fair share? I don’t know.
Our generation, particularly in Canada, was on the cusp of more than one revolution. It wasn’t just drugs and sex and Canadian nationalism on the horizon. We were bright kids who were seeing through the Maple Leaf Façade. We suspected, even in the 7th grade, that Father didn’t Know Best.
When I arrived in Edmonton, it was BEFORE the 1973 oil rush.
It was Before Wayne Gretzky.
Edmonton’s last heyday had been the 19th century Klondike Gold Rush. It was the biggest, greyest, nowheresville you’ve ever seen.
Edmonton was square, the Canadian Bible Belt. The majority of the province voted Tory, dominated by the English-Scottish settlers and their business ambitions.
You never heard the word “Indian” without “dirty” in front of it. You never heard the word “Ukrainian” without “stupid” in front of it. French Canadians? “Animals.” And this was the kind of thing you’d hear everywhere, proper people with no apologies. For me, who hailed from various cribs of Los Angeles and the Bay Area, the bigotries were novel.
Some of the cruelties were universal. Boys “fag-baited” each other constantly — see the comments in the yearbook!— and I realize many of the boys who weren’t macho enough, were in a living hell.
Some old-fashioned things about Edmonton, were qualities I loved. The wholesome stuff. Everyone read novels compulsively, even kids who were otherwise failing class. Everyone knew how to play elaborate card games— and whole families, would play cards and make cookies and smoke and drink until late at night, on a typical evening. Ewen Nelson, my best friend’s brother, showed me how to use his doctor parents’ syringes to load up the homemade Christmas fruitcakes with extra brandy before we played Canasta! Our parties were preferred over television.
Singing and dancing, or any kind of music, was everyday. Our public schools had band and orchestra and I was in them all. Everyone schooled in Canada can play a little something. It wasn’t special, everyone did it. You might comment on someone’s dad, “He has a great voice,” or how Mrs. So’n’So can really tear up a rug.
I didn’t grasp at the time that the grownups were sloshed for much of the socializing; I saw their merriment quite romantically when I was 13. Our tiny school had real “rock bands” that came in for Friday dance nights, (shades of the The Guess Who from Winnipeg) and the Vice Principal would angrily break up couples for “drape dancing.”
Ice skating was another mating activity, which I had to learn from scratch. Yes, I mean the skating part. There was a big outdoor lake — Mayfair or something? — with islands of trees in the middle and a small changing shack by the parking lot where you could cadge smokes and hot chocolate.
Because I skated so poorly, when the boys would chase the girls, I would get “caught” rather easily, and as we tumbled into the firs, fighting and screaming, laughing, snot running everywhere, our panting breath and pounding hearts— well, nothing happened, dear reader, but it always felt like it “might.” For me, at that age, sexual undercurrents were everything.
We were little lambs those first two years. Edmonton was far behind the recreational drug wave in California; it was all booze and cigarettes. (“Smokes” in Canada). I was the only kid in school who had a divorced mom. Everyone went to church on Sundays and sang “God Bless the Queen” with real fervor.
There was much going on behind closed doors. Kids told me they envied me, who wished their battling parents could get divorced. There was hunger and poverty and painful attempts to assimilate— you weren’t allowed to show any of it.
The violent weather united us, but there was real violence inside our homes too, and a youthful desperation that we were “not going to put up with this crap anymore.” Why should we bow to a queen? I said my first four letter word out loud in Edmonton, and yes, crap was it.
When I look at the yearbook pictures, they are half the story — a misleading half.
Yes, the little squirts you observe, we were first-class dorks.
But you know what was more popular than sports or any of the school spirit clubs?
Every kid I knew, was protesting the American nuclear arms testing at Amchitka Island, off the British Columbia border. It unified the student body.
We burned American flags at the downtown Edmonton Parliament buildings, and yes, we cut school to do it. Some of the teachers did too. (Love you, Mrs. Engstad). Canadian families had northern border American cousins they were helping escape the draft. Boys were growing their hair long as a protest vote, and yes, their fathers beat them for it.
Classmates like my friend Carla Cummings (see her little angel face above!) were asked for the yearbook, “What is your pet peeve?”
She answered, “Male Chauvinist Pigs.” WAY TO GO, CARLA. I noticed that many of the girls say they want to study “law” when they grow up, and believe me, they’re not talking personal injury. They were interested in gender equality.
We had royal battles in the classroom too. Some teachers were ardent rah-rah-anti-Communists who turned every lesson into a speech about the depravity of Castro, or the triumph of India’s economy over China. Who can forget Mrs. MacEachern, who disciplined me for “drawing outside the lines” and “giggling too much”? I told her India had a caste system and she said that was a communist lie.
Another teacher, Mrs. Lubin, ran the debate club. She was well-liked, respected— one of the younger teachers without grey hair. Yet she decided to bend me to her will by insisting that in order to debate, I had to argue AGAINST abortion rights.
This was just a command performance solely for her, of course. I already was the best arguer in class; I wouldn’t shut up. (Well, actually Barb Ackroyd, if you’re still here, you were another one of the uppity girls who always had a comeback!)
I refused to make an argument for forced birth. I said it wasn’t theoretical for me. “Torturing women is immoral!” I think that’s when she asked me if I was Catholic. I was thrown off debate club and given an F for that class. I was not a fan.
Another incident proved my good-girl habits were breaking up completely. I was on thin ice when I decided to force the Home Economics teacher OUT.
The class had a bad beginning. Our 1971 crew of young women were pissed we weren’t allowed to choose “Shop.” We were disgusted that Home Ec consisted of making aprons and preparing to be Canada’s Most Perfect Housewife.
Believe me, today I can imagine a wonderful, DIY, craft-oriented Home Ec program. Back then it was oppressive.
The classmate I had the biggest crush on was “Michi.” Mich didn’t come to school much. Wolf blue-grey eyes, cheeks high. Heavy smoker. She walked in late to Mrs. Bollard’s Home Ec room, with her raggedy bellbottoms and tight sweater, no jacket in the cold. It was like a bomb went off.
Mrs. B lit into Michi so hard — for tardiness?— there was clearly something else going on. Mich turned on her moccasins without a word, and left. I wanted to run after her, but I knew she’d take no pity.
As she cleared the doorway, Mrs Bollard got in one last shot:. “. . . Ukie Slut.”
That did it. Garneau teachers, no matter how redneck, didn’t talk like that. I think the old lady was drunk. As soon as recess came, I announced “Old Bull’s got to go!” and suddenly I was the leader of a gaslighting terrorist campaign that was going to push Bollard right over the edge.
Nice prim Edmonton girls — we put a box of salt in her biscuits. We flooded the laundry machines. We graffitied the outside of her room and for some reason I decided the perfect medium was lard. You can throw it outside in the cold weather and it stuck.
A couple weeks later— Mrs. B. disappeared, and no other adult tried to resuscitate the Home Ec Program. What happened? I don’t remember. You were not going to keep radical teenie women libbers down on the farm.
I wonder if anyone tattled to their moms. I didn’t. I was hiding from my unhappy mother, and my crusades at school were keeping me busy.
I have learned, in the past two days, that my dearest friend, Jane Clyne Nelson, her brother Ewen, and her parents, all died quite young. They were the pillar of the community, the Nelsons. Janie’s mom was the first woman deputy health minister, a devoted pediatrician. When I thought I wasn’t going to survive my home life, they were there for me, every night, every holiday. I remember writing Jane 20-page letters daily. The intensity of femme friendships!
I’ve learned today too, that Patti Gaines is gone — Patti who reminded me of Peppermint Patty because she could be so quick-witted and blasé at the same time.
I am still looking for other Garneau girls, using the magic of the internet, and I wonder how many might have changed their names. What happened to Michi? What happened to Irene Paap, my friend who showed me “real movies” for the first time (not Disney) and told me the secrets of English history they didn’t teach us in school?
While I have been writing this story, I learned Irene has passed, too. She promised she’d get out of “this horrible place” and move to Gastown in Vancouver, where life was not a crashing bore. Her dream: writing for Georgia Straight.
I have many apologies on my mind. I always thought I’d make amends. Perhaps I will make my start on these pages . . .
I slapped Barb Ackroyd for no reason I can remember, and she never told on me. I am so sorry, Barbie. I got in a silly scrap with Dougie Burrows and kicked him clumsily between the legs, and he looked like he might die. What agony I caused! I remember the kids I made fun of, usually because they were socially as awkward as I once was in the States. Why was I so sweet and smart, yet so cruel? My nickname was Suzi Hollywood and I wrote stories of my imaginary adventures every day, that passed around the homeroom. Joan Laurencin told me I was going to be a real writer, she just knew it.
Were we modeling the addled, angry repressed grown-ups around us? Sure. And I couldn’t stand to be unpopular. I did terrible things to stay out of that hell. What a lousy excuse.
Susan Lord and I once sat down with a carton of cigarettes to smoke in one sitting and break us of our aversion to tobacco. I couldn’t even make it through one stick, without coughing in agony, but Susan kept on going until she threw up. What a champ. Yet the popular clique still kept her at bay. You could never win. Susan was the one who passed me “The Godfather” in the cloakroom and said, “Read page 27!”
When I eventually came back to LA, I’d never again meet a student who passed me a book, for any reason.
The great a-ha moment in Edmonton, 1971, was when a promoter came to Garneau handing out free tickets to see a band called Procol Harum play with our stodgy city symphony orchestra, at the Jubilee Auditorium. The middle of November.
I was dubious, but a couple of the older kids said, No, this is COOL. The promoters needed young people to come and fill the joint! I had never been inside the Jubilee before. I walked by it every day, staring at the giant ice sculptures that the Uni students would build every winter, skyhigh totems. When the northern lights would explode over our high latitudes, they glowed like incandescent giants.
Procol Harum proved to be our saviors. They showed every kid in Edmonton there was something on the other side of Nowheresville. Eat your heart out, Gastown!
The song that brought the Jubilee down was “Salty Dog.” Kids chanted the words with tears in their eyes, a song about the sea, lost at sea, not the Queen, just alone, us sailors, all of us, in Edmonton— Edmonton, Alberta!— where you couldn’t get out, landlocked and wasted and snow blind:
Upon the seventh seasick day
We made our port of call
A sand so white, and sea so blue
No mortal place at all
We fired the guns, and burned the mast
And rowed from ship to shore
The captain cried, we sailors wept
Our tears were tears of joy
Now many moons and many Junes
Have passed since we made land
A salty dog, the seaman's log
Your witness, my own hand
Comments today… I’ll see you below!
Where did you spend puberty? Do you know what happened to your “class”? Did your generation have uncommon and untimely loss? Did you drape dance?
I argued for Audible to open up a Canadian store for a long time. My bosses would say, “Sure, it’s big, but there’s hardly any people there.” And I would argue, “But they are ten times as literate as Americans! Books are still a “thing” in Canada!” Which I still stand by. And as you audio lovers know, I did open the Canadian Audible store, finally, a few years ago. What a wild tale THAT is. More soon . . .
I am hearing from so many friends, here and on FB, who are Canadian and have backgrounds in the prairie and oil fields and long lonely roads! My adult life in BC and Québec and Toronto is a whole ‘nother story and now you have me stoked to delve in!