Yep, those were the days!
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- Published on Tuesday, October 4, 2016
Photo courtesy of the Beautiful Plains archives. The CNR roundhouse, where Chicken Corral and McDonald’s are now located, holds memories for Cam Smith. He went there with his neighbour Alex Underwood, whose father worked on the steam engines.
By Rick Sparling
Neepawa Press
This is part two in a three part series about the places we loved growing up in Neepawa. It’s not just from my generation, but also from those younger and older. This week features mostly memories from Cam Smith.
Cam Smith: Our heroes
I remember the Salt Well picnics, where they held games and races for the kids of Salt Well employees. The Crabbe boys dominated most of the competitions. It was amazing how you could spend the whole day there. Thinking back, it seems like all the days were hot and sunny with very few rainy days. I guess it's human nature to remember the good days. We played baseball and soccer on the lawn in front of the creamery with Sparks (Rick Sparling), Jake (Ray Crabbe), Skinny (Ken Crabbe), Trev (Trevor Sinclair), Red,(Ed Fearns) and Garth King, to name a few. Every couple of times there, Mr. Boyle would come out and put the runs to us, but we'd be back the very next day.
I recall the July 1st celebrations with the main attraction being the baseball tournaments up at the fair grounds. We got five cents from the umpire for every foul ball we returned. There were some good fights for those balls. It was a mad scramble for sure as a nickel was hard to come by in those days. I remember watching guys like Duane Yerex, the McGormans, Bob Allen, Wayne Sparling, Howie Hawkins, Ed Sage, Red Stewart, Sam Doherty, Ed Crabbe, the McDannold brothers Roy and Lawrence, Clint McCurlie and Murray Kolesar, just to name a few, playing against teams like the Brandon Cloverleafs and the Transcona Atomics. All of those players were our heroes.
How about the Clyde Beatty Circus coming to Neepawa? Why they stopped and set up in Neepawa to this day I'll never know. They were a big time three ring circus production. They arrived in town via CP rail and unloaded at the north end of town. Their destination was the fair grounds and a bunch of us got jobs helping with the set up. It was amazing for us to watch them erecting the big top, as they used elephants to raise the huge poles. For our efforts, we got into the big top free, but from our vantage point, Clyde Beatty and his lions looked about 6 inches tall! What a rip-off.
“Flying” planes
Cam Smith continued: Alex Underwood, my next door neighbour, took me to the CNR roundhouse, where his dad worked on the steam engines. He took me for a ride on the old locomotive, out to the water tank and the coal dock getting the 'iron horses' ready for the morning runs. I remember taking our bikes out to the airport to play in the stripped down World War II training aircraft. We would pretend that we were flying these things. The imagination is a great thing.
Ray Crabbe interjected: Mr. Irvine (the dad of twins Ron and Don) had many of the leftover training aircraft from the British Commonwealth Air Training Program. They were situated in the large field adjacent to the Irvine's large brick house on 3rd Avenue, just up the street from our home. Some of them were incomplete aircraft, but none the less, we had a great time sitting in them and pretending we were pilots and were shooting down German aircraft! All of the airplanes were yellow and made of very light aluminum and covered in a cloth-like material. I believe they were de Havilland DH-82's and Harvards.
Memories of the drive-ins
Back to Smith: The Airline Drive-in was an enjoyable way to spend a summer evening.
I’ll never forget the night Thunder Road played there and the trip back into town. It’s a wonder John Kostenchuk and Geoff Pasquill, who were directing traffic at the highway, weren’t run over!
Gerry Suski chimed in: Barry (Tab) Hunter, Larry Novak and I would ‘sneak’ into the Drive-in to listen to Elvis songs whenever his movies were featured. We had a reel-to-reel tape recorder with a long cord reaching all the way to the concession stand for electricity. We recorded the Elvis songs. The girls who were with us were not happy, because we were spending more time with the Elvis songs than with them. This was the beginning of the Cascades, as we added Darwin Crabbe on drums and Teddy Greenhalgh on saxophone.
Evans Drive In stayed open until 2:00 a.m. So the kids would end up there after a night out or at a dance. Tony was good to the kids. He gave some good advice and even gave us jobs there. I worked there flipping burgers and serving gas for a while. We never showed Tony the sign we made, which said, “Eat here and get gassed.”
Extremely lucky times
Back to Smith: The opening of the Aggassiz Drive-In was a big time thing. Especially for the teenagers. They had great food and probably the best milkshakes around. You could take the lid off and turn them upside down with nothing coming out, they were nice and thick. I helped build the drive-in as I worked that summer for Ollie Ramstead and Lorne Kines. Tim Bolton endorses the Aggassiz as the place to be once you were operating a car. I remember Saturday nights and how the town was alive with wall-to-wall people.
I’d love to find a picture showing those crowds on the streets. The Arcade was always going full tilt every Saturday night. I consider those of us growing up in the ‘50s and ‘60s to have experienced extremely lucky times. I remember getting ice delivered by the ice man for our ice box, coal for the furnace, milk by the milk man and filling the old wood stove in the kitchen. We had no TV for half of my youth, but listened to Sunday night radio playing the likes of Boston Blackie and Amos and Andy (Ed Bergun and Charlie McCarthy). I remember one Saturday night in the mid ‘50s, standing in a crowd with my dad, George Smith, watching Hockey Night in Canada on a TV in front of Smith & Anderson Electric (Sorry Sparks). In those days, the closest TV station was Winnipeg and the reception was at best… poor. George Graham (Wafer’s dad) said to my dad, “Well what do you think about this, George?” My dad replied, “Hockey on television will never catch on because the puck moves too fast.” He lived to prove himself wrong on that one. People of my age have lived from before television through to the Internet. We have seen the most change of any generation to date.
Interjection from Rick Sparling: I remember my mom and I listened every Sunday night to “Ask the Pastor” and recall Bertha Rand, “the cat lady”, always calling in. Also people would come over to our place to watch TV. It didn’t matter what the program was because it was such a novelty back in the mid ‘50s.
“Cruising”
Back to Smith: The many Halloween nights and all of the pranks we pulled off. Trick or Treating as younger kids and as teens, egg throwing at the police and the ‘special force’ they deputized. Remembering Freshie Days and who you would be a subordinate to. Going to country dances and following the local group, The Cascades. The two movies, Stand by Me and American Graffiti, remind me so much of growing up in Neepawa.
Interjection from Gerry once again: The best was “cruising” on a Saturday night, or any night for that matter. The traffic was bumper to bumper and you would pass the same cars over and over. Neepawa had the best looking girls anywhere and it was a challenge to convince them to come for a ride in your car. I eventually caught one!
All the guys riding with you would toss in 25 cents each for gas which would move the gauge up from below empty to empty. When the gas was gone, you just parked on the corner by the Bamboo and various groups of kids would go in and out of your car, “talking ‘bout cars and dreaming ‘bout women” as the song goes.
A second interjection from Tim Bolton: The Aggassiz Drive-In was the spot to turn around during the cruise and head back to the loop’s end either at Viscount School or Johnny Roco’s gas station.
Photo courtesy of the Beautiful Plains archives. Cruising the streets of Neepawa was a popular activity for teens growing up in the ‘50s and ‘60s.
Making money
We picked stones and bailed for the local farmers in the summer in order to make some spending money. Harold Ishenberg and the Nagle brothers are two who come to mind. There would be about five or six of us all sitting on a flatbed trailer being pulled around the field by a tractor for the stone picking expeditions. You would have to jump off the trailer and pick up a rock, maybe weighing as much as up to 20 or 30 lbs and hoist them up on the flatbed and then jump on until the next stone or rock. When the axle started to bend, the farmer would ride over to the slough where all of the stones were dumped.
We looked forward to our lunch break, normally after four hours of hard work. The Mrs. usually prepared great lunches, which we all looked forward to ...not as much as the end of the day though! A Saturday picking stones would give us enough money to last the next week or two, which normally was spent at the pool room or the cafes. We made a dollar an hour. You could buy a coke for a dime and a game of snooker for 25 cents.
Back to Smith: Butter buns at the Bamboo or Jam busters at Hurrells on Saturdays were something we looked forward to. Sitting as quiet as church mice watching some of the local pros, such as Pat Lord, Bruce Pedlar or Frank Bird play English Billiards at Pedlar’s Pool Room. The Santa Claus Parade on Saturday afternoon with people lined shoulder to shoulder on the main drag.
Common sounds included the 9:00 a.m. and the 6:00 p.m. Town siren and the 5:00 p.m. Salt Plant whistle, as well as Boxer Hole shooting pigeons off the roof of the court house.
I had my driver’s test done by John Kosmolak and got my first driver’s license issued by Mabel Thomson. We had bread delivered to the house by first Stu Lindsay and his horse, “Cy”, and later by a van driven by Bill Crabbe. Those were the days you could leave your milk bottle out on the front step with money and never worry about it going missing. Yep, those were the days!
Memories of tobogganing
Back to Sparling: We had many great days at the various toboggan hills in town. Ray Crabbe tells of “Cardboard Hill,” which was immediately south of the Legion. There’s now a street at that location. It was an underdeveloped hill that was great in the winter for sliding on cardboard. I recall many Saturday and Sunday afternoons being spent gathering large sheets of cardboard from boxes “removed” from the back alley of the stores on Mountain Avenue and heading out to Cardboard Hill for the day. The hill was fairly steep and with two people on a sheet, we could attain a pretty good head of steam. I can recall there were many kids there, especially on a Sunday afternoon. The explanation of the use of cardboard was quite simple....We couldn’t afford a sleigh or toboggan!
“Post Office Hill”, now Team Electronics, was always filled with kids with sleighs, toboggans, bobsleds and cardboard and was used every weekend throughout the winter. Ray recalls that Bruce Wiseman had one of the biggest and fastest bobsleds in Neepawa and it was a real treat to get a ride on a multi-seater. This was the hill where Cam Smith had some fun.
He had heard that if you polished the bottom of your toboggan, it would slide much more efficiently, so he asked his mom if she had some polish or wax and she gave him some wax to apply. He took off from the top of the hill and he was going hell bent for election, when he hit a small bump. He went one way and the toboggan went the other way and he ran into a frozen clump of dirt. His toboggan carried on clear across the flats and he had to make his way almost to Al Whillerton’s to retrieve it, then try to haul it back up the hill and back home, limping the entire way.
“McDougall’s Hill” was on Emma Street, just a block south of the town hill. Of course, the slope was the same as the town hill, but there were things to navigate around. Looking at it now, it would be impossible to go down.
There was another hill we used that was just north of the town hill in where the East View Lodge once sat. I don’t think we had a name for that hill, but I remember using it quite often.
Tim Bolton thinks the best hill was that one and even after the lodge was built, you could still use the spot in front of Neepawa’s town sign and also below Roy and Betty Thomas’ house. The yellow house at the top of the hill.
Ron Kleven recalls tobogganing on the slope at the start of Park Lake road on first Avenue, but it wasn’t much for speed. If it was a ski run, it would have been labelled as a “bunny hill.”
I think we used some of these hills for our bicycle “Evel Knievel” tricks in the summer as well.
I do distinctly remember going down a trail in behind Nels Hawkins’ house, with no regard for the trees, bushes or whatever else was in the way. I’m fairly certain we came out of there with cuts, bruises and damages to our bikes.
It had absolutely no rules
Another game we played where there was not much regard for our safety was “Kill or be Killed”. It was a game similar to Aussie style football, only it had absolutely no rules. Just get the ball away from the other team at all costs. No one went home after these games unscathed! The Court yard was our favourite spot to play that game.
The other game I remember playing was held in Hunt’s basement, below the old Eaton’s Catalogue store... The Rifle Club, at one time, used this room as a rifle range, so it was long and narrow. We would choose sides, maybe four or five to a team, shut the lights out and you had to get to the opposing team’s end. You didn’t know who you were bumping into and after about 10 minutes, the lights were put back on to see who made it. Sometimes you’d be wrestling or holding back your own team mate.
See next week’s paper for the final part of this three part series.
