Oil well fire of Labour Day weekend, 1948, by Bob Davies
Date: September 6, 1948
Our family moved away from this general area in l944, but I continued to return to McCauley school for my grades 8 and 9, and graduated from it in June of l946. Some break-up of the group resulted when I chose to go McDougall Commercial High School, while the others went to Victoria High School. Being members of the Edmonton Schoolboys Band helped keep us together.
During the summer of l948 I had a job delivering groceries for a store in that area, at 95 th Street and l09th Avenue. I managed to stay in close touch over the summer, and so it was that on the Labour Day weekend, prior to my starting my grade l2 year, our little group was lazying around with no real plan of action, when the oil well at Leduc caught fire. This of course required some action on our part, but just what action we didn't know. Here is where my memory is a bit cloudy. I had just turned l7, while some of the others were nearing their 18 th birthday, or had already turned l8. One of the older boys had access to his dad's car, and had a driver's license. The car was about a l930 Buick, or Essex, or some large make, Coupe, with a 'rumble-seat'. I remember the car having a small door just ahead of the rear fender, which was where you put your set of golf clubs. We decided to take a trip to see the fire. It was a beautiful warm fall evening as we left the city and headed south on the Calgary Trail. We had heard, or possibly just expected, that the roads into the area would be closed to traffic, so we turned onto a side road about a mile or two north of the fire. We could see the fire like a beacon guiding us towards it. Across the fields of stubble grain we hiked, the stubble making crisp, crackling sounds with every step. As we got closer to the fire the ground seemed to become soggy and sticky and slippery. I don't remember if it was mud from earlier rains, or whether it might have been oil that had blown up into the air and then had the wind blow the spray some distance from the well. I remember that we decided it was too difficult to keep walking so we stopped about a quarter of a mile (I'm guessing now) from the fire and just watched it for a while, and then turned to retrace our path back to the car.
It was now nearing midnight and the temperature had fallen a bit. Because the day had been so nice, and with no expectation of being out after midnight, I don't think any of us had jackets. There were 5 or 6 of us on this trip and with 3 inside the coupe, (it had a floor-mounted gear shift lever so that was all you could get inside) it meant that 2 or 3 had to ride in the rumble-seat. What had been a pleasant ride out from town, buoyed with the expected thrill of seeing a major disaster, turned into a shivering experience for me and whoever else it was that was in the rumble-seat, as the cool evening air and the wind blowing past and around us almost froze us. Looking back on it now, I realize that 2 of my closest friends have passed away, but that those were happy days then, pleasant memories now.
Others in the group might have included, Bob Riddle, Ron Smith, Murdo Allnutt, Terry Spence, Jim Lindsay, George Koyitch, Peter Gunn, Tommy Gunn, Teddy Duncan.