Summer Days in the Raymond Hotel, on Whyte Avenue, 1948, by Leslie Aitken

Leslie Aitken recalls six weeks in the summer of 1948 when her family lived at the aging, formerly lavish Raymond Hotel on Whyte Avenue. Leslie describes her activities in the surrounding area and her fear during a polio outbreak. Then eight years old,

For six weeks in the summer of 1948, my family resided at 10445 Whyte Avenue: the Raymond Hotel. The place was an antique. In 1894, it had been a fancy three-story, wooden affair with a verandah and tiered balconies. At that time, it was furnished with fine linens and silverware, French chenille draperies, oak bedroom and dining room pieces, and even an upright grand piano. But all of these lovely appointments had been auctioned off in 1917 and after that the hotel went downhill. By the time we got there even the verandah and balconies had been removed.


We entered the small, dark vestibule from the street. To the left, was a brown door labeled "Office." My brother, Dick, and I tiptoed past that door very quietly because the white-haired, grim-lipped woman behind that door was a power to be reckoned with. Was she the landlord? The manager? The caretaker? We children were not sure, but we did know that our family's presence in this place depended on her perception that we were quiet and mannerly, seen and not heard.


This was the time of the post-war housing shortage in Edmonton: World War II servicemen had returned, the baby boom had begun, and oil had just been discovered in Leduc. Landlords could choose their clientele and children were not their first choice.


Three feet from the office door was the telephone, a wall-mounted 1920's model with an adjustable mouthpiece, a dangling earpiece, and a small rotary dial. It terrified me. I had lived my young life in country places without a phone, speaking to people face-to-face as nature intended. My mother, however, insisted that I learn to use the telephone. Climbing on a chair so that I could reach the mouthpiece, I trembled while she dialed Libby my only city friend.


"Hello," I shouted into the large, black Bakelite mouthpiece.


"Hi, Bunny," said a voice in the small, black ear horn.


What to say next? Lacking visual cues, body language, and most of all experience, I felt tongue-tied. My mind went blank. Standing there flummoxed and mute, I heard my friend complain, "She won't say anything, Ma. You talk to her!"


My brother remembers that our suite was on a landing halfway between the ground and second floors. (Perhaps, it began life as a dining room or bar.) What I recall is the creak of stairs, and the dimness of stairwells that led both to our apartment and to the third floor, where in the coming fall my father and brother would reside during the weekdays. Because Dad was working in the city, and Dick was preparing to take grade nine at Queen Alexandra School, the Raymond Hotel would be their "town house." On the weekends, they would come home to Sandy Lake where my mother taught in a one-room school.


I should clarify, because Sandy Lake is a popular place name in Alberta, that our Sandy Lake distinguished itself by having no lake. In the hollows of the surrounding farm fields, however, the spring melt formed shallow sloughs in which we children dabbled. Lacking a lake we also lacked sand. When it rained, thick black gumbo attached itself, weighty and hoof-like, to our rubber boots.


Sandy Lake was just twelve miles southeast of Edmonton, about halfway between the present communities of Mill Woods and Beaumont. Today, the roads from there to Edmonton are paved, plowed, and frequented like city streets. In 1948, however, they were narrow, graveled, rural roads. When it rained or snowed, a false turn of the steering wheel sent you off into the ditch. Drivers carried tire chains and shovels, but even these could fail you in a bad storm.


Once, during a spring blizzard, my dad had become stranded on that road. He had abandoned the car, making his way home on foot across the fields, plunging through the icy crust of the snow, sinking below his knees with every step. We didn't even know he was out there. We heard a crash at the back door and when we opened it, he slumped to the floor, exhausted.

After that, the family budget was rearranged so that Dad could afford to stay in town during foul weather. But for six weeks, while Mum was taking summer school courses from the Faculty of Education, we all stayed together in the suite between floors.

I remember its layout as a walked path. As you entered, the bathroom door was to your right. You made an immediate left turn to avoid the sharp corner of the kitchen counter, which backed on to the bathroom. Beyond the counter, in the corner was a large gas range that smelled like a family of skunks.

"Has that pilot light gone out?" was a constant question on my parents' lips.

Matches were kept at the ready beside the stove. I see in my mind's eye their curled black ends lying in tiny heaps in the burner cups. Those were the failed matches; it always took several attempts to get the gas rings evenly ignited because the holes in them were clogged. I recall the hiss and pop of the gas as it pushed past the crud on the rings and caught fire.

With your back to the stove, you took two steps to the white, wooden table beneath the window, beyond which there was a dim, warm light and a dingy wall. We left the window open, partly because of the fickle pilot light and partly because it was warm and airless in our rooms. Mum sat at the end of the table nearest the stove, so she could serve. My brother sat opposite her, on the arm of the Winnipeg couch that encroached on his end of the table. Dad and I sat side by side along the extended leaf. Here we were at a high point in the room-quite literally-because the floors sagged in many directions. Their slope and swell comes back to me as a bodily sensation, the feel of sea legs. I see Dick's boyhood face laughing as we roll our pennies from the highest to the lowest corner of the room.


Walking through a fairly wide space between the couch and an easy chair, you turned left again to get to my parents' bedroom. I slept there on some sort of cot; Dick slept on the couch. Thinking back, I realize that our rooms must have been shabby and cramped, but at the time, I was indifferent to their deficiencies because my brother and I spent our days traipsing about in Old Strathcona.


It was a delight just to be on concrete sidewalks. They were vastly superior to muddy paths or gopher-ridden fields for skipping, bouncing balls, and riding bicycles. The only game that did not go well on a concrete sidewalk was blind man's buff. I was supposed to walk along with a scarf tied around my eyes and my hand on my brother's shoulder relying utterly on him for my progress and safety. To test me, he suddenly zigzagged. I panicked and bolted, fortunately not into the traffic on Whyte Avenue, but rather into the marble-faced corner of the Bank of Commerce. The bank is still there. So is the scar on my forehead.


That painful episode aside, life on Whyte Avenue was life on the other side of a magic door. Just a few doors west and across 105th Street was the Strathcona Post Office. With its brick and stone exterior and elegant clock tower, it seemed like a fairy tale castle to me. Short blocks away were the Mello Moor Ice Cream factory, Tipton Park, and the Strathcona Library. And along the avenue were little shops in which I pondered how to spend my weekly allowance, which was raised that summer from a dime to a quarter.

It is hard to pick a favorite from among our Old Strathcona haunts. Tipton Park overwhelmed me with its possibilities. Playtime on the Sandy Lake school grounds was spent either on the baseball diamond (if you were a big kid) or climbing the poplar trees (if you were a little kid, like I was). Tipton Park had a choice of swings, slides, seesaws, and monkey bars. There was also a clubhouse with a playground supervisor who taught crafts. I learned how to fill a greased paper bowl with plaster of Paris to make a plaque. To this day, I still fill Styrofoam meat trays with concrete mix to make my own garden blocks.

In sultry weather, the Queen Elizabeth Swimming Pool was little short of delicious. To reach it we walked well past the Strathcona Library and across Saskatchewan Drive, descending a long flight of stairs into the park at riverside below. I doubt that anyone strolling on the French Riviera has taken more delight in the gleam and sparkle of water than I took in the vision of that blue and chlorinated pool. For a child used to to sloughs, to be immersed in crystal clear water through which one could actually see one's toes was an enchantment.


We generally got our money's worth out of a morning swim pass, staying until the pool was cleared out at noon. I didn't learn to swim that summer, but I did learn to hold my breath, which was just as well, for even in the shallow end I was chest deep. I never had a mishap though; unless you count the day that I lost my underwear in the locker room. It was a significant loss because my typical attire was a two-piece garment of my mother's design: a knee-length sundress and matching underpants (in case I stood on my head). Though I searched and searched, I finally had to confide my loss to my brother.

"It's okay," he said. "We'll go straight home. Just don't run or jump around."

I walked sedately up the long staircase, across Saskatchewan Drive and down 104th Street. Then we reached the library. Here it was my habit to race up the stone-faced steps and slide down the wide, smooth banisters. In recent years, some killjoy has plastered those banisters with mortar and sharp rocks, but back then they were marble-like. Old habits die hard.

I heard Dick yell, "Bunny, get off there!" But it was too late. In front of an astonished crowd, I made my descent, sundress billowing about my waist: no cares, no caution, and no underpants.


Near the end of the summer, the Queen Elizabeth Swimming Pool was closed and the Tipton Park became off limits because of an outbreak of polio in the city. The world awaited the Salk vaccine; meanwhile, the wisdom of the time suggested avoiding the disease by avoiding crowds.


A further caution had lodged itself in my brain: avoid flies. I don't know who else believed the fly to be a host for the poliovirus, but I did. It became a fixation. Flies buzzed in and out the open window of our suite, making me vaguely paranoid. One particular fly became my obsession. Some days earlier, it had landed on a wild raspberry, which I had plucked and eaten on the way home from the polio-infested park. Clearly, it was a carrier fly, landing on that raspberry with a load of germs.


Confined to the Raymond Hotel with a stack of comic books, I brooded. Despite the open window, the room was very hot. I felt my forehead; it was a little hotter than the rest of me. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed that I had a headache. The leg that I had tucked up under me while reading was now tingling; it was possible that it had gone to sleep, but it was also possible that it was becoming paralyzed. I thought my back felt stiff. My general malaise seemed to be intensifying with every passing minute. By the time my mother got home from classes, I was ready to be put to bed with an array of suspicious symptoms. And because I was still reporting the entire syndrome when Dad got home, my parents called the doctor.


I lay in bed awaiting his arrival, turning over in my mind all that I knew about polio. It could make you sick for a very long time. It could cripple you. It could kill you.


I rued the day that I had ever seen that raspberry. In vain I searched my memory, unable to recall whether or not I had wiped the darn thing clean on my sundress. At last, the doctor came. He said I didn't have it. I didn't even have a fever. But I should be watched. It felt like a reprieve. I vowed that I would never eat unwashed berries again. I think I've kept that vow.


Summer in the city ended. Mum and I went back to spend another year in Sandy Lake. Dad and Dick spent the year 'bach-ing" together in the Raymond Hotel and coming home on weekends. The next summer, we left Sandy Lake and moved into Edmonton.


Our new home was far from Whyte Avenue. We never again set foot in the Raymond Hotel. It vanished, apparently burned down in the late 1960's, to be replaced by an Esso station, which in turn has been demolished. Where the Raymond Hotel stood there is now nothing but a few contaminated city lots surrounded by hoardings.


So, I can't go back, not physically anyway. I can't return to its dark vestibule to stare down the manager or shout down the intimidating telephone. I can't walk its dim and creaking stairs or roll a penny across its floors in tribute to a childhood pastime. I'll never know if those hissing, popping, gas stoves were ever replaced or if, perhaps, they eventually brought the place down. I will never have an adult's view of that hotel, though adult logic suggests to me that it was shabby.


But it was magical, too. It was my introduction to Old Strathcona. It was a portal to a world of urban delights. It was where I was at eight, when the sense of one's own chronology comes alive, and the understanding of one's own time in history begins to bud. I stepped across its threshold into life in the city and it was memorable.