Interview with Tony Cashman

Excerpt of Interview with Tony Cashman, Edmonton writer and local historian
Conducted by Linda Goyette, March 26, 2002

Brief biography:

Tony Cashman was born in Edmonton in 1923. His grandfather, Sam Gorman, a Chicago businessman, travelled to Edmonton in 1906, and brought his wife and seven children to settle here. Tony’s mother, Helen Cashman, was a writer for the Journal and a teacher; his father, a mining engineer, died at 40. Helen Cashman raised her sons as a single parent during the Depression. Her brother, George Gorman, was a noted bush pilot in the early years of Edmonton aviation, and young Tony admired these barnstormers and World War I flying aces who made a strong impression on him. [Wop May, Grant McConachie, Punch Dickins] became heroes partly because they lived in his neighbourhood. His uncle George Gorman made the first commercial air flight in Alberta, in an open biplane, delivering the June 10, 1919 Edmonton Journal to Wetaskiwin.
Tony Cashman served in the air force overseas during the Second World War. He later became a news reporter for Edmonton radio stations. On his own initiative, he began researching local history stories for CJCA, including a long-running series The Edmonton Story. These stories were later published in hugely popular anthologies in the 1950s and 1960s. Tapes of the broadcasts can be heard at www.edmontonhistory.ca. Tony Cashman has published more books on Edmonton and Alberta than any other writer; all of these books can be found at the Edmonton Public Library. Tony continues to write well into his eighties. For more biographical information on Tony Cashman, see the Afterword of his book, Edmonton: Stories from River City



[This transcription is an excerpt of a much longer interview. Comments within square brackets are summaries of Tony’s comments. Readers will note missing excerpts. Tape was not clear, so some portions are missing.]

LG: When the Second World War hit, did you sign up right away?

TC: I was just 16. I've always wanted to fly. My uncle George [Gorman] was in Wop May's department, the first from the city of Edmonton. [Wop May, the former bush pilot, led a military unit during the war as a flight trainer in Edmonton. Gorman had flown with him on his first airmail delivery flight to Wetaskiwin.]

..My uncle spent a year on Imperial Oil trying to fly down north and succeeded except it was such a pretty cost that Charlie Taylor, the banker, committed suicide. [Taylor] was a mercurial type and he was on a river boat coming back from Fort McMurray and he suddenly got on the deck with a rifle and was threatening to shoot anyone who came near him and shot himself. My uncle had four crashes in eight months in the same plane and he was married (laughing). So my aunt persuaded him to find something else to do. Wop May kept at it though.


LG: Were Wop May and your uncle, George, your heroes when you were a kid?

TC: Oh I thought were nine feet tall. Moving back here to Edmonton, [the famous bush pilots of the 1920s] lived in the neighborhood. [at that time Edmonton’s west end, off 124th Street.] I was surprised when I was fifteen years old or so to learn that they were ordinary men..

LG: Do you think more Edmonton men joined the RCAF during the Second World War because of Edmonton's strong bush pilot aviation history earlier?

LG: So tell me when you joined up.

TC: September of 1942. We were in Saskatoon at first. …We were supposed to be guarding against saboteurs, and in the initial training, we rounded up in Saskatoon, we spent 12 hours mangling tire marks at Prince Albert. The way they got navigators, washed up bush pilots in Grande Prairie, that was interesting.
I've always enjoyed navigation. It takes a great deal of concentration. You're just relying and condensing it to fit on a map.


LG: When did you go overseas?
TC: It was February of '44. I went in the squadron of November of '44.

LG: What do you call the bombing assignments


TC: Ops, short for operations. The Americans called them missions. We felt it was pretentious (laughing). Unfortunately, we were attached to the Royal Air Force. The R.C.A.F. was plenty new at it, and kind of uptight, but the R.A. F. [had been] at it for a long time and they were eccentrics. The R.C.A.F. was very nervous about eccentrics


LG: How did your unit become end up being associated with the R.A.F.? …

TC: The RAF had a lot of senior officials, experienced people, squadron commanders, and flight commanders. Mostly older. They needed bodies, a lot from Canada and New Zealand and Australia in this particular squadron, from almost every country. A lot of Americans too.
. [Showing photographs] This is one of the planes in the squadron. Here, that's the radio operator and that's my pilot.


LG: Was there anybody from Alberta in that squadron that you remember?

TC: Our [unclear] was from Cochrane. He was 29. He was Pops.

[Missing portion on war service and experiences.]

LG: When did you get back to Edmonton? What did you do?

TC: It must have been in June of '49. I went to Notre Dame University [in Indiana] in the U.S. the guest of the grateful country. That's how most of us got into university in those days.
I haven't met a GI from the states that didn't take advantage of that. [Free university education for Second World War veterans] revolutionized society and raised everybody up.

LG: What did you study there? Did you study history?

It was a mixed bag. I went as a mature student and the solution was that if you were a mature student they put you in all the courses. So I got on Victorian literature and the U.S. constitution and a lot of things. I had three years coming.

LG: Why did you go there and not the U of A?

TC: It was sort of a family tradition. My uncle Tony, he grew up here and Chicago, and he went there and he started hockey at Notre Dame and he was the only Canadian and started hockey there.


LG: Did you come back here after you graduated? What was your first job when you got back?
TC: I was at CFRN for a year.


LG: Did you ever consider print journalism at the time, working for the Journal or the Bulletin?

TC: No. I was about to go down at the Bulletin, but they fired the managing editor. Then I was talking to Don McDougall and he was interested, but then the job at CFRN came along. I always liked radio.

LG: You probably wouldn't have been paid very much.

TC: $135 a month Even for then, that wasn't much of a wage. And you married right away?
We got married in 1950. Veva had to give up her job, she was an assistant city clerk and married women couldn't work for the city at the time. It was sort of a hangover from the Depression and it wasn't considered fair. Of course, a lot of women got married and just didn't broadcast it, and nobody investigated. They would put no pictures in the paper as engagement announcements.

[Insert: Obituary for Veva Cashman, Edmonton Journal, December, 2005]
CASHMAN, Veva
Veva, beloved travelling companion of Tony Cashman, passed away December 22.
Veva leaves her husband of 55 years, sons Hal, Bernard and Paul (Laurel), grandchildren Helen, Erin and Paul, great-grandchildren Sierra and Thalia Petke, brother Ted Costello (Wilma) of Calgary, and many beloved nieces, nephews and friends. She was predeceased by her parents Harold Costello and Mary Ryan, and sisters Margaret and Rachael. Veva was born in Thunder Bay in 1922. In 1936 her family moved to Edmonton from Killaloe, Ont. Graduating from St. Mary's High School, Veva enjoyed a ten-year career with the City of Edmonton. In 1945, at 23, she was named acting city clerk while the clerk was on holidays, the first woman to hold the position. In 1950 she exchanged that career for a busy family life, making a home and baking bread for three boys, typing manuscripts for Tony, maintaining a keen interest in the city, and travelling everywhere by bus. She never drove. Eventually she was able to travel far and wide. She was at ease in strange cities and countries where English is a second language. A smile, eye contact and body language could communicate anything. Cathedrals and castles were always of less interest than people. She enjoyed every scene, from the noisy humbug of Las Vegas to the rest and relaxation of the west coast of Ireland. In her last, often trying years, her spirit never grew old. Prayers on Thursday, December 29, at 7:00 p.m., at Connelly-McKinley Funeral Home, 10011 114th Street. A Mass of Christian Burial will be held Friday, December 30, at 10:00 a.m. at St Agnes Catholic Church, 10826 62nd Avenue, Father Tesfu Kelati officiating, with a private family interment at St. Anthony Cemetery. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the Alberta Council of Women's Shelters, Alex Taylor School, 9321 Jasper Avenue, Edmonton, AB, T5H 3T7.


LG: So when did you move over to CJCA?

TC: In 1950. CFRN was a bit highbound. Dick Rice was a wonderful guy, but had very [limited vision], and English ideas. CJCA just had more of an opportunity. Starting something like Edmonton Story couldn't have happened at CFRN.


LG: Tell me about CJCA when you first started, what kind of place was it?

TC: The station was on the top floor of the Birks Building on Jasper. It was the station in Edmonton. CBC wasn't much of a presence then.CJCA was the one station for the whole prairies. There were some wonderful voices, Paul [Yales], Keith [Rich], Jack Wilson. They made it sound like today's station in a much bigger place.


LG: When I listened to your broadcasts on tape, the sound of the station sounded more sophisticated than it would be on the radio now. More articulate. So were the people in cramped quarters?

TC: We had half the fourth floor. Quite a location, Bergstrom’s downstairs, Thompson and Dimes which became Holt Renfrew. They were the big fashion place as I understand it and there was the Cecil Hotel nearby…


LG: A bit more upbeat in those days?
TC: laughing) Well, yes.


LG: Was the Cecil the watering hole for all the people working at CJCA?

TC: Yes. The announcers used to go there. It was kind of difficult for some of the women. They couldn't go in. [Due to liquor laws barring women from taverns without an escort.] They had to get somebody, and to go over and haul out Paul (laughing). It was a broadcasters' club and we still have lunch twice a year, once in the spring, once in the fall. The old-timers, Earl [Shawn?] and [Hottey?] and [Roeicks?]. Somebody like Peggy Miller - she used to write all the Eskimos' stories - she knew what all the guys were up to because she was always trying to track them down.


LG: You wrote news stories. Any big news stories you remember at that time? Were you only responsible for preparing broadcasts on local news?

TC: It was a combination. On weekends, there wasn't much local news because the courts were closed and city hall was shut down.

LG: Did you have to go out and cover city hall and the courts?
TC: For the first couple of years, I was doing a combination of both. From 1954 to 1961 I was working outside, started with the cops in the morning. [He would do “police checks” to report on overnight arrests and ongoing investigations.]


LG: Did you take a tape recorder with you or did you just take the notes and do a voice over?
TC: We got a tape recorder in '55 or '56, but...

LG: So mostly, you would go out with a notebook to city courts and city hall?

TC: We would phone in a lot of stories. CFRN had the first tape recorder, but it wasn't a tape recorder, it was a wire. A long wire. It used to work okay until it broke. [Laughter] …The spring on the wind-up phonograph was called a wire. Then tapes came in, but the wind-up phonograph always broke...]


LG: I don't know what the biggest news stories would have been back in those years, city hall stories?
LG. It was a very upbeat time because of the Leduc oil strike. And everything was turning around. We were coming out of an Arctic winter in economics. From 1914 until 1940 when the war was started, there was a deep chill. A lot of people were convinced that as soon as the war was over, the Depression was going to come back worse than ever. In fact C.D. Howe held up the start of the TransCanada Highway for 11 years because he was convinced that the Depression was going to come back.

[In Edmonton, the oil boom after 1948 lifted people’s confidence.] And of course the success of the Edmonton Eskimos [who won upset victories in the Grey Cup games of the early 1950s.] It's hard for people now to realize how much that event meant to the psyche of the city, and having the great comfort of the Macdonald Hotel.


LG: Maybe it compares to the early years of all those Oiler victories? Was it that kind of spirit?

TC: It was even more than that. Most of the players were locals...

LG: You had started broadcasting Edmonton stories on CJCA by then…Did you feel more interested in telling these stories on the air than on your regular job as a reporter?

TC: The two went together. The current news explained the past and the past illuminated what was going on. I never felt there was any separation between them.

LG: Did you write these stories down at the station or did you write them at home?
TC: At home, after my regular shift.


LG: You published them fairly soon after you started writing them. From '51 to '56. And you continued to write them after you left the broadcasting business, didn't you?

TC: It lasted about 10 years. By that time, I had spent six months in Europe. In Edmonton was so much boosterism that the young just didn't recognize that there were a lot of things going on that should be reported.

LG: Sounds very familiar to me, Mr. Cashman... [laughter]
TC: I went to the Rotary Club one day to hear a speaker. He was a young grad student from New Haven, Conn. and he was explaining about why every place in South America plans out their own revolutions. In South American countries there were no constitutions and the only way to change the government was through the revolution. And the Journal thought that was too incendiary to print.

LG: You were out there listening that day for CJCA?

TC: Yes. I wrote the story and thought it was very interesting. But the Journal thought it was too incendiary…

LG: What did you do after that six months?

TC: The program director at CKUA was having a row with administration so I was at CKUA for about nine years as program director. And then AGT [Alberta Government Telephones] was getting concerned about its history. They had a fellow named Bill Bruce. He had been the general manager and he quit because he was making $5000 a year and he wanted $6000. And they told him if they gave him a raise, they'd have to raise all the equities and so Bill quit and he just hunted and curled. And when they had a historical question they just phoned Bill. But when he had a heart attack, curling, they thought that they better get all these telephone stories written down. So I spent four years doing that. I was working here and there was no time.

LG: Did they pay you while they did this?
TC: Yes. They were also developing the museum on the 33rd floor [of the AGT Tower which later became the Telus tower, at the corner of 100th Street and Jasper], which the idiots shut down.


LG: It was wonderful place, it was lovely. I remember it. I forgot to ask you what brought you from CJCA to the Journal?

TC: The station got a new manager and they got all the local news from the The Journal so I figured I should get out of here. I quite enjoyed it, especially some of the stories that I was able to work on. I wrote a story when they discovered iron in the Peace River country, and I spent a lot of time with [?],they were quite happy with those stories. It was a good bunch and Ron Hayter was there [the reporter later became a veteran city councilor.] Ron was fired.


LG: For rabblerousing, for union organizing?.The three men who were fired?
TC: They always claimed they had nothing to do with it.


LG: They told me that very recently too.

TC: They all headed out to Vancouver.

LG: Now we can go back to AGT. You were there for four years writing a book, but how long were you at AGT all together?
TC: About 14 years. When I hit 60 I gave up working.


LG: So to speak!
TC: That was 19 years ago. Best decision I ever made (laughing).

LG: Thank goodness, though, because then you worked on your other projects. [Books and plays; aviation history research]
TC: The fortunate thing is that I didn't have to take on something I didn't want to do, like writing [former mayor] Bill Hawrelak's memoirs.
…
LG: So tell me what you thought about Mr. Hawrelak?
TC: He was a very able fellow in politics, but he wasn't heavily concerned with the rules…
[Unfortunately, tape is indecipherable after this point]