Growing Up in Old Strathcona, by Ruth Williams

I became a died in the wool South-Sider when our family moved from the West end of Edmonton to the South side. We could call it Old Strathcona, I suppose. We moved from one rented house to another one. The year was 1919 and I would be six years old that fall. Mum and Dad had found a larger house to rent. It was a three-storey yellow brick house, completed finished. My sister Margie was four years old that summer. I remember that my Dad was not looking forward to having to drive back and forth over the High Level Bridge every working day.


How I loved that house! Our address was 8701 - 104 Street. It was a particularly lovely street. Even that it had a centre boulevard from 83 Avenue to Saskatchewan Drive. Our house was exactly one block from the wooden steps to the South Side Park. Each side of those two blocks was lined with some very lovely old homes. In those days people would pass our house on their way to the park to listen to an open-air band concert or to have a picnic. Whenever we saw someone we knew, we would run and sit on our front steps, so that they would know that we lived there. On the front of the house Dad had a moose head mounted. He used to go hunting each fall.


Two years later, our younger sister was born. Dad had been counting on a son, and had already decided to call him Bill. But it was not to be. Dad called the new baby Bill before he knew that he had a third daughter. Mum and Dad had to find a girl's name to go with Bill. So our younger sister was named Wilma Jean, but we call her Little Bill, after Dad.


It was a great place for us to grow up. The house was on a double lot. There was room for a skating rink between our house and the next one in the winter. Of course, Dad had a garden planted there each summer.


The next block south of us was empty. So it wasn't too long until the kids began to play ball there. That was my Dad's 'piece of cake'. He loved to knock out flies to the kids who would gather there. I remember one time two boys who lived across the street came knocking at our door and asked if Mr. Freeman could come out to play. Dad knew the kids by name, and as he hit the ball he would call the name of the one it was meant for.


We would gather under the streetlight to play quite a variety of games. Kick the Can; Run Sheep Run; Red Light; Anti-I-Over. One winter, my dad and our next door neighbor, Mr. H. G. McDonald decided to get together and build a slide for winter use. Mr. McDonald had the expertise as he was the city architect. My Dad bought the lumber, and Mr. McDonald's crew built the slide in our back yard. The neighborhood kids brought their sleighs or toboggans, and great fun was had by all. We climbed up about eight easy steps built against the back of our house, dragging a sleigh, and then shot down and out into our backyard. By the way, Mr. McDonald was the architect who built King Edward School, as well as others like it around the city.


Did you know that the streetcars ran in Edmonton at that time? They came across to the South Side by means of tracks that ran on the very top of the High Level Bridge. The tracks ran along Whyte Avenue. There were spots for transferring if you wanted to go further south, or west. The tracks for the streetcars ran down the middle of Whyte Avenue. Passengers waited on the sidewalk until they could see the streetcar approaching. Then they made their way to a raised area beside the tracks.


Once as my mother and my younger sister, Little Bill, were waiting out there for an approaching streetcar, Bill became very frightened as it neared them. She pulled her handout of Mother's and darted for the safety of the sidewalk. She ran right into the path of an oncoming car. It hit her in the middle of her back, but passed completely over her without any harm except to her nerves. What Mother remembered most about that event were Little Bill's screams, and her bright orange socks beneath the car. Some bystander made the remark that if the child could kick and scream like that she wasn't badly hurt. How right he was, and how thankful we were. This probably happened about 1923 or 1924.


Do you know that even as late as 1920 some of the residents still had chickens in their backyard? Others even had a cow tethered in a back lawn and small shed where it could be milked. As we were strictly city kids, these chickens and cows were real novelties. Mother would send us with our blue granite quart milk can to Mrs. Keiley's, about 1/2 block from home to buy milk from her. We loved to be there in time to watch her do the milking.


At the corner of 104 Street and 83 Avenue there was a blacksmith shop. Margie and I love to watch the blacksmith re-shod a horse. The horse was so patient, standing on 3 legs, as the blacksmith fastened a new horseshoe on the fourth leg. How the sparks flew! Suddenly, Margie and I would remember that our mother of our grandmother has sent us to Whyte Avenue on an errand. They were probably waiting for our purchase; a spool of thread for my grandmother, stamps for mother, seeds for Dad. Off we would race toward the yellow brick house, with the mounted moose head on the front.