Growing Up On Boyle Street - A Personal Memoir by Ed Wigmore

'I have lived in the suburbs of Vancouver for the past thirty years, and raised my two children here. They have not known poverty, nor single parenting, nor walking through skid road alone at night. But in some very important ways, I am the one who had th

It was a warm summer day and we were playing touch football on the grassy field alongside 103A Avenue between 95 and 96 Streets. Most of us were about 13 or 14 years old. It was 1949 or 1950. The Edmonton Eskimos had just rejoined the Western Interprovincial Football Union and were going to challenge the hated Calgary Stampeders, and football was our game that summer, not baseball. The football in our game that day may have been a real ball, but more likely was a tightly rolled Edmonton Journal (or Bulletin) canvas newspaper sack; who could afford a football? We were Boyle Street kids, and money was scarce.


Jay took a long lateral from the quarterback and prepared to sweep around left end. But the throw was behind him, and he had to look back to catch it, whilst running forward. He ran smack into the trunk of one of the huge elm trees that (then) lined the street, and crashed to the ground, dazed. Immediately, of course, the rest of us on both teams fell to the ground in helpless paroxysms of laughter, rolling around as the tears streamed from our eyes. Then one of the offensive team realized that Jay, who was a husky and determined kid, was still holding on to the ball. He immediately got up, ran over to Jay and screeched at him "Get up! Run! You didn't fumble!" Jay was still feeling pretty swacked and was slow getting up, so the other kid snatched the ball from him and took off for the opposition goal line.


Growing up around 95 Street and 103A Avenue in the late 1940s and early 1950s, on the edge of Edmonton's skid road area, I didn't know whether Boyle Street was a actually a street, or a community, or a concept. And I didn't care: kids don't think that way. It was just there. It was where we were, and where we were from. Now, 55 years later, a retired psychologist living in Surrey, B.C., I know that Boyle Street was all of these things: a street, a community, and a concept.


I moved back to Edmonton in August 1948, from the little village of Chinook in southeastern Alberta. My father had abandoned us, my much older siblings had grown up and moved away, and my mother and I returned to the city where I had been born 12 years before and where I had spent parts of grade 2 and 3 attending Alex Taylor School. It was always to Edmonton that we returned after my father's wanderings. This time we would stay. But there was virtually no money; no welfare in those days. Family friends named Jim and Lila Hayes gave my mother a part time job at their small store, the Blue Bird Grocery on 95 Street near 102A Avenue. She was able to rent two rooms in a three-story house owned by a Mr. and Mrs. Vitaly on 95 Street at 104 Avenue (Ole Olson and his son Herbie Olson, curlers who represented Alberta in the Brier national championship, lived next door).


I had a lot of time on my own when Mom worked. I didn't know anybody. But there was this big grassy area and an old outdoor rink just across the street, and there were kids there. It was the land between 95 and 96 Streets, and 103A and 104 Avenue. This was what the kids referred to as Boyle Street. This is where I grew up. This is where I made my first real friends. This is where I learned some of the attitudes, lessons and values that shaped me. This is part of my identity: a kid from Boyle Street.


Who We WereThe kids I grew up with on Boyle Street were a melange of races, religions and cultures: Ukrainian, Jewish, black, Irish Catholic, Polish and others. As far as I can remember, I was the only WASP. And we didn't give it a thought. Edmonton at the time was a vigorous, rapidly growing city with people from many backgrounds trying to make a living after World War Two. What strikes me as most unusual, looking back, is that another boy and I were the only ones from single parent families in what was considered even then a rough part of the city.


We didn't consider ourselves a "gang," just a bunch of kids who hung out together. Our "turf" was from 93 Street to 97 Street and from Jasper Avenue to the CNR tracks. We walked everywhere. We walked downtown, to the movies and the department stores. We walked to Renfrew Park for baseball games and to Clarke Stadium for football. We tried to cadge bus tickets to the Edmonton Gardens for hockey games and to the nearby Sales Pavilion for wrestling matches. We would walk through the skid road area, which was 96 and 97 Streets from about 102 Avenue to the CNR tracks, on our way downtown.


On our saunters through skid road we would be on the watch for something exciting happening. This usually meant one of three things: (1) to see two drunks fighting; this was our favourite thing; (2) to see a drunk doing something stupid, like vomiting on the street; (3) to see a whore. We called them whores or prosties; we had never heard the word hooker in those days. As boys just recently into puberty, seeing a woman you could actually have sex with if you had enough money fascinated us. Most of the ones we saw were (to our thinking) old, ugly, gross and slightly scary.


We were street urchins. Incredibly, looking back, we always felt totally safe walking through the roughest part of town any time day or night, whether we were in a group, two of us, or alone. I realize now that this is because this part of the city was not alien to us; we were part of that environment, and it was part of us.


Confrontation with Pete JamiesonOne night, walking along 97 Street, much to our delight we spotted Pete Jamieson striding purposefully but rather tipsily on the other side of the street carrying his megaphone. Well, we couldn't resist. It was Street Urchins versus Pete. (Let me explain: Pete was one of Edmonton's great characters. He was the unofficial town crier. Every morning he would sweep the sidewalks in front of Mike's Newsstand and other businesses. With his commanding manner, megaphone and ramrod-straight posture he would order people around in the long lineups outside the downtown movie theatres. He and his megaphone seemed omnipresent at downtown outdoor events. He was also a mystery: nobody seemed to know where he lived or whether he had any family. It was rumoured that he liked his booze. But to us kids, he was pompous and grandiose, somehow a comic character. I realize now there was a strangely vulnerable man behind this supercilious veneer, and I think we as kids unconsciously tapped into that. He was an irresistible target). The taunting began. "Hey Pete, where you going?" "Hey Pete, you're walking funny" "Hey Pete, come and line us up." It was mild stuff, really, no swearing, no obscenities. It went on for about a block. Then Pete, with great dignity, raised his megaphone to his mouth and began to let us have it. His voice resonating up and down the street, he boomed out: "Here, ladies and gentlemen, you have an example of what is wrong with Edmonton today. You have an example of this younger generation which has turned into a pack of juvenile delinquents." He said a bit more, and we yelled a few other things across the street, but we knew when we were beaten. Our heart was no longer in it. The Reader's Digest would have called it "the perfect squelch." And I think maybe we realized, at some level, that there was something obscene about a gang of boys taunting an old man on a street late at night. We slunk around the next corner and headed back to Boyle Street.


Summers at Boyle Street were spent playing touch football and occasionally baseball. When we got too hot or tired - and the summers always seemed long and warm - we lay in the shade under the huge elm trees (including the one we called "the linebacker" which tackled Jay) and played cards by the hour. We would go in the woods below Alex Taylor school to smoke and occasionally blow up condoms that someone had obtained (we called them "French safes"). We would have tire races around the block. This meant finding abandoned automobile tires in back alleys and hand-propelling them in front of us while running as fast as we could. One day this ended disastrously. Gordon Irwin, who often found the best tires and usually won, rounded the corner of 102A Avenue onto 95 Street in the lead (on the sidewalk, pedestrians scattering), the rest of us in hot pursuit. Gordon had a bigger tire than usual and lost control about two houses along. His tire plummeted down into a garden lot next door to the Blue Bird Grocery, ploughed into some stalks of nearly ripe corn and knocked several of them down. We all scattered like pellets out of a shotgun, abandoned tires rolling crazily onto 95 Street. For we all knew that Jim Hayes, the large man who owned the Bluebird Grocery, was very proud of his garden. But for me, that was the least of it. My mother worked at the Blue Bird Grocery, and the Hayes were family friends. I knew that Mr. Hayes was a good-natured man, but I still ran faster than anybody else. That night at supper I lived in fear of being charged with this near-felony. But my mother, who must have known that I was among the culprits, told me how upset Mr. Hayes had been and said nothing more.


Winters on Boyle StreetIn the winter we skated and played hockey at the Boyle Street outdoor rink. There was no manager or staff that I recall, and we scraped and shoveled the snow ourselves. We had a pick-up hockey team of sorts, no uniforms or organization, and we played a few games against a team from the Norwood area. The only hockey equipment any of us had was second-hand shin pads. I tried out for left wing, but I think I was the slowest skater on the team so they put me on defense. And of course, because of my speed, someone gave me the name "EJ the Rocket" (John is my middle name). On winter nights when it was warm enough, we sometimes played "knock door run": knock at some stranger's door and then run like hell. On occasion we would go to somebody's house and listen to radio programs like "Gangbusters" or "The Adventures Of Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy." There was no television in Edmonton in those days.


On winter Saturdays we would go to the movies at the Gem Theatre, on Jasper Avenue near 97 Street. If you got there before 1 p.m., the admission was six cents. After one, it was 10 cents. This let you into a world of damaged, sticky seats, sticky floors, jam-packed with whooping children, virtually no adults. (I think this must have been during my grades 2-3 sojourn in Edmonton). There would be a string of cartoons, possibly News Of The World, sometimes a serial cowboy or gangster or horror episode and then, to loud cheering, the main feature: usually a western but sometimes a horror movie featuring either Frankenstein or the Wolf Man or Dracula. The best of all worlds was when they showed a movie called Frankenstein meets the Wolf Man. We liked westerns and our clear favourite was Hopalong Cassidy. He didn't sing and he didn't bother about that silly stuff with girls, like Roy Rogers and Gene Autry.


Nearly all of us liked spectator sports and followed the local teams. Trouble was we couldn't afford to pay our way in. There were two solutions. First, thanks to the Lord's Day laws of the time, teams couldn't charge admission prices on Sunday and admission was by "silver collection." It was silver because nearly everyone put coins the plate: paper money meant paying a dollar or more to get in, and who would do that when you could pay a quarter? Well, we would put a nickel on the plate and try to ignore the scowl of the guy holding it. This way we got into Sunday afternoon baseball games at Renfrew Park and hockey games at the Edmonton Gardens (the Flyers, and later the junior Oil Kings).


Sneaking InMost of the professional sports teams, not surprisingly, didn't have Sunday afternoon games and it meant we had to sneak in. We got to be very good at it. Our easiest prey was the wrestling match at the Stock Pavilion (proper name: Sales Pavilion) next to the Edmonton Gardens on the Edmonton Exhibition grounds. Our system was to get to know one of the youth who sold the programs, pool our nickels, pay him a bribe, he would meet us one by one out front in the crowd, give us half of his programs, we would sell a couple of them just in front of the ticket-takers at the turnstile, then walk through the turnstile flashing our programs at the ticket taker, meet the seller in the men's washroom and give him back his programs and any money we had made selling his programs. It never failed. This system worked because the program sellers were allowed to go in and out, and there were enough of them, and enough turnovers, that the ticket takers didn't know them all.


Next easiest to sneak into was Clarke Stadium to watch the Eskimos. Here our system was considerably less cerebral. After the inner security guy made his round of the perimeter, we would quickly dig a hole under the fence with anything that was available - our hands if necessary - and crawl in. As we weren't able to fill in the hole from the inside, security eventually caught on to us and shored up the fence bottoms and made more frequent passes. It got harder and harder to get in, and during the second or third season - 1950 or 1951 - we tried climbing over the fence but it was too high. By then we were ready to pay 25 cents to belong to the Quarterback Club and sit in the end zone. Toughest challenge was the Edmonton Gardens to see the Flyers. Our wresting match gambit didn't work there: the program sellers were older and wouldn't accept the paltry amounts we offered as bribes, plus the ticket takers knew them all anyway. One time we bribed someone into letting us in through the furnace room door, but this never worked again; I think the person who let us in was found out.


One night Avron Levine and I scraped together enough money to actually pay our way into a Flyers' game. We didn't have enough left over for a hot dog or pop, and we each had one bus ticket to get home. Somehow, I lost my ticket. It was a bitterly cold winter night. I tried to bum a ticket from other people, but no one was forthcoming (perhaps the Flyers had lost and they were in a bad mood). Finally, we resolved that I would sneak on the bus in the crowd, behind Avron. I should be able to do it: I was an expert at sneaking into things. But the bus driver was alert, spotted me, and ordered me off the bus. I turned to start the long walk home. A voice shouted my name. It was Avron; he had got off the bus. "I'll walk home with you." And so, in the frigid night air and the biting wind, we walked the several miles down the railway tracks from the Gardens to Boyle Street.


We tried our wrestling match gambit at night games at Renfrew Park and it worked once or twice, but then the ticket takers caught on and we were shut out. But it was a long way to walk at night anyway, and we were content to pay our nickel and enjoy the Sunday afternoon doubleheader. There were four teams in the league, two from Edmonton and two from Calgary. One was the Edmonton Eskimos (again) and one of the Calgary teams was called Purity 99. I've forgotten the others. Our favourite team was the Eskimos, and my favourite player was Lefty Ed Belter, a pitcher. He was my favourite because his name was Ed (like mine), he was a lefty, and because he usually won his games. We would take old canvas Journal sacks with us and after the game would collect pop bottles to cash in. We would carry them to the foot of Macdonald Hill, and then drag them up the long wooden staircase at the top of Macdonald Drive, and on to a small grocery store at Jasper Avenue and 99 Street where we cashed them in. While we were doing this, in the general hubbub, we would shoplift chocolate bars, gum and candy from the store.


Caught!Except for the occasional shoplifting, we were law-abiding kids. In fact, few of us smoked and, at that age, I don't remember any of us getting into drinking. Other drugs were something that we didn't know about. Looking back, we were pretty straight. My shoplifting ended abruptly in September 1950 at Woodwards. At the beginning of each school year, some of us (none of the other kids named in this article were involved in any of the shoplifting mentioned) would pocket the money our parents gave us to buy school supplies and go to Woodwards and shoplift our supplies. In my grade nine year, a store detective caught me. My mother was called in and interviewed. I was released with a stern warning. The worst part was the embarrassment and shame of letting my mother down: she had always taught me the best values, by word and example, and had worked hard to make a life for us in difficult circumstances. I never stole again. Most of the kids in our group soon learned that it was better to earn our spending money. I got my first job when I was in grade 8. Harry Goldberg talked his uncle Bill Goldberg, a pharmacist whose drug store next to the Capitol Theatre on Jasper Avenue contained a coffee shop and lunch counter, to giving me his (Harry's) old job sweeping the floor and occasionally picking up packages on my bicycle. The next year I got a paper route with the Edmonton Journal, and a few months later a much bigger route of about 135 papers. This route was on Jasper Avenue from Alex Taylor School to 97 Street. It included a lot of rooming houses, and in two years I never had anyone who didn't pay. The paper delivered cost 25 cents a week, of which 7 cents went to the carrier. I was making $9.50 a week. I thought I was richer than Scrooge McDuck!


Most of us, except for the kids who were Roman Catholic, went to McCauley Junior High School and on to Victoria Composite High, which had just been built. It was at McCauley that I connected with what was to become one of the major influences in my young life: the Edmonton Schoolboys' Band. The ESB was then based at McCauley, and each fall they took in some new members. They usually wanted beginners with at least some musical training, e.g., piano, but this fall they were short in the junior band and that qualification was suspended. Harry Goldberg had always wanted to play the drums, but he also wanted a buddy to walk to and from practices with, so he coerced me into applying with him. We were both accepted: Harry began the drum lessons, and I was assigned the tuba. Soon, we were in the junior band, and later, into the senior band, until we graduated from high school six years later. The Edmonton Schoolboys' Band was one of Edmonton's great institutions. It provided not only musical training but also character development and lifelong friendships to hundreds of youth who passed through it, including Harry and I. It gradually took me off the streets and gave me a new challenge when I was ready to make the move.


"Get the hell go from here..."The ESB didn't wipe out our street-kid mischievousness, however. Across the corner from McCauley, at 95 Street and 107 Avenue, there was a little grocery store where we would stop off for a cold pop after band practice. It was owned by a middle-aged man named Andy who spoke with a thick accent and rather fractured English - which was OK, because many of our acquaintances did. But Andy didn't seem to like or trust kids very much - maybe with good reason - because he always glowered at us and seemed suspicious. I guess this is why we thought he would make a good target for a practical joke. So Harry Goldberg and I got in the habit of distracting Andy's attention, sneaking a bottle of ketchup off the nearby shelf and putting it into the soft drink cooler which stood in the middle of the floor, filled with cold water and chilled bottles of pop. Eventually Andy began to find the ketchup bottles and suspect it was us, and watched us like a hawk. We started to bring other band members in to buy pop and help distract Andy or block his view, but he soon figured out who the real culprits were and yelled at us "You put ketchup in the cooler, I come schlep you face!" We didn't put any ketchup in the cooler the next few nights. But we couldn't resist another try. Bad decision. I think Andy was ready for us. He turned away as though distracted, we grabbed a bottle of ketchup and lifted the cooler lid - and heard Andy emitting a bloodcurdling cry whilst rushing around the end of the counter and charging toward us. He was shrieking, "Get the hell go from here, I come schlep you face!" The ketchup bottle crashed to the floor and we were out of there like two shots from a cannon. We had always assumed Andy would never actually chase us because he was always alone in the store and wouldn't want to leave it unattended. How wrong we were! We charged south down 95 Street, back towards our beloved Boyle Street turf - with Andy in hot pursuit, his face red and his storekeeper's apron flapping wildly. I think we assumed he would stop after half a block. Wrong again. I started to slow down, looked back, and saw that Andy was still close behind. Harry, with his shorter legs, was a little behind me and I screamed at him "He's still coming!" and we put on another burst of speed. We galloped over the CNR tracks and kept zooming. Finally we chanced another glance behind and Andy had stopped at the tracks, more than three blocks from his store, gesticulating and yelling at us. We found another store to have our after-practice pop, and the ketchup stayed on the shelf. A year or so later, when the band moved its base to Victoria Composite High School, Harry and I went to visit Andy to apologize to him, but he was no longer there.


At the far west end of Boyle Street, on the corner of 96 Street and 103A Avenue, stood another of Edmonton's vital institutions which had an influence on my early life: the T.E. Bissell Institute, which was the United Church of Canada's inner city mission serving the physical and spiritual needs of skid road's bereft and wounded people. It later became the Bissell Centre and moved up 96 Street north of the CNR tracks where it still serves the inner city today. When we moved back to Edmonton in 1948, my mother insisted I go with her to the Sunday evening service (the only one they had), which was sometimes an adventure because the occasional drunk would wander in off the street during the church service. I became impressed with how the minister would handle these situations, and with the work the caring staff did with people who were poor, ill, troubled and marginalized. By the time I was in senior high there were some other kids in the congregation and we formed a youth group and a youth choir, which sang at the Sunday services.


By this time, between band and church activities I was spending less and less time on the street, and our group that had been together for several years was drifting apart. Unfortunately, because I moved away from Edmonton permanently in 1963, I have not been able to keep in touch with any of our gang except for Harry Goldberg (our phone calls must always begin "you put ketchup in my cooler, I come schlep you face!"). Over the years I have often wondered how each of my Boyle Street buddies turned out, what became of them. Of the few I know of, it's pretty positive. Lemuel Boyd became a top person in the probation service of the Saskatchewan government. Avron Levine worked at the chemistry department of the University Of Alberta. Harry Goldberg was administrator of the extension department, U of A and later chief electoral officer for the province of B.C. I was a sports writer for the Edmonton Journal, a United Church minister for seven years and then a registered psychologist for the past 32 years. Some of the Boyle Street kids became distinguished athletes. Johnny Irwin from our immediate group became a professional boxer. Most, however, were slightly older or younger than the kids I hung out with, but were neighbours and well known to us. Art and Oscar Kruger both starred in basketball at the University of Alberta, and Oscar played football for the Edmonton Eskimos. Del Thachuk also played for the Eskimos. Herbie Olson represented Alberta at the Brier national curling championship. Donnie Munro was captain of the U of A basketball team and later became a teacher in Edmonton.


A Privileged ChildhoodI have lived in the suburbs of Vancouver for the past 30 years, and raised my two children here. They have not known poverty, or single parenting, or walking through skid road alone late at night. But in some very important ways, I am the one who had the privileged childhood. I was privileged to grow up in a veritable League of Nations, the only WASP, and learned true colour blindness. I was privileged to learn racial, religious and cultural tolerance by osmosis, without ever realizing it was becoming part of me. To learn self-sufficiency and independence. To learn you had to earn what you wanted and needed. To learn the value of friends and the comfort of a group. To learn to make your own amusements (imagine growing up before there was television!). To be part of the Edmonton Schoolboys' Band and the Bissell Centre. And, maybe most of all, to grow up in Edmonton in the late 1940s and early 1950s - a city of youthful vigour, where your actions were more important than your accent, where opportunities were there for those who wanted to make the effort, and where the present and the future were more important than the past.


Does a personal memoir have to have a hero? I don't know. But if this piece has a hero, there are several candidates: