Memories of Old Edmonton, 1930s and 1940s, by Elizabeth McGillivray

Date: 1930s - 1940s

On this celebration of Edmonton's 100th birthday I wish to share some memories of the long gone days of my childhood in Edmonton.


In summer all the little kids chased the iceman's horse drawn wagon to grab the shards of ice that fell to the street. We licked these treats with delight until our tongues were nearly frozen. With gigantic steel tongs the iceman held a huge block of ice on his back, as he staggered into customers homes to lower it into place in their iceboxes. His back stayed dry thanks to the protection of a large, black rubber bib. Sometimes he would pull out an evil looking knife that he used to drive down the side of a block of ice to make it fit into a customer's icebox.


Woe to the careless housewife who forgot to empty the pan of melt-water under the icebox before the iceman arrived. More melted ice in the pan - more water on the floor!


Grown-ups used to argue about when the ice would be thick enough to cut. (In the spring, there was sometimes a lottery to guess the exact time it went out!) The ice came from the North Saskatchewan River, which had to be frozen six feet deep before the blocks could be cut and loaded onto the horse drawn wagons for transport to storage in an old brick building down on the Rossdale flats. Straw was used to insulate the ice so it would keep for use during the summer months.


Then there was the milkman, with his wagon and his horse who knew exactly the pace necessary to walk from one house to the next. The milkman walked between the houses, and the horse was always at the next house waiting for him! Horses were shod in winter with special shoes to prevent them from slipping on the icy roads.


These were the days before homogenized milk; there was a certain amount of cream at the top of every milk bottle. In the thirty to forty below winters of those times, the cream would rise several inches above the bottle as it froze, if you didn't get the milk into the house as soon as it was delivered.


The Edmonton City Dairy invested in a new bottle with a round bulge on the top, just the right size to hold the cream from one quart of milk. They gave out little round spoons with a curved handle; you held the spoon in place over the hole at the bottom of the bulge, hooked the curved handle over the top of the bottle, and poured off the cream, leaving just milk behind. Great way to have fresh coffee cream every day! However, I recall watching my aunt trying to hold the spoon snug over the hole, while balancing the quart bottle in her other hand and pouring out the cream. Sometimes it worked. But you still had to get the milk into the house before it froze!


Winter seemed to occupy most of the year, and Edmonton provided outdoor skating rinks for all its children, young and old. I remember sliding down the icy, snow covered roads, past Little Bros. Brickyard, all the way down to the Riverdale skating rink. This was really two rinks, divided after school for hockey on one side and skating on the other. But once we became teenagers we would only skate at night when the boys and girls could skate together. The divider was removed then, and we glided around the whole rink to recorded music. The "Beer Barrel Polka" was a real favorite, the skating was pure joy, and it was all free!


The long awaited arrival of the new trolley buses from England was a major event. However, their first winter in Edmonton revealed a flaw; they had trouble keeping their trolleys on the wires in freezing weather. I remember seeing the trolley buses in winter silently navigating the corner from Jasper Avenue onto 95 th Street, when suddenly the trolleys would snap off in a flash of blue light, swinging back and forth in the cold air. The bus driver would leap out and with his bare hands pull down on the frozen ropes and work them around until the trolley poles were reconnected with the power lines. I felt sorry for these hard-working men who tried to keep their cumbersome vehicles moving over the frozen roads.


I remember the old two-story, wooden house behind the shoemaker on the corner of Jasper Avenue and 95th Street, its unpainted board walls weathered with age. This was the Chinese laundry where I was sent to have the " good white shirts " laundered. When I knocked on the door a small wooden panel slid back and I stood on tiptoe trying to see inside the house. A long wooden table stretched the length of the entire room, and on this table several elderly men sat cross-legged, smoking their long, white clay pipes. At one end a lone man stood ironing a white shirt. I handed the shirts to the Chinese gentleman who wordlessly accepted them and quickly closed the panel. There was no price list on the door; everyone knew it cost 25 cents for one shirt.


Three days later I would return to the old house, my quarters clutched tightly in my fist. The panel in the door slid back at my hesitant touch, and through the panel came a neatly wrapped brown paper parcel. Chinese characters were written on the paper - not my name, for how could he know it? I was forever convinced that the Chinese words said, "Homely little white girl with freckles and stringy brown hair." My quarters silently changed hands.


I attended Alex Taylor School, even then one of the oldest schools in the city. What wonderful teachers we had there - I can still remember their names - Miss Megrath, Miss Donaldson, Mr. Thompson. Not so wonderful was the playground. For some reason it was covered with cinders, the detritus of the city power plant down by the Low Level Bridge. Many a child ended up in tears with skinned knees after a fall on those sharp edged little chunks of cinder.


The only Jewish Synagogue in the Edmonton of the day was at the top of the hill at the corner of 95th Street and Grierson Road. When I was very young, my aunt would say, "This is the day the Jewish ladies come to the synagogue. Run up the hill so you can see their beautiful dresses." Those were depression days, and beautiful clothes, a rare treat for most of us, were exciting for a small girl to see.


Down the road from the Synagogue stood the barracks of the R.C.M.P., dominating the street at the top of Grierson Hill Road. (Grierson hill often slid onto the road below in the spring, and the road would be closed for weeks for repairs.) This large brick building originally contained stalls to house the horses of the Hudson's Bay Company. When more modern vehicles delivered their wares, the property was sold to the federal government, the building converted for the use of the R.C.M.P. With the wisdom of childhood, I wondered why the Mounted Police didn't just put their horses in the stalls that were already there, and install the Mounties somewhere else.


We children would watch in awe when the tall gates swung open and out came a long, black car with a uniformed, stern faced young driver at the wheel, and a ramrod straight passenger in the back seat, an officer in full dress uniform.


There was a beautiful round flowerbed in the centre of the R.C.M.P. property, carefully tended by the "trusties" lodged in their jail. These men also maintained the lawns and flowerbeds around the homes of the officers. In later years, the flowerbed disappeared and a tennis court was built in its place. The young Mounties played tennis there, and taught the boys in the neighborhood to play tennis as well. The influence of the Mounties on these young boys who lived in an area that was no longer " prime residential" must have been significant.


Our home, perched on the steep hill that was 94 A Avenue, looked up at the huge house on top of 95 A Avenue, the home of Mrs. Airth, my beloved piano teacher. A large apartment now occupies the property where that grand old home once stood.. It was many years later, when, as a piano examiner for the Western Board of Music, I discovered that Theresa Airth had been Edmonton's leading teacher of pedagogy, the art of teaching.


One of my most exciting childhood memories is of trips to the old brick building at Jasper Avenue and 97 th Street. (A small white cafe, shaped, I seem to recall, like a heart, sat astride the corner.) This old brick building contained the life's work of a fascinating elderly gentleman who I knew only as Mr. Brown. He and my uncle were old friends, and we were welcome to enter through the small, innocuous door in the alley that led to Mr. Brown's private world of treasures. And treasures they were; Indian headdresses, beaded moccasins, coats trimmed with dozens of buttons, and handfuls of flint arrowheads. Amazing large, framed photographs from the past covered the walls; pictures of buffalo, and whole tribes of Indians, with their Chief dressed in regal splendor standing in front. There were beautiful shells from the seas of the world, rocks with many-sided crystals sticking out, and geodes, their rock cavities containing a vastness of minute bits of glittering coloured crystal. Spears from the islands of the Pacific hung on the wall; the most ornately carved were once the property of polynesian kings.


But special above all to me was the giant jar containing a real boa constrictor. I couldn't imagine how somebody got him in that jar, but there he was, coiled permanently in his bath of formaldehyde.


After my uncle and Mr. Brown had visited for a while, we were invited to hold onto a pair of wooden handles that were attached to a cord that connected to a box; and when Mr. Brown flicked a switch in the box, we would both jump with the electric shock that passed through us. We never stayed long enough to satisfy my curiosity in that wonderland of surprises on every shelf, in every corner.





Then there was the Nichols Machine Shop, right across the street from the red brick Synagogue. The noises that came from that long, gray wooden building tempted every child to look inside. The carbon-streaked windows were too high for a child to reach, but I remember the day that a friend and I found wooden boxes in the tall weeds beside the machine shop, stacked them up, and peered through the a window at the black machinery that turned round and round, producing screaming, screeching, frightful sounds. Flashing blue lights leapt up from the metal that men with huge clear masks bent over, as curls of metal fell to the floor. It was deliriously frightening!


Suddenly a man in dirty black coveralls, with grease stains all over his face, came roaring out of the building towards us. We froze, right there on the boxes. "Hey you kids, get away from those windows. The blue light from the welder will blind you if you look at it. Now beat it, and don't try this trick again," he yelled. We were half way down the hill when we heard his heavily booted foot send the wooden boxes sailing back into the weeds. We hid in a garden until hunger drove us home, certain that we would be blind by bedtime. And we never spoke about our adventure to anyone because it might get back to the adults who had warned us to stay from the Nichols Machine Shop and the dangers that lurked inside.


But what a grand adventure!


Saturday was Market Day in Edmonton. That was when my aunt would say, "Now hurry up - we want to get to the market before all the good fresh things are gone." The Market was a long wooden building, with permanent meat markets and stores at each end. One meat market had only horsemeat, not considered a delicacy, but for folks trying to feed a family in the depression the price was right. The farmers arrived at dawn to set up their stalls, and the entire market came alive for the day. My aunt would say, "We'll get our cottage cheese and butter from this German lady - I know she's very clean." Sometimes we would take home sauerkraut, or wonderfully spicy apple-butter. Ukrainian ladies displayed their intricate embroideries, works of great beauty. Others supervised the sale of perogies, or sold a vast variety of coloured flowers.


I feel that I was indeed fortunate to live in that old part of Edmonton as a child. The places I remember so well are long gone. The winds of change were already blowing; the Synagogue had been sold to the Dutch Reform Church, I was told, and I'm sure Nichols Machine Shop is no longer there. I remember the little store across the alley from Nichols where I used to arrive with a mixing bowl and twenty-five cents and was told to come home with as much ice cream as a quarter would buy. I can still see what seemed like endless scoops of delicious ice cream tumble into the mixing bowl until it was nearly full. That little store, with the old black cat sleeping in the window, is surely gone too. The wonderful old Edmonton City Market is no more - huge towers stand there now - and I'm told that the old post office with the clock tower is gone too.


But the old post office on Whyte Avenue still stands, now with boutiques and fine restaurants where once stamp sellers stood.


The change that pleases me the most is the knowledge that the wondrous treasures of Mr. Ernest Brown now rest in the Alberta Provincial Museum for all to enjoy. One must marvel at the collection this true pioneer stored for posterity in that dark, windowless place, off the alley on 97 th Street.


My most valuable experience of growing up in those days in Edmonton was being able to live in the mélange of peoples who had made Edmonton their home. I grew up with Ukrainian, German and Jewish friends, and the children of families who had fled the horrors of Czarist Russia. I had friends whose parents had left the Sudatenland when they knew the threat of war was real, and Italian friends whose parents no longer trusted Mussolini. I had Japanese friends whose families had been torn from their homes in Vancouver by their own government.


When war became a reality, some of our fellow students were "Guest Children" from England who soon blended into their safer new world. Some wished to stay here forever.


A Greek family owned the American Dairy Lunch, a restaurant downstairs on Jasper Avenue. With its unique cuisine and large square room-size booths, it became the meeting place of choice for the young crowd.


Fine Chinese restaurants opened, where everyone flocked to try the new Asian dishes and learn how to use chopsticks.


Who could ever forget the Purple Lantern!


I was lucky to live as a child in this melting pot of peoples. I grew up without prejudice against people of any race or religion, because all these people were simply part of my wonderful world.


Thank you, Old Edmonton.