My Special Memories Eleanor McLean
This is a project we did for Eleanor McLean. Her family asked us to capture their grandmother’s best stories. They choose the Anthology 4-interview format and their project came out to 142 pages. We spoke to Eleanor about growing up in Winnipeg, going to Normal School, meeting her husband, and their life together. It was especially touching to hear her memories of her daughter, Maureen, who passed away several years ago.
Interview and Manuscript by No Story Lost Copyright © 2023 MY SPECIAL MEMORIES BY Eleanor McLean
CONTENTS Chapter 1: My Family 4 Chapter 2: Growing Up in Winnipeg 14 Chapter 3: The Move to Ontario 28 Chapter 4: Teaching 38 Chapter 5: My Life with Jack 48 Chapter 6: Maureen’s Childhood 70 Chapter 7: My Favourite Family Memories 84 Chapter 8: Remembering Maureen 92 Chapter 9: Coming Full Circle 98 Chapter 10: Reflection Questions 106 CONTENTS
9 CHAPTER 1 MY FAMILY
10 CHAPTER 1 — My Family MY FAMILY Growing up in Winnipeg, I was surrounded by aunts and uncles, and cousins. We never had big parties, but there was a lot of visiting back and forth. Just being part of our extended family was very enriching as a child. CHAPTER ONE Grandma Min
11 McLean — MY SPECIAL MEMORIES Left: Grandma Isabelle Dick Right: Aunt Barbara Dick MY GRANDPARENTS My grandparents were very important in my childhood because I saw a lot of them. I remember two grandmothers and one grandfather. They played a major role in my life. My Grandma Min—who is actually my Grandma Dougall—was quite a modern kind of a woman for her age. I remember she learned how to ride a bike after she was 80 years old. My grandfather had a stroke; he worked for the CPR and couldn’t drive anymore, so that’s how she went for her groceries—on a bicycle with a basket. She listened to a lot of radio— she was a baseball fan of all things—and she listened to all these baseball games, as well as modern, popular programs like ‘The Happy Gang’ and ‘Lux Radio Theatre.’ Those kinds of things were not allowed in my Grandma Dick’s home. She was quite a different kind of person. My Grandpa Dougall, after he had the stroke, took up a lot of crafts. He did wood-burning. Members of our family have breadboards and other items that
12 CHAPTER 1 — My Family he made. He also did needlepoint. He made covers for many chairs—dining room chairs and stools. I still have a wooden stool that my dad made, and my grandpa did the needlework for the cover. I also have little framed pictures. I think the needlework was a kind of therapy for him. He died younger than my grandma, so I visited her often. I remember Grandma Min’s wonderful Empire cookies. They are two layers: the top layer has a little circle cut out with the red jam showing through, topped with white icing. The most important thing in my Grandma Dick’s life was her religion. She was Presbyterian. She was widowed very young. She and my mother’s older sister, Aunt Barb, lived together in my grandmother’s home. There were always a lot of quilting bees and visitors who came for tea. I would say she was a very devout person. She went to church twice on Sundays, and I would often go with her to the evening service. I would snuggle up to her, and she’d give me a peppermint just before the sermon. She had some Scottish phrases in her speech. I think she was three years old when she came to Canada, but she retained some of those Scottish phrases that you don’t hear very much today. She was a very plain cook, but she did have some specialties like lemon meringue pie. I can visualize her sitting in the dining room, in front of the window, with egg whites on a dinner plate. She would be beating them with a fork, very methodically, adding a little bit of sugar at a time. MY PARENTS My parents were both born in Winnipeg. I think that they met in a church youth group. My mother was a very successful primary school teacher. She thought that every child was special and had great patience with her teaching. She also was a wonderful seamstress. She made all our clothes, including our parkas. Through necessity, she would make over clothes that were given to her. She’d take them all apart and turn the cloth inside out. She always did her sewing after we all went to bed, making clothing for everybody in the family. The thing I remember the most about my mom was her quiet cuddles. Maybe I took for granted all the skills that she had. She had the ability to help kids become successful. She gave them confidence; children that were struggling were the ones that she just loved. Some of those students thrived, I think, because of her patience. When she saw that a child was struggling, she just wanted to help. When we moved to Fort William, she was a principal supply. She taught for a halfday to give the principal relief to do their other duties.
“ She went to church twice on Sundays, and I would often go with her to the evening service. I would snuggle up to her, and she’d give me a peppermint just before the sermon.
14 CHAPTER 1 — My Family My dad was a very quiet, studious kind of person, very kind and steady. He didn’t have the opportunity of going to university, but he would have made a wonderful student because he loved to read. He was a self-educated man. He was a student for all of his life. My mother joined him in discussion groups. Our living room was often the scene of people gathering on a regular basis to discuss books and politics of the day and philosophy. I saw his lighter side when he played the Hawaiian guitar. As a child, I remember lying in bed when my mom and dad would have a party, listening to him playing the Hawaiian guitar. (The Hawaiian guitar sits across the knees and is played with a steel bar.) My mom—just to get in on the fun—learned how to play the ukulele to accompany him. In those days, everybody made their own fun. There was none of the outside entertainment that we have so much of today. One of my favourite memories of my dad is that every Sunday, he would line up everybody’s shoes and apply polish. On Mondays, we would always have shiny shoes to wear to school. He did my aunt’s and grandmother’s as well when we lived with them. He was just a very thoughtful, kind person. MY SISTER My sister, Shirley, was four years older than I was. She was the first grandchild on both sides of the family, so she was sort of special. The childhood pictures of her are beautiful. During those Depression years, money was not available for music lessons. My mother or my aunt knew somebody who was a teacher of elocution, so Shirley took those lessons. She would recite, and she had a very lovely voice. All her life, she was part of choirs. She started when we were going to Sunday school, and she joined the junior choir. As an adult—even after she had children— she still sang either in a church or a community choir. Because of our age difference, she was quite protective of me. In Winnipeg, you travelled by streetcars to downtown, and that’s where our dentist’s office was located. On one occasion, we both had dental appointments and streetcar fares. But before coming home, we went to Kresge’s lunch counter and had a milkshake and a plate of French fries—we called them potato chips. After we ate, we realized that we didn’t have enough money to go home on the streetcar. So Shirley said, “We’ll have to walk, Eleanor.” Top: Isabella Margaret Dick Bottom left: William Stewart Dougall, age 3 Bottom right: William Stewart Dougall
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16 CHAPTER 1 — My Family Shirley as a child We were blocks and blocks and blocks away from home that went through some of the different parts of the city that normally children wouldn’t walk in— around the station and down under the subway. When we got home, my parents just couldn’t believe that we had walked all that way, but my sister was a problem solver. If there was a problem, she solved it, and that’s what we were going to do. I can remember, along the way, she would say, “Guess how many blocks, Eleanor? How many blocks do we have to go now? How many do you think we’re going to have to walk?” That’s an example of her protection of me. The other times that I walked blocks and blocks was to the library. We could only take out two books at a time. Our library card was just a treasure. It was something that we thought was so, so special because our entertainment was reading.
17 McLean — MY SPECIAL MEMORIES Heidi was my favourite book. Besides reading our own storybooks at night, my dad would always read a story to us as we went off to sleep. I would be so upset because I would fall asleep before the end of the chapter, and Shirley was older, so she could stay awake. When it came time for the next chapter, I would be upset that Shirley knew something that I didn’t know from the story. So the library was central to our childhood lives. That’s something that Shirley and I did together. Shirley and Eleanor
19 CHAPTER 2 GROWING UP IN WINNIPEG
20 CHAPTER 2 — Growing Up in Winnipeg MY EARLIEST MEMORY I was kind of a sickly kid. I was diagnosed with Celiac Disease when I was 57. Of course, looking back now, I know that for all those years, I went undiagnosed. Many of my childhood illnesses were the result of being malnourished. GROWING UP IN WINNIPEG CHAPTER TWO Baby Eleanor
225 Munroe Avenue, the Dougall dream home When I was just three years old, I had a mastoid operation on my left ear. Those were the days before antibiotics, so it was a very risky, life-threatening surgery. I remember being in the hospital, with a long corridor of beds, all of us in the same big room. At visiting time, they would bring in a rolling rack of pretty little dresses, so we could wear one when our mothers came to visit. That’s when I was three, but it’s a pretty vivid memory, and it has stuck in my mind. When my parents were married, they saved money to build a house. They built what I always called their ‘dream house.’ It was a little bungalow, just a very small two-bedroom home with a front porch. According to today’s standards, it would be considered tiny. All the people on the street built their houses at the same time, so the neighbourhood was full of young people starting young families. THE POLIO OUTBREAK When I was younger, there was an epidemic of Polio. Winnipeg had one of the highest number of cases; there was a huge outbreak. The swimming pools were all closed down, the parks were closed,
22 CHAPTER 2 — Growing Up in Winnipeg the movie theatres were closed—it was similar to the COVID-19 pandemic now. Because I was a sickly kid and picked up everything, my mom and dad sent me to the country to live for the summer with my aunt and uncle and my two cousins. My cousin Barb was only one year older than I was, and Donald was just one year younger than Shirley. I remember going to Gretna for the summer to get out of the city and away from that Polio scare. I had a wonderful time with my cousins. My Uncle Alec worked for the CPR, and he was in the mail car or the freight car. His run would be from Gretna, just near the Manitoba border with the United States, to Winnipeg and back—they would do the run in one day. I spent at least one summer there with my cousins, maybe more. That was the other wonderful thing about growing up in Winnipeg: I was just surrounded by aunts and uncles and cousins. There was a lot of visiting back and forth. Just being part of our extended family was very enriching as a child. INKSTER BOULEVARD I had a lot of fun living on Inkster Boulevard. There were about six little girls who were all a similar age, and we would be like a gang. We would play all those childhood games, like hideand-seek. It was a paved street with a boulevard right down the centre. There was traffic flowing north on one side and south on the other. The road was patched with strips of tar. We had a game called ‘tar tag.’ You were only safe if you were on the tar. There weren’t too many cars or vehicles, and we just went off to the side if anything came along; it would mostly be delivery wagons with horses that we would see. Milk delivered by a milkman in bottles, bread and coal were delivered by horse-drawn vehicles. Eaton’s Department Store had a very beautiful carriage. It was shiny, black and red, with a pair of black horses. It was common to have to clean up the road from their droppings before we continued our game. We made our own fun. We didn’t have television, of course, and movies were very restricted. Besides those games, there was another one that we played called Tippy, but I’ve never heard of it outside of Winnipeg. It was a kind of batting game played with two pieces of a broomstick—one long piece and one short piece. We also Top: Eleanor’s early years Bottom left: Young Eleanor Bottom right: Eleanor posing
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24 ‘Giddy up!’
25 McLean — MY SPECIAL MEMORIES Eleanor, left had India rubber balls. We would also play skipping and jacks, and dolls, of course. When I was allowed to have kids into the house, we would go down to the basement, and we played school because my dad had put up a blackboard. I think it was just a piece of board that was painted black, with blackboard paint. I would always be the teacher, of course, and all my playmates had to be the students. Maybe I wanted to be a teacher, even back then. We would all go home when it was time for supper, and afterwards, we were back out playing again. We made our own fun. We didn’t have television, of course, and movies were very restricted. My parents were very careful about what we were allowed to see. When I was very young, still living on Munroe Avenue, I remember a police car pulling up to our little bungalow. My dad went out and got into the police car. I was terribly frightened that day. I thought that they were taking him away. The situation was that my dad was on a jury for a murder trial, and they provided transportation in a police car. My mother probably tried to explain to me that it was safe, but that memory stayed with me for a long time. I remember talking with my dad about it years later—I’m not sure if he told me about the murder trial verdict, but he did tell me it was a sequestered jury. He seemed surprised that I would have that memory, but it was scary because we had great admiration and fear of police officers.
26 CHAPTER 2 — Growing Up in Winnipeg SHIRLEY Shirley had her own group of friends because she was four years older. They bought movie magazines with pictures of glamorous movie stars. They had scrapbooks where they would glue these pictures and create favourite collections. She had a friend named Jeanette, who was a wonderful musician. Jeanette’s family was Catholic, and so she went to a private school and learned how to play the piano beautifully. She went right ahead and earned a number of degrees as she got older. I think Jeanette taught Shirley how to play the piano a little bit. We didn’t have a piano, so that was a big attraction for Shirley. She bought a piano after she was a young adult in her 20’s when she was living with our family in Fort William and took piano lessons. One thing that Shirley and I did together was to pick up the ice for the icebox. We had a little red wagon, and we had to walk about ten city blocks to the icehouse. I think it was a dime for a big block of ice. My mother would always say, “You have to make sure that he knows you want a good-sized piece.” I don’t know how we negotiated that, but we would take the ice home to my grandmother’s house with a canvas cover. It would be dripping all the way, of course. My grandmother would transfer it with ice tongs into the icebox down in the basement. That was before refrigeration. THE GREAT DEPRESSION My parents were married in 1925, and I was born in 1932 when the Great Depression was underway. As with many people at that time, my father lost his job. He was the assistant manager of the book department at Eaton’s, which was a nationwide department store. The way they coped with the costs of the Depression—the business failures—was to lay off all their assistant managers, right from coast to coast. My father lost his income, and they weren’t able to keep up with the payments on the mortgage on the house. They had to give up the house and didn’t receive back any of the money that they had put into it. We went to live with my Grandma Dick when I was about six years old. When I think of it now, after having successfully started a little family, to go back and live with your mother and your older sister must have been a terrible blow for my parents, especially my mother. At the time, I thought my grandmother’s house was huge, but I’ve been back to see it since, and it’s not big at all! There were the six of us living in one house: our family of four, my Aunt Barb, and my grandma. It was a two-storey home, with one bathroom. My mother started supply teaching, and that meant that she would travel by streetcar to wherever she was called—it would be a long, tiring day for her. My
27 McLean — MY SPECIAL MEMORIES father started a little business in the Grain Exchange building downtown. He called it Dougall’s Dime Library. He was well-known by the book salesmen that used to sell books to Eaton’s. They always had extra copies of books that were being published, and they gave them to my dad. He put a special binding on them to make them as strong as library books. I don’t know how, but he managed to rent this room on the main floor of the Grain Exchange. People wanted to read the latest books, so he might have had quite a number of copies of the newer books, and they would rent them for a dime a week. He was making a meagre living there, but he developed a lot of friends through it. The Grain Exchange in Winnipeg was in a huge business area; it was the center of the farming country and was the main shipping spot. So those were very, very difficult years for my parents. My mom was able to buy all the food that everybody needed with her substituting. But for Shirley and for me, those years were glorious. We had all these wonderful adults around us—four caregivers rather than two. We always had somebody to love us. We thought that we had a wonderful childhood. We never felt the strain of poverty; we didn’t feel deprived at all. I think that must have been a difficult thing for my parents, to make us feel secure when their own world was falling apart. But I never felt insecure. I felt very loved by my grandmother, and my aunt just doted on us. All those years were a terrible struggle for my parents. We lived with my grandmother for six years before the country recovered. Then, my dad started working for the National Film Board. I’ve never talked to anybody who has had a similar experience, but I’m sure that what we went through was duplicated in many homes. Many people lost their homes, and it was just so tragic. My parents never were able to accumulate enough capital to buy another home until much later. They rented an apartment in Winnipeg, then rented a house all the Dougall’s Dime Library
28 CHAPTER 2 — Growing Up in Winnipeg years that I lived with them as a young adult. It wasn’t until my dad retired when he was 60 that they bought their second house all those years later. My mother worked as a principal’s supply, and they saved her earnings. It was very similar to the little house that they originally bought in Winnipeg years ago, the same little bungalow. SIBLING RIVALRY It’s funny to think about, but there was some sibling rivalry there between my mother and my Aunt Barb. It lasted for years and years. My Aunt Barbara was a successful businesswoman. She worked for the Bank of Montreal and was very prim and proper. Every day, she would get dressed up with a hat and purse and matching gloves and go off on the streetcar to work. I imagine she was a teller—I don’t think she had any significant job at the Bank of Montreal, but it was secure. I guess the bank was one of the things that survived the Depression. Aunt Barb used to buy us underwear and the long brown stockings that we wore. She was very good to her nieces, but there was this long-standing rivalry with my mother. Even after we moved to Fort William, my sister and I could never understand it, but I know there was jealousy between them. For example, when my mother started teaching, she bought a fur coat. It was a prized possession. I remember her telling Sisters, Isabelle and Barbara in 1969
29 McLean — MY SPECIAL MEMORIES me the story that, one day, my Aunt Barb just took the coat and wore it somewhere without permission. My mother was so irritated that she got a lock and chain and secured it through the sleeves! CHRISTMAS MEMORIES One Christmas, all I wanted was a Bible with pictures—I still have that Bible. My Aunt Olive and Aunt Helen, my dad’s sisters, were wonderful seamstresses too, and one Christmas, they made me a whole wardrobe for one of my dolls. They probably gave me the doll too, but I’m not sure about that. My grandfather made a wardrobe that was like a wooden box that opened on hinges. The doll clothes hung on little, tiny hangers inside this wardrobe. Mostly, it was very simple gifts; my mom would make new pyjamas for us out of wonderful cozy flannelette. We would hang our real stockings— there would be a mandarin orange in each one, a candy cane and some of that hard candy, but no toys. Those are good memories! SCHOOL The children in Winnipeg wore school uniforms. The girls wore a tunic, with a white blouse underneath and long black stockings. Everybody was dressed the same, whether you were coming from a home of poverty or richness and wealth. There was no distinction at school, and we had everything we needed. I was happy at school. I kept my report cards for many years. I only discarded them within the last 20 years. So when Jack looked at my report cards, he said, “Eleanor, you were away from school more than you were present”—each report card reported how many days you were absent. It was my undiagnosed Celiac Disease that caused me to be malnourished, and because I was malnourished, I caught everything that came along. I was an okay student. I didn’t struggle in school, but the number of absentee days must’ve affected how much I could learn in class. During those first grades, one to six, when we were living with my grandma, I can remember being in bed a whole lot of that time. My grandma would take care of me and make things that she thought would be tasty and healthy for me. She’d say, “Eleanor, would you like a wee baked potato?” Looking back on it, I probably craved potatoes because it was the gluten in bread that was making me sick. It’s funny how your body craves things that are good for you.
30 CHAPTER 2 — Growing Up in Winnipeg CHURCH LIFE We always attended Sunday school on Sundays at about two o’clock in the afternoon. We were also in the junior choir, which met during the week. One of the highlights, of course, was the Christmas concert. Every Sunday school class would perform in some way. The classes were full of young children— there was no shortage of children. Santa Clause would come. I can remember— somebody must have imitated this—the sound of his reindeer on the roof of the church, and Santa would come down with a big bang. In his sack were little brown bags full of hard Christmas candy. Everybody got a little bag of candy from Santa—that was a big highlight! When I was about 12 years old, I went to church camp with my cousin. My Aunt Marie—her mother—was one of the camp leaders. That was a thrill because we went to a lake (I don’t know which one it was, but it would have been in Manitoba). It was the first time I’d ever seen a lake because growing up in Winnipeg, on the prairies, and without a car, I had never seen any water other than the Red River and the Assiniboine River. Once a summer, my parents and their good friends, the Conyers, who had two sons, would meet at a place called Sergeant Baths. It was an outdoor swimming pool. To get there, we had to take the streetcar and transfer to a bus. The eight of us would have a big picnic. I think we were just allowed to swim for just one hour. CAREER AMBITIONS I didn’t think about my career until I got to high school. There were two streams; you had to choose the academic or the commercial—industrial—stream. If you went into the academic stream, the choices for young women were very limited. Nursing and teaching were popular. If you wanted to work in the business world, you would have to transfer to another school and learn typing and shorthand. My sister, because she was older, went through Kelvin High School in Winnipeg, and I guess they had a combination of academic and commercial courses. Shirley excelled in secretarial skills. She was extremely organized and was very good at shorthand and typing. When she graduated, she went right into office work. Once I got into high school, I knew that upon graduation, I wanted to go to Normal School, which is what teacher’s college was called. I think that was always my plan.
“ But for Shirley and for me, those years were glorious. We had all these wonderful adults around us—four caregivers rather than two. We always had somebody to love us. We thought that we had a wonderful childhood. We never felt the strain of poverty; we didn’t feel deprived at all.
33 CHAPTER 3 THE MOVE TO ONTARIO
34 CHAPTER 3 — The Move to Ontario LEAVING GRANDMA’S We moved out of my grandmother’s home when I was 11 years old. My parents must have stored their furniture because we moved to an apartment. It was just a very plain apartment in another part of the city. My parents felt very strongly that we CHAPTER needed to be a nuclear family—just the four of us, away THREE THE MOVE TO ONTARIO
35 McLean — MY SPECIAL MEMORIES from the influence of my grandmother and my aunt. There must have been strains and stresses that I wasn’t aware of as a child and that they felt a real need to move. After three years, my dad was transferred to Fort William. That was a whole new life because living in Northwestern Ontario was the complete opposite of living on the prairies. My parents moved away from everything they knew: family, friends, their way of life. But they loved Fort William. Fort William and Port Arthur were separate cities at that time. My dad worked for the National Film Board, and he became a natural community leader. He worked all throughout Northwestern Ontario and was quite revered upon his retirement as a wonderful contributor to the education in all the small towns in the region. He was in a job that he loved, and my mother was back teaching as a principal supply, so I think those were happy years for them. They rented a big house which, my goodness, was a challenge for my mother. It had a wood stove for cooking, and she’d been cooking on an electric stove all her life. It was an older house—that’s all they could afford. Those were happy days because they made wonderful friends, and we made regular trips back to Winnipeg to visit family. The move was not easy for me. We moved in October, so all the students had started their classes by the time I arrived, and I was the newcomer and new to the system. I didn’t have any friends. The principal made the mistake of putting me two years ahead. It was a terrible mistake. He was influenced, I think, by the fact that in Winnipeg, I studied French for three years, and in Fort William, they didn’t start French until grade nine. So I guess he thought I was ahead, but I was floundering. My parents went to talk to him about it, and then my classes were changed, but I was still put ahead by one year. I graduated from grade 13 when I was 17, and I didn’t turn 18 until I was away at Normal School. I graduated from grade nine in Winnipeg, so I think that if I had just been put in grade ten instead of 11, I would have been a happier student. I just struggled pretty well all the way through high school. My grades were okay, but I had to work very, very hard just to maintain good marks. I also don’t think I was mature enough to go out on my own to go to Normal School in North Bay when I was 17 years old. I started to teach when I was 18. I think I would have been much happier to have stayed with my own age group and just matured at the regular rate along with the others. I think it’s always a mistake to put kids ahead, no matter how bright they are. So I can’t say that high school was a happy time for me. I just found it hard. I didn’t make close friends in any of my classes.
36 CHAPTER 3 — The Move to Ontario THE MOVE TO FORT WILLIAM Moving to Ontario was a huge change. I didn’t see a lot of the countryside in Manitoba, because we didn’t have a car. When my dad was transferred, my parents bought the first car our family ever had. Northwestern Ontario was so beautiful; I’d never seen so many rocks and trees, mile after mile—and wonderful lakes. It was just a complete change from a big city like Winnipeg. It was hard to leave my friends, but more than my friendships, it was hard to leave all my cousins and aunts and uncles. I had a big extended family, and my grandmother had lived in Winnipeg since she was three. Then my parents were born there, and Shirley and I were born there. All my aunts, uncles, cousins were a big part of my life, as well as my grandparents. Leaving them was a very big change, a very difficult transition, particularly for my mother. But there was the excitement of my father’s new position with the National Film Board. We were still suffering financially from the Depression when we moved, and our rented house was old and drafty. The challenges to my parents were so great. But in the end, it turned out to be the very best thing. It’s been a wonderful place to live and a very wonderful city to raise a family in as well. My sister didn’t move with us when we went from Winnipeg to Fort William. She was four years older than I was, so she had already graduated and had started working in an office. Eventually, she did come to live with the family in Fort William, and that’s where she met her husband. After her husband died, she worked with the president of Confederation College as his assistant in the final years of her career. MY DAD’S WORK WITH THE NATIONAL FILM BOARD My parents very quickly became part of the community. My dad’s work with the National Film Board became more of a community development kind of position because Northwestern Ontario is so huge, and he did a lot of travelling through the little towns. My parents’ closest friends were the community-minded people that he worked with. My dad used films as an educational tool—he was a born educator, and it was a job that really suited him. He stayed in that position and developed it over the years, retiring when he was 65. Originally the films were all documentaries. But they started to become very experimental in some ways—they’ve won awards over the years—and the films started to be used a lot in the schools. So the distribution of the films is what my dad set up through the public library systems and film councils throughout the territory. One funny incident was that it turned out that my husband, Jack, had actually met my dad before he met me. One of Jack’s first jobs was teaching in Dryden, and
37 McLean — MY SPECIAL MEMORIES Dryden was in my father’s territory. One of the things my dad did was to go into the schools and show the teachers how to run projectors. So he taught Jack how to run a projector and to use films in the classroom. It was a few years later that I met Jack. It was funny to find that out years later. MY ODD JOBS In high school, a lot of young people had part-time work. I started working at a very small Chinese grocery store downtown. In those days, the stores were only open on Friday and Saturday evenings—the department stores closed at nine. This little grocery store stayed open till ten, so after people left the department stores, they might come by and pick up a few items. I worked on Saturdays from ten in the morning until ten at night, and my salary was three dollars—that just puts things into perspective a little bit. But I was delighted to have the work. We had lots of energy because after the store closed at ten o’clock, we would go bowling or dancing—both were really popular in those days. William Dougall in his later years
“ Northwestern Ontario was so beautiful; I’d never seen so many rocks and trees, mile after mile—and wonderful lakes. It was just a complete change from a big city like Winnipeg.
39 McLean — MY SPECIAL MEMORIES There was one summer when I worked for the city’s Parks and Recreation Department. Chippewa Park was a very popular place for families to go and swim, and there was a merry-go-round. There was a lodge that had soft drinks and snacks and things for sale. The soft drinks were bottled, and you got two cents when you returned the bottle. I was in the bottle return section, and I had to pay out the two cents per bottle. That was heavy and kind of dirty work—I just hated that. When I was still in high school—I had a wonderful summer job working as a playground supervisor. I think it was for three or four summers. We had wonderful leadership training at the beginning of every summer, and there was a very strong bond among the young people that were hired to supervise these city parks. We would be responsible for running games for the little children, crafts, and storytime. For the older children, we had a basketball hoop, not a court, but just a hoop. I loved that job. I really learned a lot of skills there through the leadership training that were very helpful for me when I went on to Normal School. It was a good-paying job compared to other jobs because there was considerable responsibility. I was just a teenager, and we were responsible for all these little children. It didn’t seem like a heavy responsibility, though; it just seemed like fun. There were some wild kids. We had ways of dealing with that, mostly exclusion. We could send them home, away from the park, if they were endangering other children. But there was more respect shown for leaders of all kinds in those days; kids didn’t disrespect or use bad language or the things that we have trouble with in our society today. It was mostly that there were little bullies that would push and shove and that kind of thing. We had the authority to send them home and tell them that they couldn’t come back for a week. DANCING AND FUN I went out with my high school chums. We did a lot of double dating in those days, and a lot of hiking and biking, that kind of thing. I don’t remember going to many movies, oddly enough. Later, I became very fond of going to new movies, but maybe that was Jack’s influence. He loved movies, too. We just made our own fun. We walked everywhere or used our bikes, and school dances were very, very big events. We always had a dance card. The band would have the song selections that they were going to play in groups of three songs. Your dance card would have those listed, with a spot for somebody to fill in their name. When you arrived at the dance, if a boy asked you for a set, they would fill in their name on the card. It was important to dance the first and last set with the boy that you went with, but filling in your dance card was kind of fun. Sports, of course, were big events. I didn’t participate on any teams—I wasn’t good at
40 CHAPTER 3 — The Move to Ontario athletics—but we always went out to cheer for our teams. On certain Friday afternoons, the whole school would be released, and we would go to the stadium and cheer for the rugby team that was playing. Sports and clubs were important at school, but I studied quite a lot. I had to work very hard just to keep up my studies. When I graduated from high school—it was kind of weird in those days—the graduation ceremony was in November. By that time, I was already in North Bay for Normal School, so my sister and my parents went to my graduation because I was being awarded a small bursary. My sister went up to receive the bursary for me; it was the Doctor Affleck bursary. I often laugh about it because it was for the most improved student. You can imagine how bad I was in the beginning. It was $50, so that meant a lot to me because, besides saving from my work in the summer, I had to borrow $300 from the Rotary Club to pay for my expenses to go to Normal School.
“ I loved that job. I really learned a lot of skills there through the leadership training that were very helpful for me when I went on to Normal School.
43 CHAPTER 4 TEACHING
44 CHAPTER 4 — Teaching NORTH BAY NORMAL SCHOOL North Bay had the closest teachers’ college. We had to go there by train and then we had to board. I had everything figured out pretty closely, financially, and I had to borrow $300 from the Rotary Club. When I went for the interview, they said that they could forgive the loan if I would agree to teach in a country school when I graduated. But I was such a city girl, and I was rather CHAPTER terrified of living in the country. I didn’t know anything FOUR TEACHING
45 McLean — MY SPECIAL MEMORIES about it. Practically, I thought, ‘Well, I would have to buy a car, and how can I afford that? So I turned that offer down, and I just counted on being hired by the city school board. I was taking a bit of a chance because if I wasn’t hired by the city, I would be teaching in the country anyway. It was a bit of a gamble. When I went to Normal School, for the first time in my school life, I really excelled. I think it was because I had all those years in playground supervision. I was used to leading children, and I had learned some teaching skills before going. Fortunately, I graduated as an A student from Normal School and the Fort William and Port Arthur school boards—they were separate at that time—only hired the A students. I was hired by the Fort William board, and that’s a very happy story. Otherwise, I would have been faced with quite a challenge. To get to North Bay, I think it took 20 to 22 hours. We sat for all that time on these plush seats that were straight up, nothing reclined, and we couldn’t afford to have a berth. We were young, so we slept in those seats. The trips back and forth were quite amazing. It was a new experience. I think I became an adult during the period between September and Christmas. I was living in North Bay boarding with another girl from Fort William, and I was completely, one hundred percent responsible for myself without my parents in the background. I think that was a speeding up of my maturity. When I came home for Christmas, my parents just sat and stared at me as though I was a stranger because I had changed so much. They told me later that the change in me was quite remarkable. I guess that was my first feeling of being an adult. It comes from taking responsibility for yourself, I think, and not having the usual backups that you would normally have. In those days, we were dealing with the baby boomer generation after the men came back from the Second World War in 1945. They were married or got married and started having young families. It wasn’t unusual to have three, four or five children; hardly anybody just had two. They were big families, and as a result, the schools became crowded, and there was a shortage of teachers. So teachers started to have their pick of jobs. It was really common for somebody to move from one city to another just for a higher salary. And actually, that’s what happened with Jack. When I met him, he was teaching in Timmins, but that was his third place. He had started in Bigwood, then he went to Dryden, and then he went to Timmins. The schools were so crowded with children. They were building schools as fast as they could and opening up new wings on schools that were already built.
“ When I went for the interview, they said that they could forgive the loan if I would agree to teach in a country school when I graduated. But I was such a city girl, and I was rather terrified of living in the country. I didn’t know anything about it.
47 McLean — MY SPECIAL MEMORIES MY FIRST CLASSROOM When I started my first year of teaching, it was a bit of a nightmare. I had two grades: grades three and four. There were just two rows of grade four, so that would have been about 12 students, but there were 44 students total in the class. The kids could hardly move around. The way we taught reading was at different levels, so in my grade three class, I had three levels of reading. Then the grade four class would be the fourth. I had to prepare four reading lessons a day. While I was teaching one level, I had to supply the rest of the children with what we called ‘seatwork.’ You ended up at the end of the day with a pile of marking that had to be done before the next day, so you couldn’t even take one night off. You just worked, went home with a pile of books, and prepared lessons and marked workbooks. It was hard, hard work. Then, of course, there were the new experiences of parentteacher meetings. It was a very tough year, but things got easier after that because you learned to cope. I don’t know what became easier—the planning, I guess. Once you taught grade three for one year, the second year wasn’t as hard because you weren’t preparing everything new. Teaching had a lot of rewards, though, because the parents were very supportive of teachers. And there was a lot of satisfaction that came from it as well. I was 18 years old when I started teaching; I turned 19 in November. It’s a good thing I matured a little bit at Normal School. But life was not quite as busy at that point in time. We went at a slower pace with everything. We didn’t have cars, so you walked everywhere—it took half an hour to get to church—so the pace of life was slower. It would be pretty difficult to contend today with a crowded classroom like that because of the diversity of students and the expectations of special needs. It would be impossible to teach that number of children. But it was a sign of the times. And as I said, they just kept building schools until finally, the size of the classes came down. DIFFERENT OPPORTUNITIES I was at Normal School for just one year. After grade 13, you could go to Normal School for your training. If you taught successfully and took ongoing courses, you could qualify for your permanent certificate. A lot of men, like Jack, went directly into the working world. First, he tried accounting, but that didn’t work out. So he saw an ad in the Globe and Mail for teachers, and he thought maybe he could do that. He applied for a job without any teacher training—that’s how desperate they were for teachers. He went to Bigwood, a small community near Sudbury—there wasn’t even a road there. He had a country schoolhouse with ten grades and no teacher training. Then he qualified by going to summer school for two summers; he went to North Bay summer school and got his temporary certificate. After you taught
48 CHAPTER 4 — Teaching successfully for three years, you could make that permanent. I just had a few courses, but many men and women went ahead with their university education and got degrees while they were teaching full time. They got their degree by taking two subjects extramurally in the evenings and two subjects every summer. So that’s the way Jack started working towards his degree. First of all, he spent two summers at Normal School, and then after that, he took four courses a year, two in the winter, two in the summer, until eventually— it was even after we got married—he finally had his degree. That was very, very common, as not many people could afford to go to university full-time out of high school. I can only think of about five people from my grade 13 class who went on to university right out of high school. It was financially impossible for most people. WHY TEACH? My mother was a teacher, and as a child, I just loved the idea of playing school. Even when I started high school, my goal was to be a teacher. But there were not very many choices for women in those days. There were really only three choices: teaching, nursing, and secretarial work—I don’t remember anybody going into retail. Some of my classmates would have gone out of high school to another school to take a one-year commercial course; that would have equipped them to work in an office. Quite a few of my friends went into nursing, and that required three or four years of training. It wasn’t a degree course, but they were required to live in residence. So all through their training, they would work in the most menial jobs at the hospital. They were under curfew and had very few freedoms while taking their training on-site; it was like an apprenticeship. There are so many things you don’t recognize at the beginning, but you learn through dealing with them on a daily basis. MY LATER CAREER What stands out from my career was the difficulty of the first year and then gradually becoming more proficient through experience. Nothing can teach you better than experience. Of course, that’s true with a lot of jobs, but I think particularly that’s true with teaching. There are so many things you don’t
49 McLean — MY SPECIAL MEMORIES recognize at the beginning, but you learn through dealing with them on a daily basis. After I was married and the children were older—I think Maureen would have been in grade seven—I went back to work as a substitute teacher. That was a huge challenge that required a lot of different skills. First of all, when I went into any classroom, it was my purpose to establish order. Then secondly, to follow whatever pattern or planning the teacher had left. I think that was to give the class a bit of security; I didn’t try to introduce anything new. Eventually, I took my Special Education Certificate courses at Lakehead University for three summers in a row. During those three summers, Jack took over all the responsibilities for our home life. That allowed me to apply for a position that I think was probably the most interesting of my career: working as a special ed teacher in the area of speech and language. In that role, I was an itinerant and went to about seven or eight schools on a schedule, working one on one with children who had speech and language problems. There’s huge satisfaction in seeing the progress of a student with whom you have the privilege of working one on one. The speech part of my job was working with children who had lisps or could not pronounce words correctly; the most challenging speech problems were referred to speech pathologists. If a teacher in one of our schools noticed that a child was having delayed language or oral pronunciation problems, we began working with the child and began stage correction and enrichment. It was very, very rewarding. I loved that job. That was what I was doing in the latter part of my career. So when Jack retired, and we had the opportunity to teach overseas, that was one of the biggest struggles of my life—when you love your job, and then you have something else interesting to do. It wasn’t a problem to go because I took a leave of absence, as I hadn’t retired. I came back after our first two and a half years and went back into special education. Then we had the opportunity to go again, and I had to decide whether to retire or to go back to Japan to teach. It was like having two very good options, and it’s a difficult choice to make when you have two equally interesting options. So I retired early, but I never regretted my decision afterwards.
50 Top: Eleanor teaching in Japan Bottom left: Eleanor and Jack’s retirement years in Japan Bottom right: Enjoying all that Japan has to offer