In spring 1948 (March 24 to be exact) Dad and Mother had a Farm Auction Sale on our farm, four miles southwest of the tiny hamlet of Bruce, Alberta. The net proceeds of the sale were just over $9,600. Dad rented the farm to two brothers, Elwood and Art Willans who grew up on their family farm just a half-mile south of ours. They were “return soldiers,”—WWII veterans. One of the brothers, Elwood, had been Dad’s hired man from the end of the war in 1945 until then. Dad thought highly of the entire Willans family.
Our family—Dad, Mother, my two older sisters Gertie and Alice, my younger brother Ben and I—left for the Fraser Valley of British Columbia. Our grandfather, a widower, and two uncles and aunts, the Muiks and the Gabrish families had already relocated there several years earlier.
We left in Dad’s 1941 Ford—two adults, four children and a lot of clothes and linens. We got stranded and stuck in a severe spring blizzard near Three Hills. Dad left us all in the car while he walked to a neighbouring farm for help.
He seemed to be gone for a very long time. I remember being frightened and fearful. Eventually he and the farmer came back with a team of horses. They were soon hitched to the car and we were pulled to their farm where we had supper with them and stayed overnight.
We got to Three Hills and attended some sort of spring conference at the Prairie Bible Institute, hosted by its founder Reverend Maxwell, I believe. He had a far-reaching radio program that Mom and Dad listened to. We stayed there possibly another night or two.
When we started driving into the mountains from southern Alberta, I became very afraid of the high mountain roads, cliffs and steep embankments. I covered my head with a pillow and brother Ben told me when it was safe to look again.
We got to Aldergrove, B.C., the home of the Muiks and Gabrishes. I think we stayed with the Muik family and our cousins Violet, Howard and Morris, all of them older than I was. I know Ben and I attended Aberdeen School with Morris very briefly before Dad and Mother rented a house in Clearbrook. Then all of us children finished our school year there.
Dad and Mother purchased a house and barn on five acres at 522 Wellington Avenue in Chilliwack. I remember the address because I like how it rhymed!
The acreage was near the end of Wellington Avenue. Not too much further north of us was an Indian reserve and the Fraser River. Mother bought salmon from some Indigenous folks for about $2 for quite a number of fish in a washtub when they came to our door. I think it was illegal for us to buy fish from them.
I remember our two milk cows being very primitively “preg-checked” by Mr. Eckert, a dairyman that Dad had met. It was a big event for me watching Mr. Eckert. He stood alongside a cow in her stanchion, his back towards her head. One hand was on her back, the fist of the other hand palpating and pushing into her lower belly in front of the udder. He had a concentrated look on his face. After a minute or so, he would announce his findings.
“Yes,” he would say authoritatively, “she’s in calf.” Or, shaking his head and just as authoritatively, “No, she’s not in calf.”
He was probably correct half the time.
Our next door neighbours were the Shelongovsky family. They were Polish, had strong accents and were very friendly. Otto was the father’s name. He was a carpenter. They had three boys, Hank, Bill and Bob. I don’t remember if they had any girls or Mrs. Shelongovsky’s name. They attended the Alliance Church, which first my sisters, then later all of us, attended.
Hank and Bill were about my sister Gertie’s age or perhaps slightly older. Bill played the Hawaiian steel guitar standing up, with the guitar flat on its back as if it were an ironing board. His left hand held and moved a small steel bar; his right hand plucked the strings with steel thumb and finger picks attached to his fingers. His face, mouth and eyebrows moved and contorted as he played. I found him interesting to watch and the music was enjoyable too. Hawaiian steel guitar music was just becoming popular, I believe.
Bob was a bit older than Ben or me. He was creative, inventive and full of imagination. He made wooden swords for each of us (very nice ones) and taught us sword-fighting, which Ben and I had never seen, experienced, or even knew about.
His favourite expression was, “Take that, thou varlet!” as he parried our awkwardness and thrust his wooden sword toward our hearts. I didn’t and still don’t know what a varlet is. I believed he was some sort of bad person!
Bob also carved a little figure out of wood and painted it blue very carefully and distinctly. He made a cloth parachute, handkerchief size, with strings attached to the wooden figure, a pilot. He folded the little parachute carefully somehow on the back of the little wooden pilot and threw it hard, high into the air. When the figure began to fall, the parachute opened and the wooden pilot glided slowly to the ground or drifted a little in the breeze. He folded up the parachute and did it again, over and over. It was fun to watch.
Bob also liked to make fires in a small shallow hole he dug in the ground near the back of their property. One time he put potatoes into the fire and Ben and I helped him to keep the fire going for a fairly long time. Then we poked the potatoes out of the fire and tried to eat them, ash-covered and skins included. They were very hot, nearly all raw and not at all tasty.
Bob joined the Air Cadets in his teens. Right after high school graduation he joined the Canadian Air Force and became a jet fighter pilot. He was stationed in Germany and died when his jet crashed a year or two later, possibly 1958 or so.
The summer, late June actually of 1948, was the event of the big Fraser River flood of ’48. Apparently there was a heavy snow pack in the mountains, then a late, cold spring abruptly changing to several weeks of hot weather in late May and into June. Somehow Dad was conscripted to lay sandbags somewhere along the Fraser. He only worked for three days, then the dike (or the railway track which served as the dike) west of Chilliwack washed out.
The flat farmland around the predominantly Mennonite settlement of Greendale flooded very severely as well as all the Sumas flats farmland towards Abbotsford. It was a catastrophic event, though at 522 Wellington Avenue we only heard of the devastation not very far to the west. The city of Chilliwack itself was not flooded.
In September 1948 I started school at Chilliwack Central School. I was in Grade 4. Ben, in Grade 2, was at a different school in a different area, I believe it was called The Annex.
Ben soon made friends and was fine at the Annex. However it was a different story for me at Chilliwack Central. I felt lost, unsure and even afraid. I had no friends. So I just returned home after I had walked to school. Sometimes Dad drove me to school, then he went to the Post Office to get the mail. I was back home by the time Dad came home with the mail! I missed eight days of school in September 1948 and I wasn’t sick. I didn’t realize it then but I was missing Ben. We had been inseparable until then.
The Grade 4 teacher’s name was Miss Gillanders. She was quite strict as I recall and she taught us writing. She had beautiful handwriting. I tried hard to write like Miss Gillanders.
About that time, possibly through the Alliance Church, Dad got a job with Modern Building Movers of Chilliwack. I think the owner, or one of the owners, was a Mr. Enns. W.A.C. “Wacky” Bennett was the Premier and the Social Credit Party was in power in B.C. for quite a few years starting about then.
One of W.A.C. Bennett’s projects was a lot of road-building throughout B.C. Modern Building Movers got contracts to move houses, mostly, and other buildings out of the right-of-way of the new roads and highways. One of the bigger moves Dad helped with was moving a church somewhere in the Interior. Dad told us the church was jacked up onto blocks, then huge, long wooden beams were put under it and it was winched very slowly over wooden blocks that were soaped (for lubrication) and moved countless times from the back of the church to the front, by hand, as the church inched slowly along. To go perhaps even a quarter or half a mile would have taken several days. I think Dad liked that job he had for a brief period of his life.
Also through the church, I think, we got to know the Cabush family They lived just a few blocks south of us on Wellington Avenue.
Mr. and Mrs. Cabush were retired. Mr. Cabush had been a CNR conductor when they lived in Edmonton. He could name every stop along the main line from Edmonton east to Battleford, Saskatchewan.
They had a small house with a fairly large garden in the backyard. Some of the garden was between some hazelnut trees. Mr. Cabush sold hazelnuts (perhaps strawberries too) to the Safeway store in Chilliwack. They didn’t have a car; their small separate garage was storage for gardening things and tools. Perhaps he loaded the nuts onto a children’s wagon and pulled them to Safeway, I don’t know.
We, the whole family, visited the Cabushes quite often in the winter evenings, after supper. We walked there. There was a particular reason we went there. Mr. Cabush had a crokinole board and he loved to play crokinole. Remember, TV wasn’t around in 1948/49.
It was the men who played crokinole. The ladies visited and were in the kitchen mostly with Mrs. Cabush. I remember Mr. Cabush always wearing black suit pants, a white shirt and a black vest. The vest had a silver chain watch fob that looped down to a pocket that held a silver pocket watch. His suit pants were held up by a black belt with a silver buckle that had the letter “J” (for Julius) engraved on it.
Mr. Cabush would get the original cardboard box, with the crokinole board inside, out of a closet. He carefully pulled out the board and put it on a small, sturdy wooden table in the living room. We put four dining room chairs around it. He pulled out the cloth bag with all the checkers. He divided the 12 round black checkers in half. He divided the 12 white checkers in half. Then we chose the two teams.
When Mr. Cabush first showed us how to play the game, the rules of the game and the way to calculate the score, he also showed us how to shoot. The checker had to be placed just touching the outside line in your quadrant of the circle. You dared not ever move the board. You put your index finger alongside your thumb, palm of your hand down, and quite gently shot the checker at an opposing player’s checker to knock it out of play. At the same time, you tried to make your own checker slide closer to the centre of the board, ideally and rarely ending up in the exact centre checker-sized hole that counted for 20 points. Whenever someone made “a ringer” (of their own or, accidentally, their opponent’s checker) there was a loud exclamation! Mr. Cabush would ceremoniously take the checker out of the centre hole and place it on his right side for future counting.
Ben (as in other sports and games) caught on more quickly than I did and was soon a very proficient player. Dad and I didn’t use our index finger as the shooting finger, we used our middle finger. We often shot too hard and with less control and accuracy. Dad had large, knobby farm fingers; he mostly shot too hard and hit the pegs, his checker ricocheting off a peg or even off the table entirely.
Mr. Cabush liked to win at crokinole. He liked having Ben as his partner. There were three possible team combinations and we did change during an evening of four or five games that ended with one team reaching 100 points. But Mr. Cabush liked Ben as his partner the most.
At the end of each game, Mr. Cabush did the cancelling and adding up the score. If a “ringer” had been scored during the game, Mr. Cabush triumphantly held it up and the 20 points were counted.
After a number of games, Mr. Cabush slowly pulled his pocket watch out of his vest pocket. Soon after he did that, we put all the checkers back into the bag, then the board and checkers back in the cardboard box, which was then returned to the side of the closet. Then we put the chairs back into the dining room and we went back to the kitchen.
There the kitchen table was set with cups and saucers or glasses and spoons for everyone. Mrs. Cabush always wore a colourful dress and an apron. She would often be at the kitchen counter, slicing a brick of ice cream (a standard large size at the time which came in waxy cardboard) into perfectly equal pieces about a half inch thick. It was always Neopolitan—layers of vanilla, strawberry and chocolate. She spooned a tablespoon or so, not very much, of thawed, previously frozen strawberries from their backyard garden over the ice cream. There were cookies or squares on a plate in the centre of the table. Ben and I had previously been admonished to only have one, or at the most two, of the cookies or squares. There was always tea in a pretty teapot for the adults and glasses of milk for Ben and me.
Mr. Cabush always said a short grace before we ate. The Cabushes had lost a son in WWII—his framed, uniformed picture was on the sideboard of the dining room. Sometimes when they talked about him, they brought the picture from the dining room and set it on the kitchen table. Remember, this was 1948/49 and WWII had ended in 1945. Perhaps he was killed in 1943 or ’44 or ’45. That would only have been about five years earlier, his memory still fresh in their minds.
Soon my parents discovered that Mrs. Cabush’s (was her name Carrie?) maiden name was Fredericks. She was the sister of Herman Fredericks, Grant Fredericks’ father and a pioneer of the Bruce area. The Cabushes were Grant Fredericks’ uncle and aunt! They also had a daughter whose husband, I believe, started the Hope Mission for street people in Edmonton.
Visiting the Cabushes, playing crokinole, and eating Neapolitan ice cream at every visit are strong memories of living at 522 Wellington Avenue in 1948 and ’49.