In this, my final instalment of my descriptions of a few memories of growing up in Osoyoos, I would like to try to mention a few of the differences between then and now.
Now my parents were not the overly-permissive sort, and I may not have been a typical child of that era. However, these are my memoirs, the experiences are those of my life, and should be only regarded that way. Others writing about this time would very likely have different events that stood out for them.
For the first ten years of my life, we moved quite often, and lived in 4 or 5 different houses. Then in 1945 or 1946, as my grandfather moved from the Haynes house, we moved in, and my parents stayed there for the rest of their lives. I moved out permanently in 1959, the year I finished attending UBC and got married. So from age 10, I lived in that big old house on the east side of Osoyoos Lake.
In looking back to those years, what has left the strongest general impression is the amount of freedom we had. We were able to, as a matter of course, do a number of things that today’s children do not have the opportunity to do. And of course, they can do things that we couldn’t.
We were able to go camping overnight. We camped several times in the area of what is now Spirit Ridge. There seemed to be no hesitation on the part of parents to allow or approve of these little excursions. We bothered nobody, and nobody bothered us. We left our campsites as we found them; we packed out what we packed in.
There were very few boats on the lake. I think that at one time there were only 3 motor boats on the lake and the most powerful had a 2 ½ HP engine! We could go out on the lake at night. I used to return home from a friend’s house late at night by heading the boat out into the middle of the lake, and then be guided home by the glowing red light on a transformer in front of our house. When there was a strong south wind that produced what seemed then to be very high waves, the boat could be taken out and great pleasure achieved from riding those waves.
Bicycles were the common mode of transportation. Multi-speed bikes had not yet been developed, but some had different sprocket sizes, resulting in an effective difference in gearing. My bike was great on the flats, but most of my friends could climb hills better than I could. No 3 speeds, no 10 speeds, no gears; our machines were pretty basic. We had no TV, very few houses had phones, but we all had radios. The late afternoon hour from 5:00 ‘til 6:00 was filled with 4 serials suitable for kids our age. The only name that comes to mind is Captain Midnight. The Lone Ranger and Red Ryder came on in the early evening, and my parents could never understand how I could simultaneously listen to the radio and do homework. We had a small, very ordinary AM radio, but when conditions were right, we could tune into CBK in Watrous, Saskatchewan, or even to WWL in New Orleans.
We could not have imagined computers, iPhones, iPods and iPads, wi-fi, nor texting and so on. Any music we might have possessed was on 78 rpm records, not even LP’s or 45’s! “Hockey Night in Canada,” with Foster Hewitt was a never-miss on Saturday nights. Today’s language of MP3, JPEG, Facebook, Twitter, etc. is as far removed from our time as possible. No regrets about living when I did. While there was not a lot of money around, we didn’t know any differently. There was less social pressure, and life just seemed to go on quietly, peacefully and enjoyably. One wish is that computers and word processing had been here for my parents. Both were writers; my father wrote by hand, with many, many write-overs, and my mother progressed from an old Underwood manual typewriter to a newer portable typewriter. Neither machine could spell as well as she could! No auto-correct, no spell check, and if she wanted 2 copies, carbon paper was the only way of achieving that.
To wonder if these days are better or worse than the “good old days” is simply a waste of time and effort. To use the trite phrase, “it is what it is,” and alter it to, and include,“ it was what it was,” sums it up. It’s like comparing average wages in 1945 to average wages 60 years later in 2015. It’s like asking who the best basball player was. We make a big mistake in trying to compare eras. In this article I have tried to simply point out some differences.
And finally, we seldom locked the house doors before about 1955, and never locked the car!
George Fraser