before

My story really starts with what came before.The year is 1934.By some accounts the world is starting to emerge from The Great Depression.But times are still hard.In the western part of North America the land is drying up and blowing away


Adolph Hitler becomes the leader of Germany.Franklin Roosevelt is the American president and Joseph Stalin rules The Soviet Union.Here in Canada the Prime Minister is Richard Bennett.

It's the year that The Queen Mary is launched and Alcatraz,or The Rock as it's called is opened.American outlaws Bonnie and Clyde are gunned down,as is John Dillinger.

In 1934,a new house cost just under six  thousand dollars,monthly rental of a house was about twenty dollars,gas was ten cents a gallon,bread eight cents a loaf,a new Studebaker truck cost six hundred and twenty five dollars,and average wages were about sixteen hundred dollars annually.

Ralph Nader,Hank Aaron,Sophia Loren,Bridgette Bardot,Pat Boone,Giorgio Armani and Charles Manson were born in 1934.So was future Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien.

Nineteen Thirty Four was also the year that both of my parents were born,nearly two months and about two hundred and fifty miles apart,one in the province of Nova Scotia,the other in New Brunswick.They came from very different sorts of towns and very different backgrounds.

My father was born in the dead of winter,and I recall my grandmother saying both that it was bitterly cold,and that she went to the hospital in a sleigh.My father was the third of four children,and my grandparents were separated,a thing which would have been regarded very differently then than it is now.They must have been poor.My father never talked much about it,at least not with the purpose of doing so,but if you listened close and recalled well,you could get something of a picture of their lives.He mentioned more than once walking down the railroad tracks,collecting bits of coal that had fallen off trains.He said a lot of people did that and that it was regarded as stealing by the railroad,but still they had to do it.He stopped one day outside the liquor store and gave a five dollar bill to a man from The Salvation Army.When he got back into the car he said "Son,always give to The Salvation Army if you can because they never do anything but good." And so he must have been poor for him to have known this truth.

Springhill,Nova Scotia was his hometown.Of course it is known for the singer Anne Murray.But it was better known as a coal town,and for mining disasters and hard times as all mining towns seem to be.Part of Springhill is built on a hill,it's main street snaking out to the flats below where the mines were and where all the poorer people,and the blacks lived.There used to be an old slag heap out there that contained coal mixed with other sorts of rock,such that it could not be sold.Sometime,long ago I suppose,this heap, which was huge caught fire and it burned for years.I recall passing by it on one occasion in the car and asking my grandfather if that was Hell.The air stank from its blue smoke,and at night it would give off an eerie orange glow.Up on the hill the air was not always bad like it was in the flats.Downtown was attractive and featured a beautiful clock tower.But that's all gone now too,much of it burned to the ground in the 1970's.What I see there now makes no sense to me.On the other side of downtown,leaving town is the graveyard.You pass the houses of all the wealthy towns people first,then the cemetery gate is on the right as you start downhill on the way out of town.Here the air smells of roses and lilacs,with hardly a trace of coal smoke.Both of my grandparents are buried here,and I believed my father would be as well.But he is not.

My father was firmly rooted in Nova Scotia,as Nova Scotian as you can imagine.If you don't know what a stereotypical Nova Scotian is,picture the sea,and fish and some trees.Picture someone who identifies with ancestors Scottish or Irish.Picture hard workers,but not prosperous people,at least in terms of money.Picture family oriented people.That was my father.


References:www.thepeopleshistory.com