A shout-out today to a fellow blogger of sorts, Ed Stein. Ed is a retired newspaper cartoonist here who's begun an ongoing blog/comic/graphic novel online called “Sleeper Ave.” after the street he grew up on in Waco. So far it's an interesting mix of pictures and prose dealing with his childhood, some sixty years and it might seem, worlds away even though he's still in the same town.
His first story dealt with a massive tornado that devastated the city in 1953 but as a young boy at the time, he had an entirely different take on it from adults. Since then he's dealt with the themes of polio and racism, a storyline he says was partly brought to mind by the current measles outbreak and controversy over vaccinations.
I think the website is well worth a visit, even for those from afar. It also got me thinking back to my own childhood, a couple of decades after Stein's. I grew up near Toronto, as many of you know. So much of my childhood existence seems worlds away as well.
My dad worked for many years - over thirty- for GM. It seemed when I was a kid, everyone's dad worked for GM. Hardly a surprise, since at that time the corporate headquarters for the megalithic company's Canadian division was only a few miles from our home. They employed something like 24 000 people in the city. This was back when the Oshawa-Whitby area had a population of barely over 100 000.
The “Motors” dominated the city. Downtown Oshawa back then had three movie theaters on main street, a Woolworth's department store with a little snack bar by the window you could sit at, and acre upon acre of tall brick factories. Entire blocks along Bond Street were covered by GM's old complex; further south was the newer factory which covered hundreds of acres as well. Two of the downtown buildings were attached by a covered walkway that spanned a roadway; when I was a kid I always wanted to grow up to look out of it onto the road below. Not to work at the factory, mind you, but to get to go in and look out from the elevated walkway.
A factory , or factories, turning out thousands of cars and trucks a week needed a lot of supplies. The railways were always busy carting in boxcars full of parts and shunting out carriers full of shiny Chevy's and GMCs. With factories both downtown and in the south end of Oshawa, Canadian Pacific even ran local trains between the two- on a track that was on Ritson Road! Not parallel to it, mind you, but down the middle of the street. More than one drunk wrote off a car when surprised by an oncoming gray-and-maroon SW1500 locomotive. (CP had switched to a bright red and white very '70s paint scheme with a black triangle logo by then, but hadn't bothered to paint most of their yard engines from earlier, drab paint schemes.)
As a typical (well, scratch that, rather atypical, nerdy) boy I did have one love shared by most young lads- trains. We could hear the CP mainline from our house; dozens of freights went by every day; on nice days I'd walk or bike over a couple of blocks to a dingy park by an odd-shaped Purina pet food factory (which had several red-and-white checkered silos) and watch them. I always was excited to see the colors and logos of so many different rail lines go by- Santa Fe, Maine Central, Cotton Belt, Penn-Central- you name it. All dragged along to or from the factories by the red CP diesels. The yellowish cabooses marked the end of the train of course. When I got to my tweens I had a little Olympus rangefinder camera and somedays took pictures of the passing trains, and of the Purina building. Anywhere you went on a warm day in Whitby back then you could smell the distinctive aroma of the pet food in the making. It repulsed most people; I thought it was kind of pleasant. I don't know if I still would, or for that matter if it would instantly take me back thirty years.
Today, the Oshawa area is home to over 300 000 people and GM, still headquartered there, employs perhaps 4000 people. The “Truck plant” is gone; so too the “Battery plant.” Downtown Oshawa is a revitalizing district with a busy hockey arena-concert hall and a number of upscale cafes and restaurants. The blocks of GM factories are memories now and there's no risk of being hit by a train when cruising down Ritson Road. The trains still run by my old house, just not as often as they used to. Santa Fe, Maine Central, Penn-Central and most of the other lines have been merged out of existence and cabooses are as much ancient history as horse-and-carriages. Most of the Purina plant is gone and what's left is used for other purposes. I guess Whitby smells fresher on a summer's day,but something in me would still yearn to smell dog food being manufactured when visiting the old neighborhood.
TV antennas over every house; my grandfather's anger at my parents for letting my brother play with the Japanese boy down the road; listening to the white plastic Viking stereo in my room, digging CHUM radio and K-tel records; the air raid sirens that sounded every so often to alert volunteer firefighters when a blaze was beyond the capability of the small, paid fire department workers. So many memories that are so gone now. So alien to generations younger than mine.
I salute Ed Stein for trying to capture some of them and document life in a simpler (?) time for us, and for the future. And if it strikes a chord with you, maybe you should try to do the same. It's a different world, people. We can read about the Renaissance or wonder about the Civil War but we have some first-hand history to tell!
His first story dealt with a massive tornado that devastated the city in 1953 but as a young boy at the time, he had an entirely different take on it from adults. Since then he's dealt with the themes of polio and racism, a storyline he says was partly brought to mind by the current measles outbreak and controversy over vaccinations.
I think the website is well worth a visit, even for those from afar. It also got me thinking back to my own childhood, a couple of decades after Stein's. I grew up near Toronto, as many of you know. So much of my childhood existence seems worlds away as well.
My dad worked for many years - over thirty- for GM. It seemed when I was a kid, everyone's dad worked for GM. Hardly a surprise, since at that time the corporate headquarters for the megalithic company's Canadian division was only a few miles from our home. They employed something like 24 000 people in the city. This was back when the Oshawa-Whitby area had a population of barely over 100 000.
The “Motors” dominated the city. Downtown Oshawa back then had three movie theaters on main street, a Woolworth's department store with a little snack bar by the window you could sit at, and acre upon acre of tall brick factories. Entire blocks along Bond Street were covered by GM's old complex; further south was the newer factory which covered hundreds of acres as well. Two of the downtown buildings were attached by a covered walkway that spanned a roadway; when I was a kid I always wanted to grow up to look out of it onto the road below. Not to work at the factory, mind you, but to get to go in and look out from the elevated walkway.
A factory , or factories, turning out thousands of cars and trucks a week needed a lot of supplies. The railways were always busy carting in boxcars full of parts and shunting out carriers full of shiny Chevy's and GMCs. With factories both downtown and in the south end of Oshawa, Canadian Pacific even ran local trains between the two- on a track that was on Ritson Road! Not parallel to it, mind you, but down the middle of the street. More than one drunk wrote off a car when surprised by an oncoming gray-and-maroon SW1500 locomotive. (CP had switched to a bright red and white very '70s paint scheme with a black triangle logo by then, but hadn't bothered to paint most of their yard engines from earlier, drab paint schemes.)
As a typical (well, scratch that, rather atypical, nerdy) boy I did have one love shared by most young lads- trains. We could hear the CP mainline from our house; dozens of freights went by every day; on nice days I'd walk or bike over a couple of blocks to a dingy park by an odd-shaped Purina pet food factory (which had several red-and-white checkered silos) and watch them. I always was excited to see the colors and logos of so many different rail lines go by- Santa Fe, Maine Central, Cotton Belt, Penn-Central- you name it. All dragged along to or from the factories by the red CP diesels. The yellowish cabooses marked the end of the train of course. When I got to my tweens I had a little Olympus rangefinder camera and somedays took pictures of the passing trains, and of the Purina building. Anywhere you went on a warm day in Whitby back then you could smell the distinctive aroma of the pet food in the making. It repulsed most people; I thought it was kind of pleasant. I don't know if I still would, or for that matter if it would instantly take me back thirty years.
Today, the Oshawa area is home to over 300 000 people and GM, still headquartered there, employs perhaps 4000 people. The “Truck plant” is gone; so too the “Battery plant.” Downtown Oshawa is a revitalizing district with a busy hockey arena-concert hall and a number of upscale cafes and restaurants. The blocks of GM factories are memories now and there's no risk of being hit by a train when cruising down Ritson Road. The trains still run by my old house, just not as often as they used to. Santa Fe, Maine Central, Penn-Central and most of the other lines have been merged out of existence and cabooses are as much ancient history as horse-and-carriages. Most of the Purina plant is gone and what's left is used for other purposes. I guess Whitby smells fresher on a summer's day,but something in me would still yearn to smell dog food being manufactured when visiting the old neighborhood.
TV antennas over every house; my grandfather's anger at my parents for letting my brother play with the Japanese boy down the road; listening to the white plastic Viking stereo in my room, digging CHUM radio and K-tel records; the air raid sirens that sounded every so often to alert volunteer firefighters when a blaze was beyond the capability of the small, paid fire department workers. So many memories that are so gone now. So alien to generations younger than mine.
I salute Ed Stein for trying to capture some of them and document life in a simpler (?) time for us, and for the future. And if it strikes a chord with you, maybe you should try to do the same. It's a different world, people. We can read about the Renaissance or wonder about the Civil War but we have some first-hand history to tell!