Canada in the Fifties: From the Archives of «Maclean's»

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

Some will read this collection of articles from Maclean’s in the 1950s
as nostalgia, others as social history. Many may wonder whether there
was really a time when Canada was greatly respected at the highest
levels of international diplomacy, when Montreal was the economic centre
of the country, when the Fuller Brush Man came to the door and
“car-hop waitresses” served us at drive-in restaurants that had
“more asphalt than a service station”? Those who remember or have
heard about much of the tumultuous 1960s may find it hard to believe
that teenagers—virtually an invention of the 1950s and the subject of
two of the book’s essays—are here criticized for their conservatism
and passivity.

If, as the dust jacket says, the 1950s was “Canada’s Golden
Decade,” then it might be said that the years were golden ones for
Maclean’s, too: the writers represented in this excellent anthology
are some of Canada’s finest. The 36 selections (some of which have
been shortened) are arranged in four categories. “A Simpler Time”
includes essays on ice-cream parlors, living in lighthouses, horse-drawn
milk wagons in Toronto, and the battle between Simpson’s and
Eaton’s. “The More Things Change the More They Remain the Same”
has concerns about how “electronic brains” will affect our jobs, and
criticism of the CBC (by Pierre Berton, who also penned the book’s
introduction). After a dozen “Profiles in Fame,” the anthology
offers “Making News” (Maclean’s presented “for the first time”
revelations about Mackenzie King’s spiritualism). Given the decade of
insanity that was to follow, it is perhaps fitting that the book ends
with “My Twelve Hours as a Madman,” in which a Maclean’s editor
describes the experience of taking (under strict medical supervision in
Saskatchewan) a drug whose name was at that time known to almost
nobody—LSD.