Days Gone By: Jack Peach on Calgary's Past

Michael Payne is head of the research and publications program, Historic
Sites and Archives Service, Alberta Community Development, and co-author
of A Narrative History of Fort Dunvegan.

This book is a collection of short articles that appeared in the Calgary
Herald in the late Jack Peach’s column on the history of Calgary. A
longtime resident of Calgary, Peach brought a particular mixture of
personal experience, civic pride, and anecdotal energy to his stories.
Thus, in an article on pioneer flight, he could reminisce about being a
young boy in the 1920s, watching forestry survey planes flying overhead
and imbuing their pilots with a life of adventure that aerial spotting
of forest fires probably never matched. Peach was by no means unique as
a local historian and raconteur (indeed, his work is very reminiscent of
the writings of Tony Cashman, J.G. MacGregor, and many other popular
local historians across Canada), but both his newspaper columns and
radio talks almost always had an engaging personal twist.

Peach also had an eye for offbeat and unusual stories, like the
construction of a monorail system in Calgary in 1911 and Boy Scout
birdhouse-building campaigns. The book also includes a number of genial
sketches of Southern Alberta characters like the sometime rodeo rider
Lillian Train and the radio pioneer W.W. Grant. Of course, there is much
here that is familiar—the origins of the Calgary Stampede and
histories of major buildings like Calgary’s Memorial Park Library. Nor
was Peach an incurable optimist or booster; the collection does include
an account of the terrors of polio epidemics and some discussion of
Calgary’s less salubrious hotels and restaurants.

The one theme that runs through most of these stories, aside from
nostalgia for an earlier and less complex time, is regret at how quickly
Calgary, like other western Canadian cities, set about demolishing most
physical evidence of its past. Peach calls this urge “the sledgehammer
of progress.” The sentiment is fine, but it overlooks the fact that
Calgary itself represented the sledgehammer of progress when founded.
Many of the buildings whose passing Peach mourned were built on rings
and Métis cabins from earlier times.