Remembering the Fifties

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

This work of oral history is in some ways disappointing. Lorraine
Blashill, who is described as a “communications specialist,” has
assembled recollections of growing up in Western Canada from nearly 40
people born between 1935 and 1954.

The book cries out for editing. Some of the reminiscences are less than
coherent, and there should be no room for such observations as “I was
born at a very early age.” There are blatant errors of fact. In
recalling early CBC TV, a Saskatoon man comments that “Regina was big
time because they had CTV”; in fact, it was years before “they”
did. One also questions the validity of recollections drawn from people
who were six years old when the 1950s ended. One woman remembers being
unsettled by media reports of “[t]he McCarthy witch hunts,” but how
unsettled could she have been if she was only five years old at the
height of McCarthyism?

This reviewer, who was a child in Victoria and who grew up in western
Manitoba in the 1950s, found many memories that reminded him of the way
it was, along with descriptions of conditions that came as a surprise
(many people in Western Canada at that time lived without electricity or
running water). Unfortunately, there has been little attempt at
synthesis. What we have in this book is raw material for a magazine
article.