The Boy from Winnipeg

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

First published in 1970, this book was the second (although the first
chronologically) of a three-volume mixture of autobiography and prairie
history by a longtime Winnipeg journalist who became a leading social
historian of the West. In recounting his childhood years in Winnipeg
during the turbulent times from 1905 to 1922, Gray presents a
fascinating picture of a city that voted to have limited prostitution
but observed Sundays so strictly and reverentially that even streetcars
could not run. The bustling, fast-growing, multiethnic Winnipeg was,
Gray writes, “as race-proud, bigoted, and prejudice-driven as any city
on earth.” It was also “as crime-ridden a city as there was in
Canada, and liquor was at the bottom of it all.” He writes as well of
the city’s parks, of horse racing, of the popular sports that boys
enjoyed, and of the many ways that he and his impoverished family
struggled to make a quarter. Major events such as World War I and the
Winnipeg General Strike are seen in terms of personal experiences of
Gray and his family.

The Boy from Winnipeg won the University of British Columbia medal for
Popular Biography in 1971. This new edition includes a short
introduction by a University of Saskatchewan scholar and a few line
drawings, but unlike its two chronological successors, The Winter Years
(1966) and Troublemaker! (1979), it does not have an index. Although the
book’s references to specific neighborhoods, schools, intersections,
and parks may mean little to the non-Winnipeger, Gray’s often-humorous
account of growing up in poverty during Winnipeg’s years as a gateway
to the West for thousands of immigrants has a universal appeal.