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Here is another family story, this time from my Mom, about her father.
When I was six years old my parents moved our family to the north end of Winnipeg. We lived approximately one city block from King George Public School which was located on the corner of Selkirk and Arlington. It would have been so easy to send five of their six children there for school if our parents hadn’t been so adamant about us getting educated in the Catholic school system. This meant we had to be up by 7 a.m. to be ready to catch the streetcar (yes, I did say streetcar) and be on time for school which for us was St. Mary’s Parochial School. Our school was located directly across from St. Mary’s Cathedral on St. Mary Avenue.What's interesting for me is that with each short story from my Mom or Dad about their earlier lives, I get to know a bit more about my grandparents, and uncles and aunts, and life before I was born, thus enriching my life experiences as well. We have it so good in the 21st Century - I can't imagine walking the distance my grandfather did every day for years, at times in -40F weather, no doubt in blizzards, snowstorms, and rain showers as well, simply to save a few pennies for transit fare. Unselfish love, indeed, there is not enough of that in the world today. You were amazing, Grandpa.Not until we were finished school and were out working did our mother reveal to us how our father would walk to work on many occasions, so that there would be enough money to pay for our streetcar tickets. Our father was a barber and the barber shop where he was employed was on Fort Street, just off Portage Avenue, in downtown Winnipeg. This was an incredibly long walk for anyone on a cold winter’s day, no matter what his age may have been. I remember to this day the feelings I experienced upon hearing that our father made such an enormous sacrifice for us. It really spoke to me of unselfish love, something our dear parents were filled with. While by the world’s standards were classed as a very poor family, in my heart I always knew that God had blessed us with the kind of riches the world could never have given us.
When my father took a stroke in December, 1979, the doctors and nurses would comment often about the fact that not one day passed that some or all of dad’s children were there to visit him. We would bring our mother and go to spend time with Dad, who, although paralyzed on one side of his body, never lost his ability to speak. How do you help anyone understand that what we were attempting to do was to give back to dad some of the love he had given so freely to our mother, and to all his children and grandchildren. - Loretta Reichardt
Here is another family story, this time from my Mom, about her father.
When I was six years old my parents moved our family to the north end of Winnipeg. We lived approximately one city block from King George Public School which was located on the corner of Selkirk and Arlington. It would have been so easy to send five of their six children there for school if our parents hadn’t been so adamant about us getting educated in the Catholic school system. This meant we had to be up by 7 a.m. to be ready to catch the streetcar (yes, I did say streetcar) and be on time for school which for us was St. Mary’s Parochial School. Our school was located directly across from St. Mary’s Cathedral on St. Mary Avenue.What's interesting for me is that with each short story from my Mom or Dad about their earlier lives, I get to know a bit more about my grandparents, and uncles and aunts, and life before I was born, thus enriching my life experiences as well. We have it so good in the 21st Century - I can't imagine walking the distance my grandfather did every day for years, at times in -40F weather, no doubt in blizzards, snowstorms, and rain showers as well, simply to save a few pennies for transit fare. Unselfish love, indeed, there is not enough of that in the world today. You were amazing, Grandpa.Not until we were finished school and were out working did our mother reveal to us how our father would walk to work on many occasions, so that there would be enough money to pay for our streetcar tickets. Our father was a barber and the barber shop where he was employed was on Fort Street, just off Portage Avenue, in downtown Winnipeg. This was an incredibly long walk for anyone on a cold winter’s day, no matter what his age may have been. I remember to this day the feelings I experienced upon hearing that our father made such an enormous sacrifice for us. It really spoke to me of unselfish love, something our dear parents were filled with. While by the world’s standards were classed as a very poor family, in my heart I always knew that God had blessed us with the kind of riches the world could never have given us.
When my father took a stroke in December, 1979, the doctors and nurses would comment often about the fact that not one day passed that some or all of dad’s children were there to visit him. We would bring our mother and go to spend time with Dad, who, although paralyzed on one side of his body, never lost his ability to speak. How do you help anyone understand that what we were attempting to do was to give back to dad some of the love he had given so freely to our mother, and to all his children and grandchildren. - Loretta Reichardt
:: My mother contributes another story to my family history project:
His instructions to my mother were to bathe my father's foot in hot water with epsom salt, three to four times daily. My father's bedtime ritual always included kneeling to say his prayers. My mother had helped him ready for the night, elevating his foot on some pillows. My bedroom, which I shared with my younger sister Carol, was directly opposite that of my parents. While I lay in bed trying to go to sleep (as I had been instructed, "Go to sleep now, you have school in the morning"), I noticed my father get out his bed and kneel to say his prayers.
I literally jumped from my bed and ran to his side, pleading with him to get back into bed, as God knew he had a sore foot and would not mind if he did not kneel until his foot was better. With much love in his eyes, my dad reached up, and touching my shoulder, invited me to kneel beside him and pray. By this time I was in tears, certain that his foot must be hurting him more than ever. I knelt, and together we prayed and I asked God to make my daddy's foot better.
Some sixty plus years later, I still remember vividly that night, and realize how much this influenced the prayer life I have had since my early childhood.
:: This time out, a pair of short pieces from me dear old M and Da:
Mom: Whoever wrote the words to the song, “Summertime and the livin’ is easy”, wasn’t in my mother’s kitchen 60 years ago. Living was certainly not easy for her. I still picture her working in a very small kitchen, wood stove putting out the heat in an already sweltering room. She was canning food. To keep her family fed throughout the upcoming long, cold winte,r she would can somewhere in the neighbourhood of 500 jars of food. She would can corn on the cob, kernel corn, peas, peas and carrots, carrots, tomatoes, chickens, peaches, pears, plums and strawberries. She would make strawberry jam, raspberry jam, grape jelly, grape jam, blueberry jam. If you could name it, I swear my mother could can it.
I receive daily inspirational messages from Oprah. I think today’s thought is very fitting, in helping describe how my mother loved us all. “Love is that splendid triggering of human vitality...the supreme activity which nature affords anyone for going out of himself toward someone else." --Jose Ortega y Gasset, philosopher
:: My mother offers another interesting tale from her childhood. She lived on Selkirk Avenue, in the north end of Winnipeg, in the 1930s and 40s.
My sister Alice, who was the oldest of my brothers and sisters, was always in charge of babysitting my brother Roland, me, and the youngest member of our family, Carol. One Wednesday night, my sister Alice got the brainy idea that my brother Roland should dress up like the Hunchback of Notre Dame, and lie in wait between our house and the building next door. As soon as he would see a woman coming down the street, he would jump out from behind the building, and with a pillow stuffed in the back of his shirt, he would slither out from his hiding place looking very scary and making weird noises. Of course it was dark out, and this just added to the fun. We'd be huddled upstairs, looking out our parents' bedroom window, killing ourselves laughing, as one woman after another would run off screaming.
After scaring off two or three women, he came back in, and we all tried to act as if nothing happened. Had my parents ever found out, we would have been given the what for, believe me. What seemed hilarious back then no longer seems quite so funny to me today. If someone were to do this to me now I would probably have a cardiac arrest as I tend to scare quite easily.
:: I was talking on the phone with my mother, Loretta Reichardt, the other day, and the conversation turned to how we lived in the 50s, and how we heated our home in the winter. I recall that we had a coal furnace, and remember watching my Dad shovel coal into the large, mysterious vessel that lived in our basement on Gareau Street, in St Boniface, Manitoba. I asked my Mom what it was like in the 1930s, when she lived in a little house with her three sisters and two brothers. How did they heat their house in the winter?, and other questions emerged. I asked Mom to detail this for me, and I present to you her words below:
Then you asked me what it was like in my home when I was just a young girl. How did grandma and grandpa heat our home?, you asked. We had two different types of stoves in our home. My dad put one of the stoves up in the living room in the winter. It was called a Booker furnace. It was your typical pot-bellied little furnace that had the pipes going up through the ceiling, and into one of the upstairs bedrooms and then out through the chimney. At night, my Dad would stoke the furnace until it was unbelievably hot in the house, then my Mother would say to us, "Sneak upstairs and open the bathroom window." So one of us would open the window, and five minutes later, my Dad would yell, "Who opened the bathroom window?", and we'd all say, "Nobody, it wasn't me, Dad!" Then the stove would burn out in the middle of the night, and when it was -30 outside, the house would begin to cool down within an hour, to a very cold temperature. We had many blankets to keep us warm during those nights.
By the time my Dad woke at 6:00 am, he'd start the fire again in the Booker furnace, and one in the kitchen stove. My younger sister, Carol, and I, wore navy blue bloomers and black stockings to school with our tunics and white blouses. When it was really cold at night, we tried to sneak the bloomers and stockings on before bed so that when we woke up in the morning, we wouldn't have to step on a freezing cold floor. But before we'd get to sleep, my Mom would check on us first; she'd toss the covers back, check our feet and see the stockings sticking our from our pajama bottoms, and order us to, "Get those off immediately, you cannot sleep in your bloomers." We would respond, "But we don't like stepping on the cold floor with our bare feet in the morning", and she'd say, "You're not babies, stop crying and just do it", and sometimes she'd give us a story about her growing up on the farm, and how much harder it was then, and how much easier life was now.
In the kitchen was a large stove with a warming oven at the top. The stove itself had several rounds on the top which one could open to place the wood in. These were located to the left side of the stove. On the extreme right side of the stove was a reservoir which my parents would keep filled with water. This water would then become hot whenever the stove was lit and you had a good fire burning. There was the oven in the centre of the stove. It had a thermometer on the front and my mother would regulate the heat whenever she was baking bread, cookies, cakes, pies, or cooking meat such as a roast, chicken, turkey, etc. Looking back, it amazes me how she managed to keep the fire in the stove at the right temperature, so as not to overcook or over bake anything.
We didn't have a hot water tap in our home so we were always grateful to have the hot water in the reservoir for washing ourselves before bedtime and then again in the morning. We did not have the luxury of a bathtub or shower. We had to bathe in a huge galvanized tub which my dad would place in the downstairs bedroom which was located just off the kitchen. My father would fill a large copper double boiler on the top of the stove. I am not too sure just how many gallons of water it held, but it was enough to fill the tub in the bedroom where we could bathe in privacy. You were always happy if it was your turn to be first in the tub. Being that we were a large family, one tub full of water had to do for three of us, one after another. We took turns being first. Then my father had the job of emptying the tub and then refilling it again with more hot water for the next set of children.
This was a common practice among those of us who were considered the poor in the community. However, although we were truly poor as far as dollars and cents go, were very rich in so many other areas. My mother kept her six children spotless, our home was always immaculately clean, and because she was so gifted, she sewed most of our clothes. I lie in bed even now and sometimes can almost hear her treadle sewing machine working into the late hours of the night. When we awoke in the morning, there would be a new coat for one of us that mom had made from an old coat someone had given her. She would get these coats, take a razor blade and invite one of us to hold the coat at one end while she carefully ripped the seams open with her trusty razor blade. Then she would take a piece of white chalk, have us stand in front of her while she measured and marked just where she knew she would have to cut and sew. Voila! A masterpiece awaited one of us by morning. My mother was a real genius. We were truly blessed.