February 22, 2020
"Back in Time for Winter, the 90s" is the last decade described by the CBC series my friend Tony recommended. The tv parents grew up in the 90s, decades after I grew up, so they remember teen activities from then to show their teen daughters now: road hockey with a tennis ball, rather than the sponge pucks I used in the70s; hair scrunchies, a sort of curling using paper strips, it seems; riding inner tubes to slide down snowy hills, whereas I used toboggans, cardboard, and when my daughter was a 90s child, crazy carpets; hand-held electronic game gadgets; and low-fat foods such as omelets using egg whites from a carton, and veggie burgers from scratch.
Raw garlic as a cholesterol and general health aid was a 90s fad, the narrator says, and each tv family member eats a clove, reminded me of old Dolly in the Edson nursing home eating a clove per day from before I met her in the 80s. She danced a little jig as she explained this habit. I ate raw garlic regularly for months a couple years ago, but now I eat a daily anti-cholesterol statin pill.
Food is becoming more familiar as the tv family lives decades closer to now: bagels were a 90s item and remain one for the family. I saw my first bagel at Edmonton's Heritage Festival in the early-80s, and ate plenty of them in the Carleton University cafeteria in 1981-82. I even made them once, in the late-80s, I think. In 1990, I found famous bagels in Montreal's St. Viateur Bagel and Fairmont Bagel. Every Saturday I'd walk or bike to one or the other place near the St. Urbain Street, 1920s-era first floor apartment Ira, Mikhael, and I shared in one of those famous Montreal buildings with the iron stairs up its front. The smell of steam, yeast, and sesame seeds pervaded the bakery as the bakers took seas of bagels from the oven and slid them down the sloped steel table toward the front counter. Bring them home in the paper bag while they're warm. Put them on top of the fridge. Put them in the plastic bag that came in the paper bag once they cooled. Ira brought bagels when he and Mikhael visited us here in Williams Lake later in the nineties, and I got some when I visited them in 1999, the last year of the decade.
The Y2K frenzy ends this episode. That's already 20 years ago!
They seem to enjoy the 90s more than earlier decades, but still they whine about things they do from that era. One hopeful item is the tv dad in the kitchen, once solo. Families were busy and kids were latch-key, the narrator says, so instant food is common, homemade veggie burgers notwithstanding. There's a frozen chocolate cake, such as the 60s Rolling Stones song "Mother's Little Helper" mentions. Pushing 60, I disagree that it's a drag getting old, a lyric from the song, and no doubt a motive for the producers of this series, who might have made it to recapture their youthful experiences. One can never go home again, whether or not one puts one's foot in the river twice: different home, different river. Remember the good times and notice more as they come.
There's a last episode, in which the tv family members reflect on their experiences.
Saturday, February 22, 2020
Tuesday, February 11, 2020
Back in Time for Winter 60s to 80s
February 12, 2020
I watched the next three episodes of Back in Time for Winter and although I didn't remember as many details of each episode as I did of the first two episodes, I say a few things below.
The 1960s episode had mod clothing and hair and weaving and painting and knitting crafts. Mom knit, including pairs of mittens for us and Dad. She tried to teach me but my four-stitch line widened to several stitches a few rows down. I could knit funnels? The tv dad plays outdoor ice hockey on a homemade rink. Mom's still mired in the kitchen but there's much canned food, easing cooking.
The 1970s episode, during a time of economic slump, features pork hocks, sauerkraut, and other budget eats, as well as cross-country skiing. From the sixties on, the tv family had synthetic outerwear, having left wool behind in the fifties. In the seventies, I learned to ski. I skied in heavy fleece, not the lightweight clothing they use for skiing. I remember standing over a heat register in the floor in our kitchen to warm my feet, after skiing or road hockey. The tv family by the sixties had a portable electric heater. The tv daughters disco danced in the house. My Grade 12 chemistry and biology teacher taught us Grade 12s various dances, including disco and waltzing, before our 1979 graduation ceremony and dance. There was television, as in the sixties episode. The daughters said they liked the human interaction in the living room, a relief from their current cell-phone lives. I'm glad my 1992-born daughter can socialize in person, unlike many of her generation, and indeed of my generation, enslaved by personal digital screens.
The 1980s episode, of the era in which the tv parents grew up, after the 60s and 70s when I grew up, was more prosperous than the 70s era, and thus food was fancier, including foreign fruit and vegetables, shrimp in the shell, and escargots. That the tv mom mixed and rolled out spinach pasta as one would a pie crust, then cut it in strips and dried it hanging on dowels. It reminded me of home made egg noodle pasta from our family friend Marie Lingitz. My younger sister and I made pasta from scratch that decade, and I still have a pasta maker, but it's fiddly work and the contraption is hard to clean. It pines in one of the two lazy Susans in my kitchen. Better times brought lusher sports, including downhill skiing for the tv parents, and apre-ski drinks.
The 1990s episode's yet to come. I hope to watch it alone and thus remember more of it than of these past three episodes.
I watched the next three episodes of Back in Time for Winter and although I didn't remember as many details of each episode as I did of the first two episodes, I say a few things below.
The 1960s episode had mod clothing and hair and weaving and painting and knitting crafts. Mom knit, including pairs of mittens for us and Dad. She tried to teach me but my four-stitch line widened to several stitches a few rows down. I could knit funnels? The tv dad plays outdoor ice hockey on a homemade rink. Mom's still mired in the kitchen but there's much canned food, easing cooking.
The 1970s episode, during a time of economic slump, features pork hocks, sauerkraut, and other budget eats, as well as cross-country skiing. From the sixties on, the tv family had synthetic outerwear, having left wool behind in the fifties. In the seventies, I learned to ski. I skied in heavy fleece, not the lightweight clothing they use for skiing. I remember standing over a heat register in the floor in our kitchen to warm my feet, after skiing or road hockey. The tv family by the sixties had a portable electric heater. The tv daughters disco danced in the house. My Grade 12 chemistry and biology teacher taught us Grade 12s various dances, including disco and waltzing, before our 1979 graduation ceremony and dance. There was television, as in the sixties episode. The daughters said they liked the human interaction in the living room, a relief from their current cell-phone lives. I'm glad my 1992-born daughter can socialize in person, unlike many of her generation, and indeed of my generation, enslaved by personal digital screens.
The 1980s episode, of the era in which the tv parents grew up, after the 60s and 70s when I grew up, was more prosperous than the 70s era, and thus food was fancier, including foreign fruit and vegetables, shrimp in the shell, and escargots. That the tv mom mixed and rolled out spinach pasta as one would a pie crust, then cut it in strips and dried it hanging on dowels. It reminded me of home made egg noodle pasta from our family friend Marie Lingitz. My younger sister and I made pasta from scratch that decade, and I still have a pasta maker, but it's fiddly work and the contraption is hard to clean. It pines in one of the two lazy Susans in my kitchen. Better times brought lusher sports, including downhill skiing for the tv parents, and apre-ski drinks.
The 1990s episode's yet to come. I hope to watch it alone and thus remember more of it than of these past three episodes.
Back in Time for Winter the 1950s Was Less Irritating
February 10, 2020
CBC Gem's "Back in Time for Winter the 1950s" reminded me of much, and irritated me less than the 1940s show did. Perhaps I'm merely in a better mood than when I watched that first episode of this series. Perhaps the producers of the series pine for a past that was better than their present, although the present is pretty good, I think. Also, there's much from the past worth keeping.
The tv dad "eats anything, like all dads," like my dad, smiling eating over-salty macaroni that Mom made when they were newlyweds in 1950. He tries and fails to assemble a model car from a kit, a hobby I briefly had, in which I assembled two cars, a 1950s-era one I painted purple and a 1920s-era one I painted red and yellow. Other boys I new made more models, including airplanes. I kept those model cars for years. The tv dad also sharpens his daughters' skates using a manual sharpener, a stone inlaid into a handle he rubs along the skate blade. I had one such sharpener. The episode mentions the 1955 Richard Riot in Montreal, which Dad remembered and told me about: National Hockey League President Clarence Campbell suspended Richard just before the playoffs for accidentally hitting a referee during a fight. Montreal's St. Catherine Street became a battleground strewn with broken glass, after people tried to attack Campbell in the hockey arena during a game after the suspension.
The tv mom nervously uses a pressure cooker, which Mom thought too dangerous, so we didn't have one. My 1981-82 Ottawa landlord Richard Abbott, a Harvard-trained judge and law professor who rented me a 6 x 8-foot room, "the size of a Kingston Penitentiary cell," for $68 per month, had a pressure cooker. He told me that he was so poor at Harvard that he ate every second day. This bachelor cooked beets in his pressure cooker while he grumbled and swore at his cat, named Stupid. Abbott cousin was Stephen Leacock. On April 17, 1982, just before I finished my Bachelor of Arts in English at Carleton University, I bicycled downtown to parliament hill to watch the queen and prime minister sign the patriated Canadian constitution. Back at Richard's house, his patriation party included back bacon and whale meat, which I found chewier, greyer, and saltier than beef.
The tv eldest daughter clumsily peels apples for an apple-cheese crisp, new to me, who does know about apple crisp and just last week made apple sauce from scratch. The tv family sneers at spam. I like spam. I have a can in the cupboard. They eat corned beef and cabbage, which I don't remember eating.
The narrator says that post-1956 immigrants from "The Hungarian Revolution," actually a counter-revolution, brought spicier food, including paprikash, which my friend from Sarajevo makes here in Williams Lake; but I remember goulash as our token Hungarian dish, also made of noodles and ground beef. The principal of the rural, coastal Quebec school where I practice taught a Grade 1-2 class in May, 1991 during McGill University teacher training came from Hungary after the 1956 uprising. The other 1956 Hungarian I met was in the Mayerthorpe, Alberta old folks' home when I was a newspaper reporter there and in nearby Whitecourt in 1982-83. Kmill Kvak could be half drunk and still beat me at chess: "Very interesting, but not fun," he would say at this or that move of mine, before he took advantage of it. The hockey game playing on the common room tv near us elicited the odd, drawling, "The great Gretzky" from this retired Red Deer tailor for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
I remember portable record players such as the tv family dance to: we had them at home and at the bunkhouse of our farmer cousins 400 km to the southeast. Their farm, and their house without a flush toilet until a 1969 house replaced it, was in the region where our cousin's mom and our mom were born in time for the 1930s drought. That event drove their family to the northwest, where I was born and raised. My family had a flush toilet by the late-50s, in time for my early-60s birth. We'd play records in the late-60s in our cousins' bunkhouse, and I don't remember any hired hands living there; perhaps they lived there at other times of the year. I remember listening to songs by 1910 Fruitgum ("Snoopy Versus the Red Baron"), The Stampeders ("Sweet City Woman," whatever one of those was to my rural child mind), Neil Diamond ("Cherry Cherry"), and other musicians. When my older sister left for university, her portable record player stayed behind, under my bed. Before I went to sleep, I sometimes pulled out the machine and played records, including a three-record set of 1950s songs I got for $8 by mail in 1973. The record player was probably a late-50s or early-60s machine, and it had a green bottom half, a white top half, and a heavy brown plastic arm housing the needle.
The tv mom has a fur coat. Mom had a fur coat, fake fur. Both moms put on makeup before going out; Dad called Mom's makeup "war paint." The tv mom is taking her middle and youngest daughters to a figure skating lesson, but must look her best in public, a rare escape from kitchen bondage. Unlike the tv dad, my dad washed dishes, and even cooked a bit, most memorably French toast on Saturday mornings. I and my cousin came home from school many days to find a pile of dishes drying in the sink for us to dry and put in the cupboards that my mom's younger brother built into her 17 x 17-foot kitchen when the house expanded from two to five bedrooms in the late-50s. One of the two sons of the man who helped expand the house told me about that, and about hauling the shack from Edson to our acreage for Dad's mom a few years earlier, when I met the son, by then 85, at the free pancake breakfast my younger sister organized for September 29, 2019, in the Edson Legion, which since 1989 had been named after Dad. The hundredth anniversary of his birth was the next day. Two tv daughters skate. Dad put on and tightened my skates during my first couple years of ice hockey. I remember the smell of the rink: frozen cigarette smoke and hot chocolate, especially in the lobby.
While the eldest tv daughter is mired in the kitchen, the dad and two younger daughters have fun in the snow, riding circular plastic saucers sliding down hills, saucers I don't remember seeing until the early-1970s, but we had an aluminum toboggan big enough for three, as the 1940s episode has, and there was always cardboard around Willmore Park near the McLeod River, the best tobogganing place, about ten kilometres south of our house. Dad didn't toboggan; he said that years earlier he'd tobogganed into a prickly bush that stripped the skin from one of his legs. I thought of that years later, when I jumped through a fire that had moved from the grass around my Hudson's Bay staff house in Fort Providence and started burning a wall of the house. I jumped through the rising fire and ran around the front of the house for a pail of water from the kitchen. I put out the fire, leaving only a black singe a couple feet up the wall: I was in short pants and the fire burned the hair off at least one leg. Many years later, I would lose every hair on my body to cancer treatment.
The episode narrator said that there was public encouragement to play outside in all weather. In Grade 11 physical education, running outside was optional if it was colder than -30. I ran my best two miles, 11:10, that year, outside, in -37. In my Grade 4-6 school, we went into the bush near the school and shake or kick evergreen trees, then try to jump out of the way before their snow fell on us. We'd also start rolling snowballs for snowmen, but more often merely combine the muscles of many children to make one snowball very big. The tv dad gets indoor as well as outdoor exercise, using a Canadian air force exercise pamphlet I recognized because ten or so years ago I acquired one just like it at a used book sale.
Perhaps I like the 1950s episode more than the 1940s one because I'm used to the sniffy British accent of the narrator and the characters' sneers at the old-style food and gadgets.
I like spam and I can make pancakes from scratch, two novelties for the tv mom, but not for my mom, or for me, or for my daughter. This cute show bursts with reminders of yesteryear, and of this now, for those of us who see history as a force making us what we are, not as an irrelevant curiosity.
CBC Gem's "Back in Time for Winter the 1950s" reminded me of much, and irritated me less than the 1940s show did. Perhaps I'm merely in a better mood than when I watched that first episode of this series. Perhaps the producers of the series pine for a past that was better than their present, although the present is pretty good, I think. Also, there's much from the past worth keeping.
The tv dad "eats anything, like all dads," like my dad, smiling eating over-salty macaroni that Mom made when they were newlyweds in 1950. He tries and fails to assemble a model car from a kit, a hobby I briefly had, in which I assembled two cars, a 1950s-era one I painted purple and a 1920s-era one I painted red and yellow. Other boys I new made more models, including airplanes. I kept those model cars for years. The tv dad also sharpens his daughters' skates using a manual sharpener, a stone inlaid into a handle he rubs along the skate blade. I had one such sharpener. The episode mentions the 1955 Richard Riot in Montreal, which Dad remembered and told me about: National Hockey League President Clarence Campbell suspended Richard just before the playoffs for accidentally hitting a referee during a fight. Montreal's St. Catherine Street became a battleground strewn with broken glass, after people tried to attack Campbell in the hockey arena during a game after the suspension.
The tv mom nervously uses a pressure cooker, which Mom thought too dangerous, so we didn't have one. My 1981-82 Ottawa landlord Richard Abbott, a Harvard-trained judge and law professor who rented me a 6 x 8-foot room, "the size of a Kingston Penitentiary cell," for $68 per month, had a pressure cooker. He told me that he was so poor at Harvard that he ate every second day. This bachelor cooked beets in his pressure cooker while he grumbled and swore at his cat, named Stupid. Abbott cousin was Stephen Leacock. On April 17, 1982, just before I finished my Bachelor of Arts in English at Carleton University, I bicycled downtown to parliament hill to watch the queen and prime minister sign the patriated Canadian constitution. Back at Richard's house, his patriation party included back bacon and whale meat, which I found chewier, greyer, and saltier than beef.
The tv eldest daughter clumsily peels apples for an apple-cheese crisp, new to me, who does know about apple crisp and just last week made apple sauce from scratch. The tv family sneers at spam. I like spam. I have a can in the cupboard. They eat corned beef and cabbage, which I don't remember eating.
The narrator says that post-1956 immigrants from "The Hungarian Revolution," actually a counter-revolution, brought spicier food, including paprikash, which my friend from Sarajevo makes here in Williams Lake; but I remember goulash as our token Hungarian dish, also made of noodles and ground beef. The principal of the rural, coastal Quebec school where I practice taught a Grade 1-2 class in May, 1991 during McGill University teacher training came from Hungary after the 1956 uprising. The other 1956 Hungarian I met was in the Mayerthorpe, Alberta old folks' home when I was a newspaper reporter there and in nearby Whitecourt in 1982-83. Kmill Kvak could be half drunk and still beat me at chess: "Very interesting, but not fun," he would say at this or that move of mine, before he took advantage of it. The hockey game playing on the common room tv near us elicited the odd, drawling, "The great Gretzky" from this retired Red Deer tailor for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
I remember portable record players such as the tv family dance to: we had them at home and at the bunkhouse of our farmer cousins 400 km to the southeast. Their farm, and their house without a flush toilet until a 1969 house replaced it, was in the region where our cousin's mom and our mom were born in time for the 1930s drought. That event drove their family to the northwest, where I was born and raised. My family had a flush toilet by the late-50s, in time for my early-60s birth. We'd play records in the late-60s in our cousins' bunkhouse, and I don't remember any hired hands living there; perhaps they lived there at other times of the year. I remember listening to songs by 1910 Fruitgum ("Snoopy Versus the Red Baron"), The Stampeders ("Sweet City Woman," whatever one of those was to my rural child mind), Neil Diamond ("Cherry Cherry"), and other musicians. When my older sister left for university, her portable record player stayed behind, under my bed. Before I went to sleep, I sometimes pulled out the machine and played records, including a three-record set of 1950s songs I got for $8 by mail in 1973. The record player was probably a late-50s or early-60s machine, and it had a green bottom half, a white top half, and a heavy brown plastic arm housing the needle.
The tv mom has a fur coat. Mom had a fur coat, fake fur. Both moms put on makeup before going out; Dad called Mom's makeup "war paint." The tv mom is taking her middle and youngest daughters to a figure skating lesson, but must look her best in public, a rare escape from kitchen bondage. Unlike the tv dad, my dad washed dishes, and even cooked a bit, most memorably French toast on Saturday mornings. I and my cousin came home from school many days to find a pile of dishes drying in the sink for us to dry and put in the cupboards that my mom's younger brother built into her 17 x 17-foot kitchen when the house expanded from two to five bedrooms in the late-50s. One of the two sons of the man who helped expand the house told me about that, and about hauling the shack from Edson to our acreage for Dad's mom a few years earlier, when I met the son, by then 85, at the free pancake breakfast my younger sister organized for September 29, 2019, in the Edson Legion, which since 1989 had been named after Dad. The hundredth anniversary of his birth was the next day. Two tv daughters skate. Dad put on and tightened my skates during my first couple years of ice hockey. I remember the smell of the rink: frozen cigarette smoke and hot chocolate, especially in the lobby.
While the eldest tv daughter is mired in the kitchen, the dad and two younger daughters have fun in the snow, riding circular plastic saucers sliding down hills, saucers I don't remember seeing until the early-1970s, but we had an aluminum toboggan big enough for three, as the 1940s episode has, and there was always cardboard around Willmore Park near the McLeod River, the best tobogganing place, about ten kilometres south of our house. Dad didn't toboggan; he said that years earlier he'd tobogganed into a prickly bush that stripped the skin from one of his legs. I thought of that years later, when I jumped through a fire that had moved from the grass around my Hudson's Bay staff house in Fort Providence and started burning a wall of the house. I jumped through the rising fire and ran around the front of the house for a pail of water from the kitchen. I put out the fire, leaving only a black singe a couple feet up the wall: I was in short pants and the fire burned the hair off at least one leg. Many years later, I would lose every hair on my body to cancer treatment.
The episode narrator said that there was public encouragement to play outside in all weather. In Grade 11 physical education, running outside was optional if it was colder than -30. I ran my best two miles, 11:10, that year, outside, in -37. In my Grade 4-6 school, we went into the bush near the school and shake or kick evergreen trees, then try to jump out of the way before their snow fell on us. We'd also start rolling snowballs for snowmen, but more often merely combine the muscles of many children to make one snowball very big. The tv dad gets indoor as well as outdoor exercise, using a Canadian air force exercise pamphlet I recognized because ten or so years ago I acquired one just like it at a used book sale.
Perhaps I like the 1950s episode more than the 1940s one because I'm used to the sniffy British accent of the narrator and the characters' sneers at the old-style food and gadgets.
I like spam and I can make pancakes from scratch, two novelties for the tv mom, but not for my mom, or for me, or for my daughter. This cute show bursts with reminders of yesteryear, and of this now, for those of us who see history as a force making us what we are, not as an irrelevant curiosity.
Monday, February 10, 2020
Back in Time for Winter 1940s Makes Me Nostalgic and Cranky
Sunday, February 9, 2020
The CBC TV series "Back in Time for Winter," narrated by a man with a British accent, for no apparent reason, puts a modern family back in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. I watched my first episode of this a "golly gee" sneer-fest against 1940s domestic habits. I wasn't born in the forties but these things from the episode were in my life, too.
The tv mom didn't recognize the beef heart she was to stuff with bread pieces and fry in lard, but I remember eating beef heart, other organs, and moose organs when wild meat came from someone, sometimes one of my mother's two brothers. They all grew up in the forties, and during the war the meat rationing sent good meat to the military and left many people with organ meat.
The flip-up toaster is new to the family too, and although my younger sister for awhile used such a toaster a couple decades ago, when pop-up toasters dominated, she and I both remember the flip-up toaster that Ernie and Berta Fowler had on their farm a few kilometres north of our place north of Edson, Alberta. As I child, I thought it was magic, and that was the only place I ever saw lemon spread. My siblings, cousins, and I would usually fall asleep sitting against one another on the couch, or on a chair, or on the floor in the living room, near the pot-bellied stove. It was so warm, making the blast of cold air seem colder on our drowsy faces when we walked out of the house to drive home with Mom and Dad.
The tv dad rubs a cake of wax on a toboggan for the family to use on a hill. We painted tar on our wooden cross-country skis, heated it on the ski over a burner of the gas stove in the house which neighbors hauled from Edson for my granny in 1953, and rubbed the tar in with a cloth. Then we rubbed wax on the skis, which we rubbed in with cork, in the 1970s. Like the dad and daughters in the episode, we dressed in layers, and I still dress in layers on cold winter days.
The tv mom makes bran muffins with prunes, which I made in Whitecourt in 1982-83, using prunes from the Mayerthorpe Co-Op which I bought on Wednesdays, the day I delivered Whitecourt newspapers to the town's post office 45 km from Whitecourt. Dad had been a 1930s Mayerthorpe teenager. I covered Mayerthorpe and Whitecourt news for the paper all those decades later. A old woman who wrote a column for the paper told me she remembered Dad from the 1930s, and I mentioned that link in the paper. I'd cut the flesh off the prunes and suck on the pits while I made the muffins. The day the paper hired me, my 21st birthday, the editor fed me lunch at the Whitecourt Motor Inn. I had liver and onions.
The tv family had a wringer washer, a mystery to all family members, but more luxurious than the one I had in my Fort Providence, Northwest Territories Hudson's Bay Northern Stores staff house in 1986-87. Both machines filled from hoses attached to the kitchen sink tap, but they emptied theirs into pails which they poured down the sink; I emptied mine into a square plastic bin about a foot by a foot by three feet tall, and dragged it outside to dump in front of my house, which was about 100 metres from the Mackenzie River. The episode didn't show them hanging the clothes, they having no dryer. I had no dryer, so I attached a clothesline to a a corner of my house and a corner of the covered porch of my house, which was the old Bay store from the 1920s.
An Indigenous man teaches the tv dad how to ice fish. Dad catches nothing but the man gives him a trout. I didn't and I don't like to fish, but my in-laws ice fish. My spouse's dad's cousin gave me a fresh trout when I lived and taught in her community of Kluskus for six weeks from February-March, 2004, while the regular teacher was in Fairview, Alberta recovering from pneumonia. My spouse taught me how to clean a salmon, including cutting off the fins and removing the entrails. The tv mom makes a potato-trout cassarole, and the narrator, with his British accent as sneering as the whiny tv family, notes that cassaroles helped stretch meat. My mom made cassaroles, especially with that rarest of fish, salmon, which we got in a can once or twice per year, usually during Lent. The tv mom fed five. My mom fed 10 for a couple years. Mom liked modern conveniences, having grown up, rural not urban as in the tv show, in the thirties and forties, no cutesy era of playing poor for fun and condescension, but an era of eking out a hard living. Dad grew up poor, too. Film that, CBC, with a narrator who sounds like a Canadian, not like a British overlord among the colonials. Film how Indigenous people lived, when they weren't allowed off their reserves without Indian Agent permission, weren't allowed in bars, and were in brutalizing schools while people, including me, made fun of them. How about an APTN series to reply to CBC's white whitewash? Instead, as more than one Indigenous person has told me, "Why bother?"
The "mom in the kitchen, dad outside" division of labor might have been true of middle class families of the forties, but my parents weren't raised middle class. I suppose I was, but I've many of their habits, as the above rant suggests. Mom worked in an Edson restaurant when she and Dad met in the late-40s. Dad helped in the kitchen, especially with dishes, while I grew up in the sixties and seventies. There's a revisionist anti-feminist tone in the show, as if to say that none were feminist then and all are now: two falsehoods.
I suppose the show is aimed at people younger than I, who are full of the prejudice that the current era of screens and texting proves the young now are better than those radio-listening, letter-writing primitives of the 1940s. I like screens and email, but I also like radio and letters. This show's as stereotyped as the futuristic shows of my youth, in which people ride flying cars and wear spacesuits, but those shows were guesswork, while this one could represent history honestly and respectfully, if it chose. I suppose each era promotes its vision of the future, and of the past.
I wonder how Antonio Gramsci or Howard Zinn would see "Back in Time for Winter."
What more vituperation will pour from me if I watch another episode of this series? Stay tuned, or don't.
The CBC TV series "Back in Time for Winter," narrated by a man with a British accent, for no apparent reason, puts a modern family back in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. I watched my first episode of this a "golly gee" sneer-fest against 1940s domestic habits. I wasn't born in the forties but these things from the episode were in my life, too.
The tv mom didn't recognize the beef heart she was to stuff with bread pieces and fry in lard, but I remember eating beef heart, other organs, and moose organs when wild meat came from someone, sometimes one of my mother's two brothers. They all grew up in the forties, and during the war the meat rationing sent good meat to the military and left many people with organ meat.
The flip-up toaster is new to the family too, and although my younger sister for awhile used such a toaster a couple decades ago, when pop-up toasters dominated, she and I both remember the flip-up toaster that Ernie and Berta Fowler had on their farm a few kilometres north of our place north of Edson, Alberta. As I child, I thought it was magic, and that was the only place I ever saw lemon spread. My siblings, cousins, and I would usually fall asleep sitting against one another on the couch, or on a chair, or on the floor in the living room, near the pot-bellied stove. It was so warm, making the blast of cold air seem colder on our drowsy faces when we walked out of the house to drive home with Mom and Dad.
The tv dad rubs a cake of wax on a toboggan for the family to use on a hill. We painted tar on our wooden cross-country skis, heated it on the ski over a burner of the gas stove in the house which neighbors hauled from Edson for my granny in 1953, and rubbed the tar in with a cloth. Then we rubbed wax on the skis, which we rubbed in with cork, in the 1970s. Like the dad and daughters in the episode, we dressed in layers, and I still dress in layers on cold winter days.
The tv mom makes bran muffins with prunes, which I made in Whitecourt in 1982-83, using prunes from the Mayerthorpe Co-Op which I bought on Wednesdays, the day I delivered Whitecourt newspapers to the town's post office 45 km from Whitecourt. Dad had been a 1930s Mayerthorpe teenager. I covered Mayerthorpe and Whitecourt news for the paper all those decades later. A old woman who wrote a column for the paper told me she remembered Dad from the 1930s, and I mentioned that link in the paper. I'd cut the flesh off the prunes and suck on the pits while I made the muffins. The day the paper hired me, my 21st birthday, the editor fed me lunch at the Whitecourt Motor Inn. I had liver and onions.
The tv family had a wringer washer, a mystery to all family members, but more luxurious than the one I had in my Fort Providence, Northwest Territories Hudson's Bay Northern Stores staff house in 1986-87. Both machines filled from hoses attached to the kitchen sink tap, but they emptied theirs into pails which they poured down the sink; I emptied mine into a square plastic bin about a foot by a foot by three feet tall, and dragged it outside to dump in front of my house, which was about 100 metres from the Mackenzie River. The episode didn't show them hanging the clothes, they having no dryer. I had no dryer, so I attached a clothesline to a a corner of my house and a corner of the covered porch of my house, which was the old Bay store from the 1920s.
An Indigenous man teaches the tv dad how to ice fish. Dad catches nothing but the man gives him a trout. I didn't and I don't like to fish, but my in-laws ice fish. My spouse's dad's cousin gave me a fresh trout when I lived and taught in her community of Kluskus for six weeks from February-March, 2004, while the regular teacher was in Fairview, Alberta recovering from pneumonia. My spouse taught me how to clean a salmon, including cutting off the fins and removing the entrails. The tv mom makes a potato-trout cassarole, and the narrator, with his British accent as sneering as the whiny tv family, notes that cassaroles helped stretch meat. My mom made cassaroles, especially with that rarest of fish, salmon, which we got in a can once or twice per year, usually during Lent. The tv mom fed five. My mom fed 10 for a couple years. Mom liked modern conveniences, having grown up, rural not urban as in the tv show, in the thirties and forties, no cutesy era of playing poor for fun and condescension, but an era of eking out a hard living. Dad grew up poor, too. Film that, CBC, with a narrator who sounds like a Canadian, not like a British overlord among the colonials. Film how Indigenous people lived, when they weren't allowed off their reserves without Indian Agent permission, weren't allowed in bars, and were in brutalizing schools while people, including me, made fun of them. How about an APTN series to reply to CBC's white whitewash? Instead, as more than one Indigenous person has told me, "Why bother?"
The "mom in the kitchen, dad outside" division of labor might have been true of middle class families of the forties, but my parents weren't raised middle class. I suppose I was, but I've many of their habits, as the above rant suggests. Mom worked in an Edson restaurant when she and Dad met in the late-40s. Dad helped in the kitchen, especially with dishes, while I grew up in the sixties and seventies. There's a revisionist anti-feminist tone in the show, as if to say that none were feminist then and all are now: two falsehoods.
I suppose the show is aimed at people younger than I, who are full of the prejudice that the current era of screens and texting proves the young now are better than those radio-listening, letter-writing primitives of the 1940s. I like screens and email, but I also like radio and letters. This show's as stereotyped as the futuristic shows of my youth, in which people ride flying cars and wear spacesuits, but those shows were guesswork, while this one could represent history honestly and respectfully, if it chose. I suppose each era promotes its vision of the future, and of the past.
I wonder how Antonio Gramsci or Howard Zinn would see "Back in Time for Winter."
What more vituperation will pour from me if I watch another episode of this series? Stay tuned, or don't.
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