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.