Part One – The Childhood Years

I was born, so I have been told, early in the morning on November 15^th, 1921 in a house on the corner of Broadway and McNab Streets in Forest, in the County of Lambton, Ontario. My parents were Victor and Leila Pettypiece who were married in Corunna in June of the previous year. My father was born in 1898, a son of Henry and Madeline Pettypiece of Forest; he was one of seven children, only three of whom survived adolescence, my aunt Eleanor who was a spinster, and uncle Lister, a Catholic priest. My mother was the daughter of Samuel and Sarah Harper, also of Forest. She had a brother Fred, and a sister Agnes. Fred remained a bachelor but Agnes was married to Edgar Chafe of St. John’s, Newfoundland and was the mother of two boys, Gerald and Gordon, my only first cousins.

Before I was a year old, my parents moved to the Comfort Terrace, a quadraplex on Jefferson Street across from the tennis courts. I remember very little of that period, only vague images but I can remember my sister Reinette, who was born there in 1924. I don’t remember her as a baby, only as a toddler. While there, I’m told I had the usual childhood diseases, chicken pox, measles and whooping cough.

In 1925 or 26 we bought a house on Prince Street opposite the public school. It was in this house that I grew up and lived in until World War Two. It cost $2,000 and I remember being told we had to borrow the down payment and it took fifteen years to pay off the mortgage. During the 1930’s it was all we could do to pay the interest, never mind any of the principal. The house did not have any indoor plumbing, and I remember as a youngster, I would take my little wagon down to the corner where there was a public pump and collect water. I also used to have to go to the creamery around the corner every couple of days for a block of ice for the icebox. I can remember Saturday night was bath night and a tub of water was heated on the coal stove, which would do for both me and my sister.

We had a stove in the kitchen, which served for cooking and also one in the living room, whose pipe went up through a hole in the ceiling to the hall and then curved through my bedroom to the chimney. Dad would get up in the winter and stoke up the fire so that we could huddle around the stove pipe while we got dressed. These pipes had to be taken down every spring and be cleaned out and re-assembled every autumn.

I have unpleasant memories also of having to use the outside privy in the winter after dad had shoveled a path through the snow. I can also remember, vaguely, of being circumcised on the kitchen table.

In September of 1927 my other sister Ruth was born, but for this birth my mother went to St. Joseph’s Hospital in London. In those days a confinement lasted about ten days, so we did not see our new sister until she arrived home. By the time I had started to school, living across the street made it very handy.

I am now going to give a few general impressions of the rest of the 1920’s. I can’t recall any chronological order, keeping in mind that by the summer of 1930 I was still only eight years old.

One of the first improvements made to the house was the installation of water, which made a big difference. A central heating system had to wait until the late thirties. The inside toilet and bath made a great difference to our comfort.

I can remember my mother (who taught school before she was married) reading poetry to me before I started to school. There were the Longfellow poems of Hiawatha and Evangeline and others by Tennyson, Wordsworth, and Lowell; also some Shakespeare. She also taught me simple sums and reading at this time, and I started in Grade One (Junior Primer it was called in those days). I know I was able to skip some grades and this is why I was able to start into high school in 1933 (11 years old).

Other memories of the twenties include winter; the streets were filled with horse drawn sleighs since all automobiles had to be put up on blocks in the winter with tires removed and radiators drained; antifreeze had not been invented. There were half a dozen blacksmith shops in Forest at that time. In the spring the streets were quite muddy.

The skating rink was on Prince St. across the road from our house and they used to hold skating carnivals every year at which I went dressed once as Henry VIII. There was always live music for skating on Saturday night.

Summers included swimming in Hickory Creek – it was not polluted then although we had to pick off the bloodsuckers when we came out. It was where I learned to swim.

I can remember my parents taking us to London once a year to buy shoes. We went on the train leaving Forest at 6:30 in the morning. We would change trains at Lucan Crossing to catch the one coming down from Goderich.

My parents also took us to the Toronto Exhibition a couple of times. I can’t remember much about these trips except for the extravagant pageant at the grandstand followed by fireworks. One such pageant was about Montezuma and another about the British Empire. It was on one of these trips to Toronto I saw my first talking picture. I don’t know the name of the film, I guess I was too impressed by the sound. I had seen a couple of silent movies at the local Kineto Theatre, “Noah’s Ark” and “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”.

Not many people had automobiles; we did not even have a radio or a phonograph, but at some point we did get a wind up victrola, and an upright piano for me to take some lessons from Mabel Dunlop a local teacher who had her ATCM. I would be about 8 I believe.

I can remember downtown in Forest. My grandfather was owner of the Forest Free Press and my father worked there and one other person, Morley Shepherd. I can remember a hotel with hitching posts and a horse water trough outside. I can remember the grocery stores where you went up a couple of steps and the grocer waited on you across the counter. I can remember a harness shop. I can remember an ice cream parlour with wire-backed chairs and a soda fountain. I can remember the Town Hall where the Chatauqua travelling shows used to come every year.

There were several blacksmiths, a couple of whom did car repairs as well. A couple of gas stations where the proprietor would pump the gas for you, you could buy a gallon for a quarter.

It was during these years I formed my impressions of music. There was no distinction between such terms as so-called classical and popular. My folks used to sing these songs popular when he was growing up: By the Light of the Silvery Moon, Yip-I-Addy-I-Ay, Come Josephine in My Flying Machine, Trail of the Lonesome Pine and others. I particularly remember The Irish Jubilee. He would also recite Robert Service poems.

When the victrola arrived there was a varied selection of records, from Oh By Jingo and the Little Red Schoolhouse, to Rhapsody in Blue and Poet and Peanut. There was also a Mozart and part of a Tchaikovsky Symphony. I had most of them memorized. When I started piano lessons I learned more about Chopin and Bach, etc.

We used to visit occasionally friends of our parents. At Reg Roche’s place on Broadway next to Angela Hannum’s I became acquainted with comics such as Buster Brown and The Katzenjammer Kids. At O’Donnell’s out in the country we went once and they had some new records such as Piccolo Pete and The Two Black Crows.

It seems that in those times we knew everyone in our town of about 1700 people. We didn’t know them all personally but we knew who they were and where they lived. We lived between two widows, Mrs. Ida Brand on the north and Mrs. Wichman on the south. Both seemed really ancient to me and I particularly remember the latter because she had a pet parrot, the only one in town. We had a dog, a collie called Pal. I think he died of old age at some point. I think everybody had a porch on their house.

Mother did some gardening in our back yard. We had a grape vine on one side with hollyhocks. On the other, the shady side, there were violets, lily of the valley, jack-in-the-pulpit and a pear tree. The Pettypiece house on Albert St. had trumpet vines shading the porch.

My public school teachers were Frances Hubbard, Jessie O’Brien, Ruth Neelands and Alex Salisbury. Beside the kids I knew from school, I knew some from the country. This was through church. I was raised a Roman Catholic, and us kids attended mass every Sunday from the time we were old enough to understand and went through 1^st communion and confirmation. Forest was not a parish but a mission, and the priest, Fr. Houlkes came every Sunday from Corunna. Aunt Nora played the organ and at some point I started singing in the choir.

Through church I got to know the Hubbard family and the Forbes. Their kids went to country schools. The Hubbards had 2 boys (Bob and Tom) and 3 girls (Winifred, Geneveire, & Cuthaine). The Forbes had a boy and a girl. The boy, Wilfred, eventually became the father of Barbara who married our son Geoffrey.

On the Pettypiece side, my aunt Nora lived with my grandparents. She never married – apparently her boy friend was killed when he was quite young. I also vaguely remember my dad’s aunt Sara who lived there at that time. I must have been only 3 or 4 years old because she died in 1925. It was there I used to collect comic strips from the London Free Press, particularly one called Minute Movies. I also met two of my grandfather’s brothers. At one time there was a picture of Reinette and myself at a tea party there. She was 2 and I was 5.

At the Harpers’ I can recall they had a cellar with an outside door. They kept their wood supply there. They also kept chickens & I can remember my grandfather killing one after chasing it around the yard. He was janitor at the high school and he stayed there until the mid-thirties (in his 70’s). My grandmother baked her own bread and we looked forward to that which she gave us covered with butter and brown sugar. We also were given dishes of maple syrup, which they made themselves. One time we went next door to Charles Taylor’s to listen to his radio. It was quite large with 2 wet cell batteries and we heard the Dempsey-Tunney fight. He only had one set of earphones and we had to take turns. The loudspeaker had not yet been invented.

It was at the Harpers’ that I met some of my maternal relatives, mother’s sister Agnes and her husband, the Snowdons and great great uncle Cesar McLeod. They had a parlour where nobody went without permission. It had old fashioned plush furniture and was kept dark most of the time. This is where they kept uncle Fred’s photos; he travelled all over the world as a marine radio operator.

Aunt Nora played golf at that time and occasionally took me to the town’s 9-hole golf course with her. Also, although she didn’t have a car, one of her friends did and she invited me on a couple of car rides, one to Kettle Point, and the other to Grand Bend. This latter trip took all day and I went along with these three women. We stopped half way for tea. The road through the Pinery at that time made quite an impression; it was not paved of course (few roads were) and the trees hugged the road on both sides – it was like driving through the woods.

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