Growing up in our first house in St. Catharines in the late 1950s and early 1960s, my world was a pretty small one. We played with simple toys, spent hours exploring the woods and fields around our house, watched a few cartoons, and generally entertained ourselves. It was a great time to be a kid.
My world was my backyard, my school yard, the woods at the edge of the subdivision and whatever was of interest to my parents at the time.
Near our house there were giant sand hills where we’d play for hours. They were tough to climb up as the sand gave way, but once you got to the top you could launch yourself into space and have a smooth… sandy… landing when you came back down.
We used to go to an Avondale Dairy store near our house for ice cream. Again, it was a simple pleasure but just seemed like a really big event in those days.
St. Catharines is located on the Lake Ontario side of the Welland Canal. The canal allows ships to get from Lake Erie to Lake Ontario and avoid Niagara Falls, which would be a pretty tough obstacle to get over.
About 3,000 ships a year use it, taking goods from Lake Superior through the St. Lawrence River all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. So the ships that went through the locks near our home were truly international, ocean-going vessels.
These images were taken from an Army Corps of Engineers document about the St. Lawrence Seaway, that the Welland Canal is part of.
They were posted on Wikipedia in the public domain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:WellandLock3.JPG
This photo below is taken more recently, and shows a ship exiting the Welland Canal at Lake Ontario. You can see the old lift bridge which in my youth would have been the only throughway from Toronto to Niagara Falls and Buffalo. Construction on the Garden City Skyway (at the top of the photo) started in 1960 and was completed in the 1963, just about the time we moved to Mississauga.
As a kid we would head to the locks and watch these massive, hulking steel beasts move through the locks. At that age I wasn’t too sure where they were coming from, or where they were headed, but it was easy to stand and wonder at them.
One likens the experience to George Bailey’s character in “It’s A Wonderful Life”, played by Jimmy Stewart, as he tells the shop keeper that he needs a huge suitcase because he’s setting out on a world-wide adventure and wants to decorate it with decals from all the exotic places he plans to see.
My brush with this wonder of international travel came as I stood one day staring up at one of these steel monstrosities. High on the deck I could see one of the ship’s crewing staring back down at me. Then he threw down a package which landed near me which I scrambled to retrieve. It was a bag of matchbooks from everywhere he had been. I was too young to use them, but I marveled at the mysterious locations where they originated. It was truly one of those childhood experiences that sticks with you.
Living near an international shipping venue like this changes your perception of how things arrive at the local grocery store.
The Welland River ran close to our house and some still nights we could hear it. I’m working hard through my memory on this, but there must have been some rapids near our house because I think I can still hear the sound of the river. And the smell. In warm weather with the windows open there was just a wonderful smell. Anyone who has stood near rushing water going through rapids knows that smell as it gets atomized into the air, and some of that drifted to my house.
My father Jack used to like to go smelt fishing in the river on the weekend with his buddy Alex Hardy. They would have a couple of suds and bring in the catch. My mother was not a huge fan of the end result. Dad would bring them home and he and Alex would dump them in the old concrete laundry tubs in the basement to keep them fresh. The smell would make it throughout the house. While fresh food is nice, this was a major inconvenience for mom, and of course, they were smelts, so there was the whole smell issue. Dad was never in my Mom’s ‘good books’ after one of these fishing expeditions.
Like so many of the suburban neighbourhoods of the time, our home had formerly been a farmer’s field, and we were surrounded by fields and forests and lots of nature. My sister and I reveled in this magical playland and took it upon ourselves to bring some of that nature back to our house. Eventually we built makeshift pens in the basement. At any given time we’d have rabbits, wild turtles, some field mice, and of course, just for the squeamish, snakes. It was like owning our own zoo… but in your basement… with local animals. Sure, they weren’t exotic, and they didn’t come from Africa, but that never stopped us from marveling as we watched them.
We probably didn’t appreciate this marvelous moment in history we lived in. There were no local wars, and in fact, the economy was firing on all cylinders after the last one. We lived in a modern house with modern conveniences like central heat and refrigeration, but we were still surrounded by nature and all the wonders it offered.
It truly was the best of both worlds and I am grateful for the time I was born, to have had such industrious hardworking parents who created such a great household to grow up in. One can only consider themselves blessed to have led such a charmed life.
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