Photo Collage: There was never enough time to do it all. Cars, girls, rock and roll were all part of the freedoms that came in the 1950’s.  If was a unique time in the Canada, and we made the best of it. The majority even managed to graduate with distinction. I was one of the non-distincts, however, my sister, Louise McNeill, graduated with a distinct distinction, that being the 1961 Honour Role. This post makes it clear why I failed to do so.

(Photo selection: Jimmy Martineau, Gordie Wusyk, Billy Martineau and drummer in the background, Gary McGlaughlin, playing at the Tropicana Night Club. Below, the Pinsky Cadillac. Harold McNeill and Aaron Pinsky in a “cool” shot at the Roundel Hotel.  Sitting across from us is Dorothy Hartman, an awesome dance partner. We worked out the fine points of the back over flip as shown in the photo top right  (Dance photos from the web).

THIS STORY IS CURRENTLY BEING PROOFED AND UPDATED

Chapter 3: The High School Years

Link Here for Chapter 1 of the High School Years
Link Here for Chapter 2 of the High School Years
Link to Family Stories Index

1. Introduction

Perhaps the best way to pick my way through the final two segments of the Cold Lake High School Years is by selecting random memories. Not to worry, I will be discrete while keeping the history and stories interesting as possible. The post is not meant as a titillating account of a small town as in Peyton Place, but seeks instead to provide an account of how I950’s High School kids in a small town at the edge of the wilderness on the Alberta/Saskatchewan border lived and loved.  For the most part, private matters between consenting students during our time in Cold Lake High would stay in Cold Lake High. That does not mean I won’t pick around the edges.

Peyton Place:  The sizzling movie version of the best-selling book was released in 1957, just in time for our coming of age. While the movie was toned down, it still raised eyebrows and was soundly condemned in many quarters.  By today’s standards, it would be relatively tame.

Another thing that will become evident, this story was written from the male perspective. To make any statements about what girls focussed on in the day will be up to them.  Any girls who wish to add to my descriptions, please write a few chapters of your own, they will be added to the post so we can compare and contrast our views of life in the 50’s.

Two things defined High School boys back then as today – cars and girls. In my day the two consumed an enormous portion of our limited and highly specialized brain space – girls occupied the left hemisphere, cars the right. As we boys couldn’t use both halves at the same time, the balance wavered from day to day. For that matter, our brains stopped working altogether when other parts of our anatomy kicked in.

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Collage: The above photos provide a small representation of the five years a group of young people spent completing Junior and Senior High in Cold Lake, Alberta. The following story places a context around their world, a world that was becoming vastly different from the one in which their parents and grandparents had spent their teen years.

Link Here to Chapter 2: The Silent Generation
Link Here to Chapter 3: Cars, Girls, Rock and Roll
Link to Family Stories Index

THIS STORY IS CURRENTLY BEING PROOFED AND UPDATED

Chapter 2: The Silent Generation

September 1, 2014: Sorry for the delay. Chapter 18 along with about 300 photographs of our High School Years through to graduation, will be posted within the next two weeks.

The Silent Generation, a name coined to define those born between 1925 – 1945.  While it was applied to those of us who filed into Grade 8 at Cold Lake Junior (photos in the footer) in September 1954, we were so close to the cusp it seems to have missed the mark. Our small group preceded the Baby Boomers by a few years and in the months following graduation, we helped to add a tidy number of Little Boomers to Canada’s rapidly growing population.

The Silent Generation! Really? It seems the Time Magazine reporters who defined our group obviously never traveled to Cold Lake High in the late 50’s, nor did they do any first-hand research at those week-end ‘retreats’ at French Bay, English Bay or Marie Lake. For that matter, all they had to do was drop by one of the week-end parties at the Ruggles, Hill’s, Sanregret’s, Poirier’s or any of a dozen other homes when the parents were away. People called us many things, but ‘silent’ ‘grave’ and ‘fatalistic’ were not the adjectives that flowed past their lips.

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Above Photo (Family Archives): CF-AXL moored at a makeshift dock on Touchwood Lake, northeast of LacLaBiche (c1961). The photo was taken on a trip made by Hans Vanderflugt (my instructor) and I while flying out of Cold Lake, AB in the late 50’s and early 60’s.

Photo Below: Hans and Ruth Vanderflugt
(that photo has somehow delinked from the story)

February 20, 2012. After posting this story on February 2, 2012, a young man, Daniel Mahoney, of Vanair Aviation, in Refugio, Texas, happened to pick it up the link off the Web while searching for background on his stepfather Hans. Dan phoned to tell me, Hans Vanderflugt, co-owner of Vanair, had just been killed in a crash near Colorado a few days before I posted the story (more information in the footer).

This story is dedicated to the memory of Hans, who is survived by his wife, Ruth Hodge Vandervlugt of Refugio, Texas; one son, John Vandervlugt of Round Rock, Texas; one stepson, Billy Michelson of San Antonio, Texas; and a sister, Erna Fentener Van Vlissingen of Amsterdam, Holland.

The following book was recently published about the heroic flying adventures of Hans as he tavelled the world delivering sngle and twin engine aeroplanes.

Photo of Hans Vandervlugt (October 2011) on the book cover.
(Note: I misspelt the surname in the original post as that is what I had always listed in my log book.)

1. Bush Flying in Northern Canada

At 6:00 am, I was out of bed and heading to the dock on Beaver Lake, about four miles east of LacLaBiche, Alberta, where Axle, the nickname for the Fairchild 82A, CF-AXL, was moored. The aircraft was one of the final two members of the Fairchild Series¹ of bush planes built in the 1930s by Fairchild Aircraft Ltd. Canada, and still in service. Although not slick or fast, it was a workhorse in which we could haul up to 2000 lbs depending on how much fuel we had to carry.

On shorter trips (thirty to forty-five minutes) we only carried sufficient fuel for one or two round trips as each pound of fuel meant a pound less cargo. This particular aircraft had travelled to almost every corner of Northern Central and Western Canada, whereever pioneers were working to access the vast array of natural resources hidden among the millions of acres of wilderness rocks, trees, shrubs and thousands of freshwater lakes, rivers and streams that defined the north.

Production of the 82A was discontinued when the factory switched to cargo supply and bomber aircraft needed to help fight the Second World War. The Bristol Bolingbroke and the C-19 Packard were the most recognized aircraft being poured out of the Fairchild Factory in the 1940s.  Unfortunately, the production of the 82A series was never resumed as the plans and molds were inadvertently destroyed during the company’s transition to wartime aircraft.

CF-AXL, the aircraft we flew back in the 1950’s and 60’s, currently resides in the Canadian Aviation and Space Museum in Ottawa. It was refurbished and moved to the museum in the 1960’s shortly after we flew it when working for a company owned by the father of a High School friend, Aaron Pinsky (lead photo in the link – top left (Aaron), bottom centre (Harold and Aaron, two cool dudes).  We completed our flying training at RCAF Station Cold Lake and regularly flew together during the early years.

2. Early Mornings

On this morning I was suffering a bit of a headache after hanging out a little too late with friends, the Gatzke’s, with whom I lived while attending grade five in LacLaBiche some ten years earlier (Link). On other flights, I had also made friends with several others who put me up while on layovers in LacLaBiche.

Photo (Painting of AXE by Jim Bruce, Aviation Artists, Web Source): This, the only other 82A in service in Canada, is shown being refuelled while moored to a small dock somewhere in Northern Canada. AXE disappeared in 1964 while on a flight in the Northern Arctic. Link to the story.  Note the slide back access to the upper wing from the cockpit. That little door made accessing the fuel tanks much easier (there is also another photo attached to end of story). I can still remember the distinct smell of aviation fuel as we added fuel two or three times a day. We never carried more fuel than necessary as the weight of every extra gallon of fuel had to be subtracted from cargo.

By 6:30 Hans Vanderflugt, the Chief Pilot for Alberta Fish Products and I, had pumped the floats and topped up the gas, both accomplished with an ‘arm killer’ toggle pumps. Well, stating it was ‘Hans and I’ was generous as he usually let me do the toggle work while he held the hose. I never complained though as I was more than happy to be getting ‘free’ flying lessons as I built hours towards my Commercial Licence.  If I had to do a little pumping, then fly twenty minutes, load 2000 pounds of fish, fly another twenty and unload it, it was a small price to pay for this kind of flying time.

Once I had completed the external and internal checks, then started the engine, Hans would cast off, jump into the co-pilots seat. We would taxi into the bay for our first flight of the day.  Today, however, was to be different.

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Photo: Copy of framed photo in the dining room at the home of my sister Louise and her husband Frank Yochim. This is Franks Cold Lake Marina as it looked in the late 1960s after being moved to the Main Dock. For thirty years my brother-in-law, along with members of the family operated the Marina and following his retirement, his son Lorin Yochim took over for several years before heading out to explore the world.

Link to Next Post:  DHC-3 Fish Attack.
Link to Last Post:  Monster Fish
Link Back to Adventures Index

Big Kinosoo:   First Half of the 1900s

Photos: Mr. Labatt, left, and Mr. Z.A. Lefebvre, with three monster trout caught in Cold Lake between 1915 and 1918. It is not hard to imagine there were, and still are, fish larger than these in Cold Lake.  Pictures were copied from “Treasured Scales of the Kinosoo”, a compilation of the history of Cold Lake by Laura Dean Skarsen.

The Rush is On

Many who arrived in Cold Lake early in the 20th Century to take up the search for the Big Kinosoo, decided to stay. Many became trappers, loggers, farmers, cattlemen, while others opened businesses in order to raise money to continue their search for the big fish. In their search they caught many other big fish, but never the Big Kinosoo. He was, by all accounts, one very elusive fish. By the middle of the century, many new residents were taking jobs building the new Canadian Forces Air Base west of town. Still later, hundreds of these workers accepted more permanent positions when the base became operational.

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