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2. The Rest of the Windsor Story
Much of the Windsor part of my story has already been told in my book Windsor's Child. It would be redundant to retell that story here. This is the rest of the Windsor story, such as it is. All the main events were included in the book, but here are some "leftovers," things which I did not include in the book for one reason or another.
I often think if I could choose a decade to relive, I would like to relive the 1940's. I know that would not be the choice of others, and I am glad I cannot choose to do this because I would not want the world to have to go through World War II all over again, nor have my brother spend the last two years of his life on a destroyer again, only to die in an auto crash. Nor would I want my mother to have to relive the terrible experience she went through when Ron died. If I really had the opportunity to relive that decade, I am sure I would have to refuse because of the suffering so many people endured during that time.
But my memories of the ‘40's mostly come from after the war and after my brother’s death. They are more pleasant memories. They do not involve death and destruction or loss. They are memories of growing and discovering.
Downtown Windsor was like any North American city in the latter half of the 1940's. Automobiles, many of them black with small windshields and even smaller rear windows, roamed the streets, competing with yellow and green buses for space and passengers. My first memories of transportation in that decade involve the bus. I can still see the pale yellow bus with the green stripe and the white-on-black letters over the front that told its destination. I can still hear the squeaking sounds the brakes made as the bus came to a stop near the curb where I waited with an older family member to board. I can still see the accordion-like doors with the big black rubber strips framing the windows. I can still see the shiny metal steps with the little bumps and ridges on their surface that ensured I would have a safe step into the bus.
I can see the coins being dropped into the box and slithering down the slide making clanging sounds as they descended into the interior of the glass box. I can see the driver pulling on the lever that opened the trap doors at the bottom of the glass box that allowed the coins to fall into the black mysterious interior of the box below, never to be seen by me again. They belonged to the driver now, I thought. Only he could retrieve them from their dark cell inside the box.
I can still feel the lurch of the bus as it started forward even before I had found a seat. Holding on tightly to the shiny metal poles and railings as I swayed back and forth trying to walk toward a seat, I would literally fall into a dark green seat next to whichever family member I was with, often Diane, my older sister.
When the bus was moving, I would listen to all the sounds it produced. There were many of them. The most obvious was the roar of the engine, especially as the bus started up after making a stop. I could not imagine what kind of huge engine was needed to make such a big vehicle move.
The sound the tires made as they rolled along Windsor’s streets also caught my attention. The consistent whine went up in pitch as the bus sped along, and down in pitch as it slowed. Sometimes I would have to listen closely to separate the whine of the tires from the roar of the engine; the two sounds seemed to blend together much of the time and become almost indistinguishable.
But the sound I liked best, and remember most, was the sound the equipment in the bus made whenever it rolled over some uneven section of pavement. The seats would rattle, and the metal legs would vibrate with excitement. Hands would reach for poles and straps to steady their owners’ bodies. But above it all was the sound I liked the most. As the bus rattled along, the coin box would shake and dance and fill my ears with the sound of clunking metal and clinking coins. That was a delicious sound. I can still hear it as I write about it here.
But I have other memories from that decade. In Windsor's Child I wrote about the Stromberg-Carlson radio-phonograph my brother and sister provided for the family. I loved the smell of the vinyl 78 rpm recordings we had at our house. I loved playing those records, and watching the needle ride across the surface in the narrow grooves. I loved the way I could touch the warm spots on the cabinet of the radio-record player Ron and Diane presented to the family. After I had played it awhile, those warm spots would grow. After several months of use, I could actually see the warm spots as they changed the color of the wood over time. There was one on the left of the window that showed what station we were turned to, and one on the right. I now know those warm spots were produced by two little lights that illumined the window.
There are other smells I remember, too. Like the spring day my friends and I picked lilacs and pulverized them in a tin can of water to release the sweet scent that filled the air. Or like the smell of the fire in the big, rusty-red metal barrel in the back yard where Mother burned things that had lost their usefulness to us. Or like the odor of the cold snow that filled our back yard, or dusty smell of the sawdust in Dad’s garage-turned-woodworking shop. I also remember the smell of oil on the metal surfaces of the lathe and saws he used to produce clocks, or birds with rotating wings for the yard, or other pieces of wood that became useful or decorative items. The mixture of odors from oil, metal and wood shavings still fascinates me today.
Although I don’t remember all the sights, smells and sounds of the '40's, I do remember what was not there in that decade. There was no television, at least not for most families, not until the last year or two of the decade. Only radio. And there were no shopping malls. Only downtown stores. There was very little parking downtown; that is why we took the bus. At Christmas time downtown would be gayly decorated and a festive atmosphere would prevail. Stores would be crammed with shoppers, and prices would astound today’s buyers, although shoppers then felt they were high enough.
Traveling to grandpa and grandma’s house in Ridgetown involved taking the train once that I remember, and a car later on when Dad had one toward the end of the decade. I remember the train ride was long, even though the distance from Windsor to Ridgetown is only about seventy miles. At one point, I remember, the
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train had to back onto a siding so that a freight train could speed by. The car we were in lurched and screeched as it backed onto the track. A few minutes later a blur of rusty red and silver streaked by our windows. I suppose that is when I decided I would be a train engineer when I grew up. Traveling to Ridgetown by car left something to be desired. I sat between Dad and Mom in the front seat. Through the high divided windshield I could only see the tops of trees and utility poles as they sped by at thirty miles per hour. And we had at least one flat tire. Each way.
Grandpa and Grandma Schott lived in a small, white house on Tiffany Street in Ridgetown. As I approached the house from the street, I could see the huge window that looked out from the living room. To the right was a small porch with gingerbread trim along the top. The door was on the left of this porch, and another large window to the right.
Upstairs were two long, narrow windows side by side. Above them was more gingerbread where the two sides of the roof came together to form a triangle. Over the porch roof was a diamond-shaped window. Large trees surrounded the house.
In downtown Ridgetown two of my uncles worked. One was a barber, like his mother-in-law’s father had been, only in a different town. I don’t think I was ever in the barber shop. The other owned a bakery. The bakery smelled delicious. I remember being in the bakery as a kid, and later as an adult.
We kids liked it when one of these uncles came to visit us in Windsor, which he occasionally did with his wife, my mother’s sister. He would have a drink or two with Dad. I don’t remember Dad changing at all as a result, but Uncle did. His wallet came open and he started passing out crisp Canadian dollars. I don’t think he paid much attention to us otherwise.
Our favorite uncle was married to another of my mother’s sisters. He was an executive for a large company, and he and his wife were fairly well off. He did not usually pass out money when he came to visit, but he was very entertaining. He loved to tease us.
He loved tickling us, taunting us, teasing us and chasing us around the house. He made us giggle. He made us laugh. He made us cry for more. When we were small, we loved his teasing. When we got older, the teasing was more annoying, and he knew enough to ease off somewhat. He was really a good-natured man.
Another uncle, married to another of mother’s sisters, was not as memorable. He was a quiet man, and thus I do not remember him very well. I wondered how such a quiet man could be a successful barber, but I suspect he could talk when cutting hair. Something about scissors clicking in a barber’s hand brings out the gab in him. But when all visited, he grew quiet and let one of his brothers-in-law hand out money while the other teased. They - and us - had all the fun.
Dad’s family lived in Chatham, Ontario. They did not travel much, and I do not remember them visiting us in Windsor at any time. Dad’s father, you remember, died when Dad was only seven. His mother raised Dad and his brother and two sisters near Mull, Ontario, a small town not far from Chatham. Dad and his siblings attended the little Mull School, a one-room school house.
Dad’s sister married a farmer. They lived on a farm outside Chatham. In the '40's I remember visiting them once. They had a horse that did not like women for some reason. It would kick and whinny whenever a woman came near. I approached it carefully, but it did not seem concerned about my presence. But then, I wasn’t a woman, was I?
A railroad track ran along their property in front of their house. I remember standing along the track hoping a train would pass, but none passed, as I remember, while I stood there. The most impressive thing about the house, though, was in the basement. There was a hole in the concrete floor which had been filled with a metal plug. The story was that my uncle's father, when he was alive, became very cantankerous in his old age. It was originally his farm that my uncle now owned. Whether influenced by disease or simply by the disappointments and bitterness of old age, the old man often got mad at his son and his daughter-in-law. The hole was the result of the old man throwing a heavy metal object at my aunt one time when he was mad at her. Did he miss on purpose? Or was his aim just as bad as his disposition? Of course, he was dead by the time we visited. I doubt we would have visited while the old man was alive; my aunt would not have allowed us to. Until the old man died, the house had no electricity. He refused to allow it. Shortly after he died, my uncle had the house wired for electrical service.
I only remember seeing Dad’s brother once, and it must have been in Chatham. My uncle had muscular dystrophy and spent most of his adult life in a wheelchair. Death came to him before he reached his fifty-fifth birthday, like it did to his father, but from a disease instead of from an accident. Dad’s other sister, the youngest of the four children, lived with us. She had come to help Mother when my sister Diane was born, and she stayed. At our house she was known as Auntie. She appears frequently in Windsor's Child.
They are all gone now, and I do not know much about their lives, except for Auntie, and, of course, my dad. I do not know what kind of faith any of them had - or didn't have. I do not know how they died, and in most cases, I don't even know when. I assume some of them are buried in Ridgetown's Greenwood Cemetery, but I do not know this. They were visitors to my life when I was a young child, but as I grew older, visits grew fewer and eventually, whether because of old age on their part, or the fact that I had left home by this time on my part, I had no further opportunities to get a crisp Canadian dollar bill, or be teased, or have a quiet uncle sitting nearby, or wait for a train to pass on the track outside the farmhouse. Nor did I have an opportunity to share with them the faith I later found in Jesus Christ.
Photos: Ron in his Navy uniform c. 1943. A B-42 bomber crash landing during World War II, c. 1944. The house in which my family lived until 1951. The picture was taken c. 1993. My grandparents, George and May Schott, c. 1950. My grandparents' house on Tiffany in Ridgetown, ON. Photo c. 2001. Downtown Ridgetown, c. 1972. My grandmother Schott with her daughters, left to right: Edna (my mother), Juel, Pauline, and Bea. Photo c. 1966.
Remembering the 1940s
