temperature in August dropped to a low of 1.1 degrees Celsius. So it turns out her story wasn’t that far off. DEPARTURES I was seventeen years old the first time I left Thunder Bay, for university in Ottawa. The second time I left I was twenty-four and it was for Vancouver or, as my father phrased it, for “some guy.” When he took me to the airport I promised him I wouldn’t marry “the guy.” Then five years later we were married in Thunder Bay in Waverley Park, where my mother and father first met in 1971 when my mom was just fifteen and my dad sixteen. “Go west, young man” was a common expression among their generation, used to describe those leaving Ontario for the West Coast in search of work. In her mid-twenties my mom applied to be a flight attendant but realized after the interview that she wouldn’t be able to live in a city as big as Toronto: the biggest city they had ever been to back then was Duluth, Minnesota, with a population of 100,000. Leaving home isn’t one of the things that gets easier with practice, something that my nonna might have known because in the sixty-one years that she lived in Thunder Bay, she only went back to see her family in Italy once. It’s always hard to leave your first home even if it’s been fifteen years and even if it’s winter and not just because you might be snowed in.
Jennesia Pedri is a contributing editor to Geist. She recently wrote and directed the short film The Alderson Murder, released in the fall of 2018. She lives in Coquitlam, BC. Read her book reviews at geist.com.
16 Geist 108 Spring 2018
Working Life for a Girl in the 1960s GALE SMALLWOOD-JONES
We got paid once a week in cash—it made you feel special the first few times
I
n 1966 I was a typist at Eaton’s College Street in Toronto. My sister Stella did payroll at their downtown location. In those days, if there was no chance of getting a higher education, a girl was told she could be a teacher, a nurse or a typist. We chose the fastest road to a paycheque. We worked a forty-hour week. It was heads down with little chitchat among employees. We clocked in and out, lunch and breaks, with a punch card that determined your pay. If you were late to work twice you were fired. Short skirts or tight sweaters and you got sent home to change and then come straight back. I scrolled through microfiche when customers claimed a return but had no receipt. People tried to shaft the company so I had to find those bills. My eyes burned out on this machine. We got paid once a week, cash in a small brown envelope. The envelope was always crisp and clean, just like the dough inside. It made you feel special the first few times you held it. We cleared $38 a week, after tax. Stella and I lived in a tiny room with single beds that sagged badly. There was the smell of bug repellent but we never pinned the source. This was in a rooming house on St. George Street, sharing a kitchen and bath with seven guys who stole our food and toothpaste, so after a while we kept that stuff in our room. The men
were ghosts who drifted, apparently without work. Our landlord was well-worn and had a trick eye; he didn’t trust single girls and told us, “I don’t have no truck with any Villagers, so don’t even think about it.” We didn’t know what he meant by that but his tone was ominous so we held our tongues. We paid $12.50 a week each for the rent so this left $25.50 for everything else: food, makeup, streetcar tickets, clothes, medicines, birthdays, Bell telephone and entertainment. We never had the dollar cover to get into the clubs in Yorkville but the doorman accepted kisses at Chez Monique, so we were able to catch John Kay and the Sparrow and David Clayton Thomas and Rick James fronting the Mynah Birds. Between sets we’d hang out front of El Patio, catching riffs from the Paupers or near the Purple Onion to hear Luke and the Apostles pound out their tunes. We stared at the clothes in Eaton’s and dreamt of the day we could afford store-bought dresses. Instead, we took patterns plus three-yards-for-a-dollar cotton home to Mom on weekends. She continued to sew our clothing until we married a few years later. We also bought old men’s pants from the Salvation Army and cut and stitched them to fit us; the boys in the bands would ask us where we got them when we copied styles from Carnaby Street we had found in magazines. A huge bran muffin cost fifteen cents at the Woman’s Bakery. For supper we would clean out a can of sardines. Bread pretty well got us by for a number of years as it was cheap and easy. We bought Red River cereal and milk. We only knew how to fry eggs and ate Gay Lee yogurt when
