HK Move to Ontario

Move to Ontario

On coming to Ontario, Dad and I worked together. First at Beamsville at a nursery and then for the month of May on a tobacco farm. Dad left me and worked on a mixed farm near Port Rowan. He remarried in 1940 and worked as a farm laborer until he got a job in a factory in St. Catherines. They bought a house there. In his last years of work, he was an orderly in a hospital in St. Catherines. My Dad told me several times that the years working in the hospital were the best years of his life. He liked looking after and attending to the needs of sick people.

Unfortunately, my feeling of abandonment at fifteen never left me and I regret that I wasn’t a better son to him. I regret that I wasn’t nicer to him.

Well, I started my working life at age fifteen on the tobacco farm. First planting, then hoeing, then topping and finally harvesting. Still later, I cut stock, baled the tobacco and plowed the fields ready for next year’s harvest. My contract after the harvest was for $100 until Christmas. On Christmas day, I was given that money and I hitch-hiked to Toronto to find my sisters who had rented a flat in the west end. It was dark when I arrived.

Erica and Margaret were cleaning houses by the hour and living in a flat on Gilmour Avenue. Agnes was a domestic and living with her employer. Erica insisted that I stay with them and go back to school. I had been in Grade 9 in Saskatchewan when we left in March. And so I had to repeat Grade 9. To be accepted in the Toronto School System, I had to negotiate with the board, as my parents weren't a resident or tax payer. Somehow, this very shy, totally lacking in self-confidence, country boy managed this. School went very well and by Easter I was granted my year. I wanted to go back to work so I wouldn’t be a burden to my sisters. I returned to the tobacco farm after harvest in late September. Again, I was granted my Grade 10 at Easter and went back to the farm.

After the planting, my cousin’s husband in Toronto, who was an engineer, was able to get me a job in a factory at the W.C. Wood Co. I lived with my sisters on Gothic Avenue. The starting rate was 15 cents/hour and we worked a 54-hour week. I started on the punch press and the spot welder. I soon got raises to 17 and 20 cents per hour. In the fall, the owner announced that he was moving to Guelph and offered me a job at 25 cents per hour if I moved to Guelph. This was tempting but I had experienced the pain of being lonely and I sure didn’t want to leave my sisters so I quit W.C. Woods.

Looking for a job in those days was very difficult and I stood at factory gates along with hundreds of men looking for work. One day, while riding the streetcar, I saw a big advertisement for help needed at a war plant (Small Arms)  in Long Branch. I knew that if I asked my dad about this he would be opposed to working it because of his pacifist convictions and perhaps because of his strong German sympathies.

After I completed the job application form, I was interviewed by the personnel manager. He asked me how much money I needed. I replied, “Would 25 cents per hour be OK?”. He advised that the minimum was 40 cents per hour. The work week was 60 hours, from 7am to  6pm with an hour off for lunch. I was in heaven at  $24/week. I was assigned to the tool room. First on the shaper and then on the grinders.I stayed with the grinders for about nine months and then I graduated to the lathe. I had a brand-new Monarch lathe and it was a dilly. I stayed there until I enlisted in the Canadian army in April, 1943.

The work at Small Arms was very enjoyable. Time went very quickly and it was so much more interesting than farm work and so much easier. With my new wages, I started to buy myself clothes. First, a sweater and then some nice shoes and eventually even a new suit, tailor-made by Tip Top Tailors. I also eventually bought myself a Bulova wrist watch.

For the first time I was also having a social life. There were 6000 women in the factory and only a couple hundred men. You can imagine that it didn’t take long before I was dating, going to shows, hockey games, parties, dances and horseback riding. My friend, Addison Guy was a horseback rider and this suited me as well. We went riding a lot. First English style, which was the way I was brought up and then Western style.

Addison and I would take our dates to places like Club Top Hat, The Silver Slipper, The Sea Breeze, Palais Royale ect. It was a long way from Gothic Avenue where my sisters lived to Small Arms and so I boarded in Parkdale with some Mennonite friends, the Dirksens. Later Addison Guy and I roomed together with Mrs. Walker in Lakeview. I was there when I enlisted. My sisters, by this time, had moved into a rented house in the east end on Currie St. at Danforth and Coxwell.