Being a Canadian Didn’t Come Naturally!
I didn’t encounter Canadian history in school until grade eight. Grade eight!
By then it was far too late. Not even the heroism of Champlain, Wolfe, Radisson and Grosilliers–‘Radishes and Gooseberries’–or the Iroquois massacring missionaries could draw me back into the fold.
From day one it had been cowboys and Indians in my comic books: Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy, Red Rider, the Cisco Kid and the Lone Ranger. Every Saturday it was off to Yates Street, Victoria’s Theatre Row, for a weekly dose of Jimmy Stewart (still the best!), Randolph Scott, the Duke, Glenn Ford (I didn’t know then that he was Canadian), Richard Widmark, Burt Lancaster and others.
Cavalry to the rescue
When the bugle sounded and the Cavalry charged, it was to the adrenalin rush and cheers of a hundred young boys in the audience.
From bubble gum cards I knew that the Americans won the Second World War (despite the contemptuous snorts of my father who was serving in convoy duty in the North Atlantic long before the Japanese drew America into the conflict with Pearl Harbour), and the words to the U.S. Marine Corps’ From the Halls of Montezuma. I knew that the U.S. had won the Korean War, too, even though my best friend’s brother-in-law served there on a Canadian destroyer.
Between Saturdays, there was television: Dragnet, the first so-called reality cop show with its unforgettable dum-de-dum-dum theme and Walt Disney. There wasn’t a boy on my street who didn’t play Daniel Boone or, better, Davy Crockett, who didn’t cry (although they’d never have admitted it) when Old Yeller died.
TV did much more than that for me. Not the CBC, though; we kids wouldn’t be caught dead watching that ‘crap’ (you know, ballet and stuff like that). TV–American TV–helped to set me on the path to a writing career. For this I’m eternally indebted to, among others, Bill Burrud, producer of a weekly documentary, Lost Treasure. For months I followed the tantalizing leads to pirate booty, buried loot and lost gold mines, all of them situated (if indeed they existed) within the United States.
Eureka!
Then, one momentous evening, Burrud was talking about the Lost Creek Mine–in the Pitt Lake country beyond New Westminster. That’s New Westminster, British Columbia! I could hardly believe it–a Canadian lost treasure! I was off to the B.C. Provincial Archives (one of the conveniences of growing up in our capital city) to investigate further. But this really came later, after the formative years…
Sports? It was baseball all the way, with Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris and Yogi Berra. (Who could ever forget Abbott and Costello’s ‘Who’s on first?’) Or the legendary Lou Gehrig. He’s actually before my time but, long before his name became a sad euphemism for ALS, he made a vivid impression on me from watching the movie made of his short life. Joe Lewis and Rocky Marciano were names I recognized as boxing greats, and Snead, Palmer and Nicklaus as golfing legends.
I’d heard of Prime Minister John Diefenbaker–even liked him until the Avro Arrow debacle, but that, too, came later, after ‘growing up’ with American presidents. I knew the distinction between Democrat and Republican before I knew about Conservatives (this was before they were Progressive Conservatives), Liberals and the CCF. And I knew that the Commies were our enemies, thanks to TV’s I Spied For the FBI.
Even Rock and Roll
With my teens came pop music: Elvis, the Big O, Bobby Darren and–amazingly, a young Canadian who made it big below the line–Paul Anka. Long before Gretzky, Dion and hundreds of other Canadians, he knew that you had to go Stateside to really make it big.
In fact, there were few exceptions that stick in my mind, it was American culture all the way: comic books, magazines, books, radio, movies and television. I don’t recall anything Canadian or British (other than fish and chips) that appealed to the youngsters of my generation in my part of the world for all of the sacrifices and contributions our parents had made during the Second World War. Only with young adulthood, a job and a growing awareness of world events did the questioning trigger the erosion of concepts so long accepted at face value and a growing sense of being a Canadian in a polarized Cold War world.
All of which brings me to today, much of a lifetime later. In spite of having literally been programmed by American culture in my so-called formative years, I’d like to think that I’ve become a reasonably intelligent, thinking, caring and mature adult–a Canadian.
And twpaterson.com is Canadian all the way!
