Interviewer: Jeanne Anderson
Date of Interview: 25 February 2002
Date Transcribed: November 2002
Jeanne Anderson: Today is February 25th, 2002. I am Jeanne Anderson of the Prince George Oral History Group. Today I am interviewing Carl Strom. Would you like to give us your full name?
Carl Strom: My full name is Carl Edward Strom.
JA: And where were you born?
CS: I was born in Viking, Alberta. It's a little town about ninety miles southeast of Edmonton.
JA: Near what other larger city is it? Is it near Camrose, or....
CS: It's near Camrose, not far from Camrose.
JA: And your date of birth?
CS: I was born January 23rd, 1921.
JA: And your parents were.....?
CS: My parents....Carl William Strom was my father, and my mother's name was Hilda.
JA: Were they born in Canada?
CS: They were both born in the old country but they came to Canada in 1913. My father worked on the...taking out poles on the North Thompson River at Boulder and New River and places along there, he worked there. And my mother worked as a nurse's aide in Royal Inland Hospital in Kamloops.
JA: You told me earlier that your father was born in Sweden.
CS: Yes, he was born in Sweden.
JA: And your mother was born in Norway.
CS: Born in Norway.
JA: Did you have any brothers and sisters at that time or were you the only one in the family?
CS: No, I was the middle one. I had a brother at that time. He was born in Kamloops in the Royal Inland Hospital.
JA: His name?
CS: Alfred William Strom.
JA: And other siblings? Sister?
CS: Sister Evelyn, Evelyn Strom.
JA: And she was born in....?
CS: In Willow River.
JA: Willow River! Oh, yes. Okay, so you were born in Viking, Alberta, and you moved to Prince George when you were very young.
CS: I was a year old when we came here in 1922.
JA: You came in the wintertime or...?
CS: It was in the spring of the year.
JA: The spring of the year. Why did you come to Prince George...or why did the family come to Prince George?
CS: The reason my family came to Prince George was on account of the railroad ...which went through from Jasper to Prince Rupert, was built in 1909 to 1913, and they used railroad ties. They just took whatever they could take from the bush to put ties under a railroad. And by 1921, the year I was born, these ties were all rotten, went rotten, because they weren't peeled or anything like that. So they started letting out tie contracts to make new ties for the railroad and that's why my parents and my uncle came out here, to make ties for the railroad.
JA: What sort of timber did they use for making ties?
CS: Mostly jackpine and fir. They never used spruce for them.
JA: And why not?
CS: Well, spruce wouldn't last as long in the ground, it rots very quickly. So you never ever use it, they just use pine and fir.
JA: I know you were young, but do you have any idea of how they went about cutting the timber, making the ties?
CS: Well, they had to get a tie contract from the CNR... sublet from the CN... and then they had to find a place where there was some timber, tie timber. And then they paid the government for the timber and it was for so much a tie, and they just went out there and cut. They had quite a bit of restrictions. You couldn't cut a tree under 13" at breast high.
JA: Very large then. What size were the ties?
CS: Well, the ties were 7 by 9, 7 inches thick and 9 inches wide. That was called a number one and it was square on both sides. You had to use the broad axe to square it on both sides. And a number two was just a flat tie, just hewed on two sides. And they were cut eight feet long and peeled. They were skidded out to a landing place where you loaded them on sleighs, and then they were hauled to the railroad and they were loaded in boxcars, and then they were distributed all along the railroad.
JA: How did they actually cut the trees down? What equipment did they use for cutting down the trees?
CS: We had to...I made ties myself one winter. We had a one-man saw that we used and a five and a half pound axe, and then an ordinary axe, a pole axe, and then we used a broad axe for hewing, a different axe altogether.
JA: Can you describe a broad axe?
CS: A broad axe? They weighed between 7 1/2 and 8 pounds and they were flat on one side and the handle fitted into them. If you were right-handed or left-handed, you could switch the handle for whichever way you were.
JA: That must have been...you'd have to be pretty strong and tough to...
CS: Oh yeah. Lots of people... The tie-makers were mostly Scandinavians in those days. They came over here and they could make the most money by cutting ties, and that's the way they wanted to...
JA: How many hours a day would you work at that?
CS: Well, you'd work about eight hours a day. But it was all contract work, so if a fellow wanted to work for four hours in the day and already made his quota, he could go home any time he'd like. There was nobody to tell him.
JA: Was it an individual job or were there crews?
CS: Individual. You worked by yourself.
JA: Piece work, as they called it.
CS: It was piecework, yeah.
JA: And they considered it was making good money at that time?
CS: Oh yeah, they made good money. Most of these fellows that made these ties...they were all made by hand and it was an individual work. You didn't have a partner or anything like that. You done it yourself. You felled your tree. And you fell it so that you could...that it was flat so you could walk on the top of it because when you used the axes you had to stand on the top of the tree and walk quite a length of it and work from the top.
JA: Did anybody ever cut a foot?
CS: Yes, there were people that did cut their feet and toes, and things like that.
JA: What kind of money would it be at that time?
CS: Well, for a number two tie...it wasn't square, it was just flat on two sides...the person that was making the tie got about 15 cents a tie for making that. And for a number one, which was a squared tie, square on four sides, they got 20 to 21 cents for it.
JA: And how many would you make in a day do you think?
CS: Well, a lot of them made up as high as thirty in a day. It was a lot of work, hard work. And then you had to peel them. The ones that needed peeling, they had to be peeled, and then you bunched them on the skid trails in the bush. And then they came along and picked them up later with a horse and a dray, like they just loaded a few on and hauled them to a place where you could load them on a sleigh. Most of the ties were all hauled by horses and sleighs. The horses was a big thing in those days.
JA: You moved to Prince George in 1922. Where did you live at that time in Prince George...or where did your family live?
CS: The family lived in Prince George when we first come here, but when we went out in the tie camp that winter of 1922, the whole family moved out to the tie camp. My mother was cooking, and my aunt was cooking. Us kids weren't going to school so we were under their feet all the time.
JA: How many tie-makers would be in the camp?
CS: Oh, there'd be about twenty tie-makers.
JA: In that particular camp?
CS: Yeah.
JA: What did you do for...when you weren't making ties?
CS: No. They'd come in at night, like in winter it gets dark quick. The men had a bunkhouse all of their own and they all stayed in there. They had a great big barrel stove in the centre we used to feed with wood, and they had racks around to hang their clothes because they were all wet, when they came in at night they were soaking wet. They had to dry their clothes. And then they had double bunks, one fellow slept above the other in their double bunk. And there's no windows usually in these places, so the guys used to take a wood auger and they'd drill a hole, right near where they slept, through the log and then they'd make a plug and put it in there. If they wanted to get fresh air or something, they'd pull that plug out.
JA: They didn't play cards or anything there?
CS: Yes, they did. Not very often though because most of them just sat around and talked and they smoked. Most of them smoked cigarettes and they didn't play cards. They did a little bit, but not that much. They'd go to bed real early, as soon as they got in after supper they'd go to bed because they had to get up early in the morning to get out at daylight, out in the bush to get their tree felled and to start making their ties.
JA: And you had a cook shack and a dining place for them there too then?
CS: Yes. That's where my mother and my aunt... they done the cooking that winter in there. It was not the best of a life because you were more or less tied down. You couldn't go no place or anything, you were out in the bush. But they had things that they could do, their own hobbies and things, you know.
JA: Well, how did you get out to the bush from..?
CS: Well, we went out by train, or....out to Isle Pierre, that's where it was at. There was no road there then in those days but there was a railroad station there and a landing where you landed the ties, and you could go by train from Prince George out there. That's how we got out.
JA: How far would the tie camp be from the landing?
CS: Oh, probably a half a mile from the railroad.
JA: How did you get supplies in there, or how did you...? [voices overlap]
CS: By train.
JA: Where from, Prince George?
CS: From Prince George, yeah.
JA: They'd have to order them, I guess, or...?
CS: Well, usually somebody had to go into town to clear out the order because there was no such a thing as delivery or anything like that.
JA: That would be quite the job, to feed the family and twenty men, hardworking men.
CS: Oh, they bought it in huge amounts. They used to buy fifty-pound boxes of dried apricots and raisins and...? That's the kind of food they had, was dried peaches, apricots, pears, and all that kind of stuff.
JA: How long did you...did your father work in this tie camp then? One winter?
CS: Two winters. That winter in 1922, we came back into Prince George in the spring and stayed in Prince George all summer, and that fall we went back out to the tie camp again for the winter of 1923. And then we made ties all winter and in the spring we came back to Prince George, of 1924, and my dad... Tie making was getting...they were getting enough ties, more than they wanted for the railroad, so he figured he had to do something else, so he rented a farm at Willow River and we all moved out there in 1924. That's where my sister was born there in '25, on the farm; and also my cousin, he was born there at the same time.
JA: When you say that you rented a farm, what was....?
CS: It was the farm that belonged to a fellow called Wylie. It was a farm that had been started in the early days, and he lived in Winnipeg. He needed somebody to be on it and that, so my dad rented it from him, rented the property.
JA: Did he farm on it?
CS: Oh yeah. He had eighty acres under cultivation. He used to grow potatoes, hundreds and hundreds of pounds of them. He used to haul them... A friend of my dad's and my uncle had a friend in town that had a Model T truck, and they used to haul the potatoes in bulk in this truck to the railroad and they'd load them in boxcars in Willow River just like they do grain, you know. They wouldn't be in sacks or anything. And these potatoes all went to Edmonton to a processing plant and I don't know what they done, they made potato chips or powdered potato or something like that. But they were beautiful potatoes. I never seen potatoes like that before.
JA: The whole eighty acres was in...?
CS: He had them in potatoes, yeah. He had two big potato diggers, mechanical ones, and they were pulled with a team of horses, each one of them, and we used to... When potato-digging time came, my dad he knew the neighbours from Shelly, he knew them quite well, we all did, and he hired them. They'd come out and they'd camp right on the farm and they would do the picking of the potatoes after they were dug.
JA: How did you haul them?
CS: We hauled them to the railroad station in the Model T Ford truck.
JA: And who loaded them into the ...?
CS: The truck driver, the guy who was driving the truck. He had a helper with him. The fellow's name was...that had the truck, was Ollie Olson, was his name.
JA: That must have been quite an interesting... Oh, you wouldn't be old enough to do much but watch them, I guess.
CS: No, I couldn't do anything.
JA: Two years old, you couldn't be expected to do very much.
CS: I can just remember, that's all. Lots of people can't even remember back that far.
JA: Do you want to tell us a little bit about your sister being born on the farm?
CS: Yeah, she was born there in 1925 in the spring. The closest doctor to the farm was at Eagle Lake Sawmills, at Giscome, and that was five miles from Willow River, and we were two miles from Willow River, so it was seven miles away from the doctor. We had a girl there by the name of Stanyew, her name was Elizabeth Stanyew, who was helping my mother doing the housekeeping on the farm. And she got on the horse, bareback, and rode to Giscome, seven miles, and got the doctor and he came back with her on horseback when my sister was born in June 1925.
JA: Do you remember the name of the doctor?
CS: Dr. Lacely was his name.
JA: How long did he stay in Giscome?
CS: Oh, he was only there a couple of years. But they had other doctors there after that. I don't remember what their names were.
JA: Can you tell me exactly where the farm would be now, compared to the town of Willow River?
CS: Just north of Willow River. Like the Willow River runs in the town of Willow River and the Fraser River was about two and a half miles away. And right where the Willow River run into the Fraser, there was like a delta there, and that's where this farm was. This was where we'd farm.
JA: Was it cleared when your father took it over?
CS: Oh, yeah. Some of it was, yeah.
JA: It's interesting at that time when the history of B.C. was...that somebody would have a farm....
CS: All kinds of guys had homesteads up north of Willow River there, a lot of old-timers in there.
JA: Can you remember the names of them?
CS: Oh, yeah, I remember the names of a lot of them. One's name was Lou Askrin, Ralph McVoy, and... Oh, there was various other ones but I just...Tommy Raymon..
JA: Where did they come from, into Willow River from?
CS: They came here with the construction of the railroad and then they just took up homesteading somewhere.
JA: Did they get the land for free, or was it....
CS: Well, pretty near.
JA: Yeah. Homesteading was you had to clear so much, was it, keep it so long?
CS: Yeah, that's right. We lived on the farm here until about 1926 or '27, I forget, in that area anyway. My brother turned six years old so he had to go to school, so instead of commuting back and forth that two and a half miles everyday, my dad bought a house in Willow River. The whole family moved into Willow River, into the village, and the school was there. At that time there was about forty kids going to that one-room school.
JA: Can you tell us a little bit about the construction of the school?
CS: It was built of logs and it had two windows on one side and no windows on the other side and it had a...? before you went in to the...? where they had wood and stuff for the wood stove that they had in there. The front end was two big blackboards in the front of the school. But it was only windows on one side.
JA: How big of a building would it be then?
CS: Oh, it wasn't that big. It might have been 20 x 14 or something like that.
JA: Did you have individual desks?
CS: Yes. Actually a lot of the desks that we had there were tied together, maybe three or four of them all tied together, and they could move them around on the floor.
JA: When did you start school?
CS: I started school that same year my brother did. They took me in, I don't know why. I was only five years old. I sat in Grade One for two years. I don't know what arrangements they had. My mother had some arrangement that they took me into the school some way or other.
JA: Did you speak English all the time?
CS: Always. My dad and mother both spoke Scandinavian, or knew how to speak the Scandinavian, but after they got married they both spoke the English language so none of us children learned how to speak the Scandinavian language. We often wished that we had, you know, but that's the way they wanted it so that's the way they...
JA: Do you remember anything of any of the teachers that you had at that particular time?
CS: Yes. We had... The first teacher that I had at school, his name was James C. Long, and the second one was a Mrs. Edgerton who, I believe, is still alive. She lives in Oliver. And the third teacher's name was Robinson. Then we had some teachers off and on in between that took over for another when they had to go away or something like that. Relief teachers.
JA: Who managed the schools, the school board or...?
CS: Yes, it was the school board. It was, yeah. There'd be two or three people of the village who would manage the school.
JA: Did you have any shopping or anything in Willow River at that time?
CS: There was two stores there. There was a general store owned by John Newson, was his name. And there was another store right across the street from there. It was Mrs. Crawford, who came from back east in Nova Scotia or...what's that other place right next...?
JA: New Brunswick?
CS: New Brunswick. She came... Her family was the Ganoly Chocolate family and that's who she...But she came out to Willow River, I don't know why, but she always used to talk about her parents owning the Ganoly Chocolate Factory.
JA: Did she bring any to school for the kids?
CS: No. This store that she had more or less...it was a hotel also and people use to.... They had four or five rooms there that she used to rent to people if they wanted, when they came through there. That was the Lunar Hotel in Willow River.
JA: Well, Newson kept the store for quite a long time.
CS: Oh, years. He had it at Newlands first. Yeah, he had the store there a long time. It was there when we come there.
JA: That would be in the '20s.
CS: '25.
JA: '25. What sort of...
CS: When we moved into the village.
JA: What could you buy in the store?
CS: You could buy practically anything. It was a general store. He had meat, he sold tools, and all the tobacco products and things like that, and any kind of canned food. He sold sacks of flour to people, you know. It was a general store, and so was the other one, the one Mrs. Crawford owned. She didn't have quite as big a supply as John Newson did. He had the post office.
JA: What size of town would Willow River be then about that time?
CS: Well, it's hard to say. The only thing I can say is that there was forty children going to that one-room log school, so there was quite a few people lived around there.
JA: Are there any of the families of those people still there, or not?
CS: I think our family was the last family, and my stepmother, Ruth Brown. Ruth Cunningham was her name, and then she met... My father married her after my mother died. That was the last of the family. Oh, there was lots of families lived there afterwards. They built a new school.
JA: Newson had the store for quite a long time. Did his daughter take it over or something?
CS: His daughter took over the store. She was married to a schoolteacher in Prince George. Pennington was his name.
JA: Yeah, Harold Pennington.
CS: Harold Pennington, yeah.
JA: I don't know who owns it now.
CS: I don't either but...
JA: It's still going.
CS: It's still going. They even have a liquor store in there.
JA: How long did you stay in school in Willow River?
CS: I just went to Grade Eight. After I finished school I went to work at Giscome.
JA: ??... on the school there you told me about your writing and things that you took while you were in school.
CS: The which?
JA: The writing, handwriting.
CS: Oh, yeah. I have a certificate for the McLean method of handwriting.
JA: I guess all the teachers taught that at that time.
CS: That's right. A special handwriting that they taught everybody, that style of writing.
JA: And your sister started school there too?
CS: Yes. She went all through public school in Willow River and then moved into Prince George to go to high school.
JA: What about your brother?
CS: Oh, he didn't...he stayed...didn't go to high school either. We didn't have the opportunity. My mother died when we were very young so we had to more or less look after ourselves in the house - do the cooking ourselves and everything.
JA: Where was your father then?
CS: He was out working on the culvert gang on the railroad or... He was always out working somewhere.
JA: And the three of you had lived....
CS: No, we looked after ourselves.
JA: ???????? school?
CS: Hmm?
JA: You said you went to work at Eagle Lake Sawmills.
CS: Sawmills, yeah.
JA: Can you tell us about what kind of work that was?
CS: Yeah, I went to.... When I was about fifteen years old, in the spring of the year I heard that they were hiring young people down at Giscome, where Eagle Lake Sawmills was situated. So I went down there and asked for a job and I got it. They paid 25 cents an hour at that time.
JA: What did your brother do?
CS: My brother, he didn't work there. He went into Prince George and he worked in different places around Prince George. But I stayed with Eagle Lake Sawmills until I joined the army.
JA: Did you live in Willow River and was there.....
CS: No. When I was working there I lived in the boarding house. They had a big boarding house in Giscome. You could stay in there.
JA: Did they have windows in it?
CS: Oh, yes. It was a...all modern conveniences.
JA: Plumbing and...
CS: Plumbing and everything, yeah.
JA: And what about the food?
CS: Well, they had a dining room on one end of it, which was excellent.
JA: What sort of food did you get in that boarding house?
CS: Regular food. We used to get steaks and everything like that.
JA: So it was a good place to live at that time?
CS: Oh yes, it was one of the best.
JA: How long did the 25 cents an hour...did that....?
CS: I got that for about three months, and then they seen that I was doing my work properly and they raised my wages to the same as everybody else, 40 cents an hour.
JA: What type of work were you doing?
CS: I was loading boxcars, loading lumber in boxcars.
JA: You must have been a big teenager then because that's a rough job.
CS: Oh, yeah. Used to do it all day long.
JA: What did you do at nights there for....
CS: We used to play cards and things like that in the boarding house. They had a kind of recreation room in the lobby of the ??? A lot of us used to go into...most of us had a car, I had a little Model A Ford...and we'd drive to Prince George and go to a show or things like that at night.
JA: There was a road through then?
CS: Oh, yeah. It was one of the most traveled highways in northern British Columbia, between Giscome and Prince George.
JA: What was in Prince George that was so interesting?
CS: The shows. The theater, and we used to go to dances. On weekends we used to go out to some of the lakes - Cluculz Lake, West Lake. They had roads out there.
JA: That would be in what years?
CS: I started working in Giscome in 1938.
JA: When did you join the army then?
CS: In 1940.
JA: Did they have a recruiting place in Prince George?
CS: Yes, the old Legion. They used the old Legion, which was a two-story building. It was more or less...I can't...You know where the post office is today? It was across the street from that.
JA: What street's that, Dominion Street?
CS: No, it was Seventh Avenue, I think.
JA: It was across the street then?
CS: Well, it would be, one of them...
JA: ????????????? building.
CS: They brought in some military doctors and things like that, and they'd give us our medical right there in the building. Then we stayed in Prince George for about two days, and then they sent us to Vancouver.
JA: Can you tell us a little bit about what Prince George was like back in 1938, '39? About how big a town it was. You said they had theaters, stores...
CS: Well, I'd say in that era, time, there was maybe about...there could be about ten thousand people living in that area, in Prince George, at that time.
JA: What type of streets did they have?
CS: Well, they had...you always hear people talking about wooden sidewalks, well Prince George had wooden sidewalks for awhile but they didn't have that many of them. And the streets were just ordinary gravel streets, gravel roads. One street there, Third Avenue, was made of blocks of wood on end because it was swampy.
JA: What about hotels, were there many?
CS: Yes, there was lots of hotels in that area, small hotels. There was thirteen beer parlors in Prince George at that time.
JA: How old would you have to be before you....
CS: You had to be twenty-one to go in there. And then they had them separated in those days. The women and the men were separated. They didn't drink together. But on the women's side, she could invite a man in with her, but the women couldn't go into the men's side at all.
JA: Why do you think that was?
CS: Hey?
JA: Why do you think that they had it separated like that?
CS: I don't know. I have no idea. They had the same thing in Alberta, too.
JA: Nowadays it seems like we've got a regulation ?????. I'm trying to think about what the reasoning for it would be. Men got too rowdy when they were drinking or....?
CS: That's what it was, yeah.
JA: Okay. You were then at the Eagle Lake Sawmills two years...one year...two years?
CS: I was there in '38 and '39.
JA: So you would be seventeen or eighteen years old then?
CS: Yeah.
JA: How old were you when you joined the army then? Eighteen?
CS: No, I was nineteen.
JA: Nineteen.
CS: So I might have been there a little while longer than that. I know I was there long enough to... I probably started work there in 1936, '37, because I was fifteen years old when I started there so that's when it would be, around 1936. And I bought myself a car that year too, a Model A Ford roadster.
JA: Who owned the mill at Giscome at that time?
CS: AT that time it was owned by a fellow by the name of Roy Spur.
JA: He was there quite a long time.
CS: He was there quite awhile, yeah. And he was the sole owner of it. But before that, it used to belong to an American...what did they call it? They called it...I forget what it was.
JA: Winton?
CS: Winton Brothers, they owned it. Yeah.
JA: Well, they still own a mill in Prince George. The Pas, isn't that....?
CS: That's part of it. Yeah.
JA: How was the mill operated at that time?
CS: The mill was operated by steam. It had big steam boilers and the engines were steam. Then they had a big generator in the engine room there that produced electricity and they run the planer mill by electricity.
JA: What about the logging? Do you know anything about the logging that was going on at that time?
CS: Well, most of the logging that was done around that time was done by.... They had a logging railroad, too, north of Giscome and they logged all that north part with logging trains. Brought the logs down and dumped them in the lake. Then they went into truck logging, built plank roads and things like that and then all their logging was done by trucks after the railroad phased out. But there's a lot of people don't know anything about that railroad.
JA: I've heard about it but....
CS: I've seen it in operation.
JA: It ran right down to the mill, and how far back did it go then?
CS: It went right down to the mill and it went about, I'd say, eight or ten miles back in the bush from there.
JA: Along the river?
CS: No. It went along Eagle Creek until they got down near half-way between Giscome and Willow River, and then they went up a kind of a cut-slope and they went to a different level with the rails. The first camp was called Camp Three. And then they built more railroad into Camp Eight. There was Camp Seven, Camp Four. All these different ?? all had the railroad right into them and they used to load the logs right on the flat cars, and the steam engines would pull the flat cars into Giscome.
JA: How did they get the logs onto the railroad tracks?
CS: They used horses in places, and they used drag lines in lots of places. They pulled the logs right from the bush right onto the...because the train would load them right on. They had some steam donkeys and stuff like that in there. Some of them are still sitting back in the bush there.
JA: It must have taken quite a crew then to...
CS: Oh, that Camp Eight was one of the biggest logging camps in... Well, it was the biggest in northern British Columbia, and they had an awful pile of horses in there.
JA: Which direction would that be?
CS: That would be about a mile from where we had the farm.
JA: Back onto the river then, from Eaglet Creek?
CS: Yeah. Back up north of it. And where this big logging camp was, was on another creek called Hospital Creek, which went right into the river right near our farm. They called it Hospital Creek because there was a hospital there in the construction days.
JA: Well, the mill must have had access to a lot of timber then.
CS: Oh yeah, they had access to a lot. But they're still logging back in there. They haul, you know, truckloads. They haul it into Prince George. They have a road that goes...they call it the North Fraser Highway. My wife and I used to go in there on weekends. It was a nice trip. Go right to Summit Lake, and we'd cut through on this logging road right to Upper Fraser, and then cross the river there and come back through Aleza Lake.
JA: Oh, that must have been a real trip then. What condition would the road be in?
CS: Oh, it was good. Good roads. Well maintained.
JA: Why do you think they gave up the train logging?
CS: I think it was because it was too costly, too costly for the time. It was at 1938 they brought their first logging trucks into Giscome. Ross Ewen, he was the one that brought them in there, and Harold Mann.
JA: It must have been interesting...
CS: Before that it was all horse logging, and railroad. That railroad logging didn't last very long, about two or three years.
JA: But Giscome never did grow to very much of a town, did it? There was not much shopping or anything, just the one general store?
CS: There was the company store. They had a company store and they also had... Brown had a store, A.D. Brown.
JA: Where was the company store?
CS: It was across...you know where Brown's store was?
JA: Yes.
CS: It was across the track, more or less right next to the mill pretty near, just right on the railroad there.
JA: What did they sell in it?
CS: They sold everything. Anything you wanted to buy.
JA: Brown and them, they were in competition?
CS: Yeah. But then they finally closed the company store down and they let Brown handle it, run the company store there.
JA: Was he employed by the company?
CS: ??
JA: Ran the store. Pretty diversified operation.
CS: Then they had... They had quite a big school in Giscome. They had two or three churches there, too. A Catholic church and... I know the school that they had, the big school they had there, had two...well you must remember it?
JA: Yeah.
CS: It had two floors, the upper and lower [Side A, Tape #1 ends]
Side B - No Content
Side A, Tape #2
JA: ...continuing with the Oral History of Carl Strom. Carl has been off on sick leave for awhile but is back now, so we're going to finish off his oral history.
CS: June, 1940. And we had our medicals in Prince George in the old Legion building. They brought in a military doctor and they also used old Dr. Hines and Dr. Ewert. They give us our medicals and we were told that we would be shipped to a training camp. But of course a big bunch of us were sent to Vancouver to the Seaforth Armories, and another bunch were sent over to Victoria. My brother, he was one of them. We stayed in Vancouver for a week or so and then they shipped us all to Calgary, to Currie Barracks, and that's where we took our military training for six months. Then we had a chance, after six months, to take a trade, so I took up carpentry and joinery for six months. That was in 1941, off and on, and that's the year they shipped up overseas. What was good about the excellent training we had in Calgary, a trades school, was that it give us extra pay in the army. We got extra pay all the time we were in the army for it, so that was one good thing about it. And then we did work at it for awhile overseas, building hospitals and doing odd jobs around. We built the Canadian base laundry at Borden. And then they took all those young fellows out of that construction part of it and I went to a training school. I was a bridging instructor, for Bailey bridges in the army.
JA: This was in Canada or in England?
CS: In England.
JA: In England. So you did carpentry, or that type of work, in England first and then switched over to ?? ?? after they decided you were a good candidate to do something else.
CS: Yeah. So I became a bridging instructor in the Royal Canadian Engineers at a place in England called Cove and that's where they done all their bridging training.
JA: How do you spell that place?
CS: Which?
JA: The name of the place you were at.
CS: [spells the word] C O V E. Cove.
JA: The reason I asked is because when a typist comes to do this up, they sometimes don't know.
CS: It was on a little... We were stationed on a little lake where the guy had pontoon bridging, things like that, for the water. We trained a lot of people. One of my classes I had a fellow from Prince George in it. He still lives here. Oh, what the heck, I.... Him and his wife are very active in the Moose Hall. I forget his name, I can't think of it right now.
JA: Oh, if it comes to you we can fill it in when we're typing it up.
CS: He was actually... When I got married overseas he was the only fellow I knew and he was the best man at my wedding there. I'll have to think of his name. There's a whole family of them here. I got married in 1944 and then I was shipped over to Holland that same month.
JA: Your wife was someone you met in England?
CS: Yes. I met my wife in a canteen over there. She was in the Royal Air Force and I was in the Army. She was a photographer in the Air Force.
JA: Must have been an interesting job.
CS: Very interesting.
JA: Before the days of colour?
CS: Huh?
JA: Before the days of colour photography?
CS: Oh yeah.
JA: Then when you were shipped to Holland, what did you do there?
CS: Well, when our ship was sent to Holland it was late in the war, the war was pretty near over so I didn't have too much to do at all except just be there. From overseas, when I came back to Canada, I came back in 1945. Shortly after the war was over I was sent home. I was hauled back to Canada and when the Japanese war finished I was in Prince George, and then they discharged me. That winter I worked in a logging camp cutting trees.
JA: And you mentioned, too, that you were waiting for your wife to come over.
CS: Oh, she never came until a year after I was here. Exactly one year.
JA: Why was that?
CS: She was still in the service.
JA: Oh. They didn't discharge them at the end of the....
CS: Yeah.
JA: Did she ever go overseas? In the Air Force, I guess, did she fly with the...
CS: Oh, she wasn't a flyer, she was a photographer, but she was in the Royal Air Force.
JA: Yeah. But she didn't have to take aerial photographs or anything?
CS: She just... mostly what she was doing was developing.
JA: Oh yeah.
CS: Pictures and things like that.
JA: I know it seems odd asking the questions but people that have no experience like that would have no idea what was going on.
CS: They called it the photographic reconnaissance unit. That's what she was in. That's her picture here in her uniform.
JA: So finally after a year she did get out?
CS: She came out to Canada, yes.
JA: And what was her impression of Canada?
CS: Well, they all had different impressions because there's quite a bit of different living in what we were doing here. Over there, most of them lived in apartments. A lot different to the way of life we have here.
JA: After you were married, did you have a place to live there, or did you stay in your units?
CS: Oh, she was still in the service so I very seldom ever seen her until... She was stationed in different places ?? ?? ??... I never would have got a chance if I was there. We would meet at some certain place and...
JA: A weekend leave or something like that?
CS: Yeah.
JA: Where did she come out to...you were in Willow River at that time?
CS: Yes, she came out in 1956 [corrects himself] 1946. '45 was when the war quit. She had to stay in the service for extra year. Most of the British people did. Well, I could have stayed too, but I didn't want to.
JA: So if you brought her right out to Willow River, that would be quite a change from...
CS: Oh yeah. I met her in Jasper and then we came home on the train. I think it was in the evening when the train come to Willow River. The passenger coach was quite aways from the platform. There was still snow on the ground all over, and she had to jump out into that much snow, which she had never seen before, you know. It was quite an experience for her.
JA: Where did you live then, in Willow River?
CS: Oh, we had a little house there that my dad had waiting for us.
JA: Oh, isn't that nice. Right in the town site?
CS: Right in the town site, yeah.
JA: Is the house still there?
CS: Just a two-room place. It had a kitchen and a bedroom. She didn't care for the... We didn't have any running water. We had a pump in the house. The outside toilets, she didn't care for them. But it was just a new way of life, that's what it... It didn't bother us because we were used to it.
JA: Grew up with it.
CS: Yeah.
JA: How long did you stay there, in Willow River?
CS: We stayed in Willow River approximately a year and then we moved to Prince George. They were giving out to veterans who were married and had one child...you had a first opportunity to get a house up in the Miller Addition there, so that's where we got out first house. And that was the only house we ever had, and we lived in it for over fifty years.
JA: And I'm sure it's still there?
CS: I sold it, yeah. It's still there.
JA: Yeah. I know some of the neighbours that were up in that area - Marg Polston and Terry Stiles were [voices overlap]...
CS: They all lived on Dogwood Street.
JA: Birch. What's the next one...Cedar. Marg lives on the corner of Cedar of Fifteenth.
CS: Polston?
JA: Polston, yeah.
CS: Polston, I know her.
JA: I know they know you. Yeah. So when you came...then you moved to Prince George. Did you have any other reason than the poor accommodation to move to Prince George?
CS: We didn't move on account of the poor accommodation. The reason we moved to Prince George was because we had a better chance to better ourselves. And then I got started in the lumber business, too, at the same time, with my family.
JA: Do you want to tell us what particular lumber business you were in?
CS: Well, I went into the lumber business working for my uncle at the start with, Strom Lumber Company. I stayed with them for about a year and then his son and me, we started a mill of our own.
JA: And where was that?
CS: And that was at...it was out at the Kelly Road, it was on the Kelly Road. Then we moved from there, we moved the mill from there a year later down to Strathnaver, and that's where we spent all our lumber years, a mill down at Strathnaver. Hixon Creek.
JA: Is there a mill there now? I don't think so.
CS: Oh no, no.
JA: No. I've done some research on all the schools that were built in that area. The schools were built along with the lumber industry in that area, and I've got into quite a problem with Canyon Creek. Apparently they built Canyon Creek at one spot and then moved it further up to Hixon, I guess, and still called it Canyon Creek. But that was back in the '30s, I think, they started that, so it would be quite well developed in there when you were in the lumber business?
CS: Well, they tried to restore all these old schools. There's one at....this side of Hixon Creek there, a place called....dumb today. It was an old log school anyway. Actually it's still there.
JA: It is, eh?
CS: It was up on the hill above... They called the place... It's funny how you get a blank like that. And I drove by there every day.
JA: The teacher circles would call this a 'senior moment.' It'll come back to you. And ?? ?? you have at Red Rock and...
CS: Well that was before we moved to Hixon, we had the mill at Red Rock.
JA: And Kelly Road, Red Rock and Strathnaver?
CS: Strathnaver, yeah.
JA: And then you worked with Ivor Killy?
CS: I worked with him before I started into my own business.
JA: He was quite a name in the lumber business here.
CS: And I also, afterwards when I went in my own, I stayed... I was in that for thirteen years, and then I went back working for Ivor Killy. I worked for him for a year after that. I was in a lot more business. I sold out. I sold my half-interest to my cousin.
JA: You just had one brother, did you?
CS: Yeah.
JA: The one that was here, was it Alf?
CS: Yeah, he was in the lumber business too.
JA: Was he the one that went into the police force or was that one of his sons?
CS: Yeah, that was him. He went into the police force, the provincial police.
JA: Yeah. And then here it says that here that you started to take night courses in electronics ???
CS: Yeah. While I was working in the lumber business and that, I took night courses in radio and television repair, electronics, which I kept up for one year and then I got my diploma for electronics and I started my own business in downtown Prince George.
JA: What was the name of that?
CS: District Radio and TV.
JA: Someone asked me about that and I said that I wasn't sure because... Yours was District Radio and TV. There was one City Radio and TV, too, sometime during that time. Anyway, that's not... Where was your shop located?
CS: We still own it. You know where the B&B Music is, and Fichner Shoe Store?
JA: Yes.
CS: Well I had two little stores in between the two of them, and they're still there. They're still operating as...one's a shoe store and the other's a delicatessen. And my son and daughter look after it now, I have nothing to do with it anymore, but it's still in the family.
JA: And I said 1961, so that's [voices overlap]...
CS: That's when I built it, yeah.
JA: What was there on that street at that time?
CS: Well, there was quite a few things. A lot of the things that were there then are still there, like B&B Music, quite a few other stores. But they did change over the years, you know, different...
JA: I'm sure Cuppa Mocha wasn't there when you were there.
CS: No. That's where Spanner's Men's Wear used to be.
JA: And on the other corner there's Morrison's Men's Wear now.
CS: Oh that was there for a long time. That store was built, the new one, in 1940, because it wasn't finished yet when I went in the army, and that was the old man Morrison himself, he built the store. The son still owns it.
JA: Going back a bit, when you were in Willow River, do you have knowledge of when that second school, I guess it was, was built in Giscome? The one that was there until...
CS: You mean the one that had two stories?
JA: Yes.
CS: No, I have no idea.
JA: Someone told me they had an idea it was built in 1921, but we went back in school records and there was a school in Giscome from 1916, I think, on.
CS: That school was built... I mean I can remember when they built it, but I can't remember the time. It was quite a nice school.
JA: Yes. That's the one I taught most in, is that one, and we were doing some research on that, too. I asked Alice Neal and she said to ask Zetta Colebank, but unfortunately Zetta Colebank has passed away so...
CS: Yeah, but Alice Neal would know more about it.
JA: Well, I don't know. She didn't offer, and that was what she said. Because she said there was another small school over where the lumberyard was, on the station side of the tracks, to start with and then they built that one.
CS: Yeah, that's right. That was the old, old school.
JA: She was trying to find me a picture of it but not successful. Anyway, that's backtracking. So from District Radio and TV, how long did you stay in that business? Here it says 1985 you retired.
CS: Well, that's when I went out of...when I closed the business down.
JA: So you were in the radio and television business from 1961 to 1985? Twenty-four years.
CS: Yeah.
JA: Was it a successful business?
CS: Well, I had to be. I still have the buildings there and everything. Yeah, it was very successful. I brought up my family while I was running the store. My wife helped me.
JA: Did she work in the store too?
CS: Yes, she did but she never got no credit for it. That's where I made a big mistake. I should have had her on the payroll the whole time. Oh yeah, she worked in the store quite a lot.
JA: And here it says in 1985 you retired and rented out the stores?
CS: And they're still rented out.
JA: And you have two sons. Are they still in Prince George?
CS: Yeah, they live here.
JA: They do, hey?
CS: Yep. [phone rings]
JA: Oop. I'll get it.
JA: Start over again. "I retired..."
CS: Hm?
JA: Start over with "I retired in 1985..."
CS: ...1985 from the radio and television business and just more or less killed time around home, doing gardening and things like that, actually never ever went back to work.
JA: Were you active in any of the organizations?
CS: Well I was active in the Legion. I was on the executive of the Legion for quite a few years.
JA: Are you still a member?
CS: Oh, I'm a life member.
JA: It was a very prominent organization for a long time.
CS: Yep. It was a very...the Legion's a good thing. But there was lots of things that the veterans, when it came back they didn't like the way they run it. I shouldn't be saying things about it because I'm still a member of it, a life member. It was a very... To be a real Legion member, you had to spend a lot of time down there and you had to do a lot of...and I never did that, so...
JA: Well that was probably the weakest part of it, wasn't it? I belonged to the women's...
CS: Auxiliary?
JA: ...auxiliary when they had one out in Giscome because my brother was in it. My father was in the First World War...my grandfather...so I mean I had lots of grounding to be in there but, as I say, I didn't participate in that part too much because...
CS: They didn't keep the Legion there very long, did they?
JA: Well, I don't know if they actually had the Legion, but they had the Auxiliary.
CS: They had a Legion, too, because I think Charley Dunn or one of the Dunns was...
JA: Bill Dunn?
CS: ...the president. Bill was, yeah, to start with.
JA: Now that you have retired and fooled around with it, have you got sort of a general statement to make about your whole thing because you were in the country [corrects herself] or in the area since you were one year old.
CS: Yes. Well, I used to do a lot of skiing -- that was my sport. I also, in later years, became a radio amateur. I was active in that for a good many years, I still am, I'm still a radio amateur. My wife was also. She was a radio amateur.
JA: What was your call letter, what are your call letters?
CS: VE7PRU, it's on the ??? VE7PRU, and mine was VE7BXC. But now I got another call, what they call an old-timer's call, and it's VA7CS. That stands for British Columbia, VA7, and the CS is Carl Strom, my initials.
JA: Oh yeah. Should be one to remember all right. Do you use it often? Do you have people that you contact?
CS: Not very often. Oh, I use it once in awhile. My son, he's a radio amateur also, the one that works out at Clear Lake. He goes out there every weekend. He's got a big place on a lake there. He owns the property.
JA: I've never seen Clear Lake. I know where it is, but I have a general idea.
CS: It's Lynx Lake that he lives on, pretty close to where the radar base is. And he's also a radio amateur. So, on weekends I talk to him right from here, out there. He doesn't have his equipment set up at home, he has it set up out there. I just use that little hand-held one there.
JA: Well, what about Prince George, what do you think has... You've seen the changes in Prince George from the years of...
CS: Well, I've seen quite a few changes in Prince George. Actually, just things that have changed... You have to accept it because lots of it you don't remember.
JA: Most old-timers tell you about the wooden sidewalks and...
CS: That's one thing I never mention because before they had wooden sidewalks they had gravel sidewalks in Prince George here. They had wooden sidewalks in areas where they had to have. Where there was water running and things like that, sloppy, they'd build a wooden sidewalk. But the thing is this, why people make such a big issue of that I don't know, because every city in Canada had the same thing.
JA: Oh yes. Perhaps for most old-timers, that was their first impression. Maybe they had come from where there were no sidewalks. Wooden sidewalks were one step up. Now they're very busy with all making them handicapped or wheelchair accessible, and along the bypass there, at 5th, 10th, 22nd, 15th, 10th,... ?? ?? ??
CS: But I also was very, very disappointed in them tearing down the canopies. That was one of the best things they ever done in Prince George. People could walk down the sidewalk the whole length of Third Avenue and George Street and be out of the rain and everything else, you know.
JA: Oh yes, I thought they were good but I guess the new generation in Prince George [voices overlap]...
CS: Well I don't know what their thinking about because everybody that had a store, like I had thirty feet store frontage, we built those canopies. I paid $10,000 to have that part of mine built. But we don't get no compensation for that, they just tear it down because it's on City property.
JA: It's quite interesting. The last fellow I did said that the City had made a lot of mistakes in allowing this fringe development. Because he said at one time he recommended that they buy that whole lower level between the river and downtown, and that's where all these box stores should have been.
CS: That's where they should be.
JA: Should have been, instead of all, you know....
CS: Yeah but which come first, the chicken or the egg? That's the way I look at it. Box stores came in here later. So where are they going to put them, they have to put them out...unless they buy out the property.
JA: Well, that's what he said, that they owned half the property now, and with a good tax sale or whatever else they.... Anyway, just an opinion.
CS: No, but I think Prince George should have stayed...the downtown area should stay the way it is. Because they're moving everything out anyway, their shopping and everything. I mean people could have specialty stores and things like that.
JA: Well they've done a lot down on George Street anyway.
CS: And Third Avenue, towards ???
JA: They've done a lot of development, I think, around Fourth Avenue...or not Fourth Avenue, on George Street.
CS: And that's....
JA: Where you can get out and see Pine Centre, with new stores going in all the time, and going out.
CS: Costs a lot of money to have a store in there.
JA: I guess I showed you what the finished result looks like?
CS: No.
JA: Oh, this is just one of the ??? Vanderhoof, when I just happened to have a copy of that one. But that's the format that it comes out in. Now with yours, I was asking you about putting in copies of your certificates, and pictures of...do you have any uniform pictures?
CS: Pictures of me?
JA: In uniform.
CS: Oh yeah.
JA: We can put your wife in, too, or a wedding picture. You know, anything that's contained in your... I was talking to Ernie about that, Ernie Kaesmodel, and he said Speedy Printers was the best place, they make the best copies.
End of Interview