Shaun Newman Podcast - #742 - Si Campbell

Episode Date: November 11, 2024

In honour of all the men and women who have served our country I am re-releasing a conversation I did back in May 2019 in Unity Saskatchewan with a man named Si Campbell. Si was born in Zealandia SK in 1924. He lived through the Great Depression, fought in WWII and worked on the railroad for 38 years. We talk in depth about life in the Depression, his time in the war and the life lessons he’s experienced. Cornerstone Forum ‘25 https://www.showpass.com/cornerstone25/ Clothing Link: ⁠⁠⁠https://snp-8.creator-spring.com/listing/the-mashup-collection⁠⁠ Text Shaun 587-217-8500 Substack:https://open.substack.com/pub/shaunnewmanpodcast E-transfer here: [e-mail] Silver Gold Bull Links: Website: https://silvergoldbull.ca/ Email: [e-mail] Text Grahame: [phone]

Hi, my name is Bruce Aiken. I was a pilot with the Royal Canadian Air Force for about 21 years. I served as a tactical helicopter pilot for most of my career, flying the Griffin, supporting the army. And then I spent a little bit of time later on in my career as a flight instructor passing on what I learned to the next generation. I'm here to talk a little bit about Remembrance Day and what it means to a veteran. You know, when you sit down and you think about it, a lot of it is about service. It's about people who are willing to stand up and put their lives on the line, put their lives on hold, put their families second to serving the country. A lot of people, you know, in this day and age, don't think about the collective good for themselves.

And that's one thing that I think sets apart people who have served. from your average person in Canada. It's about selflessness. It's about putting the needs of the country, the needs of other people, the needs of people in need ahead of yourself. You know, you go out, you go to places that aren't particularly nice

and the people there aren't particularly friendly and you're there to make sure that you're doing good and you're helping the world and trying to make it a better place. Part of it's about courage. It's about going and doing jobs that are hard and sometimes scary. Even though deep down in your gut you know there's a chance that you probably could be killed, you pick your socks up and you kind of carry on and you get it done because you know the rest of the guys and girls on your team are depending on you. If you don't do your job, then they can't do their job.

It's about sacrifice. It's about being loved. to put your life on the lines, but being willing to die for something that you believe in, even though other people may not agree or think it's a worthwhile cause. So on Remer's Day, I like to take the time to reflect, I like to think about, you know, the men and the women that I've served with and how awesome they were. Couldn't imagine a better group of people. I like to think about the people who came before us who served in the first and second world, in Korea and all the other conflicts that came up and went and how they have helped to change

the world, how they helped to shape the world into what it is today and give us the freedom that we enjoy every single day. I also think as an aircrewman, you know, there's a lot of people who died along the way, not necessarily in combat but also in training. Actually, I think we probably killed more people in training than we did in combat. And that's just part of the service and part of the sacrifice you make as an airman doing a bit of a risky job. I always also find a little bit of mixed feelings that come with a Remerance Day. I always feel a little bit of pride in my service what I've done for this country.

but I also feel that, you know, you could have always done more. And I think that's where a lot of veterans struggle is thinking about how they could have done more, how they could have saved their buddy, how they could have done more to help the people in the countries that they were serving. But the reality is you can only do so much. You have to accept that as part of your sacrifice and your service. So that's kind of all I have. Just like to wish happy and thoughtful remembrance day to all the veterans and all the people who have served before us. Welcome to the John Newman podcast.

I am sitting across from Mr. Cy Campbell. I've had this one marked on the old calendar now for a few months. I've been talking with a few of the young boys, as you put it, who you golf with. They've approached me. And so we're just going to go down memory lane with you. and have a little fun today, okay? Okay, yeah. So you were born in 1924.

Yeah, in Zalandia, Saskatchewan, out on a farm, yeah. Born in a raging lightning storm and a rainstorm, and a doctor of the name of Thomas H. Cuddy came all the way out there on a horse and buggy in that storm to bring me into the world. No kidding. Yeah. So what happens if he doesn't arrive? I don't know. They just figure a way of getting you out.

I guess, yeah. So it must, yeah, it mustn't have been the easiest. My mom had been down to Mayo Clinic twice, and she passed away a year and a half after I was born. Holy crap. With cancer, yeah. I was the youngest of five, yeah. So you had no mom then growing up?

No, my grandmother, my mother, my dad's mom and dad came up from Rolo, Saskatchewan, up to Roethstown in Zalandia, and she raised us kids. She was 68 years old, and my granddad was 75 when they came up, and she looked after us kids. Otherwise, dad would have probably had to put us up for adoption, and that's the reason she came up. My granddad and my grandmother, they farmed down in Iowa,

and so they sold out down there, and they bought land right across the railroad track at the little town of Rolo, Saskatchewan, and lost it to an unscrupulous land dealer, so they didn't have any money either. and when my dad got back the second time, my mom was down in Mayo Clinic. He didn't have five cents left in the bank and no land either. They lost his farm to pay for that.

My mom being down in Mayo Clinic. So your grandparents then originally come from the United States? Oh, yeah. Yeah, my dad's side of the family came for the States. my mom she came from Bowmanville, Ontario and they

moved out west to farm yeah so I was we got a couple thoughts rolling through my brain already so let's go back to the night

you're born so what was the closest hospital to you guys this farm then would be Roastown would be yeah

would be probably maybe maybe maybe maybe probably 15 miles yeah

by horse and buggy probably yep that's about it holy man it comes to mind because I was just saying you up air I'm expecting our third

here in October and a guy seems to forget how easy it is to drive the two minutes in a vehicle warm no matter if it's nice cold outside rain and thunder

and it don't matter the hospital's sitting right there for you yeah it was amazing thing that he did that, you know, really, boy, something. That's almost risk in your life. Yeah, that's for sure.

That's for darn sure. Yeah, and he was retired when I got a whole of them. He was retired and living in Winnipeg when I got a whole of them and when I got on the railroad in 1948 there, had to prove my age. I had what they called a delayed birth certificate. I was being as their mom was sick, you know, that time. Well, they never thought of having me baptized or even registering me for a birth certificate. Yeah, in those days.

So, yeah, I went overseas with that. It was all right that birth certificate, but it wasn't okay for the railroad when I got on. It was okay to fight in a war, but it wasn't. okay to work on the railroad. Because I have a delayed birth certificate they called it, hey. So, yeah. So I had to find

I got a roll of paper to choke a cow there trying to prove my age for the railroad. I'm finding Dr. Cuddy, I traced him down through the file newspaper in Celandia file newspaper

in 19, put out in 1924. And and he wrote the CN letter. Of course, he didn't know what I was named, but he knew there was a boy. So they even sent that letter back, and I wrote to them again, and he wrote the CNR a scathing letter. And that's when I, they accepted it then.

Crazy. Absolutely crazy. What was being raised by your grandmother like, a woman that's 68 and has seen even for your time different things? She had nine children and lost five of them. She lost two teenagers, a boy and a girl, either with diphtheria or the flu. I'm not sure. She lost the two teenagers in one week. and then she lost two, another boy and a girl that were just little ones.

Holy cry. She lost those two in the same week, not the same as the teenagers. No, there was quite a two years difference. And then she lost another one at birth. So then she come up and raised us. She was a mom to me. Yeah. Well, you'd, I'd given you a questionnaire, and you'd said she was the most influential person you ever had in your life was your grandmother. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. She always told me if there's a job worth doing, it's worth doing well.

Isn't that the truth? Yeah. Yeah. That's a lot of loss. You think... Yeah, that's right. I mean, in today's standard, like, it must just be... Yeah, then, of course, then my brother was killed when she was still there. So that was another one, you know, another. Yeah. He was just a young man at the time. Yeah. So she put up with a lot, especially putting up with us five kids.

Yeah. Did you, I guess I'm almost out a loss for words, because It just, you know, my grandmother lost a son at a young age as well. And it just seems like the further you go back, the more commonplace that was. Yeah. And yet, I never see bitterness or anything like that in the age groups or the generations before. There was a lot of children died at birth. And a lot of women passed away at birth.

you know during those early early days you used to look in the newspaper even after you know when I was reading a newspaper you know passed away causes unknown you know something like that well they didn't know the things for the doctors in those days that they do like nowadays yeah you know I lost just after I joined up I I got into the Air Force. I was in Brandon. And that was, I think, on the 9th of June, I went to Brandon. And on the 26th I got word that my brother was missing overseas. And that was in June. And then in first part of December, my grandfather passed away. And then I went overseas the next year.

And while I was overseas, my grandmother passed away. Oh, man. Yeah. Last all three have been one year. Let's talk about the Great Depression. I was saying before we got on here that I come from, I got my degree in history, and I've read a lot on it and a lot of different things from back in your days. But I thought maybe you could give us a glimpse into going back to then and what it was like

and maybe the struggles you guys faced or what you saw. Well, my dad. Because he was a jack of all trades and a master of none really, but he made a living. Well, you know, he had a tough go of it there, trying to make a living for eight of us, you know, in the family. My, you know, five kids and him and my grandpa and grandma. And when I think back, things were not all rosy with him either. There was some times there when things were, the old coal bin was pretty, pretty, you were burning some very fine coal dust, you know, because he didn't have money to buy a load of coal, you know. But, scraped it through. Yeah, there was, yeah, things that he should have done, but then I think back,

you know things that he probably wasn't able to do yeah but yeah then the 30s we lived down in that Rostown area when we moved up around Zalandia well 1937 was really the worst year the driest year of all In 1937, there was no rain in that country. And a wind would get up and there'd be a dust cloud. I can remember my granddad and my grandma was on July the 1st. I think that was in 1937. And they all went to the lake, Harris Lake, which was quite a few miles from us.

They all went in the back of an old model T Ford truck. And on about three o'clock in the afternoon, we were living in an old house, a two-story house, two rooms up and two down, you know. And we looked out in the west, and there was just a cloud. Maybe saw it on TV there. It was just a rolling cloud of dirt coming.

And then the wind hit and that. And you couldn't see the barn from the house for dust. It was just unbelievable. And then about, oh, probably 4.30, 5 o'clock in the afternoon, all of a sudden it blew up a rain. We hadn't had a rain. And it absolutely poured, just like a monsoon. Well, the dirt was running down the windows.

and, you know, from the dust, the dirt stuck on the side of the house. And it washed all of that off. And you could hardly see out the windows in the west side of the house for the dirt that was on them. And by the time it got done that, they were cleaned from the torrential rain. Yeah. Yeah. And they all got stuck up at the lake.

In fact, they started home. and they was a little a couple I don't know where it was but there was no gravel roads and they were on this

more or less like a trail and they got as far as this little wee house and they pulled in there and everybody stayed in there and I think there was 14 of them in the truck

and they slept the night there tried to sleep the night in this little wee house, a man and his wife, yeah. And they finally made it home the next afternoon. And we lived Eagle Creek. It's like a riverbed north of Rostown there. Us boys, we used to run up and down those hills.

In fact, I took Irene down there to show her those mountains that were used to climb, you know, the little hills in Regal Creek. And Eagle Creek was about a half, three-quarters of a mile across. And the next morning we had our few cattle that we had. I went down to see how they were doing. And there was a river, the full widths of the creek flat there was a river. And the cattle would be standing out there on a little wee little of islands, you know, right tight together to get out of the creek.

the water, you know. There's something. It was really something. Yeah. So that was the, we had a garden, I could remember, and we had a long row of trees on the west side of the buildings. And we had their garden there, just a narrow garden and a caragana's along the south side. And we looked across and there you could see the army worms coming. They were coming from the southwest. And he is just black behind them. So we got busy and dug a trench along the south side of the garden and up, part way up the west side to run out of steam and then put a little bit of straw on the bottom of it. Well, it was so dry that the worms got in there and couldn't make it up the other side. And the dad took care of seed and put that and touched a match to it. Well, it sure

got rid of the army worms and saved the garden, most of the garden. But we couldn't stand the stink for our worms, you know. Can you imagine the stink or the smell of it would be just make you throw up perfect? That was another experience in the dirty 30s. Yeah. What was the things you were short on in the dirty 30s? Was meals tight? Meals, very tight, yeah. You were able to grow a little bit of a garden, you know.

You hauled water, pails of water, and it wasn't such a thing as hoses for those days. You hauled carried water by the people. pails and put on, you know, the things that were the most important, I think. No, we always had enough to eat, you know. I think it was pretty tough on people that lived in town more, that possibly. I'm not sure on that, but I would imagine that there would be a lot of people that lived in towns, you know, that didn't have a gardener or anything, that would have a tough, tough time making it through the 30s.

Yeah. What was the first vehicle you ever owned, or your family ever owned? Oh, my dad had an old 29 Pontiac coupe. That was the first car we had. You remember thinking when he pulled that in the drive, like, holy moly? Oh, yeah, it was. house. Yeah, we didn't get that till. Oh, cow. Yeah, we didn't have a vehicle all during pretty well the 30s. I was getting close to 1938, probably, maybe 38 when we got that first vehicle.

Yeah, think about that, 1938 in that area. Not sure, but I think so. for rides every once in a while? Oh yeah, yeah. He used it to go to work and that, you know. What was your father doing for work at the time? Well, he worked at anything he could get his hand at to make a dollar. Yeah. He worked at anything, anything at all.

He worked on farms, he worked, yeah, work carpenter work. He worked on an elevator gang, building an elevator, you know, in the 30s. I can remember, yeah, he worked on building an elevator at Rostown on North Rostown in 19. Let me see, that would be just a little wee Gaffer, probably three or four. 1928 probably he worked for part of a summer on an elevator gang. Just building an elevator elevator there at North Rostown. Yeah. Yep.

What age did you start working at, Cy? Me? Well, I worked spring and fall there for about three years when I was going to, well, about grade 9, grade 10. And I worked in the spring and fall there for about three years. It was probably a little more than that. I was in grade 10 and 11. And, yeah, when I came to grade 11, yeah, I flunked my first year in grade 11 because I was, you know, you work out a month in the spring and then a month or more in the fall. So you really were a long ways behind in your schoolwork, you know.

And then I joined up and they sent me home. And then I broke my shoulder that fall. And so I looked like I might not get in. So I was lucky the second year. I went back to school because of my shoulder. I broke my shoulder and I went back to school as I was laying around

doing nothing that winter and I was okay to work that spring again and it was a good thing I got my call up then there I'd have probably flunk my second year in grade 11 as a student I wasn't the greatest I guess let's talk about school for a few minutes

did you go to a rural school or did you come into Rosedown? No, I went to Zalandia. Zalandia had a little one-house room school? Oh, God, no. No, it was a big brick building. Oh, okay. Two rooms up and two down.

Oh, wow. But I went to a country school, two of them. When I first started to school, I went to one that was just north of Rostown there, by, as I say, about where we lived down at Eagle Creek, yes, boys. And that, that's the... That's where I first started to school, and then I moved to a school that was out there just three miles from where I was born, a place called Dublin School. Well, then when you got to grade seven, when you finished your grade seven, then you had to go to town school.

So how far of a distance were all these schools from where you lived? Oh, it wasn't bad. when I started school, it was a mile and a half. And were you walking? Yeah. And then, yeah, winter, summer. You say it wasn't that bad, but in today's standards, that's far enough. Oh, God, yeah, here, we had a school bus in town, pick kids up in town to take them to school.

Like that, I really had to laugh on that one. But the next school was, it all depends on which way we went. If I cut across the field, it went straight north. It was two and a half miles. And then when I got into grade eight, I went to Salandia, and that was six miles. So I went six miles. Well, I walked for the first while, first year, pretty well, and I was pretty well. and then I got a bicycle.

And I went by bike, and we lived on number seven highway, and they just redid that. So it was a big, it's all. They used to do that with elevated graders and a big deep ditch, you know, but a high grade. So the snow pretty well stayed off of it. And then when I got a little bit too much snow, I had this old bike and it kept breaking down.

so I had a coley dog so I taught him to pull a sled and so I thought oh well I'd come home on a Friday night and the bike was busted I had to push it to town to get it welded so I trained the dog to pull a sleigh

and so I thought well maybe he'd pull the bike so I put him on a rope out in front of the bike and I went to school two winters with him. Pulling you? Pulling me on the bike. On a bike. And then we moved past the landia, three miles,

and he pulled me to school for another winter there with on the bike. Yeah. He was a fabulous dog. Yeah. Back then, did you guys have school dances and festivities like that? Yeah. The country schools had to do. dances every now and again. We used to have in the country you'd have Christmas concerts,

you know, and put little plays on and sing and all of those little things that go on with the Christmas concerts. And oh yeah, I can remember the first Santa Claus I ever saw. And he gave me a a paper bag with candy and an orange a Jap orange in that was something boy I'll tell you yeah

that was in 1930 yeah 1930 yeah that was something yeah I really believed in Santa Claus for quite a few years

yeah in in 1939 Germany invades Poland Yeah And World War II is Underway Yeah

What's it like back here Like living on the On the farm I don't know Things went along Pretty well Just carried on in Canada Like

That's why I say Canada doesn't have the furthest idea what a war was all about because they've never experienced something like that. It's pretty hard to tell a person what war was like, you know? The First World War, you read, I just finished a book here a while ago on trench warfare in the First World War. You just can't fathom how bad that would be. like I remember my first wife Audrey, her dad was in the first war of war.

He was in the trenches and they had what they call duck boards there. That's like the, well, just a, you know, like he used on a forklift, you know, to those pallets, you know, something like that. And he had a blanket and he was laid down to her. have some sleep and it has been raining and there was water in the trench and he laid down on that and rolled himself in his one blanket that he had, I think. And he woke up the morning and they felt something warm against his cheek and there was a rat curled up on the side of his cheek to keep warm. Could you imagine that? And his feet were hanging over the edge and there His legs were in water right up to his knees.

That's the only thing he ever said about in the trench warfare. But then you read this book, and it's a true story. You can't fathom. John Doe Public wouldn't. It's hard to me who fathom, you know, that it could be that bad. And I think that's what's so

why I'm glad you had decided to come on here because we can talk about your experience because I was saying, you know, like my generation, I just, we've lived in probably the best time in the history of the world. Oh. And especially in Canada.

Oh, my God. I've said that yet time and again. We've said Irene and I've talked about how fortunate we are. We've gone from my age and, you know, horse and buggy days to putting a man on the moon and a spacecraft that's gone by Mars, you know, and we're still conversing with it that was out past Puto or something here. Just, yeah. Yeah, and it's been going now for, what is it, 10, 12 years, that one. It's gone past Pluto.

They had one leave in the 60s, say. Yeah. And they just lost contact with it in 2014. What is that? Like, we're talking 40-some years. Yeah, right. Of going off into space. Yeah, and being able to still communicate with it.

Yeah, communicate. It's just mind-boggling. Yeah. And that's what I say. I can remember the big, tall, black man. He lived in the Everglades down in the States there. And they got him one day and they said, do you realize that we've put a man on the moon?

And he said, oh, said there's been a man on the moon for years. No, no, no, we're talking about a real man. No, we put him up there with a space. And he said, ah, pshaw. And that was the end of the conversation. I thought that was so, that was really worth to see him on TV. Ah, pshaw, he said.

Yeah. Didn't believe him. Yeah. Yeah. No, we've been so bloody lucky. Oh, I helped that. myself, talk about luck I've been, you know, to live till I'm 95, yeah, next month or in August. In August, yeah.

Yeah. And I've got to say, like, you're frigging impressive. Like, this is unbelievable. I'm sitting here, and, like, you're talking like your 60. Your memory is better than my memory. Oh, no, it's so great. Yeah, when you're the older, you get, the further back, you can remember, but you can't remember yesterday. Yeah. Well, in 1939, the war breaks out.

Yeah. And you said you had two brothers, they both go over? Yeah, my first brother that was killed overseas. He left when I was in the hospital there with my broken shoulder. Broken shoulder? And my other brother, he left there shortly after that spring. And he left. And so they were both overseas.

Do you remember what year that was? Well, you might have already said it and I just missed him. Well, I'd be 1942. Is that my first brother? Yeah, they went in 42, 1942. And they were both in the Air Force? Yeah, yeah. One as a rear gunner like yourself, and then one was an electrician?

Yeah, he flew. He was on a squadron of Spitfires fighter aircraft that went. They went over on the continent, and they more or less they followed the front lines up as they went, you know, the spits. My other brother, he was in a four-motored bomber squadron, four-motored aircraft. He was in a sterling. They were not as... They were a good aircraft. They flew the same speed, you know, whether they were loaded or empty.

They were a big, big aircraft. They were bigger than I flew in Lancaster's. Canadian-built Lancaster's. They were a fabulous aircraft. The Sterlings were a bigger aircraft, but they weren't quite as maneuverable as. the link was Yeah

So when they leave Is there like Is the only way to hear The progress of the war is just by radio? Yeah And so was that happening Once a day, 10 times a day? Oh yeah you could pick up news

Well he used to have I can remember the national news Was at 8 o'clock at the evening I can remember my granddad Used to listen to the when we got a radio. When did we get a radio? 1938, I think it was.

Give or take. Yeah, it might have been before that. Yeah, we had a radio. And my granddad, he was kind of hard to hear. He would listen to, when there'd be just three of us home, my granddad and grandmother and I, And my granddad, he'd listened on Friday nights.

He used to really listen to the fights. Joe Lewis and the Box and Match is on Friday nights. And gang bust is over Chicago. You could pick up Chicago on the radio in those days, you know. And he used to listen to the hockey game, Foster Hewitt. Yeah? Yeah, he used to listen to the hockey games and listen to the news. eight o'clock in the evening, yeah, the national news that he rarely missed that, yeah.

So he was well versed on how the war was doing too, you know. Yeah, he didn't last very long after it started, but, well, I shouldn't say that. It lasted for 1943 when he passed away. Well, I just, I think, like, I had two of my brothers go traveling the world, and by the time the second one traveled, there was just, with technical. There was just so many different ways to keep in touch with them. By that time, you could even have it where it was video calling, right? Like, you'd actually see them. So it never really felt like they were that far away, or the mind just can't understand it when you can see them, right?

The first brother used to send email. So we used to get an email once a week, so you kind of keep in touch. And I'm trying to get my brain wrapped around, having brothers go away to a war, and what you guys knew of what was going on, and were you in touch with them at all? Yeah, write letters, but that usually took from two weeks to months or more to get a letter. Yeah. You know, he'd be it airmail. Airmail was a little blue envelope that folded out, you know, and then you folded it up and then glued it.

And that was airmail. Otherwise, you could send a regular letter. And you could put that in regular post for three cents, I think it was. I think that's what a stamp was. Yeah. Air mail was, well, you know, I'm not sure. I think it was either six, eight or twelve cents for the airmail, went by air. But you can imagine the amount of mail going back and forth with all of the guys that were in the service.

Like you take the little village of Zalandia there that was probably 100 people. Yeah, maybe 150 people in Zalandia. Our honor rule, there was 82 guys. 82. 82 from around the area there on the honor roll from the little town of Zalandia. Yeah, but that covered, you know, say six, eight miles all the way around, you know. Yeah, but still 82. Yeah.

That's a lot. Oh, that's a high percentage. Oh, yeah. So, and, you know, and we lost, I think, 10%. And that's a funny part of the, most of the, the, it was usually around 10% what we lost in deaths. you know, during the war. We lost 10% of the guys that went overseas pretty well in the Second World War. You know, so, and that was about the same around Zalandia.

I think we lost eight guys out of that, out of the, to hit. Was there, what was the atmosphere like of going over there? Was there, like, excitement to go? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, hell, it's not going to happen to me. You know, it's not going to happen to me. Like, that only getting killed is only going to happen to somebody else.

You know, you're that dumb about it, that's for sure. Well, it doesn't go all the time, but there's some times where you're, yeah, you're a little scary. But, you know, normally, you know, in a workplace, you know, your dangerous job you got, you're not going to get hurt I agree but you're going over to a world war where well it's the same thing I don't know millions are dying

yeah yeah minutes you're having people shoot at you on a daily and I mean in the workplace here yeah but it ain't going to hit you what did you take for training do you remember your training to go over there yeah

I of course everybody's joins up in the Air Force going to be a fighter pilot. Yeah, no. Yeah, no, you can't be a fighter pilot. Yeah, I don't know what was the matter with. I don't think they need pilots that day, you know. Well, okay.

And I told my brother, I told my brothers, I'll see you overseas. Well, they laughed. You know, here's a kid's laying in the hospital bed. My one brother, that was a... When he went over, as I say, I said, I'll see you overseas. Oh, yeah, right, yes. Yeah. But I've seen my other brother, the oldest brother.

Yeah. I've seen him. Must have been. Twice, three times, I think. Must have been tough to watch them go. I can just imagine my brother's going off. Yeah, yeah. Oh, as I say, yeah, it was kind of lonesome around home.

you know, when we'd get together. Yeah, they're both overseas, yeah. We used to get their letters, yeah. But you didn't write home, you know, every week. Yeah, that's for sure. Yeah, that's for sure. So, yeah. In your training today, so they put you in a Lancaster bomber?

No. You never hit four-motored aircraft till just before you went to the squadron. You started out on a little single aircraft, single-motored aircraft, like gunners did. Well, you had a cockpit up in the back of it there with a machine gun in it. And I went to, when I first went in, I took my basic training. That's learned to March and all of that sort of garbage, you know, in Brandon, Manitoba. And then we went to ground school, went to Winnipeg from there, and you learned the Morris Code then.

And, you know, through other basic things about it. And then we went from there to... We went out to Rivers, Manitoba, and that was an aerodrome there. And you did Joe jobs there. It's just like a holding area to wait for you to get into a school where you take the other stuff that you need to. And you had to learn to do those jobs because you might flunk out in the air crew, so then you'd be stuck in a ground crew, you know, and doing, you might be doing.

Joe Jobs for the Oval War. Lots of guys did that, you know. You call it Joe Jobs, I'm talking about cleaning bathrooms and that sort of car, but did that too. And then we went to Quebec City, and again we did, learnt the Morse Code, and you do aircraft recognition, you know, and learnt what an aircraft, like the different, you learned what all the aircraft were, when they're coming straight at you, you know, or the outline of them. You know, you had to know whether it was a Spitfire coming, going to fly behind you, or if it was a Master Schmidt 109 or a Falk Wolf 190, a German aircraft.

So you had to know all of those aircraft. Otherwise, you'd shoot your own aircraft down, you know. So that's, you did, spend a lot of time learning, aircraft recognition and they did that in Quebec City. And then they sent us back to, I came back to McDonald-Manitoba. That was just north of portage to prairie, you know, this side of Winnipeg. Okay, we went to McDonald-Manitoba. And then you, that's when you learned to fire your machine guns from air to ground or air to air.

They, you'd learn to fire at a drogue that another aircraft was pulling and be on a, on a cable, you know, a way out behind about, you know. So you learned all those things and how to do it. So in total, how many months were you in training then before you got into pilot? Yeah, that's why when I couldn't be a pilot, well, in a navigator, well, I said, well, uh, well, you can be a navigator. How long does that take? Well, a year and a half. Oh.

Well, what else you got to buy me? I'm about the same. No, I don't want that. Yeah, wireless operative, how long is that? Oh, about a year. No, what's the least, air gunner? How long does that take? Six months, I'm going to be an air gunner.

So you just were eager to get over there. Yep, that's right. Yeah, I wanted to see, I wanted to be over there to see my brothers. Yeah. So what was the biggest shock then when you finally got over there? My biggest shock. Yeah, like, I mean, now you, where do you get stationed when you leave Canada? Well, we left on a troop ship, and there was 12,000 of us on it.

We went over to the New Amsterdam, and there was 12,000 of us on it. We landed at just at Gourick, Scotland, just west of Glasgow, and then they took a way down to the south coast of Bournemouth and put a, and we were in a holding unit there until we got to go to a flying training school and we finally got out of there and we went to a place where there was two-motored aircraft, a bomber-type aircraft, flew Wellington's, and that's where we crewed up. where you got your crew. And those six of us got together. Everybody didn't have anybody to fly with.

And that guy, he looked okay. And we're lucky we had a fabulous aircraft crew. My pilot, he was from just out of Galt, Ontario. My bomb maimer was just out of the suburb of Toronto. My navigator was out of Toronto. My mid-upor gunner was from Toronto. My wireless operator, he was from Vanguard, Saskatchewan. That's down by east of Swift Current.

And then myself. And then so we finished training on two-motored aircraft. and then they sent us to a training unit on four-motored aircraft. And then you needed an engineer. So that's when we picked up our engineer. He'd been overseas. He joined up in the Army, and he went overseas in the fall of 1939, just when the war broke out.

But then he remonstured into air crew, and he became an engineer. So he was from down east someplace. but he married over there. He was married by the time we got over there, you know. So if he had some time off, like he'd get a 48-hour pass, you know. Well, he'd always go to where his wife was, you know. So, yeah.

So then there was seven of us then on a crew. And then when we got proficient with that, that, being as a crew and everything, then they sent us to our squadron. So they sent us to the squadron in 1944, August in 1944. Yeah. And started flying operational trips in around the 1st of September. What was that like? In 1944, exciting.

That was, yeah. Yeah, yeah, that was their first few trips. Well, we were very fortunate in that we went. Our first trip was the Cap Grenet, which was just across the channel. They said that, yeah, they said that the rear gunner, he shouldn't even have got, he shouldn't even have got credit for being over-enemy territory because it was right on the coast. Yeah, so then, and so we really got broke in easy. Our fourth trip, we went to Bergen, Norway,

and on a bombing run all across the North Sea. We flew right down along the water there, so they wouldn't pick us up on radar, you know, going across the North Sea. And then we climbed up and bombed the submarine pans in a fjord at Bergen, Norway. Yeah, it was just on TV the other night, Bergen, Norway. Yeah, it was quite interesting, yeah. You saw, and it showed a picture of it from above, you know. It was, oh, oh, I said, I read, whoops.

Yeah. So then we went, then we started going to Germany after that. Pretty well, all my trips after that were all to Germany. What was it like, I don't even know if I can ask this properly, but bear with me, you come up, you're under the radar, so nobody can pick you up. Yeah. Are your hair standing on end?

No, not really, no. There's sometimes there, when I flew, we had pretty well control of the skies, you know, really. when my brother flew, no, it was the Germans had control of the skies with fighter aircraft. When I went over, we still, there was, guys got shot down, but not to the amount that there was when my brother did. My brother lasted only seven trips when he got shot down. Those lots of guys got shot down on the very first trip, you know. And how many trips did you take, Cy?

I was 36. 36? Yeah. Yeah, that was 32 was classed as a tour of ops for bomber squadron. And we did 36. Well, the Germans put a big push to their. our Dan's, we were winning a war, and we weren't losing aircraft in numbers like they were, like say when my brother did, so they were, you'd be training a lot of guys, so they'd cut back

on the training, and then the Germans put a big push on, so they had aircraft in the sky, they gathered up everything they had and made a last push, and so we were losing aircraft, an air crew quite strongly and so they just up the amount of trips we had before they called the screen this they might say they called screening you know that was your last trip so we did four extra trips and it just classed as a tour see after you got 32 trips in or finished a tour of ops then you had a rest period and sometimes you were able to come home for a while But if you only had one tour, the guys that finished a tour of ops, say, at my brother's time, if they finished a tour of ops at 32 trips, they'd get some time off,

and then they'd be back and fly another tour. Some of guys flew three and four tours, like fellas that were over there early, you know, in the 39 and 40, you know. Yeah, flew the goddamnest aircraft you could ever see. where we flew pretty good aircraft. Like a Lancaster was a fabulous aircraft. Yeah. And the Halifax, yeah.

I'll just show you what a Lancaster looks like. While I'm looking at a picture of the Lancaster bomber, I was, if people haven't seen it, they miles ago looked it up online because it's something. But your view from the tail must have been something else. Yeah, well, you get to see where you've been. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

But the worst of it is when you're up in front and then you're looking at the, you know, when they were shooting at you, putting up flak, they call it. It's exploding, exploding shells, eh? And that brought down a lot of aircraft. And the sky would be just black, he'd look up ahead because they had, you know, some cities were really, really, what do you call it? had a pile of guns around them, you know, to keep aircraft from shooting down, especially cities that had a lot of manufacturing, I like wartime manufacturing.

They would have a lot of guns around it, you know, to keep you from bombing them, you know. So they'd pick up at height, what height you wear, and then they would set their exploding shells to explode at that height, they'd see. So, yeah, we flew it around 20,000 feet. Yeah, that was about the average for Lancaster and Halley. Americans, you were flying for it. They flew higher. They were able to flew.

But they didn't seem to be. They seemed to be flying about the same height as we were, you know. And how many bombs would you carry on you at a time? Well, it all depends. You could carry a difference. You carried 500 pounders. We'd carry 14,000 pounds. 14,000 pounds of bombs.

Yeah, but that's if you're only going, say, say, six hours, you know, flying time. Like three hours over there and three hours. Three back, okay. But the further went, the further you went, well, the less bombs you had because you needed more petrol. That's right, to get you there and back without running out fuel. They gave you a little extra time of fuel to get you there and back. Could you feel the shock from up that high or it was just an image of explosions below you? Like with a 500 pounder with that?

No, you'd feel, say a 4,000 pounder, a bomb, you'd feel about 4,000. a bomb, you'd feel about 4,000 feet, you'd feel a little bit of a thump, you know, yeah. When she dropped, when she exploded. Of course, then they had the big ones there near the end of the war. They were huge, yeah. Yeah, then you'd feel them way up there. Yeah, yeah.

Most of the time you didn't, yeah. If you were flying it down there, say, had 500-pound bombs, you know, when you were dropping them, well, if you're flying at 500 feet, you weren't doing much bombing, I'll tell you. Yeah. That's when that was scary because those guys down there, you were looking at light anti-aircraft. You're looking at machine guns and everything, you know, for, you was, if you were. But we never flew that low. No. You fly with the same seven guys every time you flew that?

Mm-hmm. I'm assuming that created a bond like no other. Yeah, it did, yes. My mid-upor gunner, we had wound up with different ones. Yeah, we won't go into that. I had about four different mid- upper gunners, but we won't touch that. Sure.

The first one is, yeah. The guy that we first got rid of, he finally, he was with the crew. He just went spare, you know, and flew with any crews. he flew with a crew. The pilot was on his third tour of operations, and some of them were on their second, and they got shot down,

and he was the only one that lived, apparently. My pilot met him on the streets of Toronto, two or three years after he had taken prisoner at the last. Of course, the phone has to ring and interrupt us. No, that's quite all right. That's not a big deal at all. Okay. I was wondering, so we were talking about the seven guys you were in a crew with.

Obviously, you weren't flying missions every single day. No, no, no. So what did you do in the barracks in between? In between? Was it cart games? Was it training? Yeah, you had pool tables and ping pong tables and you play Penny. or crap game or something if he wanted to go along that line or or yeah there was

lots of stuff to do on the station you know on most of those stations like it could play play softball hardball or soccer you know so there was there was lots to do you didn't really have to sit in the barracks and look at two walls you know no I used to play pool and I play ping pong. Yeah. Oh, yeah. There was lots of stuff to do. This one I was on the squadron.

Well, all the stations were pretty, some stations were way better. The station our squadron was on, it used to be a permanent station, like it was an Air Force station. REF, like Royal Air Force, they used that before the war even, you know, when they first started to fly an aircraft really during the first World War. So there's a lot of the, of course, the population wouldn't have been as many before the war, you know. So their sleeping quarters weren't as much.

So when they started using it during the war, well, then they built a lot of Nissen huts, you know, and they had 12 beds in them. Each one of them on the squadron, yeah. And then they made mess tents there where you went on our squadron there. We used to go outside the main gate to go to the mess hall, yeah. So yeah, we were very fortunate. it all the way along, really. The aircraft that in training were war rate, I would like.

Man, like the old, when I got my wings up at McDonnell, Manitoba, north of there, when I got my wings as an air gunner, the old ferry battles. They first came out, they were supposed to be a fighter aircraft. The damn things wait a ton. or wherever. They lost those aircraft when they first died use them as a fighter. They just lost as fast as they put them in the air.

They lost them. Those had crews, you know. So they put them into training. Well, then they had the old Anson's and the old two-motored aircraft for guys that were going to be pilots and bomber pilots or whatever, you know. And then they had the harlors.

They were a single, they were a good aircraft. But as I say, man, you take the, they had a number three, number three, I think it was the SFTS in Saskatoon, they flew Harvard's out of there. And they were a good aircraft, yeah. The guys had come clear out as far as Rochstown on cross-countrys, you know. And they used to like, well, in fact, we used to, we'd get in this little open turret. All it was something in front of you, but the rest was all open, you know. And it would be in the wintertime, you know, Christ, it was 20 below or 30 below. and we'd be out and we would shoot at the air to ground like out in Lake Winnipeg.

They'd put spruce trees in the ice and you practice shooting that way. Or then they'd be shooting at a drogue that another aircraft. Well, anyway, this day, my pilot, he said that's what he did. Instead of going overseas, a lot of guys had it stuck with flying that sort of crap, you know. joined up to be a fighter pilot. Oh, I'd say, were you a fighter pilot? No, I flew that damn airgunners there. But anyway, this day, I probably said,

are you all done? And I said, yep, well, I'll settle down. We'll go out a little cross-country. So I'm hunkered away down in there, and I was just looking out like this, and all of a sudden I looked at, holy cow, they're going west. They got a high line, you know, those big tall steel towers with power lines.

We went underneath them. So then I really got interested. And there's the local telephone line right there, right there. And the snow was swirling out behind us, so then I really get interested. I'd get up and look up straight ahead. And there was a little black dot up there, and it's getting closer, and here's a farmer. up there in a big old buffalo coat, and he's up on a three-deck wagon box, all hunched over going down a trail with a team of horses,

and there was a black coolly dog run along behind, and we went over top of him. And you buzzed the tower on it. We went right over top of him. Oh, what a dirty thing to do. Those horses turned around right in the harness front near, and his two feet was out, and I'm sure that dog came out from underneath the slate. and took off across country. Oh, yeah, I thought that the guy, he said, what do you think of that?

I said, well, I kind of, I'm a country boy. I don't think that was a very nice thing to do. You know, he could have ruined a team of horses. But you take those guys that were flying out of Saskata, those Harvard young guys, you know, flying under bridges bridges and there'd be more than one guy lost his life going under a bridge or one fellow up the North Saskatchewan, I think it was, one or the other. He decided to shoot up a ferry going across there, but he forgot about.

The ferry only runs from a cable and he hit the cable and killed himself and the ferry. They hit, floated away down the river before they got it back. Yeah, it cost them hundreds and hundreds of dollars. Yeah, killed himself at the cable. But those fellows, you know, they were always chasing cattle and, yeah, farmers around in the fields, that sort of thing, and they weren't supposed to. Some guys would get washed out, you know. Grounded for the rest of the war.

Yeah. I'm wondering in the war, there's a couple big moments that always get talked about, Pearl Harbor in 1941? Yeah, yeah, I was at home when that happened, yeah. Yeah, my brothers were still home too at that time. Well, you know what, really?

You shouldn't say it, but I don't know how long United States would have stayed out of the war. They might have stayed out of the war long enough that the Allies would have Hitler and a beat us, you know. Because then they entered the war.

They had to enter the war. And they started helping out over otherwise before that, no. All they did was sit back and sell arms and machinery and ammo and everything else. We had

we had a lot of guys, Americans join up with the with the Canadian forces came up from there. We had a fellow on our squadron. Mackie was his name. Mackie was quite a guy. He was our squadron and he was a sergeant pilot. And of course they always thought that, you know,

Canadians are a pilot. If he's the boss, maybe he should be an officer. He should at least be one stroke above the rest of his crew. But Mackey, every time he'd come up for, to get his commission, he'd pull some prank. And most of it was he'd shoot up the airfield with a four-motored aircraft. And, yeah, he, one day we were up by the control tower, and the control towers, you know, it's higher than that. That's right. Yeah, he came across there at about three feet off the deck with a four-motored aircraft and pulled her up and went over the control tower.

And yeah, an Air Force girl, she jumped out a window and you've seen him coming and broke her collarbone. That was so they grounded Mackey then. And, of course, then he never came up for a commission for quite some time. And when he did, he'd do the same thing again, you know. He wound up, yeah, after the war, yeah, we sent us guys back down to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, and who's there, but Mackey was there. Still walking along with his boots undone. Yeah, his battle dress undone.

And you walked through the, we were down in Yarmouth. And, of course, when you got back to Canada, well, things were overseas. You never paid any intention to salute and some officer, you know, because there was so many of them. But when you got back to Canada, you saluted everybody that was an officer. Over in Yarmus Nova Scotia, we walked along on Mack, he's got his boots undone and slopping along there, his battle dress undone.

We're through, when you come to the attention area, is where the flag was. And you walked through there. You marched through there and you saluted the flag. Well, yeah, that didn't go over when you're overseas, you know. This big car pulled up with a purple flag on it, and here's the old groupie. Well, he chewed our butts off, you know. And Mackie was standing there, saluting him, saluting him, saluting him. So, yes, sir, yes, sir, yes, sir.

And the old guy's in there. And he said, funny, he said, oh, bull. Oh, God, yeah. Those funny things happen. Yeah, Mackey. It's good Mackey. What about 19? How about D-Day?

How was it? I've listened to the squadron yet, but we were flying on two-motored aircraft and Wellington's. They grounded us. All local air traffic was grounded. because the sky was full of aircraft going across. You wouldn't believe, you know, from not having hardly an aircraft that was worth two cents at the start of the war in 1939,

you wouldn't believe that you could put that much stuff in the air. And they're talking about Lancasters and Halifaxes and American aircraft. And two motor aircraft and the old DC3s, two motor aircraft, they were a workhorse, pulling gliders, you know. And it didn't matter where you looked in the sky on D-Day that you could probably count. I'll bet you you could count 100 aircraft flying. and it went on all day and all day. Yeah.

As a part of the Air Force, did you go, what on Earth is going on? Or did everybody know what was going on? Oh, you knew what was going on. Yeah, you knew it was D-Day then. As soon as it happened, yeah, you knew it was D-Day. But going across England, you know, that little island, yeah. And that, you just can't imagine you could build that, amount of stuff in, you know, in four years.

You know, it's just mind-boggling to think. Yeah. Yeah. I forget how many Lancasters they built a day in Canada. Well, they pretty much converted every factory and building. Yep. Yep. Like everything.

No cars. That's right. Yeah. If they were, they were used for, and the war efforts. Yeah. Yeah, it's amazing. Was there anything before you left over here in the Roestown, was there any factories or anything? Like were you guys doing anything to support the war effort? Oh, cripe down east. Oh, yeah.

Oh, there was, everybody was busy. Like the girls, that's, lots of women went down east and worked in factories in Winnipeg and cities. So moved from Saskatchewan to go out east? Oh, sure. all over, all over Canada. Yeah. Oh, cripe you. You better not be not busy working. Because, yeah. And like over in England there, they had what they called the Land Army girls. Like everybody worked. In the Land Army, they did men's work. Yeah, they had a uniform. The girls did. and they did lumbering and field work, you name it, they did it, yeah, just amazing. No, no, there was lots, thousands of women worked.

That's when girls and women, when they came, what would you call it, came into their own, that they should have been recognized long before that, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They found out that they were doing work that men could do quite easy. There was lots of transport drivers over in England were all girls. Yeah. Yeah. In fact, the queen, there she was. She drove transport during the war. Did she?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. She was with a... If there was something like... Yeah. I like the word. word you use fathom, you can't fathom it. Right now I cannot fathom what you're talking about. I can't even begin to imagine. But if there was one piece of advice you could take from being apart and going through that and being, you know, Canada didn't see the war on its own territory, but it was a huge part of the World War. Oh, craik. Is there something that you could tell the generations now that what would be the advice you'd pass along from being a part of something

like that. You know, I don't know. You're never going to stop wars. It's ridiculous, I know, because look at what we got right now. We got guys, China, Trump, Russia, Putin there. You know, there's about four guys there could start a war just like that, tomorrow and then people would be crazy enough to go to fight while that guy sits at home you know it's like in the First World War the generals yeah I think

each general a lot of them had were in charge of a certain part of the front lines and I think they would there was only about one or two of them that that We're up in the front lines with the fighting men. The rest were all back sitting having tea. And it's your turn to attack on your salient tomorrow, maybe, you know. And they're like... And so they just attacked, yeah, against strongholds that Germans had. And we lost thousands and thousands of them.

Like Vimy cost us how many. Three, four thousand dead, yeah. Vimy Ridge. Yeah. And that was really something to take Vimy Ridge. And only lose 3,000, I think it is. And those figures are maybe not exactly right. I forget how many did.

It costs us on Vimming Ridge. Regardless, it was a lot. Yeah, it was a lot. And yet, to take that well, they'd been trying to take it for, that cost the English, the Allied forces, it cost thousands of men to take, that was trying to take a thing that was impossible to take the way they were doing it, you know. Yeah, it's stupid, absolute stupidness, you know, really. Do you think that another world war then is inevitable?

Oh, God. I would You know nowadays Oh Yeah you could Just about Ruin the whole world

With the bombs Now we have You know Christ You Almost clean out the city In New York For Christ's sake

With about two bombs You know Unbelievable Look at what we did To Nagasaki You were Shima. You're a Shima, yeah.

With one bomb, boom. And now we have, they're ten times as great as that, you know, so, yeah. Korea there, that asshole, I got on Korea on there. Oh, well. Oh, yeah, like, shit. Me, they were flying overseas, it's like a pea shooter. That's about like a pea shooter nowadays. Yeah.

Yeah. Did you ever, I was wondering, I was watching a documentary on World War II, and they were talking about bombers going, I think from either side, going over and dropping pamphlets. And did you guys ever do any of that? Yeah, we did a couple. And what were on your pamphlets, do you remember? Oh, propaganda. Do you remember what the propaganda said? No.

You never paid any attention. Or the other thing, we did a couple of trips, out of the bottom of the aircraft is a tube about this big around and about this long. So for people who can't see the size, it's about three inches in diameter? No, about that big around and about that long. Yeah, and about that long. Halfway down was razor blades stuck on the edge. Well, you took strips of aluminum, you know, the strips of aluminum about that blown and that's long, and they were made up in bundles. Okay.

So you dropped those in there, and you flew over, and that's when Hitler figured that the main attack on D-Day, you read that, he said he wouldn't listen to them, to Ramallah, them saying, no, they're not gonna attack there. They're gonna attack down, you know, about where we really did. He wouldn't listen, no, no, there's gonna be up there. So one of the reasons is we flew over that thing

and they call it window. They call that stuff window. How it ever caught the name of window. So you, and you just keep dropping it. You just keep dropping these bundles out of there. And there's millions of strands this long would flutter through the air. And you'd get quite a few aircraft dropping them. And it would look like the bomber squadron was coming that way.

Really? On their radar. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It showed up as a bomber squadrons. I had not heard that. Yeah. And they call that window. So you'd drop window from the plane.

Yeah. So that they'd think that a squadron was coming in over here, but realistically everybody's positioned way over on the other side. So then they'd send their fighters that way to intercept that bomber squad. Absolutely, and they'd get over there and every bunch of tinsel flying. There wasn't any. All of a sudden you quit dropping it and headed for home. But they'd already moved their fighters up to intercept this bomber squad or bomber.

or, you know, yeah, there was all kinds of this stuff going on. The little tricks of the trade. Yeah. So we did that, we did a couple of trips just before D-Day, yeah, heading that direction. Yeah, it was quite good, resting. Yeah, so you just had this stuff piled in the aircraft and the- and just drop it as fast you can. The bomb-hammer and the wireless operator there, they're just popping it up through those, yeah.

And there was, yeah, they were quite tightly packed, but as soon as, But as soon as you dropped it in there, the section. Yeah, would pull it right through the razor blades. Pull it right through there and then it just disintegrate. It's quite interesting, yeah. Another thing the boys had sent me was a news article from Yorkshire about a plane crash on at the air base that you're a part of. Yeah. What happened there?

That was an amazing thing. my son in Erdry was looking at Facebook or one of them and he heard a name on his phone. He heard it, you know. That's familiar. So he got interested. And it was the base that I was on. How that thing ever got there,

They said, had quite an experience at the base on this crash, aircraft. It was us taking off. The old Halifaxes, they had Merlin engines in them and they were war right out. And they had quite a drift to port to left. and you're and so you're supposed to counteract that with throttle you just give more throttle to you

but they were so war out that to get the damn thing off the ground you had the right through the gate you had the throttles as far forward as you could get to get them off the ground because they were war out well so here we are

I'm sitting in the rear turret and tails up and we're doing a hundred and 10, you know, and all of a sudden the, you're looking back and there's the runway, and all of a sudden the runway goes that way, you know. And we're taking off across the airfield, and there was an aircraft sitting down there waiting for us to go by. Well, we're heading straight for it. So my pilot touched the brakes a little bit, and they got too much, and we're heading straight towards another aircraft. and the only way we're going to miss it is we couldn't go any further to the left. So we pulled up the undercarriage and there's a solenoid that the engineer had to stick to some through this hole

and trip a solenoid for you to pull the undercarriage up. Well, you're quite a sit in the air, you know, to start with. We're still doing 110, you know, and we dropped and we hit the ground. and bounced and part of the tail on the port side disappeared and this big black bundle stuff went flying by the tumbling through the dirt and the dust and hell that's the port inner engine and the diseases we bounced and then we came back up in the air about 10,

feet or so. And the next time we came down, we had a gravel pile. And the other part to the starboard inner motor went by on the other side. And we finally, we came to rest right underneath the wing of that aircraft sitting there. It was an operational aircraft. It had motor trouble, and it got diverted to our aerodrome with engine problem or something. Yeah. And he had a full bomb load a full pet load on and he's got guys standing around there you know and the engineers had you know even though we were going across the he said it was quite quite funny it's it looked like ants leaving an ant hill they were running in every direction because here we are coming straight at them you know and we stopped a foot from hitting the undercarriage underneath that there and my pilot he opened the

ski patch above and it was and climbed up and stood right out on the wing of that aircraft. Yeah. Yeah. And I put a bit of the air. You got out of the aircraft quick as fast as you could and got the hell away from it in case it caught on fire because usually, you know. Yeah, and I dropped out of there and hit the ground running pertinent. Yeah. And that was, that, that, you know, it was, That was that crash. Yeah, well, I got the article on my phone. What was that? Oh, okay.

Yeah, like it's... Yeah, there's some different things that happened that he hasn't got it in there. Yeah. No, it's pretty cool. And it's even got a little write-up on you. Yeah, each one of us says where we're from. Yeah, absolutely, yeah. Yeah, it says Silas Camel was born in August 1924 in Zeelandia, Saskatchewan.

Yeah. And was working and farming there when in... listed in the RCAF service in Saskatoon on the 9th of June, 1943. He was also posted to the 419 squadron, and having risen to the rank of W-O-2, he too was recommended for the DFC on the 22nd of May, 1945. When he had flown 35 sorities between the 28th of September,

in the 14th of March, 1945 as a rear gunner. The recommendation also states, this warrant officer has completed 35 operational sort the majority of which have been over the most heavily defended targets in Europe. W.O.2 Campbell's cooperation, coolness, devotion to duty contributed in large measure to the successful completion of an operational tour and his cheerful confidence has inspired a high standard of morale and his crew and the squadron in general. Yeah, that's putting it on pretty heavy, I think. I don't know. I mean, that's pretty cool for an article to A, be stumbled upon like that.

Yeah. And then for them to have, you know, in your questionnaire, you always talk about how happy you are to be where you're at and everything else. Yeah, that's for sure. Yeah. And it's cool that they caught that back then because obviously that hasn't changed now in how many years. Yeah, that would be my pilot and them that wrote that up. That's when they've got the DFCA. Yeah.

A lot of it would be for my pilot and my and my crew, you know. Yeah. When Hiroshima and Nagasaki happened and the end of the war comes, right, it's all done. What were the thoughts of the group? Everybody's ecstatic? Well, see, after I finished my tour, then I went as instructing aircraft recognition. And then we came back to the, we had all joined up to go to the Middle East to fight against Japan, my whole crew. But of course we all got split up, and if we'd have went, if we'd have went, if the war would have kept up,

it probably had a whole different crew if we'd have gone to the, we wouldn't have wound up with the same crew again, I don't think, no, because I'd never seen my guys after that. I'd seen my bomb aimer down at Yarmouth. But, yeah, the, yeah, I was in Yarnhamer. Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. Then I was instructing, I was supposed to be instructing aircraft, Japanese aircraft recognition. Good God, I didn't know, and a zero from a ferry battle, you know. And I was trying to tell guys that were flight lieutenants and that sort of thing, commission guys, they'd already did a tour or two over in Burma down in there. They should have been the ones that were instructive, not this kid. I didn't know the first thing of

But then, boy, when the VJ day come along, was I ever happy because I just would sweat every morning I'd have to go to and try and tell these guys what a zero look like, you know, and I didn't have the faintest idea. That's how stupidly good the military can be at times to send this coyote in there to, yeah. So when you come back from over there, what do you do? That is a tough thing.

Boy, I'll tell you. See, you take a lot of guys were criticized. I was only in for two years, you know. And when all of a sudden, the war's over. oh it's like it's like you're out in the middle of dropping out without a parachute you don't know

what the hell am I going to do like of all this time you've had somebody tell you what to do all of a sudden you've got to do you've got to tell yourself you've got to tell yourself what you're going to do not have somebody else tell you so you know

and that is a tough thing you You take some of those boys that have been in since 1939, and they never got their discharge until 1945. They had a family at home. They'd never seen. Some kids, they'd never, their kids going to school, for God's sake. You know, wife got pregnant, you know, when they left, and they're gone for near six years. And the little child doesn't know them from Adam, you know. here's a guy that he's been in there and somebody's been telling them what to do all those years and you know when you're learning

you know when you're a teenager and up to you're 20 years old you know 21 22 that's your top learning portion of your life you know what the rest of your life is going to be and there you are out on a limb you know and the guy standing there with a saw going to cut it off ago. It's a hell of a feeling. It is. And I was, I say it, I was only in two years. I didn't have a problem, really. My dad had a moving outfit, so I had something to do when I first got home.

I was on home on leave there for a while, for a month's leave, before I went down to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, and even after I got out, and this, and, you know, everything you picked up, was 50 pounds, you know, jacks and, you know, all that stuff, moving buildings. That was tough work. And you weren't used to tough work, you know, that just about killed me. After about four days, I'd make an excuse I wanted to go and see a buddy of mine. Yeah, right. It was just an excuse to get the hell out of there, so I didn't have to do any work. But it is a heck of feeling and especially and I thought about those fellows that had been in you know since 1939 you know and all of those years yeah they yeah when we got to

Brandon we had you were set up in flights about 55 guys and then you had a corporal and you did your basic training you know how to march and you knew how to salute and all that sort of garbage you know. Well, these fellows, there was 12 of them, they had joined up when war was first declared. What they did, they gave an old the unfield rifle and they sent them up to the Aleutians in case the Japs came along. They had this old Enfield rifle that if he were scared if he ever got a shell in the barrel, that it was all rusted and they were terrible things. They're up there for four years.

Yeah. And then they send them down to Brandon to do the basic training. Can you imagine what those guys would be like? They'd tell. Yeah, right. Yeah. I could remember this is getting a little dirty side. The guy was Campbell.

His name was Vince, Vincent Donald. And my name is Silas Franklin. Well, anyway, yeah. Vince, he was quite a character. Yeah, but anyway, so they called him veneerial and me Siff. His VD. Yeah, yeah. And the SF.

Yeah. That's pretty good. Oh, yeah, that didn't last long. Yeah. You had to, like, in those years that you're in the war, Obviously, humor had to play a big part of it because you're under so much stress, right? Oh, fabulous. It was, well, you can imagine what it would be like getting 18, 19, 20-year-old guys together.

Yeah. Yeah. It was a great experience. I wouldn't have missed it for my life, you know, even if I'd have bit the dust. It was really something. and like exciting and scary at times. Like sometimes we were flying along there and you're in the rear turret and you can look right down

alongside of you and there's some ac-ac coming up at you, and you think, ooh, I wonder if that went a way down there's got my name on it, you know, something like that. So there's some times you wondered about, yeah, well, some days you thought you kind of had a feeling that maybe you wouldn't make it. That trip, you know. I remember my pilot saying one time, because he's sitting up there, he's got to take his crew into that thing where it's nothing but, like, like, ACACBurst, great big. And every once in a while they'd put up a boomer, azoa aircraft, it hit an aircraft. When you get a direct hit and all of a sudden aircraft just goes off like an actual bomb, you know, really,

and nothing comes out of it. Just pieces, no parachutes come out. A friend of us, our crew, good friends were flying out there about, yeah, about two little three and three. yards or 100 yards or something like that and they got a direct hit one night on a daylight trip and yeah and there wasn't anything come out of it and that really shakes you know that sort of thing really really hits home then you you kind of it's kind of hard sitting there on that hard seat because you figure you're going to get one up your ass you know but My pilot, he looked up one day and he said, boys, and he had that feeling that day.

Boy, he said, I don't know if I can take you in there. And that little voice came on, the intercom. Oh, an Osborne was his name. And we called him Ozzy. Oh, Ozzy, you've got to have faith. Yeah, I guess so is it. I think it was my navigator that said it. Nobody owned up to it.

Now you got a faith, Ozzy. Yeah. So, that was it. So those times are pretty scary. Yeah. Lying now. But? I should have started it off with this.

I'd had a lot of people text me and I'd thought it when I first, I knew you were coming on. But I'm so grateful for what you guys did. Like, you're a part of, you know, we get to live in a place that the freedoms we have is just, we take it for granted almost every day. Yeah. It isn't because of what went on back then. It might not be the way it is.

Oh, hell. Well, as I say, like my brother there, when you, did you ever hear the story of, did you ever hear the name, Menarski? I can't say I have. Minarski was a mid-upper gunner. He was on a crew on our squadron. The aircraft, they call it the Monarsky aircraft that's down at Hamilton, the Lancaster that's flying. There's only two Lancaster's flying in the world.

The other one's over at Croydon, at Airfield, just the other side on the outskirts of London, England. The other one is down at... You can go to Nantan, south of Calgary, if you want to see a Lancaster. Okay. They'll taxi it out, and the forem motors are running, and it's just fabulous. Everything is there. We'll have to do that. It is.

And they have a time, I think it's in September. I'd have to find out. I wouldn't mind going back. Well, they treated me like Royal because I flew in one. I forget I was going to say what the hell was I going to say it must have been a lie it was a name

oh Monarski Monarski Okay they got hit and were on fire and the pilot said Minarski was a mid-upper gunner he said abandon aircraft Menarski goes there was a door halfway back there in that aircraft, back down about here.

And he noticed the rear gunner couldn't get his, couldn't get his, he was stuck in there. The damn thing was, they got hit with flak too. And of course, and they were on fire. And then Iarski was back in there trying to get it open and trying to get him out and he couldn't. and he finally in his, and the rear gunner looked at him, he said, hollering out of him, go, go, go. And his clothing was on fire. And he got his chute was on.

He had it on. And his clothing was on fire. And Benareski walked back and turned and saluted him and jumped out. And his chute burnt in midair. He lived when he hit the ground But they died shortly after The aircraft came down and hit and exploded on it hit the ground And all the other guys were gone

You know And the rear turret came off and rolled out away from the aircraft And the doors flew open And the rear gunner fell out on the ground Just a few bruises Can you believe? I cannot believe That is unbelievable

Yeah Well anyway Audrey and I, my first life, Audrey, 409 squadron was reconstituted up at Cold Lake, and Audrey and I went up there, like the squadron, it was like a, yeah, well, who was there, but Mnarski's crew, and we got teamed up with them. They found out we were from the same squadron, see? That was in May that that happened when they bailed out. and got taken prisoners.

And so we spent the evening with them two nights. And Audrey danced. And the funny part was I had seen the navigator. He was big, tall. He had about as much meat on him as that door. And him and my navigator were friends because he stayed on the squadron as an instructor. No kidding.

Yeah. So he remembered my navigator. Bob Young. Yeah, so we just had a great talk to the rear gunner, yeah, he said, yeah, he said, yeah, that didn't take very long to get to the ground, he said. Can you imagine what he'd be thinking, you know, I think this is going to hurt. No kidding. If he was thinking anything at all. Yeah, you know, yeah. Oh, a friend of mine. He got blowing right out of here, crap. He was a rear gunner, too.

And it was a beautiful moonlight night. And he got blowing out of there. And he was floating around, and the moon was between his legs, and all of a sudden the moon disappeared over here. That's when he came to and realized that he was floating through space with snow. And they just issued us with seat packs. The rear gunners had seat packs. didn't. Before that, you used to, they wondered, they were losing rear gunners. For the simple

reason, if they had to bail out and you're going down, you had to turn your thing around and your motorists are probably dead. So you had a little crank there that you had to slowly and your turret and move around until it's straight in line with your hookah. You pull your doors open, lean back, get your chest pack, your parachute on, put it on, go back in and then turn that little crank till it slowly went around to the beam and then fall out backwards. Like they thought, then they thought, you know what, you know, I'll bet you if we gave the rear gunners a seat pack like the pilot, you know, it would probably save some guys. No kidding. Yeah, it's right. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, that's what happened to. This is Bill McLeod. Yeah, so he's floating through space, yeah. Yeah, and he came down in the upstairs of a house that had the thing blown off. Yeah, and he got taken. My other guy, a friend of us on the squadron, he didn't have a parachute

when he got blown out of the aircraft there at the rear tier. And he landed on the bounce, off a haystack, the only one in the field. And he bounced off a haystack out off the ground, wound up with a broken leg or something like that. Other than that, nothing the matter. Yeah. Cuttape in prison, yeah.

Could you imagine? How lucky could you get? Yeah. When you come back, how long is it until you start working on the railroad? Oh. What did we say? 19. I started on the railroad

In 1948 Yeah What made you decide to go to the railroad? Well I was working I was down east working in the body shop And the paint got to me

I got pleuracy So I had to get out of there Came back out to Meringo My sister and her husband He was the elevator agent Came out there I worked for a guy that had a hardware And a grudge

and I was running the hardware. And the CN station agent by the name of Sybil, his name was, just happened to be talking to him one day and if you ever think of going to work on the railroad. I was free and easy. Well, I guess he sent my name in. And so on September the 17th and 1948,

I finished up. I was quit there. A guy by the name R.B. Campbell. He needed some harvest help, so I went running a combine that fall. And I finished, and it just pulled him in the yard and was getting it set up to put away for the winter. And the phone rang, and the guy, I was where he said, the guy, Sybilte wants to talk to you, he says, yeah, this is, Sybilts said, you know, you said, you're interested going to the railroad work in the railroad. So I said, my boss said, am I all done?

here? Well, yeah, pretty well, so I, oh, I got a chance to go to work on the railroad, co-fed, he said, so I said, yeah, sure, this was about 7 o'clock at night. I said, where do I go to work? He said, right here in Meringo. Oh, oh, well, yeah, okay, when do I go to, when do I go to work? He said at 10 o'clock. So you started that night. At the 10 o'clock that night, didn't know the first thing about it. But you're not. But you We were talking about this. You almost go 40 years on the railroad. Well, from 48 to...

You said you figured 1986. Yeah. The year I was born. Is that right? That is. Yeah. I'll soon have as many years on pension as I did working. No kidding.

Of course, a lot of guys accuse me of shit. How did you notice any difference from being pensioned off and working? What did you think of work on the railroad? It's good. I loved it. I was a station agent. You don't know, maybe you don't know what that is. A lot of people don't know what I did.

No, you've got to, yeah, school me. Well, you've seen the stations. Yes. Haven't you? Yes. Okay. Most of them were at the end of Main Street in the little towns. That's what I did.

You handled Express and Freight and Morris, telegraphy. I knew my telegraphy already, you know. My telegraphy, I knew that. And you were able to copy train orders for trains, you know, give the messages.

You sold airline tickets, you sued railway tickets, you know. And so you did all of that. And yeah, and that's what I did for all of those years. Any memorable thoughts on working the railroad for that?

Oh, yeah, lots. Yeah. Well, I also, I was out at Edson, and I worked there as just a straight telegrapher, you know, in train orders, because everything was done by what they call train orders. These are notes that used to hand up to trains to tell them where you're going to meet a guy, you know, meet a train going the opposite direction. Right. Okay, so then I started out as a train dispatcher in Edson.

I did that for a year, a little over a year. But that was like an air traffic controller. Same thing pretty well. Yeah. So, yeah, that was too heavy. I couldn't see running trains for the rest of my life, you know. So I figured a station agent's job. I used to relieve station agents on their holidays, you know.

Yeah. Liked it. I got to know of John Doe Public, you know, meeting John Doe Public. I was my own boss. I had a place to live, raise my kids in smaller places, you know. So that's what I did. Pretty good life then. It was, yeah.

It was a good life, a good life. Yeah, you're pretty well, your own boss, yeah. See, I should repeat something for you. You got a piece of paper? Sure, yeah. I'll show you. Okay, just rip a piece off. Oh, no, just write on the book.

Okay, yep, absolutely. Train orders, is what you give to trains. Okay. As a train dispatcher, you would press and get an operator, say, that was a telegrapher operator at Unity and Wainwright. Okay. So you give trains. So here's a train order. Say it's 106, order number. And it's at Unity. Yeah. Okay. It's to extra. 4315 West at Unity. Period.

Okay, here's the body order. Extra. 4315 West. Meat, extra. O, 52, 78 East. Winter, name of the place. And... I know where winter is.

That is... Okay, I was the agent that entered for... Where you really? Oh, the crap! Okay. Signed and your initials. And my initials was SFC. Okay, so...

Okay, now you give this to the operator at Unity. Okay, you say, all right, Unity. So the Operator Unity said he has to repeat this. Right. And in the meantime, you're the dispatcher and you're underlining each thing as he says them. Okay, so that there's no mistake. Okay, Unity says. Order number 106.

O&E, N, G, HDSIX at Unity, VNI, T,Y, period. Extra, 4315. A 4 U.R. to Chaud will be O'Ne, 5E, West, VST. Meat, extra. 5278, a 5. E to WS C, B N-E-I-N-G-H-E-E-C-S-T-T-E-E-C at Winder-I-N-T-E-R signed S-F-C. Do you know what I said? No, I have no idea, but I, I could get the gist of what you're trying to say.

Order number 106, O-N-E, 1, N-O-U-G-H-T, 0, 6, S-I-X. Okay, extra, 43-3. 15, F-O-U-R, T-H-R-E-O-N-E-F-I-E-E-F-I-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-C-E-S-E-E-E-S-E-E-E-S-T-E-E-E-S-T-E-E-E-E-E-S-T-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E---------------------------------------------------------------- signed SFC. You're quite the word smith or at least the letter smith. Yeah. You give those yeah and as being the dispatcher you go like as each guy you give this to more than one guy, hey? That's right. You give one to this guy at the energy and this guy here at Wainwrights. And you're making sure trains don't run into each other. That's exactly right. Yeah. That's what you used to do. You still got it. Same as an operator. Yeah. All right. We took a

quick little break so that I can decide if I'm tiring them out or not. I got a bunch of questions that people had asked me to ask you, but there's different, I guess I wanted to go over the 94 years you've been going, almost 95, what is the one thing that sticks out that's happened in the world

that when you look back, you just go, oh yeah, that was pretty cool or that was huge or it can be like TV it can the invention of the TV it can be flying somewhere for the first time

it can be a person an event I think maybe the thing that I thought was absolutely fabulous is when they put a man on the moon yeah

1969 yeah I think that was was one of the main things that I thought was absolutely fabulous. Really. I've had other things happen, but nothing compared to that, really, you know, really. Yeah. I had another person ask, what's your favorite decade? Decade?

Yes. Well, I guess the one would be in the 40s. The 40s was your favorite decade? I guess so. Yeah. There was more inventions made during the war, and it was the most exciting time that I had in those two years. I was in the service. And, well, I went on the railroad. I went out on the railroad. That was quite exciting when I first did, and to be a train dispatcher was exciting. and to have your first agency that's your own place, you know, and married there in the first 50s, in 1951, married for the first time, but went with Audrey for a few years in there.

Yeah, that was cool. That was cool. That was cool. That was ten years. Yeah. I had a question from Dean Amagerty. He said, Sigh, you were born in the 20s,

survived the Great Depression, went through World War II, some of the greatest global changes have occurred in your lifetime. What do you think was the glue that kept the fabric together back then? Oh, boy, that's a tough question. I don't know how you'd answer that.

Like, in what way you mean? You mean that kept the world going? Yeah, or maybe kept people pushing the right direction. Because, I mean, there was, you know, for a lot of people, their sons and daughters and husbands, wives, children, you name it, were gone fighting in wars. It wasn't, I don't think the economy by any stretch of the imagination was booming. Well, when you went from the Depression when five cents was worth five bucks, you know, and all of a sudden you went from there where nobody had a job.

into the war of the war where all of a sudden everybody's got a job. And all of a sudden you went from earning nothing. Like my brother, my brother worked for $5 a month for a farmer, you know, in the 30s. How much? Five bucks a month. A month? Yeah. And the government gave the farmer five bucks just to take them so he'd have something to do.

My brother, so, but the farmer didn't have to give his five bucks. So my brother worked for an old German fellow down in Zalandia there. He worked for five bucks a month and there's no feed. They fed Russian thistle, green Russian thistle to cattle. Holy moly. And that, and my brother said, you went into the barn with rubber boots, not just a pair of loaf. Yeah, that he said.

And you didn't walk around, you know, half in a dream because when a cow lifted her tail, you better start heading for the other side of the barn. So we worked for five bucks a month. It bought you a few packages of Vogue tobacco at 10 cents a pack, and five cents for a roll of people. papers, like Vogue papers for rolling smokes. Yeah, for rolling smokes. Yeah.

So you went to a dance. It cost you, yeah. Well, I remember when I was in the Air Force, we were in Winnipeg, we went up to the dance hall in Grand Beach on a weekend. And they had jitney dances, they called them. every dance you had you paid five cents each like so you had to have a dollar or two when you went because you'd just go ask a girl or if maybe you would go from with a girl from Winnipeg and so it

cost you 10 cents a dance yeah so yeah that was that was something but then of course then you went into the war and everybody had a job. Yeah, some of them didn't pay that well like in farm labor, but all of a sudden the price of grain went from like there was some years that, well, for an instant, show you how bad it was, that a guy used to ship your cattle a carload of cattle to Winnipeg to the auction market. It'd have to go all that way to sell your cattle. Okay, or else you had a buyer come around, you know,

would buy your cattle. But if you had enough cattle, you could ship a whole car. One fellow, they said they shipped a carload of cattle to Winnipeg, and you rode in the caboose down there on the freight. and they got into Winnipeg and they sold and he didn't have enough money left to pay the freight that were worth nothing. Nothing. Yeah, worth nothing.

So there were those times but that of course was in the 30s. But then of course the Warriors came along well then all of a sudden everything was worth something and you went from as I say a depression to, well, as I say, like there was more inventions done in those five years, that you just can't believe how it could be. I had the next question I'm staring at is Ken Rutherford asked,

what are the one, two, or three things to focus on in life? Well, the number one thing is to be happy when you go to work. And I told my kids that I don't care what you do in life. I've told my kids, I don't care if you have a pick and shovel. If you're happy, if that's what you like, then be happy when you go to work in the morning. I can't believe you're not on this earth very long, you know, really. When you think, when I think back of it doesn't seem like it's pretty near a century, you know, since I was born. It just, you're not on this old world very long. So I can't imagine going to work every morning.

like I can't imagine working in an auto factory and putting that same damn bolt in day after day after day and putting the nut on it. Can you imagine that? Oh, yeah, yeah. That's one thing. Money is not everything

is the other thing. Money won't buy you happiness and able to, the other thing, is be able to laugh at yourself. There's nobody that's perfect. And I feel sorry for the person that can't laugh or laugh at himself. So those are the three things, I think,

are one of the main things in life to go through life being happy. That's really good. I love. Yeah. That's really cool. That was a good question from Mr. Ken. I shouldn't be surprised.

He pulled one out. He's a guy who looks at the life with those, I would say those things. He's a very happy guy. Yeah. If you could go back to your 30-year-old self, what would you tell the younger you? Oh, crap. Well, I'd probably tell them that same thing. Yeah.

Yeah, for God's sake, whatever you do, be glad. Be glad that you're alive. Yeah. I said, I do that old thing in the morning. I look, I tell people, I look in the mirror that ugly old bugger, and I say to him, nice to see you sigh. Yeah, it's nice to be alive. My father asked, over a lifetime of memory, what sticks out in your life?

What have you done or experienced that sticks out to you? That sticks out? You talked about them putting a man on the moon, but what have you done in your lifetime that sticks out to you? I don't know. I've been satisfied. with my life. I guess I probably could have made a better life. I guess one of the things that I think that I should have done in my life was be better with my kids. I was not a great person around children, you know and maybe that was because I was in and I did hear that a lot of guys had that problem

after being in the service and have a guy barking on your butt you know to do something you had a little bit of a tendency to be too strict with your children and and I'm not the only one like I wasn't real bad but I thought at times when, you know, I was immaterial, just what you, if you chewed their butt out, you know, for doing something. That really was immaterial to life, you know. That's one of the things that I, I think. I've always thought that there's one thing that I was always sort of, that I didn't get a chance to thank my grandmother for raising me.

You know, and she was gone when I was overseas. Like, she'd been passed away for over a month before I knew it, you know. And boy, that really shook me up. Yeah, yeah. I can remember I was sitting in my closet there, all by myself one day. And that's when I'd heard that day that my grandmother had passed away. And yeah, and that's when I got homesick.

Oh, and I'll tell you, anybody that says they've never been homesick or lucky, because, boy, I'll tell you, you can ball like a baby. I was 20 years old. That's a tough situation to be homesick. Yeah. And kids go through that early, yeah. But I was 20 years old, and I just got a letter that saying my grandmother passed away.

And I thought, oops, yeah. And I've thought of that lots of times, you know. Yeah. Of course, when you're 18 years old, you don't tick along that line. You're, yeah, saying away above something like that. that. What was the first vehicle you ever owned?

Oh, a 1946 chev. What color? Green. A green. Yeah. Did you buy a brand new? No. No.

Hell no. We were married. I lived in winter, for God's sake. They couldn't afford one for the card's sake. Yeah, I was baseball with Newburgh from winter. And Audrey had to stay home with a little one. He said if we had a car, then maybe I could go. Oh, yeah, sure.

We went to Turtleford after we got the car, and oh, God, was it hot. And, of course, no air conditioning. And she had a tendency to be car sick, and so did my old. girl. It was just a baby. And going up there through the river and up in those hills, you know. And they both got tar sick. And then they sat in the car all day

in that heat. So that, I didn't last long playing baseball after that. It wasn't, yeah. Yeah, I didn't laugh about that. I'll tell you. You probably had a divorce on the road right quick. Speaking of sports, as I'm a sports guy, what sports did you play growing up?

I played hockey when I was in high school and ball, played softball. And for the team around Salandy. We had a good team. We used to play us guys that were in high school, played senior hockey against seniors. and yeah we played all around there. Other than that, you know, I never, then I, as I say, took up golf and that's it. When you're playing hockey for the hockey lover and me, was it out on an outdoor rink or did you guys have? Some of it, yeah, Zalandia down there.

We played outside like those other little towns like Milden and Sovereign and Harris and, oh, let me see. Delisle. No, God, I think it was Tess here. One of those up there between Rostown. They had another one that had an indoor rink. Laura. Laura, it was. Yeah.

had an indoor rink but Roastown of course had an indoor rink but all of those other little places they played outside yeah shovel the rink yourself and everything else yeah well that's usually done for yeah

yeah how about your gall the boys would probably take me out back if I didn't mention that you got a hole in one last year yeah and I heard that might be the second one you've had in your lifetime yeah it was yeah

I got one on the other hole, number six one time. What course is this, Cy? Out here. At unity, both at Unity? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I never seen either one of them go in the hole. I reached down to pick up a T when the guy is all started hollering like,

Rick Blanchett and twid them. It's in. You got a hole in one. Oh, crap. I didn't even see it going. I couldn't see that far. You know, guys play their entire life. Never hit a hole in one.

And you do it at 93. That's pretty freaking cool. Yeah. It's luck. Well, I'd have the other one. Don't tell them that. That's skill. I got one last year.

It's all skill side. Yeah. Great. Yeah. Well, yeah. I can imagine what they say too. The other one was down on number six. I did that one.

And the same thing was there. They hit the ball and they had a closest of the hole. I had a cardboard on a stick. And it was right in front of the hole. Well, I hit the ball and I hit it left, a bit left. and it hits the green and it's rolling towards the hole, you know. And I thought, well, so it'll probably roll right off. Oh, I reached down to pick up my tea and, yeah, it's in.

The guy's over and the other tee off. Hey, you're lucky son of a gun, Campbell. It's in the hole. Yeah, it must. I had one in from Morgan Man. I interviewed him and his brother two weeks ago, I guess, now. And he asked, are we evolving as a people? are we going the other way?

Oh, hell. We must be going up because we keep inventing stuff that's, you know, there's, I can remember my grandmother saying, and we've said the whole thing as you go down through life.

Yeah, I don't know what this world's coming to. Yeah. I don't know what those kids are thinking. Yeah. You still say the same thing, as my grandmother said. You know, yeah. But I don't know. I don't know what's going to happen with that thing. With the phone.

With technology you're talking. Not only that, but what it's going to do to John Doe Public. Like our kids. I see it was showing on TV when they were talking about cell phones and it shows the guy he's walking along and he's going to see oh he's walking along and he's boing and you could hear the steel post and he just hit that with his forehead and you could hear it go boing and he backed up and moved over and he walked on down the street look You'd think that's smarten them up?

You would think so. Yeah, God. But I think that's taken away from our kids. They can't add two and two and get four. You know, and I think it's going to ruin them with a conversation with somebody else. You go in, you go in to pay for something and forget it as far as giving them the extra change with most of it now. Now it's all this tap and card and no money at all. No, no. Yeah, well, that's right. Yeah. No, so you just don't bother you give them 10 bucks and it tells them what change to give you.

Yeah. I don't know how that's going to affect us. down the road um Christ right now can you imagine what would be like if we had a

would you can you imagine what it would be like safer as west of Winnipeg if we had a major major power failure or if somebody shot down our

deal up there our our satellite Yeah. We'd come to a stop. Yeah, we'd absolutely. Yeah. If a war happened and they shut up and knocked out some of those things, you know,

well, we'd come to a standstill in Western Canada. And especially, you could, you take about three bombs in Winnipeg and you knock the railways out and you got Western Canada stuck. you know it's yeah that's that's getting that's getting a little more but yeah

somebody's the accent what do you think of so a big thing right now is it used to be global warming and now it's climate change yeah what's your thoughts on that I don't know

I don't really know about that I don't know if maybe it's happened over centuries before us, I don't know. It'd have to be a long time ago, if it was. But whether that's, whether we have something to do with the global warming, I don't know. I don't know.

How about a different one? when I was when I was when I first get to vote when you're young and you're 18 you get to vote you don't really you don't understand

what's going on heck even at 33 I stole some days don't understand what's going on you've had a lot of prime ministers specifically in Canada

go through this current one Trudeau for the West at least has done a lot of damage and I'm curious

over your lifetime Have you seen, like, does this feel like this upcoming election is as big as what I personally think it is? Or have you seen this time and time again over the centuries? No, I think this one is, oh, well, I think he listened to his old man. Old Elliot Trudeau. He said, don't worry about, yeah, the money. Yeah. You go into debt, yeah, it'll straighten itself up.

And he's got to be thinking the same thing. Because look at the amount of money. Every time he turns around, he's given away millions and millions and millions of dollars. Can you imagine giving Loblaws, what, $1.4 million dollars to buy a new, new things for their store? you know like where you put stuff in the deep freezes yeah la blas

yeah 1.4 million bucks the answer to you is no I can't imagine doing that well it did yeah like so in your mind then this is as pivotal is what I think it is

this coming election yeah yeah this God I don't know how many millions and millions of dollars we're in the hole now that he's give. Just the amount of money that he's give away. It's, it's, maybe his old man, Pierre, maybe he had it right. Because I guess you look throughout the world and you look at most countries, they're all in the hole.

So maybe it doesn't make any difference. Maybe it's only figured of a speech. I don't know. Okay. Okay, so four left. Kelly O'Donnell asked, if Sask people from the Great Depression could give us advice, what would it be? Boy, you're really picking my brain.

Hey, I told you I was going to make you think today. Yeah, well, let's put it this way. I remember, and worked in Edson. I would start out the street. That's when we were first married. I was making payments. You used to, when you got your pay every two weeks, you went and paid the grocery bill. And then every month you paid off all your others paying for your furniture and all of this and that.

And sometimes I'd get home after paying off all the bills and I'd have a dollar. If I had ten bucks left for two weeks, wow, we'd go to a show or we'd go bowling or something. And sometimes I'd have a buck left to do for two weeks. because you could go and you could charge the other cigarettes or something if I was smoking I could charge them down at the grocery store. Then all of a sudden they decided you've got to pay cash. We damn near starved for two weeks. Well, okay.

Then it's amazing when you look around the country And you see houses worth 500 grand. And a big motorhome sitting there, or a fifth wheel, and a truck with duallys on it to pull it, and a couple of scadus, a CD, they called it, for zipping around the water. Oh, I think, I wonder,

if that's the way to go, because I never could afford that. Well, you know, they're working for wages, too. You know, they must be a hell of a lot better manager than I ever was. But maybe it's the way to go. They've having all that fun when they're young, when you should be having fun, you know, where I know, we really didn't well we had fun

you know when we first married we had fun but we didn't have any money to spend to have the fun with but we had we had fun

you know now now hell we got the money too goddamn to hold to know how to spend so does that tell you anything

I'm sure the listeners will take from it what they want Yeah Live it the way you want it What was the first motion picture you ever saw? Movie? Movie? Yeah Oh, I saw Charlie Chaplin

In a non-talkie. In Roastown And my art teacher When I first started to school Yeah, in 1929 Our teacher took 14 of us kids To the show in Roastown No kidding

The neighbor guy come over with us same old truck that they all went to the lake with. Yeah, remember I was saying on July the 1st. Okay, he took us all to Rostown, and we went to the show. And that cost her 10 or 15 cents each. But, and it was Charlie Chaplin and an on-talkie. And what did you think of that? Oh, fabulous.

Oh, God, if I could see, he's due to come on back on here in a week or so. and if I can I'll probably watch it he was he was absolutely terrific yeah oh Charlie Chaplin who was your favorite musician or band oh well you know what

the ones I used to really enjoy listening to was Don Nessor and his Islanders I'll tell you what I'm going to have to Google I'll have to look him up yeah yeah Don Messer and his Islanders What would be the song from them?

Or just everything in general. Oh, everything in general. Yeah. He had an orchestra. He played all of that old country music, you know. Well, I'm a country. I'm a country guy. You know, I like country music.

I find country music is each song pretty well has a story to tell. Like Google here. and has fake country music. Yeah, that's what Dawnmaster did. And they were around for years, yeah. Sticking with culture, what was one book you'd recommend to read if you're going to read one book? Oh, I don't know, really.

Oh, that I really got a kick out of? that it was as though I was right there, and that's James Harriet. James Harriet? James Harriet was a vet, a veterinarian, and he was at Harrogate. Just down the road from Middleton St. George, where I was on the squadron over in Yorkshire, England. Our number six group was RCAF. There was all those squadrons are the only place they have. left to put us, the Canadian said, we would like our own squadrons.

We're flying with the RAF and we don't get a credit for anything and we didn't. Well, we, when my brother, he flew with the REF, Royal Air Force. Well, we were just, we were classed as those guys from the colonies, you know? Yeah. Well, that's what we wear. And what was, oh, sorry. So we moved up, they moved us up into Yorkshire. And we're the fog and the rain,

and that's why we were diverted to other aircraft, the airfield, other airfields quite often coming back because we're fogged in. But James Harriet was a veterinarian, just down the road at Harrogate. And the first time I picked up a small book was Harrogate. James Harriet. Wow, so I started reading.

He wrote, he to read the book all short stories. Okay. And you would swear you're right there. You know, like,

like for instance, he's telling about, he's out in Yorkshire and, oh God, the farmers are, you know, dirt poor. And the fence lines were poles that were like this, you know, or else a old rock, you know.

And he was out there, and the cow was trying to have a calf. And so they got her down, and so he's laying on her head holding her down. And he said, they don't know, he said to the old farmer, he said, they don't know, he said, I got her down, he said, you pull the calf. And the old farmer, he said, I could not pull the calf. He said, well, get Alec there, you hired men. And Alec was a little short. Alec, the little cuss.

He couldn't pull the skin off a custard. But, yeah, James Harriet, if you get a chance to read the best of James Harriet, you'll laugh because, and there's nice things. Like you could go to bed at night and take the book and you can read a whole story. I'll have to take a look into that. Yeah. All right, I know I said four. Now I'm probably past that, and everybody's probably laughing at me. I got two more.

I've got to get to one more by Kelly O'Donnell. He said, if SaaS people from the great, oh, no, not that's SaaS people. I'm reading the same one. What have been the biggest impact on rural Saskatchewan, electricity or going from horses to a tractor and car? What do you think was the bigger change? Oh, power. Power?

Power in rural Saskatchewan. Yeah? Yeah. Oh, God, yeah. Yeah. tractor definitely too, but not all guys could get a tractor right off the bat, you know. But power came in to rural Saskatchewa. I remember I was out of winter in 1954 when the power came in.

700 bucks got you power. You signed up for it right away because we had an old guy there. He always had it in for winter. and he knew that the power was going to have to come through his property. And if he didn't take it, you had to have so many on the line, you know, or they wouldn't put it in. Well, he was very close to it, and he figured if he stopped him from going on his property, then winter wouldn't get the power. Well, anyway, it went along, and everybody went through him $700, and we got the power.

and he went right past his barn. You know, well, then he decided, oh, oh, if I can't stop my guess I might as well get it. Well, they said, oh, no, you're not going to get it at 700. It's going to cost you $2,100. There's something about it. And the laugh was on him. But I can remember that. Oh, so when the power came in, you'd drive to the country at night.

And, of course, everybody had every light on it they could. They had, you know, all the main lights out on your pole, yard lights, you know. They'd all be on and yet the lights would be all over. Must have been quite a side. It was. It was really something, yeah. Because Audrey and I drive down to Alsace, you know. And late at night always when you're going there, you. you know, pretty well.

And there was lights in the whole country, and especially at harvest time, you know, you're combing lights on and everything. Yep. Okay, a final one, a fun one I like to do with all my guess, is if you had a time machine and you could go to one sit front row at any event, where would you go, which event in history?

Ha ha. You mean a sport, anything you mean? Anything. You take me wherever you want to go aside. Oh, well, I've been there before, but I'd go back down and watch a Blue J game, and we might do that this summer. Yeah? Yeah. Would you go to the one where they win?

Oh, it don't matter. Okay. Well, I think that we, if you had a time machine, you can go to a Blue Jays game. That's what you're saying? Yeah. So you might as well go and see the one where they win it? Yeah, don't. How the hell do you know who's going to, if they're going to win or not?

Well, that's the lovely thing about a time machine. You can go to the exact day. Oh, a time machine. Yeah, I suppose, eh? Never thought of that. Yeah, time machine. Go to wherever you want. You go to a Blue Jays game.

Because that's what I mean. You can go as far back in history as you want. You can go wherever you want. No. No. That's not right. I always wanted to go to Vimy. And I have no idea why I didn't go.

My son just went to Vimy. And I couldn't believe it when he said he was going to go to Vimy. Because he never seemed like he was interested in anything as far as me being in the service at all. And he said to me, do you want to go to Vimy? Yeah, I would like to go to Vimy. But I don't think I could if I was going myself, you know, but Irene has trouble walking. She don't like to admit it. And there's quite a bit of walking if you go to Vimmy.

So I haven't. If I had that thing, I would go to Vimy and I'd go back over to my brother's grave. My brother's buried in Harlingen. It's up in Northern Holland. He was shot down there by a night fighter over the island of Texel. And it's amazing how the Dutch people knew what the hell was going on at night. They knew that my brother had been shot down over there. He was the only one, his body was the only one that, and it washed across the Ziderzee.

About 10 days later they picked up my brother's body on the shore. And, well, you know what kind of shape you'd be in, you know. And he's buried in the little soldier's plot like. like we have out here at the cemetery, in the Municipal Cemetery at Harlingen, H-A-A-R. They have a way of saying that double A like, but H-A-R, L-I-N-G-E and Harlingen. And Audrey and I went over

and stayed with host families over there. We were able to go because the Legion, the War Graves Commission and the Dutch people made it monetarily available to Canadians who they give credit for their freedom. We went up there, he took us up, drove us up to Harlingen, and we met the people that look after my brother's grave. We met them, we took them out for brunch. And they assured us that my brother's grave would be looked after by their families down through the ears. And there's not a bleed grass out of place in that. On my brother's grave, or all of them that are in there.

There's quite a few in it. But it's amazing how we walked in and we didn't know where it was. you know, so I thought maybe we'd find the guy that was looking after the place, you know, they're usually a guy like we do here in the summertime. And there was a little short Dutchman and finally cornered him way over there and was able to converse enough.

Ah, Canada said, yeah. And he said, ah, I thought so, your voice. I said, my brother, Donald Edward, yeah, come. So he takes me over. He said, it's down that road there. Yeah. And so I took his picture. And then those days, when you sent their film in to get it developed,

it would come back about this big. But on the side was another small picture, just a little one, the same picture. So my brother was going over to see, his son was over at Lara, Germany in the Air Force. And this is my brother, the other brother, you know. And so he was going up there. So I said, here, I give you this picture. This is about five years later. Take this picture and see if this little guy is still working there.

my brother went in and he found him and he walks over and he said ah he showed him his picture his picture he said ak kambo from canada that's how much they think of Canadians like he could have just forgot that you know if that had been American he wouldn't even talk to you you know but and my sister went over another well it's only about three years later and same thing yeah he knew she was my brother's sister yeah amazing well i really really appreciate you taking the time i hate to i'd probably keep you here

until eight o'clock at night but i got to get you fed here at some time yeah well that's really something that's that really choked me up to go and see my brother's grave. We were closer together than my older brother. He was away working, you know, before my brother, Don, he had, I don't know what color hair. It's brown and yet it's like a burgundy, you know, you might call it. But at a temporary and freckles fight, loved fight.

fight. In fact, the last time my brother, they got together over there. Before I got over there, they'd been into town and they got on two buses coming home in this R.A.F. Airdrope. And his brother didn't come and he'd seen

him in bed the next morning. That's the last he'd seen him in Jesus. His eyes were black and yeah, he had the hell beat out of him. Yeah, he got fooled around and he took about five guys on, and he said to Fred. Yeah, I took three of them down.

That's the last, my brother saw them. He took three of them down. Jesus. Friends, you know, he's in bad shape. Yeah. But those people, yeah, they, That was really something to take care of my brother's grave. Yeah.

I'd like to go to Vimy. I have a feeling I'd take my other son from Hedry. Just the two of us go. Irene would probably leave me. But that's it. Thanks again, Sigh. Okay. Hey, guys.

I hope you enjoyed, Sai. I just want to thank Sy for coming on. That was for him to talk about World War II and open up like that.

It's, you just don't get conversation like that. Well, maybe never in a lifetime nowadays. But I really appreciate Cy coming in and some stories

and how things were back then. Next week, I have Jackson Kaluwski and Bryce Kindop. Bryce plays for the Everett Silver Tips and Jackson plays for the Seattle Thunderbirds. They're going to talk about growing up in the city of Lloyd. They were on the same team that went to the Tulles Cup

and Midget AAA, and then what it took to get to the Western Hockey League, what they do in the offseason, their training, and just some other cool stuff about two young kids playing hockey still. So tune in next week. We'll see you then. Thank you.