Nostalgia runs deep throughout Flin Flon and area.
Tales of yesteryear – of a first date at Milt’s Sweet Shop here or a Memorial Cup win there – are an ingrained part of our culture.
Heck, our hockey team’s 1957 national championship victory formed the basis of a Flin Flon Community Choir musical, Bombertown – my favourite production of theirs, incidentally.
As someone who came along long after the Baby Boom, I am often fascinated to hear about the way things used to be in
Flin Flon.
Just recently I read about a mock Nazi occupation of our community, held in 1942. It was meant to simulate how Manitoba, including Flin Flon, would surrender to the Germans if need be. The one-day exercise went so far as to place Flin Flon city hall under the “occupation” of “enemy forces.”
The mock surrender may have been well intentioned. Maybe officials really believed there was a serious chance Hitler would invade Flin Flon.
Or perhaps it was a government propaganda exercise designed to boost military recruitment, a veiled dose of “sign up to serve your country or this is what happens!” Knowing what I know of the era, and how populaces throughout history have been frightened into supporting war efforts, this possibility sounds more likely.
Can you imagine that happening today? Can you picture actors dressed as Taliban soldiers descending on city hall during Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan? People would balk. It would be seen as ridiculous. And so I’m pretty sure we’ve seen the last mock invasion of Flin Flon.
If you talk to Flin Flon’s oldtimers, many lament the watering down of disciplinary standards at our schools. A common observation: “Kids just need a good smack today.”
Is it really that simple? I’m reminded of a former Flin Flonner I interviewed several years ago. He spoke of a local teacher he said had repeatedly hit him in class when he attended high school
decades earlier.
The man was still very angry, perhaps traumatized. From hearing about his life, it sure didn’t sound like “a good smack” had instilled anything positive within him. In fact, the opposite seemed true.
How many parents today would feel comfortable having a teacher dole out physical punishment to their child? I certainly wouldn’t. Times have really changed.
A more recent example of “I can’t believe they used to do that” is the now-defunct Hudbay copper smelter, whose emissions once billowed from the tip of the smoke stack.
After the smelter stopped puffing in 2010, a friend told me he was surprised that so much air pollution had persisted for so long in our area.
To be clear, smelter emissions complied with health regulations of the day. Nevertheless, my friend made a comment to the effect of, “People will look back on this time and say, ‘They really used to breathe that stuff in?
Until 2010?’”
I grew up knowing smelter smoke as a fact of life. I thought every town had it in their core areas.
Yet I must say my friend was probably right. When you’re living in a particular era yourself, you don’t always recognize how societal realities of the day will come to be viewed in hindsight.
Mock invasions. Teachers who hit. Clouds of toxins in the sky. All are now part of the way things used to be, and we’re better off for it.
Local Angle is published on Fridays.
