As Flin Flonners prepare to welcome a new Co-op store along Highway 10A, we are also about to bid farewell to a true northern Manitoba landmark.
The pending demolition of the former armoury building will forever alter the look and feel of our community.
For nearly 60 years, the armoury, with its hardy brick exterior and rippled-metal dome, has been one of the first things people see when driving into
Flin Flon.
I have always had a special connection to the armoury for not one, not two, but three reasons.
When I was a kid, my dad, Morley, was the major at the military reserve unit then based in the building. I was a
Flin Flon version of an army brat, running through the armoury’s white-walled hallways with friends and sipping on “swamp water” we brewed by mixing Pepsi, Orange Crush and Dr. Pepper at the soda fountain.
Each Christmas I looked forward to Santa visiting the armoury, inviting us little ones onto his lap. I’d nervously wait my turn, admiring the gorgeous leather chair on which he was perched. One year I was too shy to say what I wanted out loud, so I whispered it to him. He smiled.
When I was a bit older, Dad and I would venture over to the armoury after-hours to shoot some pool on the pool table. For some reason I was really into pool and darts toward the end of elementary school, and the armoury became something of a playground for me.
After the federal government shut down the armoury – northern Manitoba’s only military complex – in 1996, I thought I had seen the last of the building.
But a couple of years later, my academic credits all out of whack, I found myself returning to the armoury as a high school student at Many Faces Education Centre.
It was such a nostalgic feeling to be back at the armoury. The school division’s efforts to convert the building into a learning institution could not camouflage the many familiar nooks and crannies from my childhood.
Just a couple of months after graduation, the armoury served its third incarnation in my life. I enrolled in university through the now-defunct Campus Manitoba program, which was based in a single classroom at the end of the building’s hallway.
The same room where I drank swamp water as a little kid, then studied Shakespeare in high school, became my university lecture hall. With the aid of technology, our small classes linked up to professors in Winnipeg and Brandon, as well as other distance-ed students across Manitoba.
I must hold some weird place in the history books for having a building in my life that at various times was my dad’s workplace, my playground, my high school and my university campus.
To make matters more interesting, I grew up about a four-minute walk from the place. How many people only have to walk four minutes to get to both high school and university? I always felt fortunate to be able to do that.
To most people the armoury was that brick building on the way into town, but to me it was a second home, a site of my transition from childhood to adulthood. I’ll miss it.
Local Angle is published on Fridays.
