Might as well begin at the beginning.
In the beginning, I was born at the Flin Flon General Hospital at 3:55 pm on June 8, 1940. Attending physician: Dr. Percy Johnson. I have no conscious awareness of this event.
My mother, Rachel, following a few days of respite, then picked up her bundle of joy and carried it – that would have been me – from the maternity ward, down to the main floor and out what was then the main entrance on the north end of the hospital.
Thus I entered the world of life and living in Flin Flon.
This scenario played out in my mind just last week when I was visiting my old hometown and wandered over to take a look at the current construction site. The usual hospital entrance has been obliterated and I was directed to the old entrance where I had made my first appearance so many years ago. This being only the second time in my life that I had been in the hospital.
My real intent was to find a window from which I could catch a good view of the new construction. That may appear to be a practical reason, but the underlying purpose was to see what changes had been inflicted on my childhood day’s environment.
You see, my mother’s journey from the hospital to home was a short walk down the steps in front of St. Ann’s church, cross the street and then walk half a block up Church Street to the little house (#43) that still hangs onto the side of a rock.
This was my home. This was my neighbourhood. I was a Church Street kid – an Uptown kid.
There are those who may dispute my claim that this was the best location in Flin Flon, but allow me to take you back to the times of the 1940s and ’50s and illustrate just how great a place is was.
Cross the street and behind the hospital stood Main School. The school grounds. The Scout Hall. The high sewer box. The HBM&S playground. The Rink.
Cross the back land and there’s Main Street. Walk two blocks north to the Community Hall and one block south to the Saskatchewan border, where we boys would play “pretend driving” in the old cars at Cardell Motors. We had it all.
I found the window in a reception area on the third floor. A hole. Blasted rock. Foundation forms, rebar, workers and equipment. Nothing is easy to build on the rocks. I gazed around and tried to imagine the scene from my childhood.
Only two of the original houses on that side of the street remain. Mrs. Howatt’s house was moved away in the early ’50s to make way for the first addition to the hospital.
The BIG apartment house at 40 Church – four storeys of it – gone, the Keddie house, gone, the duplex next door, gone, the apartment house south of that, gone. The Comeau apartment house so far given a reprieve, the two-storey duplex next to that gone. And the tiny Spencer house at the end of the block holding on to life for just a little bit longer.
Where stands the present new wing of the hospital once stood Main School. In my time, a grade 1 to 6 elementary school with Mr. Steve Klym as principal. Lynch, Kuntz, Baldwin, Wood, Ruckle, Ross, Johnson.
Where the most current almost-demolished parking lot is located was once a ball diamond. Where there’s a gaping hole was once the location of a set of swings (with head-clunking wooden seats suspended on HBM&S industrial-strength chains) and a sandbox of sorts.
A bit further south was the Scout Hall – which had once been a one-room school after being moved from the mine site where it was originally built as an assay lab.
I tried to conjure up the memory of the sights and sounds of a schoolyard full of children, miners’ kids mostly – though several of the Church Street kids’ fathers were involved in retail business and service owning to our proximity to Main Street.
Oh yes, the schoolyard before school and during recess – the grades playing in their unofficially proclaimed territories and then gathering at one of the three assigned doorways upon hearing the ringing of the big school bell.
Standing in lines. Lines of girls and lines of boys. No one could enter the school without first standing in line.
“Excuse me sir, are you waiting to see a doctor?”
“No. No, I am just looking at…the construction.”
I made my way to the ground floor and out the door – just as my mother had.
Vincent Murphy-Dodds is a former Flin Flon resident. His column appears the first Friday of the month.
