At Work Upstairs

I’ve been preoccupied with school these last months: going back to school after a long absence is hard work. Doable and satisfying but hard work.

My grandmother, my mother, and my aunt

My plans to visit my mother every couple of weeks fell apart in October and I’m not sure how to fix that in the winter term.  She’s living in an assisted living facility sixty miles away and I travel by bus. To visit her, I leave the apartment at about 10:30 in the morning and get back at about 7. The visit itself is about two hours: longer than that is too tiring for her.

I spend a lot of time in waiting rooms trying not to think about the many ways in which she is disappearing.

The other day she was delighting in a cat calendar which she probably bought as a gift for me. She can’t really read a calendar anymore: she’s unmoored in time.

Each time she sees that cat calendar it’s fresh and new to her: she rediscovered it three or four times over the course of my visit. And each time I got to see that giggle you can see in the photograph just behind the cat.

She’s disappearing but she is still there.

I’m not a historian by training so when I read histories I find myself swinging wildly between grasping the overall flow of events and hunting out tiny details.  This makes reading books like Michael Petrou’s Renegades: Canadians in the Spanish Civil War especially pleasurable.

On the one hand reading Petrou’s meticulously documented account reveals the vistas of my ignorance—take Morocco, for example. I had no idea that Franco’s coup began in Morocco and that many of the Nationalist troops were from North Africa.  I was also surprised, but probably shouldn’t have been, to learn that much of the Spanish Civil War was trench warfare. Being sent into an International Brigades disciplinary unit (euphemistically referred to an engineering, fortification, or labour battalion) meant night work repairing often too shallow trenches and a very high casualty rate. Hard to tell if disappearing into one of the Republicans’ secret, extra-legal prisons—Prevention Houses—was a worse fate. Hugh Garner ended up in a labour batallion for attempted desertion but accusations of Trotskyism could also have near fatal results.

Detail from photo taken near Teruel, probably in January or February 1938

On the other end of the scale, there are tiny details derive ultimately from Petrou’s work with Comintern records and in other archives.

Petrou’s research turned up this photo from the Imperial War Museum—an ambulance named after Tom Ewen (also known as Tom McEwen), father of Jean and of two sons who fought in Spain.

It also turns out that Stewart “Paddy” O’Neil—one of the leaders of the On-to-Ottawa Trek—was born Stewart Homer. (He died on July 6, 1937 during the Brunette offensive.)

Like O’Neil many of the Canadians fighting in the International Brigades had spent the early 30s as itinerant workers and logged time in Bennett’s work camps. Having lived rough for many years, the Canadians were unlikely to leave their bedrolls or shovels behind because they were too heavy. They left that particular mistake to those they dismissed as “New York ice cream boys”. Not surprisingly the American and Comintern officers of the International Brigades thought the Canadians had an attitude problem.

Over the last three years or so I’ve become interested in the people whose lives were shaped by the Communist Party of Canada (CPC). (Three shelves of books dealing with Edwardian Antarctic endeavours testify to my attraction to somewhat obscure bits of history).

Doug Smith’s Zuken: Citizen and Socialist lacks of notes and bibliography but it filled in a few gaps in my understanding of Winnipeg history and the lives of a few people involved in the mid-20th century CPC.

Joe Zuken, a lawyer and CPC member, was a long-time Winnipeg school board and city council member. What’s stuck with me the most is Zuken’s work in defending the people arrested in 1940 under the Defence of Canada Act Regulations. Passed in September 1939  (and subsequently revised to limit some of its draconian measures), the Act permitted the arrest and indefinite detention of people perceived to be a threat to national security.  The state swung the net wide and caught up members of political, religious, and ethnic groups. Many of those detained did not go through any formal court process (most notably Japanese Canadians).

Those that did go through the court system found the process lacking in a few niceties. Those passing through R.B. Graham’s court in Winnipeg discovered that the judge had a habit of sentencing people in public court to jail time and then when the paperwork was being drawn up adding an additional qualification of hard labour. Tom McEwen was one of those sentenced in November 1940 to this combination of jail time and hard labour.

Joe Zuken in 1940

Graham’s hard labour additions led to legal challenges, not the least of which was that the Defence of Canada Act didn’t have provisions for hard labour.  Graham’s sentencing practices were curtailed but Joe Zuken, acting as McEwen’s lawyer, did some diligent legwork and discovered that Graham and jail officials had tried to tidy up after themselves by crossing out the phrase “hard labour” in one or more copies of the warrants that sent McEwen to jail. Worse the warrants would sometimes be re-typed to remove the offensive, extra-legal sentence of hard labour.

Zuken’s persistence led to the September 1941 filing of a writ of habeas corpus for McEwen.  After a period of judical review, McEwen was released in October 1941. He was free the length of time it took to walk out the door of the Headingley Jail.

The RCMP immediately detained him and interned him first in Petawawa and then in the Hull Jail before the shifts the war led to a release of most of the Canadians interned for being Communists.

I’m trying to wean myself off of murder mysteries. For years they’ve been at the heart of the bulk reading I use to cope with stress.

Photo: xxrobot

I started reading mysteries in graduate school. Mysteries stood outside the prescribed reading routine and were something I could enjoy without having to be too serious or analytical about the texts. Other popular genres didn’t appeal.

I’d had my fill of popular novels dominated by romance plots in my adolescence when I read my mother’s copies of Helen MacInnes, Jean Plaidy, Mary Renault, and others. Science fiction didn’t attract me strongly since the technology-dominated and hyper-masculine stories were off-putting.

I was too stubbornly interested in rationality and realistic plots to be able to suspend disbelief and enjoy fantasy novels.  Mystery novels, though, suited me: mostly realistic, plot-driven, puzzle-based, and, if I chose carefully, strong female characters.

My pattern in television watching was much the same, with a larger dose of science fiction and fantasy given the company I keep. That started to shift earlier this year as we were getting ready to put the television away for several months. Often I’d catch myself noticing that I was only watching a murder mystery because I was bored.

A common enough experience but one day I stopped long enough in the noticing to ask myself what exactly was entertaining about watching fictions founded on watching someone’s pain. To relieve boredom I was treating cruelty and death and assault as a form of entertainment.

The television’s been packed away for many months now. Occasionally in a fit of frustration or boredom I’ll watch a crime show online but I’ve more or less eliminated the genre from my view.  Reading material is a different matter and I’m making much slower progress there.

Last year’s reading total was made up of 18% mysteries. This year I’m looking at 21% so far.  The reason’s not hard to discern: at the library my hand still goes to formulaic mystery novels. The branch I use has a large mystery collection, a good-sized romance collection, and a smaller collection of literary fiction: that’s what suits the majority of its users.

I’m not sure what I’ll shift to for light reading. Romance novels and plots still don’t interest me much. Not interested in adding more fear into my life with horror fiction. I’m more open to fantasy than I once was and I’m slowing reading through Terry Pratchett—slowly because I am going to run out soon. I’m not particularly drawn to vampire/werewolf/zombie fiction. Military or imperialistic fantasies disguised as space opera won’t do it for me. Short stories are, well, too short.

I’m difficult.

And in need of reading suggestions. Basic requirements: light reading that passes the Bechdel test, has a good plot that doesn’t pose marriage as the solution to the characters situations, and doesn’t position conquest, pain, or death as the key entertainment. Bonus points for comedy.

Institutional repositories have a mixed reputation and success levels and many of the difficulties Dorothea Salo outlined a couple of years ago are sadly familiar anyone who has worked in corporate digital publishing. New publishing systems are over-hyped, users are generally under trained, and disappointment always follows the expectations that content owners will maintain their own documents through a full life cycle. And let’s not talk about metadata much less file-naming conventions cause I might have flashbacks.

All the same, I confess a nerdy delight in sites like the Theses Canada, especially since it’s easy to identify which items come with downloadable files.  Reading the first chapter or two of a thesis can quickly give me a sense of the major arguments in a field and a list of  key texts I should work through.

My most recent IR find is from Simon Fraser where I was able to read a recent MA thesis by Anne Toews on Annie Buller and Beckie Buhay’s friendship (pdf).

Beckie Buhay (l) and Annie Buller (r) in the mid 1920s

Buller and Buhay were key figures in the early- to mid-twentieth century Canadian Communist Party (seen here sometime before 1929 in an image cropped from a Buller biography once downloadable from Progress Books).  References to their organization, writing, and management work are scattered throughout most accounts of the period. Detailed information that both places them and their friendship in context and adds  accurate information grounded in the historical record is much harder to find.

The combination of Google and Simon Fraser’s IR made it extraordinarily easy for me to find Toews’ work. And since Toews’ has done significant archival work, someday, if I find myself shaping a curiosity into a larger project, I’ll be able to find key records. That’s no a small thing when you’re interested in rather obscure topics.

There’s more work to be done of course—I still have lots of questions about Buhay—much I’m happy and grateful to have found and read Toews work.

Seventy-five years ago today, the leaders of the On to Ottawa Trek got on the evening train in Regina heading towards a meeting with an intractable R. B. Bennett.

Arthur Evans (2nd from left), Mike McCauley, James "Red" Walsh, Robert "Doc" Savage, Peter Neilson, Stewart "Paddy" O'Neil, Tony Martin, Jack Cosgrove (source: On to Ottawa Historical Society)

Not quite three days later, they arrived in Ottawa and cooled their heels at the Keewatin Hotel. This hotel is long gone but used to stand around the corner from the train station on Sussex South, roughly above the overpass that until recently was a good spot for sleeping rough in Ottawa.

The trekkers filled the time until their Saturday meeting with Bennett and his cabinet with meetings with representatives from various work camps, including the Rockcliffe camp (DND Work Camp Project 27 PDF).

Not surprisingly, the meeting with Bennett did not go well and quickly degenerated into insults of one sort or another. Bennett didn’t take kindly to be asked if he’d ever slept in a tar paper shack or eaten work camp food. Evans didn’t take kindly to being called a jailbird. Matters went downhill fast.

The Trekkers withdrew and help a rally at the Rialto Theatre on Bank Street where they called for a National Trek.  The Trekkers primary audience would have been comfortable at the Rialto which was located between Waverly and Frank. Refurbished in 1932 with a small neon sign, a cream and gold interior it sat 485 people. It owner at the time, A. Levinson, once remarked “I’m not selling movies, I’m selling a heated sheltered park bench for a dime” (See A Theatre Near You).  Since then the Rialto’s gone through multiple incarnations from seamy to high brow (see recent account for a sense of the streetscape then and now; and for oddly comic view, see an Ottawa Citizen piece on the Rialto’s reincarnation as an art house.)

Unmourned by the good burghers of Ottawa, the Trekkers retreated to Regina. The Trek ended badly but contributed to Bennett’s electoral defeat and the closure of the work camps. The Trekkers delegates went on with their lives. Walsh and Martin spent time in Spanish POW camps; O’Neil and Neilson died in Spain; Savage spent time in the merchant marine; Cosgrove and McCauley drop out of sight; and Evans carries on with his union and political work.

There are few left now who have first hand experience with the 1935 Trek.

CC licence

Most of the people who signed the title page of Arthur Evans’ biography are gone now but the anniversary of their efforts is reconfigured in a new trek to Ottawa in protest of homelessness.

Amazing what a slight shift in life circumstances can do for your perspective. This morning’s tech column on the radio was a near paen to Mastercard’s SmartCards

The combination of keyboard and online connectivity are being marketed as a method of reducing credit card fraud.  When a button on the card is pushed, the card produces a unique password that can be used once.

Passing over the inherent surveillance possibilities, I’m struck by a couple of accessibility problems with this type of device.

The teensy keyboard looks like it would be fertile ground for typos and frustration for anyone with the dexterity issues posed by garden variety changes that come with age.

More problematically the conceit of the card also relies on an invisible resource: the card holder’s short term memory.  The ability to remember patterned information (such as a phone number) diminishes with dementia and the likelihood that someone with even a mild memory problem will recall a random string of digits is small.  (Password systems in general wildly over-estimate people’s ability to remember random strings: there’s a reason why people hoard passwords on paper.)

A card such as this may indeed become part of a cashless society but it would also be a source of additional (and unneeded) frustration for people with less than obvious limitations.

Links:

• Credit card details and a press release
• Radio show
• Basic information about dementia in Canada

After the mad rush of house prep and sale (5 weeks end to end), we’ve entered a new stage of waiting. Since selling the house we’ve dashed to Halifax to find an apartment and returned with a lease in hand. We’ll be moving into a medium-sized apartment in a low-rise building on the north-west corner of the Commons. We’ll be on a well-travelled bus route but close enough to work, school, and shopping that we’ll be able to walk to most places.

While we’re still trundling things to the charity shop, this is an oddly idle time. The stoved-in garden shed is gone. The movers are booked. Furniture has gone to new homes. Spring yardwork is done. Utility cancellations are scheduled. Boxes arrive later this week. Each task completed inches us away from this house.

Soon enough the new owners will arrive and with a bit of weather luck they’ll arrive when the peonies are blooming and the house will have its first toddler of this century. I think she’ll like the echoes the place makes when it’s empty and she’ll soon figure out which of the fireplace tiles makes a satisfying clonk clonk sound.

I’m learning that selling a house has two major phases: the somewhat mad scramble to get ready and the somewhat maddening waiting as people look things over.

The first phase went quickly enough despite the miles and miles of baseboards that grew in the night and needed fresh paint in the morning.  Though I might have, well, did grumble at the process, it had its own satisfactions and was easy to measure: this much paint applied, these many books cleared away, and that much floor space revealed. All visible changes and all very much controllable.

The second phase is moving along as dozens of people troop through the house hoping it’s the right place for them, imagining their things in rooms that still hold a lot of signs of us, and if they look closely enough, the four families who lived here before us: Hoeys, Hicks, Petits, and Gomery-Powells.

The clearest signs come from the Gomery-Powells and the Petits though their colour palettes of green and beige have vanished under our yellows. The Hicks, we think, were the family that severed the land making way for our neighbours’ bungalow. The Hoeys were here from 1914 through the second world war when the house (with, yes, one bathroom) held seven adults during Ottawa’s wartime housing shortage. During the Hoeys time there were lilacs lining the back yard, peonies along the sunny side of the house, and a well out back where a maple tree now stands. The Hoeys and maybe the Hicks were here when there was a marshy area just beyond the dogleg in the road.

This is the hard phase of selling, with unsatisfying measures of progress: this many people at an open house, this many first showings, this many second showing, this many bookings coming up.  Very little remains in our immediate control as we can’t magic up a second bathroom, make the basement deeper, or get rid of the small apartment building you can see from the back porch. And much as I wish it, it’s hard to make people instantly love this old, well-loved, and well-used house but soon enough there will be lilacs,  bleeding hearts, forget-me-nots, and peonies.

When I was a kid the end of August brought the horror of new school shoes, the pleasures of new school clothes, and the excitement of the Provincial Exhibition.

Source: Lester Public Library

The Exhibition with its fancy poultry barns, pie booths, and midway was held in the neighbouring village: a little too far to walk when I was a kid but only a ten-minute ride in the car once we were all rounded up.

Perpetually denied candy floss, my favourite thing at the Ex was always the Tilt-a-Whirl.

We’re shaking things up chez nous. We’re selling our house, moving to Halifax, going to school (me) and finding a new job (him).

I’m alternately very excited about the prospects and nauseous: an oddly familiar feeling.