Memories of Kampe’s parents

Jake Kimberley Penticton Dear Editor: I read with interest and approval that the new Penticton Regional Hospital Tower is to be named for David Kampe (Okanagan Saturday, March 4). It brought back a flood of memories to me because the name of Kampe is linked in my memory to the time I arrived in Summerland in August 1946.

I was a 22-year-old war bride. I came straight from a bombed city in the U.K. with service in the Auxiliary Territorial Service stationed on Salisbury Plain and married to a Canadian from the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion. And I came to Summerland. I found it difficult to understand why my husband’s family only took Saturday late day off to go down town where the community seemed to congregate and shop on that dusty, hot street once a week. But it was August and everyone worked the orchards daylight to dark seven days a week with a meager return and no safety nets to help them survive.

The words used in the newspaper account described the Kampe family as “living in poverty” — and it was for them and for many in the Okanagan. In the immediate post-WWII period and for several years after, most families were living, much like the Kampes — fortunate to have a house often with plywood partitions but otherwise unfinished.

To purchase the necessities of equipping a post-war home was difficult. To acquire a brand new bathtub or a toilet, it was an achievement.

No refrigerators. Air conditioning — lucky you if you had a mature tree shading your house! And the summers were hot! Making a living from an orchard with very