Shoebox opens a window on the past
An unexpected photo of his father in his younger days the highlight of treasures unearthed by son
I came to call it the Eclectic Shoebox.
The things in it have little in common other than they were shoved inside a box from Browns Shoes until a rainy day, when I could sort through them. Ha! There’ve been plenty of rainy days over the years; it took a pandemic for me to blow the dust off and look inside.
It was like finding a pirate’s buried chest: The sweetest Father’s Day cards from my son; photos of him and me when he was a baby and toddler; a cartoon by former Province political doodler Bob Krieger of my then-wife Lynn and our boy.
There was an outstanding folder of 1930s postcards from Washington D.C.; dozens of press passes, from the 1991 Molson Indy Vancouver to the 2019 election-night reception for federal NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh.
But it was the old photos of my folks that were the treasure in this cardboard chest.
Many I was familiar with, especially the photos of the wedding of my parents, Don and Marg, in 1957 at the Watrous, Sask., United Church.
There were some rarer ones of my mom’s mom Mabel, who died before I was born, and mom’s dad Sandy, who died soon after I was born.
Sandy had been a homesteader before he accidentally shot his thumb and two fingers off his left hand while reaching for his shotgun. He went back to school, became a lawyer, then became mayor of Watrous, a bustling railway hub three miles from the popular saltwater-lake resort of Manitou Beach.
Sandy’s farmhouse became Gordon’s Inn after he pulled it by horse and sled across the frozen lake one winter around 1904 and set it down beachfront at Manitou. It was the cottage in which I spent pretty much every single summer day of my boyhood.
Photos of Fannie, my dad’s mom who died when I was four, and whom I recollect visiting at her Avenue D home in Saskatoon; dad’s dad Harry, from whom I get my middle name, and who died when I was 10.
But that’s all nostalgia.
What was new, what made me do a double-take and say ‘Wow!’ was a portrait of my dad I’d never seen in my life until I pulled a yellowed envelope out of that shoebox.
“He belongs in a Fellini movie,” Lynn said when I texted her the image.
Styling glasses, cigarette held like he’s James Bond at the baccarat table, Clark Gable ’stache. Could my dad have once been cool?
He had a pharmacy, Action Drugs, in Saskatoon’s blue-collar Mount Royal neighbourhood. It seemed every Christmas Day he’d get a phone call from someone who’d forgotten to get their prescription filled, throw on his winter coat and overshoes, head to the store and then deliver the pills.
“I loved your dad,” a stranger wrote me a few days ago on a Facebook page for people who grew up in Saskatoon. “He was our family pharmacist for decades.
“Every time we had to get a prescription filled it would take an hour: 20 minutes to get it filled and 40 minutes of our dads shooting the breeze with each other ... lol.”
It’s one of many tender notes I’ve received after posting something about my dad on social media. He touched a lot of lives.
I’d once seen a photo of dad in his early 20s, when he was serving in Sicily: It was photographed from behind while he did a handstand, muscles rippling across his back and shoulders. That was a surprise because, like me now, he was pudgy in middle age.
This ‘Fellini’ photo, though, was a shocker. I’d only ever known dad to dress like a pharmacist and a Rotarian. But then, what would my son make of those photos of me from the 1970s and ‘80s that were also in that box?
Growing up, I took dad for granted, I think, as perhaps sons tend to: An ashtray or Mennen aftershave for Father’s Day; I had trouble remembering if his birthday was the 20th or 22nd. Or maybe the 23rd.
I got to know more about him after my own son was born, asked my dad more questions. But always through the lens of being his son.
It’s nice to see these photos, especially the ‘Fellini,’ and it’s nice to hear from those people who knew him.
It’s nice to remember the sacrifices he made, and to be reminded he was more than ‘just’ my dad.
(The writer’s mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s when he was in his 20s and died in 1991; his father died in 2013 at age 90.)