A park warden’s daughter
A life rich with adventure remembered
Eleanor Suddaby sits across from me at a table in Calgary’s historic Heritage Park. Her eyes impart a sense of adventure as she shares a part of her family story that will be passed onto her children and her grandchildren.
Growing up between a mountain life and a prairie life, Eleanor Suddaby lived a rare childhood, which has influenced her to this day. The Dirty ’30s were ending, and it was the beginning of Second World War. Eleanor didn’t know it at the time when she was born in Calgary on May 15, 1940, but she had a family rich with a history of pioneering, homesteading and mountaineering.
Eleanor’s father, Elmer Jamieson, was born in 1903 to Dr. George Jamieson, a veterinarian, and Esther Jamieson. Elmer shared his father’s grit and his love of horses. Eleanor’s father spent his early years refining his skills as a saddle bronc rider in regional rodeos, including the Calgary Stampede, ranching, and on roundups in the Cypress Hills.
Elmer was one of the 17 Canadian cowboys chosen to compete in the world’s first international rodeo that was held at London’s Wembley Stadium. He and three other cowboys rode the rails across Canada as they cared for the 150 steers travelling to Montreal with a final destination of England.
The crowd at the newly finished Wembley Stadium must have held its collective breath when Elmer was the first cowboy to find himself busting out of a chute hanging onto a bronc called Teacup to the roar of 127,000 people cheering him on for the ride of his life.
In 1938, Elmer married Viola Massey. Their son George was born in 1939, followed by daughter Eleanor in 1940. Eleanor’s roots ran deep with homesteading, but her early childhood surroundings were the mountains and peaks. And for the next seven years of her life, Eleanor shared a love of the mountains with her dad when he joined Yoho Provincial Park’s Warden Department in 1942. There they led an unusual life in a little log house covered with vines at Wapta Lake, two miles over the Great Divide.
At the time, it was an isolated living. The Trans Canada Highway was not completed, and the gravel road was closed from October to May. Besides skiing and snowshoeing, flagging down a train was the only way to get in and out during the winter.
Eleanor looks into the distance as she recalls, “We were way out in the wilderness, and there was nothing except the railway. The section men (the men who kept the railway clear) and their wives were the only people we saw.
“It was very isolated. My dad would be away a lot, and he had a radio that he could hook into telephone lines and call home on nights when he would be looking for skiers or lost climbers, or hunting down troublesome grizzlies or bears. Mom would keep us up late to keep her awake while she waited for his call to relay messages to other wardens if needed. The whole family was really quite involved in the life of a park warden.”
Being so isolated also meant medical care was hard to access, and accidents were dealt with and treated with whatever was on hand. Elmer Jamieson had all his dad’s veterinary equipment to doctor ani- mals, and he also put them to good use on his family. One winter he ended up stitching Eleanor’s head, using icicles for freezing.
Growing up, Eleanor and George were kept busy measuring snow depths for estimating snow for spring runoff, shaking trees to dislodge bugs for early environmental studies, going to the lookouts, riding horseback, picking berries and also stopping road traffic when the gravel road and train tracks were taken out by snow and mudslides.
“My mom was in her early 20s and my dad had trained her to be a very good shot. Naturally she had to be, because my dad was away a lot. I remember when my mother shot a bear through the screen door. The bear kept hanging around the house, looking through the windows, and he would rise up on his hind legs and tower over the door frame. When my dad came home he saw a big mound of black bear, and he said to my mother, “Viola, it is my job to protect the animals,” and she replied, “And it’s my job to protect the children.”
But Eleanor also got into her fair share of trouble as well. In the wintertime, the snow was extremely deep and heavy, often having to be sawed off in chunks from the roofs so they wouldn’t collapse.
“One day, hoping to stay warm, we hauled wood onto the roof from the woodpile and dropped individual pieces down the chimney. We soon had flames reaching several feet above the roof. My mom and aunt were in the house happy to have a few minutes break from us kids, when they noticed the house getting very warm. They shut all the chimney dampers, and still the chimney and pipes were red hot. We kids were terrified by this time. When the women figured out what was going on, they put out the fire by dumping a winter supply of salt down the chimney. How we managed not to burn the house down is still a mystery.”
Eleanor gives a laugh and says, “We were in trouble a lot. I don‘t remember the consequences, but they probably weren’t all that bad. We were all alive, and that was the main thing.”
For her early years of education, Grade 1 and Grade 2, mom Viola taught her at the kitchen table.
“My brother and I were taking correspondence lessons that would be sent out to be marked as there was no school, of course,” she laughs out loud, “we had recesses, Mom ran a tight ship there.”
Inevitably, the children were growing up, and needed a proper education. This move marked the end of a memorable time of the whole family, living and working in Yoho National Park. The Jamieson family packed up and moved to a farm near Viking, 560 kilometres northeast, and attended rural school.
Farming and attending a country school was a huge change for Eleanor after her freedom in the mountains. They always had injured wild animals rescued from the train tracks, like bear cubs, young moose or deer from time to time living in their home in the Rockies. Now they had cows, sheep, and pigs to look after. Cleaning the barn, learning to drive horses, and feeding the thresher crews during harvesting had become the norm. Eleanor and George rode horseback to and from school on a white horse named Buster. Buster would lower his head, and they would sit on it one at a time and he would raise his head until they slid down his neck onto his back.
As for career choices, Eleanor saw her future picked out for her.
“I wanted to be a nurse. Well, what were your choices? You could be a secretary, nurse or teacher in those days,” she says with a chuckle.
In 1957 she worked as a secretary with the Canadian Department of Natural Resources. “There was actually a women who’s job was to stand at the back of the room to see if you threw out a lot of paper or made a lot of mistakes. And if you did, she would come up and check to see why you were throwing out a piece of paper.”
It was a short-lived job, and Eleanor was looking for a better match, and in one area of her life she found it.
During her prairie years, she grew up knowing Darrel Suddaby, who lived near Viking. But it wasn’t until graduation in Grade 12 that they started dating. On November 7, 1959, they were married and settled in Calgary.
“It was hard then for married women to find jobs because they thought if you were married, you would have a baby right away. When you went for a job interview, you had to get a medical examination. It was awful. It usually included an internal examination. And sometimes you had to go for the medical exam before you even had the job. I applied for a job through Manpower and they sent me to CBC for an interview for a clerk position. During the interview, I was asked how long I was going to work, and I had to sign a contract saying I would work for two years.”
Eleanor ended up working for CBC for 36 years and retired from her position as a production manager for CBC Newsworld in 1996.
Eleanor’s shared passion with her father for the mountains and a way of life will leave a winding legacy for the future generations, leading them to new paths. Her mother and father have passed on now, and are buried at the old Banff Cemetery. Finding New Trails is the epitaph on her father’s tombstone.