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Column T.W. Paterson: My readers speak out: foghorns to murder

What makes nostalgia so meaningful to so many?
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Mount Saint Helens erupted on May 18, 1980. (USGS photo)

By T.W. Paterson

What makes nostalgia so meaningful to so many?

One of the most gratifying returns of writing a newspaper column and a website/blog is the feedback: it’s almost constant, morale-sustaining and almost always fascinating.

Today, I thought I’d turn the tables around and share with you some recent “mail,” all of it in response to something I’ve written in the Citizen or on my website.

Of particular interest to some readers was one of my numerous reminiscences of growing up in the Swan Lake area of Saanich. Irene obviously identified with my childhood days as she wrote: “So many great memories on this page. I am so glad I was part of the 50s as I think it was the best decade ever.

“Great songs, bands, juke boxes, saddle oxfords, best school chums who are still friends today. Woodward[’s] store was the best; I still have an outfit I bought there that has never gone out of style… Thank you for the memories.” And thank you for sharing some of yours, Irene.

Wrote Iona: “That is exactly how I remember growing up in Victoria. Thanks for writing it. Would love to read more.”

Thomas, born in 1954, wrote that I described his growing up in Victoria “very well… I lived my youth with reckless abandon. All the things you described, and with the wonderment of a young mind where everything is new and exciting. I did not do well in school and was strapped every day…however, my lack of classes did not stop my education. I think it was Albert Einstein that said, ‘Don’t let schooling get in the way of your education,’ something like that.

“So growing up in Victoria, I feel privileged. I spent many, many hours in the Museums, that were free. And just wandering around the city and its coastline. I marveled at the architecture and the history and I think my education was just fine. So thank you for your memories. If I could go back to those simpler times, I would go in a Heart Beat.”

Ah yes, the good old days; too bad they’re not making them any more!

Roger wrote to say he’d like to read more such columns and King was a blast to the past, he being, like me, a Daily Colonist survivor; he as a sports writer, me as a flunky. He remembered my weekly articles in the weekend section, The Islander, bless him.

Wayne got straight to the point when he reminded me that I’d overlooked another unforgettable sound from childhood days in Victoria/Saanich (Citizen, Jan. 10, 2018): “The fog horn.”

Yes, the fog horns! Anyone old enough to hear one on a foggy night is truly blessed. What a unique sound — ooooom-pahhhhhh! — repeated over and over again with a long pause between. They were discontinued at B.C. lighthouses years ago but I recently had the joy of hearing one at Arbutus Ridge — on a ship inbound for Cowichan Bay. What a treat.

Wayne set me to thinking of another sound that, if not unique to Victoria, certainly was unusual. In the immediate post-Second World War years and the beginning of the Cold War, multi-engined bombers (I definitely remember Lancasters and cone-tailed Neptunes) would circle the city before heading out over Juan de Fuca Strait with a target drone trailing astern. Once well over the water, RCN ships from Esquimalt used them (the drones) for gunnery practice.

This drill, too, has gone by the wayside although I’ve had a single eerie reminder since. That was the Saturday morning that Mount St. Helens blew her top. While feeding my chickens at Cherry Point, I heard rumbling that went on for hours, just like the gunnery practice of old. It wasn’t until I heard the news about the eruption that I realized that the navy wasn’t back to firing at drones in the Strait.

It was Serena’s short email that gave me a glow. She was responding to my website post on Molly Justice. Molly was savagely murdered on the railway tracks by my home before I was born but she’s very special to me. She was my Aunt Ada’s best friend, the namesake for my cousin Molly, and until her death in 1989 my grandmother Ellen Green ran a memoriam ad in the Colonist, “In loving memory of Molly Justice…”

Coincidentally, Jan. 18 was the 75th anniversary of Molly’s murder where Darwin Road crosses the CNR railway tracks in Saanich, now the Galloping Goose Trail. Wrote Serena: “I stop at the CNR grade at the end of every workday and imagine she is peering at me with a smile from beyond some nearby trees. I ride the Galloping Goose at night in that area and like to think she is watching over me…”

To my mind, to be murdered then forgotten is the cruellest double jeopardy and I’ve endeavoured since I became a professional writer to keep Molly Justice’s memory alive in print.

To all readers who take the trouble to acknowledge the Chronicles or my website, be it at the gas bar, the bank or the store, or who make the effort to write, thank you!

www.twpaterson.com