Kids grew up fast during the 30s and 40s

By Joan Janzen

Winnie Larson of Kindersley sat back in her easy chair and reminisced about her life which began with her birth on April 8, 1931 on a farm at Shell Lake, Sask. She and her four siblings and parents lived on a mixed grain farm located approximately 70 miles west of Prince Albert.

“My father died when I was three years old, and my mom remarried five years later,” she explained. Her stepfather immediately became the father to four young children, as well as having another child a few years later.

Like every other farm kid back then, Winnie milked cows and helped out with household chores. “I even helped stook one year because we didn’t have extra help,” she said.

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Winnie as a teenager (far left) standing beside her mother, aunt and young cousins.

Winnie Larson recently celebrated her 93rd birthday and enjoys living at a senior’s apartment in Kindersley.

Winnie recalled the dry years of the Dirty 30’s when their garden and crops were eaten up by striped army worms. A hole in her running shoe revealed the unfortunate discovery that the worms also bit humans.

During winter, spring and fall, she and her siblings walked three miles to a one-room school, where 29 children and one teacher filled the desks. However many days in January were spent at home due to extremely cold weather. When winter weather permitted, the students built igloos in the winter and played a lot of baseball in the warmer months.

“We always looked forward to Christmas. We’d have a Christmas concert at school and put on plays and they bought costumes. One year we had Disneyland play and I was a dwarf,” she said.

Christmas was the only time they received gifts. Each child was allowed one gift, which was usually something they had picked out from the Eatons catalogue. In the morning they would find their stockings filled with hard candy, an orange and an apple, which were all rare treats.

“We couldn’t afford those things,” she said. However she recalled her parents receiving family allowance in the amount of $5 per month for each child when she was a school-aged youngster.

“We lived close to a river so we’d wade in the water and skate on it in the winter,” she said. In exchange for babysitting for a family, Winnie received a pair of figure skates. On her first attempt at skating, the blade went into a crack and down she went. That was the end of her skating exploits, however her brothers learned how to skate using those figure skates.

Although the family didn’t have access to many books, the Free Press newspaper arrived once a week. “There was a continuing story in the paper and my mother would read some of it to us each night,” she recalled.

Winnie became ill for about six months when she was ten years old, so her mother took her to see a travelling doctor who stayed in a hotel where he saw patients. There she was told her appendix needed to be removed, so Winnie and her mother travelled to Prince Albert by train. Winnie’s mother returned home, but Winnie stayed at the hospital for ten days.

A year or two later Winnie’s mother became ill after the birth of a stillborn baby, and spent four months in the hospital at Prince Albert. By then Winnie’s oldest sister had decided to move in with their grandparents who lived twenty miles from their farm. That meant Winnie was left to take care of her siblings, who didn’t see their mother the entire time she was hospitalized.

“I grew up fast. By the time I was eleven, I would bake bread … twenty loaves at a time,” she said. She could also knit and sew on a peddle sewing machine, just like her mother had taught her.

Winnie’s formal education ended after Grade 8, and she took on various babysitting and housekeeping jobs. “The wages were $15 a month back then,” she said.

Her adult life began when she was married at the age of 18. She and her husband were blessed with six children - three girls and three boys. The family moved to Kindersley in 1962 and twenty years later her husband passed away.

Winnie began housecleaning at a motel to support her family. Five years later she got a job at the new Kindersley Hospital where she was employed for 21 years. She also remarried, however her husband passed away after they had been married for only a year and a half.

Although she tragically lost two adult sons, she has three children living in Edmonton and a daughter who resides nearby in Eatonia. Even after she quit working at the hospital, Winnie served as a caregiver for people in their homes for about ten years until her 80th birthday.

Now Winnie enjoys life at the seniors apartment building where she resides. She attends church, goes shopping, and plays cards twice a day.

Thanks for the visit, Winnie. I really enjoyed it.