Jackie Oja 2006

 

Jackie Oja

Interviewed Wednesday October 4th, 2006

 Maata’s Road

Nipigon, ON

 

 

I didn’t know that there was another highway until I asked Irwin why those were two accesses to the golf course.  That’s when he told me that’s where the old highway was – the original one.  Suicide Hill was changed too with the new highway.  It was more of an s-curve before.    I moved to Nipigon in 1953 and then I left in 1956 and I came back in 1958.  When I came back in 1958 we had a beer store which we didn’t have before.  We had a plywood mill and the high school was in Red Rock.  That was in the two year span that I was gone. 

 

I believe the high school was built in Red Rock because of the finances because of the mill.  I think it was a matter of the tax base.  It all happened in the same year, the plywood mill and the school.  The town was booming then.  When you went uptown you had to look for a parking space for your baby carriage in front of the Bay.  You had to squish your carriage in to find a space to park that carriage. In the winter time it was nothing to cover up the babies and put them in their carriages and stick them outside to sleep.  I’m serious!  Nowadays you wouldn’t think to dare leave your baby lying in a baby carriage outside alone!  You would be charged probably!  Imagine that! 

 

We lived in Greenmantle when my daughter started school and there were over fifty-eight kids on that street.  That was also when Greenmantle houses were first built up there.  We bought one of the first houses that when up – when you go the M.N.R. you turn right it was the third house right next door to Atwill’s.  The house was just built the year that we bought it because we bought it brand new.  That was the year before Kenny went to school and he’s forty-five now.  That’s something interesting too – we have to go by there because up the back lane there you’ll see a big oak tree and I believe that’s the only oak tree in Nipigon.  I planted it there in the late 1960’s.  I just went out and bought and wanted to have an oak tree.  Everybody told me it wouldn’t grow but I talked to Blake not too long ago and he said it’s huge.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen an oak tree up here.  I keep forgetting to drive around and take a look at it.  I was sitting here earlier and thinking what Nipigon used to be like.  Nobody had any money!  Phone up Zechner’s, put your grocery order in and if he was working and if you had a small kid at home – no problem – as soon as all then Thompson kids were home from school, he would take all the kids in the truck and go to Zechner’s and pick up the groceries and deliver them right into your kitchen.  And if you had money you paid for it and if you didn’t Zechner carried you until you had money.  If it hadn’t been for old Florian Zechner there would have been a lot people in a lot of trouble.  I think people seem to forget those things.  You could phone for groceries if your list was small or big.  He would let you charge with no questions asked.  I don’t know how many people he carried. 

 

There were two Jewellers – Kriff’s and Sheckner.  Then there was a restaurant which was Joe’s snack shop and then there was the Rendezvous Restaurant and Liberty Café was there also.  Right where the library is was the Roxie Café and across the street was the Misty’s Grill.  I mean everything was just booming!  I think there were about three thousand people in Nipigon.  There were a lot of bush workers that there isn’t anymore.  There were a lot of boot-leggers too.  And there were Taxies running back and forth to Thunder Bay and to Beardmore too.  We used to get a bottle of ____ for one buck too ($1.00).  Sometimes it was something to get that dollar too!  It used to be five dollars for a night out. 

 

Well Irwin was making a dollar and a quarter an hour when we bought our first house down on Duluth Street and we had a baby and that’s what he was making.  We charged a lot of groceries and we always paid our grocery bill eventually.  During those years when you didn’t have the cash Florian Zechner carried a lot of people.  Visa credit card started up in the 1960’s and when it first came out it was called Chargex.  The only one that didn’t jump on the band wagon at that time was the Bank of Montreal and they still stick with their own Mastercard.  The first telephone was Northern Telephone.

 

 And this is kind of interesting too and maybe people aren’t aware and some would remember the Kinsmen and the Kinettes in Nipigon.  We were both chartered members of that group.  But there was before us years before we started over some forty years ago.  There had been another Kinsmen Charter in Nipigon at one time and this was the second time it had been chartered in Nipigon.  It was our group that started the senior supper – there were twelve Kinsmen and twelve Kinettes and it was us that started that Senior Supper every year.  So it’s nice to see it continue on.  There weren’t enough members and they lost their charter.  And once you turn forty years old you can’t have any voting rights – no – you can still stay on but you’re considered a K40.  You can still belong but you don’t vote or hold office which in a way is good because it keeps the younger ones involved.  I think what happened too was a lot of the members – there were so many changes with the OPP and Bell Telephone was in here and different ones that were coming and going and I think that there were too many transient members.  And once they got transferred and they’re gone they are hard to replace.  They did lose their charter because of lack of members.  It was a good group and we had a lot of fun.  It was here for quite a while!  When Cameron Falls closed down we had a group that moved all the playground equipment down to the arena. 

 

Now this Rotary thing, that was fifteen years ago.  What happened was Rotary was for years the “old boys club”.  There were no women in the club period! Women were not allowed.  In fact there are still a few clubs now that still won’t allow women join their club.  The Port Arthur Club tried the Rotary International to confirm that I was the first female Chartered President in the world but they were never able to confirm that.  They were going to put up signs in Nipigon about it.   I still think I probably was.  I was just sitting and having coffee with Peter Young and I was asking him about the Rotary. Peter help out the Thunder Bay club and the Marathon club, he helped get those off the ground.  We got people talked into it around here and it took a while but then we had enough to get a charter.  We had twenty-two or twenty-three when we chartered.  Some people there were three, four or five people – we had an awful time to get enough members.  Finally we got it off the ground and they’re doing really well.  Well the main goal for years was to wipe out polio in the world.  There’s certain classifications that members need to join and they only allow someone with certain classifications in the club.  We’re not members any anymore – we’re retired now.  You also need to attend sixty percent of the meetings in order to stay on as a member. 

 

We camp all summer.  We’ve also been Legion members and it’s been close to forty years now that I’ve belonged to the Ladies Auxiliary and a few years as member of the branch.  I was the first female bank manager in Nipigon.  I was first female bank manager at the Bank of Commerce in Red Rock.  I was Bank Manager at the Royal first then we had a grocery store for a while so I ran that.  The store was right across from where the old hospital used to be.  That was our confectionary store!  Then after we got rid of the store I went back to work in Red Rock at the bank.  I worked there for eight years.  I left before that bank closed in Red Rock and I came back to the Royal Bank in Nipigon.  Now I’m on my second career working at H & R Block.  That’s full time from January to April and then one day a week after that. 

 

We have two children – Kenny and we adopted a daughter.  There was always something for the children to do but Kenny wasn’t the kind that cared to much for sports or anything competitive.  Its not that activities weren’t available for the kids, there was plenty to do.  It’s just that he never really got into hockey or stuff like that.  We didn’t worry about the children.  Hockey was big thing with the North Shore League.  Before there were seats in the old arena they would have about two thousand people at a hockey game. 

 

This a cute story that you’ll like.  When Kenny was born and that was at the old hospital with Dr. Wells.  So this is my first baby and I’m thinking well there’s supposed to be some horrible pain with this.  The doctor asked me if I was having contractions.  “No, no pain or contractions but the baby is moving every minute” I told him.  So he told the nurse to check me out.  “Get her down to the delivery room” and I was laying on that gurney and of course my feet were up in the stirrups.  So I’m laying there and these stirrups aren’t very comfortable and I want to roll over on my side and I can’t.  So I started puffing and the doctor asked me if I was having any contractions yet?  I said “no” and he told me that I was having one now.  And I said “no, the baby is just moving”.  This went on and on and on.  And finally I said “oh I feel like a cigarette” and the doctor turned around to the nurse which was Sibby Nachuk.  The doctor turned to Sibby and he said “get those oxygen tanks out of here and go down to the room and get her a cigarette” and she did.  Without a word of a lie I was hanging on that delivery table on my side smoking a cigarette waiting to have a baby.  Can you believe that?  When you tell that story nowadays, people think you have to be joking – and that was the gospel truth. 

 

Now we live out here and there’s bears and our little thing would go after the bear and of course the bear would go after him.  I just feel better when Irwin goes to town that he takes the dog.  The wolves are getting closer too. 

 

Those were the days too if you’re kid was sick or you were sick you phoned up the Doctor, even the doctor in Red Rock.  They would take the information and the Doctor would close his office at five o’clock and he had his little bag and he would start making house calls.  Doctor Somerleigh would come out and the Doctor from Red Rock, you could call them in the night no matter what time and twenty minutes he was right at your back door.  It was so different.  Even the post office, Johnny Dampier was the post master.  When he closed that post office on Christmas Eve, he loaded every parcel that was sitting there, in his car and delivered them.  That’s all the part of the past.  We had no T.V. and we didn’t have computers and things like that and it seems to me we did a lot more things. 

 

In the 1950’s there was a dance every Friday night at the Elk’s and there was no liquor served there.  All you had to do was step out the side door and somebody would pass the bottle around.  And any of us that were underage we had a friend that had a house on C.P.R. property so we would go there to drink because the town police couldn’t come on there.  And we were all underage!  That dance hall was full every Friday night.  I think one of the saddest things is the lack of social skills that in my mind relate directly to the computers.  Try and carry on a conversation with those people about something and they’re totally lost.  My granddaughter is like that and it’s very sad how computers have changed things. 

 

Even the cars – last summer I hit someone’s bumper and my husband wasn’t impressed.  It was a fiberglass bumper and I wouldn’t want to hit anything with my car and depend on that bumper for anything because I barely touched that other car in the parking lot and it just wrecked that bumper. 

 

The Liquor Store has been here as long as I’ve been in Nipigon.  At the same spot too!  The Beer Store came after that.  At one time they had a little pass book and they had to give that book in every time they bought something.  It was a Liquor Book – I may stand to be corrected on this but it was the way to control bootleggers.  But there were a lot of bootleggers. I must say that you didn’t need a lot of money to have a lot of fun.  Actually my aunt was living here and I came to live with her when I started high school. My aunt’s husband worked around here doing bush work and whatever.  That’s what I should have done was finish high school!  I went a head and did all this other stuff and I never had time to go to school.  Maybe that’s what I should do now eh!  Well I had enough of that for a while and went out to work and then I moved to Lindsey.  And I got a job in Lindsey and I stayed at my grandmother’s.  I worked night shift and then went to Business College during the day and when I worked day shift then I went to classes at night.  I did that for about a year and then I worked at a sewing factory.  That was an interesting job, sewing flies in army shorts.  I did forty-eight dozen pairs a day.  They were all military supply issue and they would inspect everything.  There’s another little happy phase – with experience I met a lot of different people, it’s the real world.  That’s why I came back up here, Irwin followed me down and we got married.  He came up for a holiday that’s what it was and he was making a dollar an hour in Lindsey.  He was just getting into the electrical end of it and he wanted to be an electrician.  And we borrowed a hundred and twenty-five dollars through Household Finance to come up and visit here by train.  We thought we were rich!  Can you believe it?  So anyway he’s was talking with his friend Mark Banning when we were up here and Mark said if he wanted to come up here and work for him he would give Irwin a dollar twenty-five an hour.  Well were we going up in the world or what?  So we went back and packed all our belongings – everything we owned in the back seat of our old car and came back up here to Nipigon.  That’s how we ended back here – for that extra .25 cents an hour more. 

 

Even those couple of years that we lived in Lindsey.  We would know a couple of the people that we worked with but when you went home at night you didn’t know who your neighbor was.  You didn’t know who lived across the street.  Even in those days city living wasn’t all that great!  It was very different when I first came here there was a large Finnish Settlement.  And those people stuck together.  Years ago when I worked at the Nipigon Café there were two Finn cooks in there they wouldn’t speak English to you unless they had too.  And they spoke perfectly good English.  And some of them never did learn much English because they felt they were here first and why should they.  Well Irwin was born in Fort William and I have his Grade One report card at home and it says failed.  Underneath that word it says “it would help Irwin a lot if he learned to speak English”.  That has to be hard on a child. 

 

I think the thing that hurt Nipigon a lot was that by-pass.  That’s another thing that happened in those two years.  That happened in 1957 because that wasn’t there when I left in 1956.  You had to drive around the Nipigon Café and that was the way all the time.  And all across the Canada and you see it in the Muskoka area all the devastation there of the quaint little trading posts and gift shops and little restaurants.  It used to be beautiful drive through there and all these places were thriving.  They’re boarded up and falling down.  It’s pathetic.  Anybody going across Canada you used to have drive through Nipigon, at least they would drive through Nipigon and they would look around and spend some money shopping – we lost all that.  

 

My great grand-parents were one of the earlier settlers in the Huntsville area and in fact they’re both buried there.  There is a book written about the early years of the Muskoka area – and there’s a picture of my great grand parents in that book and there’s story of how they settled in that area and what life was like.  We used to drive through to Niagara on what they called Blossom Sunday in spring.  It’s all under concrete – its shopping malls.  Where are all the fruit trees and farms –it’s sad.  It’s not the same anymore.  The orchards on Prince Edward Sound across the bay from Belleville – called the sandbanks.  It was something to see, it was like a desert all this fine sand washed up from Lake Ontario.  We used to go there on Sundays and what not and there were orchards after orchards after orchards.  And in the fall they would have their jugs of apple cider for sale and different things and it’s all gone.  It’s trailer parks, campgrounds – we can make all the money without doing the work of the orchards – they’re all gone!  We keep looking for things to bring the tourists and keep letting go of the things we have.  You know that Nipigon River Bridge and as famous as that Nipigon River is and what’s its famous for and you look across the bridge on the left hand side – that would never happen in the States.  There would be picnic tables there and there would be a sign, there may be a flower garden.  Not something that would have to cost thousands of dollars, it’s pathetic.  Look at our lookout up on top of the hill as you’re going out town – one picnic table way over in the bush.  That’s pathetic!