Last week I reminisced about some of my more memorable summer vacations as a kid. Ah, the good old days, gone, gone, never to be repeated except in memory, alas...

A friend who read that Chronicle about summertime mischief marvelled that we Saanich kids made it out of childhood alive. Sometimes, as an adult with decades of life’s experiences and realities under my belt, I’ve looked back and wondered myself!

But it wasn’t all mischief and mayhem, as I recalled in this piece that I wrote way back in 2001.

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Was it really all that long ago?

Another year and another new school term, the clock just keeps on ticking... Time seems to fly by ever faster. Change comes upon change, change begets change—progress!

Whatever did we do before TV, computers, cell phones? Was life really simpler then?

A typical 1950s black and white TV set required an antennae on the roof. Life was hard in those days! —*Wikipedia*

Today's television and movie fare revolves around sex, swearing and gore. Why (God, how I hate to admit it), I can remember when cowboys preferred their horses to girls, and the least familiarity between hero and heroine was sure to elicit a chorus of boos, hisses and groans from the young audiences that filled Victoria theatres each Saturday.

In that pre-inflationary age, with just a 50-cent weekly allowance, you could go to town and back on the bus, watch a movie and buy an order of real fish and chips afterwards. Try it today!

I can remember when TV came to the Rabeys, first in our neighbourhood to have one (strictly black and white, of course, with a 17-inch screen), and subject to erratic reception—remember ‘snow’?—from an antennae that would go crazy whenever a plane passed overhead. No satellite, no cable, no wall-to-wall colour screen, no watching a movie on your cell phone.

The plot line of the first show I saw is branded on my brain: an episode of one of the best-ever cop dramas, Dragnet. (They don't make theme songs like Dum de dum dum anymore, either.) Nor movies.

For the first dozen years or so TV had to rely upon old—I mean really old— Hollywood films to fill its evening programs, and we kids grew up on the same Depression-era fare, much of its second-generation vaudeville, as had our parents. For them, it was deja vu, for us everything old was new, ala the Three Stooges, W.C. Fields, Tom Mix.

Living besides Swan Lake in Saanich, I realize now, was something like the best of all worlds: close enough to town for the amenities, at least, those that were offered in the provincial capital of the day that was scorned by metropolitans as “a cemetery with a business section,” where they rolled up the sidewalks at midnight.

(How times have changed!)

When I was a kid we had Jersey cows that gave milk with cream. —*ca.images.search.yahoo.com*

In Saanich we were surrounded on three sides by water, trees and dairy farms. Not factory farms, either, with their cookie-cutter cows of black and white, but Heinz 57 multi-coloured Jerseys and Guernseys that were the favourites for family farms because of their high butterfat: thick, rich—real—cream, almost halfway down the bottle, and milked by hand. Now butterfat is out and so is the bottle, replaced by wax cartoon and plastic jugs.

No one who's ever heard the milkman coming with his bottles rattling in their metal carry-alls, will forget the sound.

In memory, it’s something like the comforting purr of a smoothly functioning, multi-piston engine aircraft vs. that of a jet. Or the wonderful sound of a steam locomotive versus the diesel engine. No contest! That was another of Saanich’s blessings: growing up beside the railway tracks.

Long before the CNR had discontinued steam across Canada they operated the last of the newer steam locies on the Island. Today, Cowichan Valley residents have ‘live’ steam at the BC Forest Discovery Centre, but there's no comparison to walking home on a frosty cold night and hearing the haunting far-off woo-wooing of a large steam locomotive.

Or standing on the Boleskine Road bridge as one passed underneath with the steam, smoke and smell of oil coming up through the cracks in the wooden decking. Or getting the strap for trying to drop an orange down the smokestack as it chugged below one's feet. (Now scrapping is out now, too.)

Most of us walked up to two miles to school until we were old enough to have bikes, strictly one gear, only the rich kids having three-speeds. Buses were for public transit not school kids.

Most folks had refrigerators but some still used ice boxes, and on hot summer days kids would follow the ice truck, begging for chips to suck on. If he’d humoured everyone every time, he’d never have had any left to deliver. There was a vegetable man, and firewood, coarse, wet and guaranteed to give you more slivers than Carter had pills, delivered to the door.

And sawdust, if our parents were unfortunate enough to have chosen that mode of heating.

Today, when you hear a high-powered vacuum working in your neighbourhood, it's a carpet cleaner not a sawdust man blowing wood chips into the basement hopper. Coal was delivered too, usually in sacks by big black men made all the blacker by their cargo.

But that's all changed now. Gone, gone into the basement of history as, inevitably, must we all. You’ll never again see a ‘silver’ US penny or a ‘bronze’ Canadian nickel or a 50-cent piece in your change—or the Canadian dollar pegged at $1.08 US.

But there is hope for a slower, calmer future.

I saw it on Craig Street in downtown Duncan. No Trekkie, this little boy was about five, and wearing a 1950s red felt cowboy hat with white braid. Some grandparent had to have kept that treasure safe and sound in a closet all these years. And on his hip was a rootin’-tootin’ six-gun and holster.

My kind of guy!

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Musing Out Loud...