Atmospheric Old Strathcona with new innovations

Edmonton's Old Strathcona, on the south side, is a great neighbourhood.  Side by side with the historic buildings are new ideas to keep the area  clean. A  sand- filled ashtray, strategically placed on a street corner, bears this legend: "Thank you for not littering. You've just saved yourself $250." It then quotes the relevant bylaw number.  

Magpies and inland gulls in Edmonton

In Edmonton recently, I finally managed to get a picture of a magpie. This bird, a relative of the crow, became infamous in our family many years ago, when it swooped down to steal pancakes off our picnic table while we were camping in Banff.

Observing them in William Hawrelak Park, I belatedly learned that gulls live inland as well as on the coast. These are a different type from the ones we see in White Rock, though: smaller and more compact. The picture below shows river gulls hanging out on a sandbar on the edge of the North Saskatchewan River.

Image left from
Edmonton River Valley

Historic neon signs in Edmonton recall past institutions

Neon signs for baths, and news stand with the Star Weekly. The iconic CNR sign speaks for itself.
In 1913, the Edmonton Turkish Baths opened in the flatiron building on Jasper Avenue. Later these morphed into the Georgia Baths. Open until 1991, they were the city's oldest steam baths.

Baths were beehives of social activity as well as grooming. The original Turkish baths had separate steam rooms for men and women, tubs, showers, a snack counter, shoeshine facilities, a cigar stand and a barbershop. There were also 13 sleeping rooms.

In the heyday of steam baths, tubs and showers in homes were by no means a given. Public baths were popular with working men, and Edmonton's early immigrant groups also used them. Before cheap and plentiful air travel, many who emigrated never saw the old country again. Perhaps the baths, popular in Europe at the time, reminded lonely emigres of their original homes. 

Old railway speeder

Currently on display at the Alberta Railway Museum, this speeder once belonged to the now defunct Northern Alberta Railway. A speeder was a small railcar designed for a couple of men to go out and do maintenance on remote stretches of track.

Here in southern BC, the Fraser Valley Heritage Railway has weekend speeder rides available from its station in Cloverdale. The seats are bare wood and the cars are noisy and have no shocks, so the ride is a wee bit bumpy.

Staff quarters and train post office

Many kinds of railway cars from different eras of the past are on display at the Alberta Railway Museum. These modest quarters for railway employees look sparse but comfortable.

Furnished as they were when still in use, they give visitors fascinating glimpses of the nation's social history through the vitally important railway era. It's fascinating to see where the various categories of train passengers and workers ate and slept. It was a big shock to learn that black railway porters, who provided for the sleeping comfort of others, had no beds on the train!

An old mail car is also on display. You could mail a letter by pushing it through a slot on a standing train. The mail was well guarded and sorted between stations.

Underwood typewriter and bracket lamps on the train

As I struggled mightily to learn to type, I never dreamed that CN train engineers were using the same model of typewriter as we had in our classroom.

Thanks in  no small part to the user-friendly Underwood machines, I finally acquired this skill. Hard won, it has served me nearly all the days of my life.

My mastery of the keyboard has come a long way since Grade 8, when my clumsy immature fingers first wrestled with a typewriter.

This work station with its Underwood typewriter, lit by oil lamps in wall brackets, is on display in a train car at the Alberta Railway Museum.

All the Light we Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

Image from national book award

This beautiful book reveals darkness imbued with light. Not the light from the bombs that fall on St. Malo late in World War II. Nor the brilliance of the world's largest natural diamond, smuggled away from the occupying army by an employee of the Paris Natural History Museum.

Not even the light of knowledge put out over the radio waves in scientific broadcasts for children. Nor yet the light of courage in a blind girl conveying messages to the French resistance.

All this light is impressive, of course. Still more inspiring is the hidden light in the human heart: the love between a father and his blind daughter, and the love for a friend and an enemy that beats in the heart of an orphan boy from the Hitler Youth.