The Old Meteor Skyliner (1959)

I'm speculating that this photo was taken in 1959 during a visit to Vancouver (this is the front yard of grandma St.Clair's house). Dad was stationed in Calgary to teach flying for a year. The 1954 Meteor Rideau Skyliner in the background was mom's car when she and dad got married. It had a transparent roof (you could snap-in a sun screen when it got really hot) and dad and I traveled from Calgary, Alberta to Dartmouth, Nova Scotia when he was stationed back to Shearwater in 1960. I had the entire back seat as a playpen and bed for the five day trip. I can still see remnants of the old trans-Canada highway in places along the way in Northern Ontario, and I can imagine having to drive that tortuously winding and narrow pathway through that still-sparsely-inhabited territory. Whenever I smell fibreglass resin I am instantly transported back to the garage of the house on Firefly Terrace on the base at Shearwater. Dad once worked on repairing holes in the trunk and the floorboards of this car using fibreglass (probably in about 1962). We had this car until about 1965 or 66 when we purchased our first Volkswagen. I saw one exactly like it on a used car lot in Merritt, B.C. in about 1994. Had I not been a student at the time it would be mine now.

Dawson heritage (1959)

This photo was taken in Banff at the Banff Springs Hotel in about 1959. The Mary Maxim sweater, like my father's, was a common item in the Canadian fashion landscape. You can still see them in some places today, curling rinks for one, but they are a vanishing craft.  

Prince Edward Island (1960)

This is the cookhouse at the fish processing plant in Gasperaux, PEI. We used it as a cottage for a week or two in the summer of 1960. In this photo Edith Bishop follows the infant Kim (about 14 months old here) into the path/road that meandered among the various buildings on the property. All of the roads on the property were "paved" to varying degrees, depending upon their proximity to the plant, with crushed clam shell fragments, giving them a glistening white shimmer that contrasted sharply with the red soil. The cookhouse was some distance from the plant although some shells are visible if you know that they are there. This is probably late July or early August as the Bishops used to spend those prime vacation weeks on the island every year. It is still the best time to vacation on the island as the weather is much more dependable in those months. This is the first family vacation I can remember (I'd have been five that year) and the memories of the landscape, smells and the heat in that building still linger in my memory 46 years later (of course the pictures help).