1937

From the big scrapbook of time, here’s a look at Canada in 1937--

This year 1,103,012 automobiles will be registered in Canada’s nine provinces and another 149 in the Yukon Territory. McLaughlin-Buick represents wealth, prestige and power in the nation’s capital. The Prime Minister uses a McLaughlin-Buick limousine.

January 13: Police estimate that 18,000 devout mourners filled the streets in Montreal for the funeral of Brother André. He was a member of the Holy Cross Order and an important religious figure who had miraculously healed thousands of sick and crippled believers. A cathedral will be built in his memory on Mount Royal and he will become St. Andre in 2010.

January 28: Hockey star Howie Morenz is injured in a freak accident during a game against the Chicago Blackhawks. The three-time Hart Trophy winner and All-Star will die of his injuries on March 8 at the age of 35. His funeral will be held in the Montreal Forum and 15,000 will attend the service.

February 13: Prince Valiant appears in newspapers for the first time. It is the brainchild of cartoonist Hal Foster. The character in the strip is inspired by and loosely based on the life of recently abdicated King Edward VIII. Foster is already famous as the creator of the Tarzan cartoon strip. The Halifax native will continue to draw Prince Valiant until 1971 but the strip will continue is still popular today.

A state-of-the art radio studio in 1937--this is CKFC, a competitor of CRVC in Vancouver.

February 16: CRVC begins broadcasting from its new home in the Hotel Vancouver. The station’s power is 10,000 watts.

March 1: Parliament amends the Old Age Pension Act to include blind persons over the age of forty. The monthly cheque is for $25.

Daimler-Chrysler will close the Holmes Foundry in 1988, after 70 years of operation.

March 2: Workers at the Holmes Foundry in Sarnia, Ontario stage a sit-down strike for better wages. It doesn’t last long; hundreds of armed citizens believe the workers are Communists. Townsfolk join policemen at the factory to beat and arrest the striking employees, many of whom are recent immigrants from Eastern Europe who don’t speak English.

March 17: Nurse Dorthea Palmer’s trial has lasted six months. Charged by the Crown for unlawfully passing out information about contraceptives to poor mothers in Eastview, a suburb of Ottawa, she is acquitted by Judge Lawson. The Crown will lose both subsequent appeals. The criminal code will be amended only  in 1969.

March 10: Tommy Hunter is born in London, Ontario. He will grow up to be a country singer and in 1965 he will become a network star, hosting The Tommy Hunter Show on the CBC. His weekly series will be on the air for 27 years.

March 23: The Toronto Stock Exchange moves into its new digs at 234 Bay Street. The streamlined, Art Deco building is air conditioned and cost $750,000. It will receive heritage designation in 1978 and the TSX will move to a larger building in 1983.

March 31: Federal Minister of Labour, the Honourable Norman Rogers, releases figures that 1,265,925 Canadians are on the dole. The news is encouraging, that is 250,000 fewer collecting pogey than in 1936.

April 8: Parliament reluctantly approves a trade deal with Berlin in order to redress the balance of imports and exports. Canada now imports twice as many goods from the Third Reich as it sells to Germany.

Gotta be KD! Kraft Dinner is the most popular meal in the Dominion and will be for decades to come.

April –: Kraft Dinner appears for the first time. The slogan is “Make dinner for four in nine minutes.  From Cape Breton to Vancouver Island, we love the macaroni and cheese dish so much that in 2012, Canadians buy 1.7 million boxes of KD every week.

April 8: Negotiations with General Motors of Canada are going nowhere so members of UAW Local 222 walk off the job. GM management is willing to give verbal commitments but the union demands a written contract. GM doesn’t want to waste the paper. An outraged Premier Hepburn threatens to send troops to the factory but the workers hold their ground. The work stoppage is front-page news all over the continent. Twenty days later, the employees will have a set minimum wage, seniority rights, a 44-hour workweek and a guarantee that management will respect the union as the sole bargaining agent for the employees. Best of all, it is a written contract.

April 10: Parliament creates Trans-Canada Airlines. The Crown corporation will change its name to Air Canada in 1965.

April 15: Trade unions are recognized as legal bargaining agents by the province of Nova Scotia.

The sassy 1937 Chevrolet Cabriolet weighs in at 1265 kilos (2,790 pounds) and rides on a 2 844-millimetre (112-and-one-quarter-inch) chassis.

April 28: GM workers return to work in Oshawa, Windsor and Regina. Despite the strike, production figures for the calendar year will reach 44,203 Chevs; 3,378 Pontiacs; 6,880 McLaughlin-Buicks; 15,964 Chevrolet and Maple Leaf trucks and 1,630 GMCs. With 81,742 units built, that is considerably better than the 61,830 vehicle total for 1936.

April 29: Members of rival union locals clash on the docks of Montreal. Police are called to stop the rioting. No one is killed but a police horse has to be put down after being injured.

May --: New coins are minted in honour of King George VI’s ascent to the throne. The monarch’s head is seen on the obverse side of all the coins but the reverse sides show our national pride. The penny carries two maple leaves, the nickel has a beaver on a log, the famed Bluenose schooner is enshrined on the back of the dime and a caribou for the quarter. Canada’s coat of arms graces the 50-cent piece and voyageurs in a canoe are seen on the dollar coin.

 

King George VI and Queen Elizabeth

May 12: God save the King! We have a new sovereign. King George VI is crowned in a royal ceremony at London’s Westminster Abbey.  His coronation marks the occasion of the first worldwide radio broadcast. Loyal subjects in Saskatchewan and Manitoba set their alarms for 2:45 AM Central Time to hear historic event, live, on the stations of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

A Woodward Department Store in Vancouver.

June 2: Charles Woodward is dead at the age of 95. In 1902 he founded the chain of department stores that bears his name. Woodward’s will serve folks in Alberta and British Columbia for nearly a century before being purchased by the Hudson Bay Company. The business tycoon will be laid to rest in the Masonic Cemetery in Burnaby, BC.

Robert Paul and Barbara Wagner perform a perfect death spiral at the 1960 Olympic Games. This painting appeared as a collectable sports card in boxes of Wheaties breakfast cereal.

June 2: Robert Paul is born in Toronto. He will grow up to be figure skater, paired with partner Barbara Wagner in 1952. In a 16 day-run of glory they will win the Canadian, North American and World Championships in 1957. The pair will skate home with Olympic gold at the 1960 Squaw Valley winter games. This will mark the first time in Olympic history that the gold medal will be awarded to a non-European pair. All seven judges will give the couple first place scores.

Our eighth Prime Minister will be remembered on the $100 bill in 1976.

June 10: Sir Robert Borden is dead in Ottawa at the age of 84. The Nova Scotia native served as the eighth Prime Minister and led the country through The Great War, 1914 to 1918. He is best remembered for forcing conscription through the House of Commons and instituting the Income Tax Act, a temporary measure to pay for the war.

Canadian Military Pattern trucks were built by Ford and GM Canada. This 1943 CMP example is a Chevrolet.

Summer: Officials of GM Canada and Ford of Canada attend Top Secret meetings with military strategists from Britain and Canada. The rival automakers pledge to work together if there is a war by developing war vehicles that share common parts. War does come in 1939 and when it is over, six years later, workers at Ford and GM have built nearly half a million trucks using the Canadian Military Pattern.

June 14: Folks tuning in to the CBC at 1:00 Eastern Time catch the first broadcast of The Happy Gang. The fast-paced mix of hot music, corny jokes and brilliant comedy sketches quickly make it the most listened to programme in the country as more than 2 million listeners tune in each weekday. The show will air on the CBC for the next 22 years.

June 29: Armand Bombardier is granted a federal patent to build something called a “snowmobile.”  The clever machine glides over the snow on a combination of tracks and skis.  Industry analysts think it may be commercially successful and possibly have future military applications.

July 5: In a repeat of last summer’s scorching hot weather, the mercury reaches 45C in the communities of Midale and Yellowgrass, Saskatchewan. 

July 19: The Bank of Canada issues the first bilingual bank notes.

July 30: The new national air carrier, Trans-Canada Airlines, makes its first flight from Montreal to Vancouver. The 4,025-kilometre trek takes only eighteen hours with stops in Kapuskasing, Sioux Lookout, Winnipeg and Regina. TCA is a Crown corporation, a subsidiary of Canadian National Railways, that is expected to earn money for the federal government.

August 14: The Newfoundland Department of Health and Welfare has suspended its 42-cent a week welfare payments because blueberries are ripe. The ministry intends to save buckets of money by having recipients on the dole earn their wages by picking blueberries and selling them to suppliers for 18 cents an Imperial gallon (4.5 litres).

September 1: The newly formed Crown corporation—Trans-Canada Air Lines begins passenger service between Vancouver and Seattle. The price of a round-trip ticket is a hefty $14.20.

September 8: Barbara Rosberg is born in Niagara Falls, New York. She will grow up in Niagara Falls, Ontario and wed Murray Frum. Barbara Frum will be known to millions for her hard-hitting interviews on As It Happens on CBC Radio and The Journal on CBC-TV. Her character will be immortalized on Sesame Street as Barbara Plum and her show, The Notebook. Barbara Frum will die of leukemia in 1992.

October 1: Albertans now earn the second highest minimum wage in the country. Men with one year’s experience in the same job and with the same employer will earn 33.3 cents an hour or $15 a week. 

A1937 Rogers Majestic Medium and Shortwave Tombstone Table Radio with six Spraysheild tubes.

October 1: The stations of the Canadian National Railways network officially become affiliates of the new Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The broadcast day is expanded from five hours and 45 minutes each evening to an 8 am start and sign off at 11 pm daily.  In Vancouver, CNRV becomes CBV but folks still tune in at 1100 on the AM dial.

November 18: Governor General Lord Tweedsmuir presides over the first Governor General’s Awards for Literature at a glittering gala affair. Bertram Brooker, author of Think of the Earth, accepts the award for best novel. His psychological thriller is set in a small Manitoba town. Lord Tweedsmuir plans to make the award dinner an annual event.

December 31: Workers at the Ford Motor Company of Canada, Limited have produced 48,601 Ford and Lincoln Zephyr automobiles and 24,196 trucks for the year.

1953

From the big scrapbook of time, here’s a look at Canada in 1953--

Meteor is slotted between Ford and Mercury in price.

Meteor continues to be popular with the buying public. Workers at Ford turn out 40,115 of the mid-priced beauties for the 1953 model year. It is the fourth best selling car in the Dominion, after Chevrolet, Ford and Pontiac.

January 4: GM announces completion of a sprawling 7-hectare truck factory in Oshawa, Ontario. The price tag is a cool $4.5 million. Colonel Sam and his boys will recoup the expense handily; the new facility can turn out 50,000 vehicles a year.

January 9:  The Chevrolet Bel Air series is unveiled nationally. The snazzy and jazzy top-of-the line bowtie will cost anywhere from $1,954 to $2,204 f.o.b. Oshawa, Ontario.

January 9: Margeurite Pitre is hanged for her role in blowing up a Canadian Pacific Airlines DC-3, killing all 23 on board so she can eliminate her boyfriend's wife. It is the biggest mass murder in North American history. She is the 13^th woman to ever hang and she will be the last because the death penalty will become history in 1976.

January 16: Workers at Ford have done their part to stop the spread of Communism by completing a $4.9 million military order for M-38 four-wheel drive trucks.

January 24: Chrysler Canada is awarded a $3.9 million military contract to build cargo trucks, ambulances and spare parts. Much of what is built will be headed for the conflict in Korea.

January 27: The debate rages on from coast to coast but the Canadian Dental Association and the Canadian Medical Association formally approve of adding fluoride to municipal water in an effort to fight tooth decay.

Crowds throng the fibreglass Chevrolet Corvette.

February 13: General Motors' famed Motorama opens at the Canadian National Motor Show in Toronto. It is the first Motorama exhibit in this country since the end of World War Two.

February 16:  Lanny McDonald is born in Hanna, Alberta. He will lace up his skates for the Toronto Maple Leafs, the Colorado Rockies and lead the Calgary Flames to a Stanley Cup Victory in 1989. When he retires he will have 500 goals, 506 assists and 1,111 regular season games under the belt.

The most enduring of Kraft foods, 2010, we will consume 1.7 million boxes of KD of the 7 million boxes sold globally every week. KD will be the single most popular grocery item across the nation.

February 16: James Lewis Kraft is dead at the age of 78. The Stevensville, Ontario native was founder and president of Kraft Foods. As an inventer, he created products such as Velveeta, Miracle Whip and good ‘ole Kraft Dinner.

Introduced last year, the de Haviland DH-106 is the world's first commercial jetliner.

March 3: A Canadian Pacific Airlines de Haviland DH-106 Comet crashes upon takeoff from the airport in Karachi, Pakistan. All eleven on board are killed. This tragic incident marks the world’s first commercial jet crash.

March 13, 1953: The first domestically-built Hudson Jet rolls off the line in Tilbury, Ontario. The starting price for the pint-sized Hudson is $2,393. Only four-door Jets are produced in Canada and production will reach 1,267 units by the end of the model year.

March 19:  It’s Oscar Night in Hollywood and Neighbours, a National Film Board production, brings home a golden statuette.

Montreal architect Ernest Cormier was chosen in1950 to create our gift to the United Nations.

March 27: The people of Canada give a gift to the United Nations. Our gift is seven majestically sculpted doors that open into the General Assembly. Each door is glass and nickel silver with bas relief sculptures of Peace, Justice, Truth and Brotherhood.

March 30:  Domestic manufacturers used 2 million kilos of natural rubber, 2.4 million kilos of synthetic rubber and 770,000 kilos of recycled rubber in making new tires and tubes this month.

Space Command is the CBC's first dramatic series. It depicted life on space station SXW1. William Shatner was one of the stars.

April 8: The chairman of the CBC reports that it costs up to thirty times as much money to develop a programme for television as it does to buy one ready made from the US or the UK.

The 1953 Hudson exhibit at the London Motor Show in Earl's Court.

April 13: Hudson lines in Tilbury, Ontario are shut down because of parts shortages. Workers will be called back in two days but everyone will be glad when the war in Korea is over.

April 16: The Habs beat the tar out of the Boston Bruins in four games to win Lord Stanley’s cup.

April 18: Frederick Alan “Rick” Moranis is born in Toronto. He will grow up to become a comedian best known for being Bob—half of the Mackenzie Brothers. His wife will die of liver cancer in 1991 and he will retire from the limelight to raise his children.

May 3: Communist troops attack and defeat the Royal Canadian Regiment on Hill 97 in Korea. The death count is 26. Another 27 soldiers are wounded and seven have been taken prisoner.

Perhaps Pontiac will be assembled in the converted factory.

May 8: GM announces that its new Oshawa truck factory will be converted to auto assembly and expanded immediately to cover 17 hectares.

May 11: The first car rolls out the doors of Ford’s new assembly plant in Oakville, Ontario. The Ford Custom is the 2,794,525^th vehicle built by workers at the Ford Motor Company of Canada, Limited.

May 14: It’s a boy for Violet and Tuck Cochrane, a bush pilot in Lynn Lake, Manitoba. Their son Tom will be inclined to play the guitar and be lead singer for the group Red Rider. The seven-time Juno winner will be inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 2003.

May 21: It is a little after 4.30 pm when an F4 tornado rips through Sarnia, Ontario leaving four dead, 40 wounded and 500 people homeless. Damage is estimated at $15 million.

1953 Studebaker Champion four- and two-door sedans.

June 1. The doors are shut at Studebaker’s factory in Hamilton Ontario. Because weapons of war have priority over civilian manufacture, there is not a transmission to be had anywhere in the land. Five hundred workers will wait at home until some can be built and shipped and the other 325 men will inventory the goods. They all go back to work nine days later.

June 2:  Millions stand in a London downpour to watch the coronation of our new monarch, Queen Elizabeth II. Film crews immediately fly the tapes to Canada, courtesy of the Royal Canadian Air Force. Eight hours later we are watching the historic event on the CBC. Even our soldiers fighting in Korea celebrate by firing red, white and blue smoke shells at the enemy.

June 20: The highest temperature ever --with the Humidex calculated into the equation—is recorded in Windsor, Ontario as folks swelter through 52.1C heat.

July 1:  It is Dominion Day throughout the land. Canada is 86 years old. Workers in Toronto build 238 Nash cars this month.

Listeners who wrote to CBW would receive a QSL card like this one, a written confirmation of reception.

July 5: The CBC affiliate CBW opens for business in a new, state-of-the-art $1 million studio complex located at 541 Portage Street in Winnipeg. Broadcasting at 990 on the AM dial, the clear channel, 50,000-watt signal can be heard throughout much of North America.

July 13: The Stratford Shakespearean Festival of Canada opens for the very first time in a large canvas tent erected on the banks of the Avon River. in Stratford, Ontario. Actor Alec Guinness is first to appear on the makeshift stage. The six-week event is a success and will grow into an eight-month long love affair with theatre. Sixty years later the Stratford Shakespeare Festival will draw hundreds of thousand of people the world over.

July 15: It is the birth date of Mila Pivnicki. When she is three, her family will move to Canada from Yugoslavia so that her father can study for a graduate degree in psychiatry at McGill University. Mila will study engineering at McGill but will drop out at nineteen, to marry a lawyer by the name of Brian Mulroney. Mrs. Mulroney will be active in many good causes, including the Canadian Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.

July 22: Paul Quarrington is born. When he grows up he will write quirky novels including Home Game and Hometown Heroes: On the Road with Canada’s National Hockey Team. The Toronto author will win the Stephen Leacock Award in 1987 and the Governor General’s Award for fiction in 1989.

July 27: The war is over. The North Koreans and the United Nations sign a truce to end the three-year long bloodbath. Millions of civilians are dead. Sadly, 314 Canadians were killed and 1,211 more injured. The troops can come home and life will get back to normal for all of us but Korea will still be divided sixty years later.

August:  The RCMP begin moving Inuit off their traditional lands and into settlements. The first to move are 53 Inuit who are taken from Inuujuak (Port Harrison), Quebec, and Pond Inlet, Cornwallis Island and Ellesmere Island to new land much farther north. The idea behind this scheme is to establish sovereignty over the Arctic.

The Right Honourable Louis St. Laurent is our 12th Prime Minister. He will serve as PM from 1948 to 1957.

August 9: The federal election is over. Voters have handed “Uncle Louis” and his Grits a commanding majority in the House of Commons. The Tories could only muster enough votes for fifty seats. The CCF takes 23, Social Credit wins 15 seats and six are taken by independent candidates.

August 24: A second heat wave that hits southern Ontario is so fierce that in Hamilton, Studebaker is forced to send the workers home for two days until the weather breaks.

October 7: The war is over but it is virtually impossible to find parts to build cars. GM cuts the workweek to 37 hours while waiting out the misery of parts shortages.

Canadian soldiers in Dieppe, France being marched to prison by their Nazi captors on August 19, 1942.

October 8: The Canadian War Claims Commission releases its shocking report filled with a long list of horrific abuses suffered by the 9,000 Canadian soldiers in Nazi POW camps.

October 16: The Roman Catholic Church issues a statement calling on parents not to allow teens to form romantic attachments. The social custom leads far too frequently to the “occasion of sin.”

October 25: The first privately owned television station in the Dominion takes to the airwaves in Sudbury, Ontario. CKSO will change its call letters to CISI in 1971 but it will still serve the area as a CTV affiliate in the 21^st Century.

November 19: It’s a boy for Robert and Geneva Mays. They will joke that James’ first word will not be “mama” or “dada” it will be “Buick.” He will grow up to become an automotive historian, specializing in documenting stories of the Canadian industry.

November 23:  Built at Vickers shipyard in Sorel, Quebec, the 107-metre long M.V. William Carson is launched today. The 8,300-tonne freight and cargo ferry will sail between North Sydney, Nova Scotia and St. John’s, Newfoundland until the terminal in Port-aux-Basques is upgraded. She will sink in 1977 after striking an iceberg.

November 28: The 41st  Grey Cup match is won by the Hamilton Tiger Cats, having thumped the Winnipeg Blue Bombers 12 to 6 before a crowd of 27,313 fans at Varsity Stadium in Toronto.

December 10: A fire in seat cushion stock at Ford’s trim department does $10,000 worth of damage and causes the entire production line to be stopped for a day-and-a-half in Windsor.

December 10: Canadian Press reports that Manitoba has a total of 2,318 cases of polio, of which 85 have died. Government officials say this incidence exceeds all known Canadian and world figures.

Five-year old Elinor will help raise money for the March of Dimes, an organization that raises money to fight polio.

December 31: The nation reels in fear as 8,734 people have contracted polio this year. It will turn out to be the worst year on record for this horrible disease that cripples and kills.

December 31:  The Top Ten selling cars this year were Chevrolet, Ford, Pontiac, Meteor, Dodge, Plymouth, Buick, Oldsmobile, Studebaker and Monarch.