Interview with Don Robertson, October 1993- Tape 1 Side B
Description
- Audio (MP3)
-
Audio (MP3) - Creators
- Gary W. Muir, Interviewer
- Don Robertson, Interviewee
- Media Type
- Audio
- Item Type
- Interviews
- Description
- This interview is with West Brantford resident Don Robertson, who was the manager of an Agnew-Surpass shoe store and attended Brantford Collegiate Institute and business school in Brantford. He recollects his life in Brantford and the surrounding area during World War Two, the Great Depression, and various community events. The notes attached are from listening to the interview and are not a full transcription. However, they accurately summarize the general topics discussed during the interview.
- Notes
- :00- Sports rivalry between BCI and West Brant
• The kids in West Brant did not want to play on the BCI team, and formed their own team, of which Robertson was a member, which ended up playing against BCI in the final (unclear which sport is being discussed)
0:23- “The Duke”
• Refers to Mr. Overholt, the principal of B.C.I. while Robertson was in attendance
• Robertson “never had much to do with him”
• Some people liked him and some didn’t, Robertson remarks that he was like a “toy bulldog” though, as he was a small man
• Recalls that there wasn’t the same “hatred” as there is in schools today, although he recalls when he was in grade eleven or twelve that a couple of guys got suspended because they were “going to take a crack at one of the teachers”
• Robertson never had much to do with Overhold, as he never had him as a teacher and never got into any serious trouble
1:45- Winhold (?)
• Robertson didn’t like that he would get students up to the board with algebra and would “make you feel like a muddy nickel” if you didn’t understand it
• He seemed “supercilious”
• Robertson claims he learned more algebra in the army- he was called into the orderly room was night to see the Colonel along with two other men, who announced that they needed officers and that he had looked at the scholastic and attendance records of the three of them and determined that they could make it as artillery officers
• The three of them all decided to do it and passed, and ultimately became captains
• Robertson learned “more algebra and trig in a few months than he learned in four years at BCI”
• The class wasn’t as big in the army and the instructors had “time to spend with you” particularly to explain trigonometry
3:50- Time at BCI
• He spent four years there, having dropped out after grade twelve
• Partly one of the reasons he dropped out was that he had a part time job and could see that his schooling didn’t apply to going any further in his career with this job
• The job was at the Canada Carriage and Body(?) Company, in the office
• Jack Powers was working there at the office at the time, and told him that if he had the right education, he could get a job there “tomorrow”
• Robertson talked it over with his dad who “wasn’t too fussy” and told him to go to business college, so he quit BCI and went to business college for six months
5:18- Business College
• They had arithmetic there
• He used to sit beside a man named “Albert Barnett(?)”, who lived in a white house along Oak street who also had about four years at BCI
• They used to work together on the arithmetic, which made the teacher angry because they got it done so fast
• He quit high school in either 1928 or 1929- likely ’28 because he got the job at the Canada carriage and body company, and was in the office checking invoices
• At the same time, he also had a part-time job working at Agnew’s
6:35- Agnew’s job
• There was “a fella there”, not the manager but a man from Ingersoll, who was “a real Jim-dandy” who told Robertson that he should come and work with Agnew’s since they had all kinds of room for advancement
• He spoke with his dad and gave notice to Canada carriage to a man named “Stuart” who told him to come and see him if he ever needed a job again
• He also worked “2 or 3 summers” at Waterous in high school
• He started working at Agnew’s on his birthday, in 1929
8:34- Great Depression in Brantford
• In 1929, things “weren’t too bad’
• The depression “didn’t really hit” Brantford until the fall of that year, but started other places too
• His job at Agnew’s wasn’t affected- he worked there for about 14-15 months before they moved him to Woodstock, where he stayed for a year and a half before being moved to St Thomas, where he stayed for three years and met his wife
• The world’s fair was on, and his wife and her brother and his girlfriend went there, and while they were there in Chicago, the company told him he was needed in Galt right away, so he moved. When his wife returned from Chicago, he had already left!
• He was in Galt four years before moving back to Brantford
• He does not recall a lot of effects of the depression in Brantford
• The effects of the depression in Woodstock were delayed several years, while it was in effect in St. Thomas from the beginning
• 1932 and 1933 were “the worst years”
11:48- Differences in Brantford upon his return to the city in 1938
• Recalls that some of the stores were different
• Some of the streetcar tracks had been ripped up and were using buses
• This issue with the streetcars was that they weren’t flexible, so if the city expanded, new track would need to be laid
• A lot of people used to use the streetcars all the time
• The first bus that they started to use was the West Brant line, because the streetcar just went straight down Colborne, but the buses could turn and go down to Oak, Walnut, and Brunswick street so that more people could use them
13:39- World War Two
• He enlisted in the 54th, and they were all primed to go overseas, and in their final medical exam it was discovered that he was “allergic to asthma”
• The rest of the boys went overseas in 1941 or 1942, and he went to Petawawa to do some instructing
• In Brantford, “fellas were coming and going, and every once-in-a while somebody wouldn’t come back”
• One of his best friends, named Norm Edmonson didn’t come back
• Recalls the air force and army camp in the city, and remarked that there were a lot of girls in the air force camp who were “a pretty good bunch of girls”
• One of the girls that worked for him in the store made friends with some of the girls at the air force camp, and many of those girls couldn’t get home for Christmas, so that year he and his wife had two or three of them over for Christmas dinner
• A lot of people from Newfoundland and Nova Scotia were brought into Brantford to work there
• Something interesting happened when he and his wife moved to Brantford and their daughter was born. They originally lived together in an apartment on 99 Peel Street upstairs, and when their daughter was about 2 and a half they got a house. Many years later, he and his wife decided to take a 16-day bus trip to Florida and the first day out of Brantford on the bus, they sat down with a nice-looking man and lady who happened to work in Brantford during the war and had lived upstairs in 99 Peel Street right after he and his wife.
18:11- Housing shortage in Brantford
• During the war, there was a big housing shortage
• The city had taken a lot of houses during the depression for back taxes, and advertised lots and houses in the paper which you could bid on
• Robertson bid on his house and a lot on Elmer street, and got both without having enough money to buy either
• His dad told him to go talk to Jack Ryan, the mayor, and tell him who he was (the mayor knew his father)
• The Mayor was “a real Irishman”- he asked about the situation and Robertson explained that he had won two properties, and the mayor gave him the one he wanted and said that he would look after it for Robertson
• The lot was 250 dollars, where Elmer runs into Darling Street
19:58- Wartime business
• The only problem was getting merchandise, as a lot of the factories couldn’t get the raw materials for shoes and were making them “out of anything they could get their hands on”
• No one had to be laid off, but you couldn’t buy any good shoes or any imported shoes, since most of the shoes were imported from the United States and Great Britain (in both these places, shoes were rationed during the war)
• There were multiple store locations- originally the one on Colborne street was opened by John Agnew, and the one on market street was run by another man
• Agnew bought him out, but it was a viable business so it kept running
• Agnew’s was from Brantford, but the Surpass part of it was in Quebec, where there was a men’s shoe factory
22:19- Wartime rationing
• Meat, butter, sugar, and gasoline were always plentiful for the Robertsons
• The Johnson family used to bring their kids into the store and would give Robertson any extra rations he needed, as they had nine children
• The toughest rations to get and trade were gasoline- Robertson didn’t have a car at the time, so didn’t have a gasoline ration, but his father did
23:50- Halloween stories
• When Robertson was going to Ryerson school, about in grade five or six, he came to school one morning after Halloween, and one of Britain Dairy’s wagons was lifted into an oak tree and no one ever found out how it got there. “They had a heck of a time getting it down”!
• There was a junk dealer with an old horse, and his oldest boy was twelve and not very bright, the second boy was better, but the third boy was very bright. There were also three girls, and the girls were “real smart” and worked downtown in a dress store. The youngest girl was named Lily, and she had “a birth defect” but had a “sparkling personality”, and “everybody just loved her”.
• This man had an old horse in the barn at the back of the house. Apparently on Halloween night, someone “transformed the horse into a zebra” with black and white stripes using whitewash and black paint. It was a Saturday night, and the next day was a Sunday so the family wouldn’t take the wagon out on the street. The oldest boy came out to feed the horse that morning and came screaming back into the house and they immediately called the police, who found what appeared to be a black and white zebra in the barn. The incident "created quite a sensation”.
• Apparently, the horse had black stripes all winter!
• Between Brunswick and Walnut street, there used to be a lane where there were “johnny houses” which people would push over on Halloween, and “there was always quite a to-do about that”
29:03- Town rivalry and other stories
• He never encountered town rivalry himself, there may have been some isolated incidents
• There was quite a rivalry when they played ball, but it didn’t develop into fisticuffs
• One day, West Brant had a very good junior ball team who had to be under twenty, and they had a very good pitcher by the name of Casey(?). They had to play the Homedale team down in a park where a school is now, and the pitcher pitched a no-hitter that day
• Many years later, a boy worked for him after school and came in with some of his buddies and one of their last names was Casey- his father had pitched the no-hitter that game!
• Jack Casey was Edward Casey’s younger brother, and he married a girl from West Brant named Ethel Davies who worked in Welsh’s store
• He had a couple of “Catholic girls” work for him one year who were very nice, and always sent Christmas cards and things like that
• One of the girls decided to get married and Robertson was invited to the wedding, but it was during the last of the war, and as they were coming out of the church a detail of two jeeps rolled up to the church and one of the priests had to go right away as there had been an accident
• The wedding breakfast was going to be in the Kerby house, and since the priest was gone the other girl who worked for him wanted him to be master of ceremonies instead so that her uncle Joe could be dissuaded from being master of ceremonies, since he was an auctioneer and they were worried that once he got up there he wouldn’t stop talking!
- Date of Original
- October 1993
- Playing Time
- 34:33
- Subject(s)
- Personal Name(s)
- Jack Casey ; Edward Casey ; John Agnew ; Jack Ryan ; Norm Edmonson ; Albert Barnett(?) ; Jack Powers ; Ethel Davies
- Corporate Name(s)
- Agnew-Surpass Shoe Stores Ltd
- Language of Item
- English
- Copyright Statement
- Protected by copyright: Uses other than research or private study require the permission of the rightsholder(s). Responsibility for obtaining permissions and for any use rests exclusively with the user.
- Contact
- Brantford Public LibraryEmail:b4@brantfordlibrary.ca
Website:
Agency street/mail address:173 Colborne St.
Brantford, ON N3T 2G8
