Growing Up In Coquitlam

            Growing up in the fifties was really very carefree. For parents too because they didn't know where we were for most of the day. "Oh they're just out playing". And we were, but if it was in today's world, child welfare would have whisked us away. I was ten or eleven when I got my first bike. It had belonged to a Finnish boy whose father was killed building the sea-to-sky highway and he and his mom were moving back to Finland. That bike just expanded my world exponentially. There was usually a gang of us as we headed out in the morning. I would go over to Dave Treger's and probably run into Earl Netzlaw on the way. Dave's younger brother Tim would usually come if we were going fishing in one of the creeks running down the hill that is Coquitlam.

            The key to any successful education is the excellence of the instructors. Dave had an older brother Gerry from whom most of our wisdom came. It was at the Tregers' that I learned to make slingshots. Maple crooks abounded in our bush and there never appeared to be a shortage of bike innertubes for rubber and shoe tongues for pockets.

I have wondered what Mr. Treger thought of all the tongueless shoes that his family sported. Slingshots weren't always used for good when I winged a stone off the pavement into a neighbour girls leg as she was speeding down the road on her bike. It was a good shot but her father chased us into the bush for miles.

            We hung around in the bush a lot. All that is left of that bush now is Mundy Park with its two small bog lakes - Mundy Lake and Lost Lake. We became adept at bringing down tall alders that were 6 or 8 inches at the butt and building log forts. Nobody was crushed by falling trees or whacked with an axe. The same was for building rafts on the lakes. It was usually green alder that was used and it barely floated above the surface. I wonder now if we always travelled with an axe. I didn't have one so it must have been the Tregers. Austin Road ended near our houses and the trail led through the bush to the power-line (the power-line that just fell into the Fraser the other day) and down to Essondale, the mental asylum as it was known then.

            Essondale had extensive orchards and cherry season would draw us down the hill. In those days, a few people who were former inmates had built crude shacks in the bush and had planted gardens and lived, summers anyway, there. We never thought anything of running into people there, that's just how it was. Essondale also had extensive farms, known as Colony Farms, between the Lougheed Highway and the Fraser River where they raised prize winning (at the PNE) cattle, hogs and sheep. In those days, most institutions like that and like penitentiaries had their own farms where some inmates were able to work and the food raised was used in the institution. It seems so logical that good, healthy, meaningful work would be beneficial to recovery.

Occasionally, we would head for Colony Farms and ride the sheep. An end to that came when Earl Netzlaw picked a ram to ride and the ram's horn hooked Earl in the nostril and ripped it open. Don't tell your mom Earl or we'll really be in trouble.

            Parents were on a "Need to Know" basis and unless a limb was lost, they didn't need to know, and probably, didn't want to know. We must have had some close calls but I can only remember one really close childhood call. It must have been about 1954 and we hadn't moved up to Tregers' neighbourhood yet. My friend Ronnie Garneau and I had wandered up to the dump at the end of Como Lake Road. The site is now a high school, Dr. Charles Best. Rumour had it  that some kid had found a 5 dollar bill in some discarded clothing so every kid in the municipality made the dump part of their rounds.

Two men were shooting a handgun at some cans set up on the overturned frame of a car and as we walked well in the back of them, a ricochet drilled a groove into the back of Ronnie's scalp. We were walking side by side and either one of us could have been a casualty. Ronnie told his dad but my parents didn't need to know.

            Towards New Westminster from Colony Farms is Leeder Creek, where the Port Mann Bridge is today. This was an area where log booms were tied up waiting to be processed at one of the many mills in Coquitlam/New Westminster, the largest being Fraser Mills in Maillardville. We often rode in our gum boots, fashionably turned down at the top, and would go fishing from the log booms. Running across the floating logs never seemed to be a problem and when one sunk down it was just logical to jump on to the next one. I suppose we were lucky and the most we got was wet feet although I knew a family who lost one of their boys into the river.

            In the other direction, in Port Coquitlam, were the large Canadian Pacific Railway  yards and roundhouse. I don't know if we always happened there at lunch or what but there never seemed to be anybody around the roundhouse. The turntable for lining up the locomotives with the roundhouse doors was powered by steam and quite simply by turning a handle we could make it go. I don't remember ever being chased away from there. That roundhouse is no longer there but it must have been at least ten miles from our place which was at the top of the hill and the roundhouse was at river level. I would be hard pressed today to jump on a bike and make that trip.

            I know that times have changed and bad things happen to kids who are out on their own but we were carefree. We went where we wanted, didn't really get into bad trouble, weren't harassed by anybody and survived to become self reliant. We grew up with the confidence to tackle anything and often did.