With my mother and siblings in front of our house on Beaverbrook Streetin the fall of 1960
I have this memory from the year our family lived on Beaverbrook Street in Winnipeg in 1960 and 1961. One day I came home from Sir John Franklin School several blocks away and there was a car on the front lawn of our neighbour lady’s house.
This photo of our former neighbour’s house on Beaverbrook was taken last year. The house hadn’t changed much in half a centuryalthough I remember it being a rather bright yellow with green trim.Did a car really drive onto its front lawn one day in the 1960s?
I wanted to use the car on the lawn incident in the latest novel I am writing but wondered if I had just imagined it or it had really happened. In my imagination, the car had driven right through the front window of the house and I was quite sure I remembered that the Winnipeg Free Press had carried a story about it.
Thanks to my Winnipeg Library card which grants me access to old newspapers I was able to find a story about a car on the lawn of a house at 280 Beaverbrook Street on the front page of the Winnipeg Free Press. Turns out on December 20th 1960 there was a two-car collision on Beaverbrook Street that left one car on the front lawn of 280 Beaverbrook. Both drivers escaped critical injury but 34-year-old Karl Klees was admitted to the Misericordia Hospital for observation.
December 20, 1960, issue Winnipeg Free Press
However, there is no report that the car actually drove into the house as I remembered. I was a voracious reader as a child and so no doubt I dramatically embellished the story in my head but it was nice to know that at least part of it was true. And in my novel of course which is fiction, I will be free to make the story about the car on the lawn as dramatic as I want to.
With my mother and siblings in front of our house on Beaverbrook Street in 1960.
I lived on Beaverbrook Street in Winnipeg for one year. My father finished his medical internship at the St. Boniface Hospital and decided to do a surgical residency for a year with Dr. Jacob Isaac who worked at the Winnipeg Clinic. We had to move out of the apartment building for interns at the St. Boniface Hospital where we had been living. My parents found a house we could rent at 278 Beaverbrook Street. We lived there from 1960-1961.
Last week I went to find our Beaverbrook Home. It is still there but looks a little different. The front part of the house which was a sunroom when we lived there, has been stuccoed and most of its windows have been removed.
Outside our house on Beaverbrook Street in Winnipeg, ready to go to the beach with my Auntie Millie and her children.
Hanging stockings on our fireplace in the house on Beaverbrook Street
Mom reading Jack and Jill magazine to us, in the living room of our Beaverbrook house. Check out the leafy wallpaper behind us.
Mom took in foster children, two little babies, during the year we lived on Beaverbrook Street. Barry and Linda each lived with us for about six months until permanent adoptive homes were found for them. My parents didn’t take any photos of Barry and Linda but I remember them and how sad we were when they had to leave. I so admire how well Mom managed to look after her own three children and also take in foster childrenand give them loving care.
The house next door to us at 280 Beaverbrook still looks much as it did in 1960. An elderly widow lived there and I have a memory of coming home from school one day and seeing a car that had driven onto the front lawn of the house.
Grade Two Class Sir John Franklin School – 1960-1961- Teacher Miss Ushay- I’m in the back row right beside the principal
I went to Sir John Franklin School for grade two and my teacher was Miss Ushay. She was young and very pretty but I don’t remember much about my school year except I once got 7+7 wrong on a math test. I had two best friends April and Catherine who were both in my class and also both lived on Beaverbrook Street.
My sister and I on the playground at Sir John Franklin
My sister was in kindergarten at St. John Franklin. The school was closed in 1989 due to dwindling enrolment and was torn down in 1991.
This is what the site of Sir John Franklin School looks like now
278 Beaverbrook in 2021
I am glad my old house on Beaverbrook Street is still there although I wonder how long it might last since many of the older homes in the neighbourhood have been torn down and replaced by new modern homes.
Spring in the backyard of the Beaverbrook house with my siblings.
Summer of 1961 in the backyard of the Beaverbrook housewith my siblings
With my family in the backyard of our Beaverbrook House
With my Aunt Viola on the yard on Beaverbrook
278 Beaverbrook was my fourth home in Winnipeg. I have visited the other three as well in the past year. You can read about them here.
That’s me in the doorway of a house I lived in at 110 Home Street in Winnipeg. My family moved into the house in 1954 and we lived there for the next four years. I have been back in Winnipeg for nearly a decade now, but for some reason, I had never made a point of going to look at my old house. I decided to do that this past weekend. I was a little worried about what kind of state the house might be in, but it was BEAUTIFUL and obviously, had been treated with tender loving care. Of course, it looked a little different sixty-some years ago. This is the one photo I could find of the front of the house in 1954. My grandparents helped my Mom and Dad buy the house and various aunts and uncles lived on the third floor at different times while they were going to university or working in the city. The bedrooms on the second floor were rented out to university students and my Mom cooked and cleaned and did their laundry. This provided income for our family since my Dad was a medical student at the time.
This is how the house looked in the fall of 2016
The house was sold in 2016 and so I was able to go online and see the listing, which contained lots of photos of the house.
Winter 1956 -Playing outside the Home Street house with my friend MaryJane.
On the front steps of the Home Street house with my friends Dorothy and Lynette
Here I am having a bath in the kitchen of the house in 1954. Here is how the kitchen looked in 2016.
My Dad reading my sister Kaaren and me a story in the living room of the Home Street house in 1958. The living room of the house in 2016. The radiator is still under the window but it has been painted a different colour. There is a lamp in the same corner.
Standing on the steps of the house before leaving for Laura Secord School in 1959. Standing in front of 110 Home Street in August of 2020.
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