Your homes were our playgrounds!

I grew up on the 800 block of Third Street in the East End of Fort Frances. I think that our home was the third of fourth built on the street. As a youngster, I was able to supervise the construction of all the other homes that were built along the block.
Once in school, the ending of the school year announced a new construction season.
Stan Dolny, whose shop was located at the corner of Second and Frenette was hired to build many of the homes. He also built several on speculation.
Today as I walk along those two blocks of Third Street, only a few of the original families who built their homes in the 1950’s continue to live there. The Egans, the Spuzaks, the Christiansens, the Haugos, and Mrs. Skinner still occupy their original homes.
The rest of the homes have changed hands.
In those childhood years, an Armstrong drag line usually operated by Donnie Christian would show up for a day and excavate a basement building large piles of earth usually behind the home.
It was the biggest sand pile in the world for the boys and girls who lived on the street, and we would search through those big piles for stretches of clay to build things with. We didn’t have the “Tonka” toys of today, but that didn’t diminish our imaginations. We built roads, and subdivisions, castles and homes.
We got to know the builders, their workers, the dump truck drivers who brought in the sand and gravel to build the basements.
The day after the hole was dug, the workers would show up and begin putting the cement footings in.
I hadn’t stopped to think about those times until Saturday. I had dropped in to Stan and Millie Ward’s 60th anniversary and many of those old faces from Third Street were there. All four of their sons were there. I had grown up with boys on the street. Stan was a cub leader. He drove us week after week to cubs and then home.
I hadn’t seen Stan and Millie’s oldest son Doug since he went off to university and began pursuing his career in journalism. Doug now writes for the Vancouver Sun and covers the national and provincial political scene.
We talked about the old Third Street and the people who continue to live on the street.
The parks didn’t have jungle gyms in them those days. So our gyms and climbing apparatus were the homes that were being constructed on Third Street. Workers would remove the ramps into the buildings at the end of the day, and after they had left, we would deftly climb the cement walls into the open homes.
Parents who came checking on us would cringe at some of the routes we used to climb in and our biggest disappointments came when the windows and doors were delivered. That announced the end of our playground equipment.
Exiting the buildings proved much easier than getting in. It involved usually jumping from a window across the space between the basement wall and the ground. Sometimes we missed but in youth you don’t necessarily seem to hurt yourselves.
Behind all those homes on Third Street was bush. We were free to roam the street and the bush adjoining it. The whole area was our playground. I suspect that all the mothers kept an eye on us, but we felt free to travel the street and area.

–Jim Cumming,
Publisher