Memoir/Backstory

From Western New Brunswick,and from Springhill,in Cumberland county,Nova Scotia,my parents arrived in Goose Bay Labrador,in the Canadian North.I've never heard the story of how they met,so far as I know,but they married in the late 1950's and lived another three or so years in the north.

Goose Bay is almost straight north of Canada's Atlantic Provinces and anyone with a passing knowledge of the history of the latter half of the last century will know a lot about how it came to be there and what the place is all about.You see,it was a product of that history.And my parents were drawn there by the flow of that history.

Now in discussing history I usually like to forego the tinder dry and mouldy textbooks for what I refer to as the Ron Thomasson (comedian and bluegrass musician extraordinaire) school of history.At least what it lacks in accuracy can be made up for in wit.
So how did Goose Bay come to be.Well,there was this guy in the 1940's by the name of Hitler,who by all accounts was a bit of a jerk.I can't attest to that personally,but a great many people say it's true,and I believe them.He was so bad in fact that everyone ,both good and bad guys alike got together to remove him from the scene.Doing that wasn't easy,but it was successful,eventually.But this raised a whole new set of problems.Because there was this guy named Stalin who was said to be even worse than this Hitler guy.He killed more people,but that didn't bother us too much while we were all fighting Hitler.But about ten seconds after Hitler was gone we recognized Stalin for what he was.That was at the end of WWII.You probably heard of WWII-it was in all the papers.

With WWII over,us North Americans needed another enemy,so Stalin and a succession of  others made a natural choice.They were after all communists,Godless by definition and against all that America stood for.So began a new war called the cold war,and that's where Goose Bay comes in.America had,of course bombed Japan with a new kind of Moltov cocktail,that was bigger and better than anything that came before it.And that finally ended WWII.But the enemy,the Godless Communists in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were not far behind in developing ever better firecrackers of their own.So,the Americans decided what they needed was a better way to deliver these new explosives.So they more or less kidnapped a man by the name of Von Braun,who,as luck would have it had at least one or two revolutionary ideas about how such things could be delivered.He'd been doing it,and assorted other dastardly things in Germany before he was spirited away.A German friend of mine says he conceived of rocket propulsion because of a gross overindulgence in good German beer and Weiner Schinitzel,drowned in sourkraut.Again,I can't attest to that.

At any rate,rockets turned out to be a much better way of delivering atom bombs than the old tried but not quite true method.Those big bombers were heavy and always seemed to generate a lot of noise complaints when flying over enemy territory.As it turned out,you could expropriate property in Kansas or Nebraska,bury these rockets,called missiles,and if you ever had to fire them the only one who would be annoyed would be some farmer who had a bunch of smoking holes where he should have had corn.Crop insurance didn't cover that,apparently.Well.that farmer and several million Russians that is,but of course they were communists.There were communists over here too but we could get to them without bombs.A man named McCarthy,a master of innuendo and also a bit of a jerk was in charge of that.But I digress.

At some point,our American friends decided to share this cold war with us.As it turned out the most direct route from the United States to Russia went right over Northern Canada.I t was also a convenient place for all of that military hardware to land once the United States superior military machine had shot it down.Far better than Washington,or Los Angeles or Chicago.Well,maybe not Chicago.After all,they had the Bears and the White Sox.

So what followed was a building spree of military bases all over the north.Including Goose Bay which had both a Canadian and an American base.And that's where my parents wound up.By this time a man named Ike came along and decided that war could be used to advance the economy and we haven't looked back since.It seemed to work like a charm, and here in Canada kept a number of communities viable,including Goose Bay.

Well,that's the history part of it,or at least most of it.There were a few other events of note,like the formation of the State of Israel which no one seemed to recognize for what it was because people like Bertrand Russell and Charles Darwin had convinced a great many others to stop reading their bibles.And of course,Newfoundland,where Goose Bay was located had just become a part of Canada a few years before.It wouldn't be long before they became the laughing stalk of Canada and many wished they'd not joined and started flying the Canadian flag upside down.

And thats what I know about Goose Bay.Well,there are a few things my father told me and some things I could tell from family photos,but that will have to wait for tomorrow.