Ulrich Laska has added a comment to our forum about Cartierville School
Ulrich Laska (MCHS ’63) has shared with us the following comment at the earlier post entitled:
Cartierville School in Montreal
I’m pleased to share with you his text as a separate post, in order to bring your attention to it. Wonderful to read your comment, Ulrich!
It has occurred to me to ask: Are there Cartierville School alumni who did not attend Malcolm Campbell High School, but who would be interested in attending the MCHS 2015 reunion, as a friend of an MCHS alumna or alumnus?
If you are in that category (that is, you attended Cartierville but not Malcolm Campbell), please let me know.
Ulrich Laska recently wrote:
I attended Cartierville school from 4-7 grades. My parents having landed from post war Germany in 1951 bought a brand new bungalow in a very early suburban subdivision of Roxboro in 1955 for $13,000. I was always amazed and grateful how just a few years after such a terrible war we were welcomed to Canada, could buy a home, receive a wonderful education, and live a life of peaceful opportunity.
Roxboro it was a sea of mud. No one had thought to construct a school. There were 4 years of daily school busing down Gouin Blvd to Cartierville, with stops at A Ma Baie and Saraguay. We didn’t have a TV at home so I felt a little left out when all the kids would be mimicking the TV shows and commercials of the night before. Those were the years of cars with big tailfins, I remember the favorite game with my seatmate Ricky White was to see who could count more 1959 Chevrolets or Pontiacs during the trip.
I recall Mrs Staniforth in 6th grade and the pregnant Mrs Gamble in 7th grade. One year I was Mr Weatherbee in the school play, and Mrs Findlayson would hover over me applying stage makeup, all I remember was the bad breath. Occasionally there would be a movie afternoon down in the basement, that was always a treat,
Baseball and touch football in the school yard during lunch hour were fond memories, there were no organized team sports available for kids back then, not like it is now. The schoolyard was where I learned to play those games, that’s where I first hit a baseball and caught a football. The camaraderie and lessons in fair play were memorable.
On occasion we would sneak off at lunch hour and scavenge for lost golf balls at the nearby golf course. Sometimes when there was an activity after school, it was a problem because the school bus would be gone. I would have to hitch-hike back home. How times have changed.
So many names come back to me, hazy with mists of time. Thank you Jaan for hosting this forum and helping resurrect these snippets of history.
[End of text]
Cartierville School in Montreal
You can access the full Cartierville School post here.
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I would never have imagined how many people share my interest in Cartierville School, which I attended for Grade 4 – a memory that has stayed strongly with me. I would also like to mention in passing that I never thought I would be learning to write simple HTML codes, but that’s what I’ve started to do now, to speed up the process of quickly getting these posts up on the website. I’m really pleased that so much interesting information is being shared via the comments.
We bought a house in Roxboro in 57, and it was a full 6 months before the garbage man realized there was somebody living in it 🙂 I went to school with Brigitte. I was best friends with Jenning Dai’s sister Sheila. And didn’t you live a few doors down from the Bunn family? I was friends with Christine. And Kathy Dawson, was she from Roxboro too? She would have had a brother Steven who was a year or two younger than me but they lived just two houses away. They built Roxboro School just in time for me, and also Riverdale. I walked to my schools, never had to take a bus or train until McGill. Good times, Ulrich 🙂
Good to read your message, Enid, to Ulrich. You might also be interested in the following post:
A message from Sheila Dai, reaching out to friends of her brother Jenning Dai
Yes, I had seen it. I still remember the shock of hearing about Jenning. A lovely boy.
Could you give me any news of Brigitte? Sad how schoolmates from Quebec have lost track of each other.
Although I suppose you wouldn’t know Brigitte. Still sad how we have all scattered.
I don’t know Brigitte. However, I will send you an email for a contact who might know of any news about Brigitte. I will also post this item at an MCHS Facebook Sixties Reunion group. That may be another means whereby we can arrive at a news update.
For certain, sad how we have all scattered. On the other hand, pleasing that from time to time people can reconnect, after the passage of 50 or 60 years or more.
That would be nice, thanks Jaan.
Cartierville School goes back a long way before your time there. Actually, it was a result of the baby boom after WWI that prompted its construction in 1922 of a 4 room school with enough additional land to allow several extensions over time as the community developed further.
Before the first extension there was a portable unit, not like today’s modern units, but an old wooden one with grating over the w2indows. When I first attended school there in 1950, I lived a few blocks away on Reed Street, the 4-lane cement highway that led to the Cartierville bridge. I would not be 6 years old until November that year so I was always one of the youngest in the class.
There were two Grade 4s which were held across the street in the old Church with chalk boards dividing the classes. I cam back to the school for Mrs. Staniforth in Grade five, the teacher I hated the most and it would be the following year that she chose to move up to teaching Grade 6. I just could not win!!!
At one point Mrs. Finlayson gave me the strap….though I think I hurt her knee more by pulling my hand away the first time. Not an uncommon happening when you have learning disabilities and there was little or no treatment back them. I remember Mrs. Shields taught me that difference between b and d, & p and q. She said visualize a 4-poster bed with the b and d as the top posts and the p and q as the bottom post. It was easy to remember after that. Life has been an interesting journey for me and not ended up as I had hoped. Nevertheless I have been happy. Have a great day!
I like the fact that the history of Cartierville School goes back a long way and that we are able to share a good amount of solid information about the history of the school. There was an idyllic quality to the school (including its pleasing, compact, human-scale architecture) and its surroundings (the large school grounds, with a slope toward the Back River, and the large trees). There were also characteristic human qualities (with qualities of strong emotional support as well as of cruelty and coercion) that are a part of the history of education, including the methods of corporal punishment that were the norm in schools across the country in those days.
As I recall, the use of the strap was an everyday part of school life, from the primary grades on, until at some point in the early or mid-1960s, when at least within the Protestant School Board of Greater Montreal, the use of it appears to have been abolished. When the use of the strap was abolished in other school systems I do not know; it’s a question that is of interest, for me.
I have recently begun to picture, in my mind, what the experiences were like (for example, in relation to school-inflicted violence) in those days, for Indigenous children and adolescents, separated from their extended families, in residential schools across Canada. I am really pleased that the full historical record, as it relates to Indigenous and Settler history of that era, and of previous eras, is now becoming, to some extent – and perhaps an increasing extent – a part of public consciousness.
I am reminded of a July 9, 2017 Toronto Star article, entitled: “John A. Macdonald was the real architect of residential schools: The controversy around Egerton Ryerson and Hector-Louis Langevin distracts from the fundamental fact that our first prime minister was the architect of Canada’s Indigenous genocide.”