OUR GEOGRAPHY - OUR HERITAGE
HANNS F SKOUTAJAN
A bundle of Geographicals, some three years accumulation of my favourite mag, provided me with a seat in the back of the truck. We were moving our few possessions to our new home about 100 miles east of Toronto in the summer of 1942. I was then 13 years of age and curious about my new homeland. Shortly after leaving the suburbs a light drizzle descended on us and the driver arranged a rickety tarp over me and our meagre possession. It managed to keep us dry, particularly my precious magazines.
The Canadian Geographical Journal, as it was then called, was my favourite magazine from which I would not be parted by rain or snow. Over the years since our arrival in Canada in April 1939 at Halifax’s famous Pier 21 after our flight from the Nazi scourge, the monthly editions have brought us a plethora of information and pictures about every part of our country but also of places beyond our shores.
We came by the Canadian Geographical Journal in a novel way. Our group of families were settled on very marginal land on abandoned homesteads in northern Saskatchewan after freeing the German takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1939. People at the University of Toronto became interested in our plight. We were probably the first immigrants to receive second hand clothing from sympathetic people half a continent away. The clothing was usually dumped in an empty granary to be picked over by our people. My mother acquired a very nice fur coat, muskrat I believe, in that way.
One day, however, the shipment consisted of reading material. Our benefactors had properly surmised that ours were not only material but intellectual needs. We poured over the mound of books and mags like hungry ants. I salvaged a copy of Two Little Savages by Ernest Thompson Seton, a classic which dealt with a boy about my age who had contracted TB and for his recuperation was sent out to a farm to benefit from the fresh air. He befriended another boy and together they undertook many adventures. It also contained a good deal of nature and “Indian” lore . I learned how to make a bow and arrow and to identify a variety of wildlife. That copy still rests on a place of honour on my bookshelf.
My father garnered several copies of the Canadian Geographical Journal . He had the audacity to write to the editor to explain our impoverished circumstances but also our interest in this new homeland. Soon afterward we received a bundle of back copies and a five year subscription gratis. When it ran out we subscribed and have continued to do so until this day, 75 years later.
The September 1939 edition carried an article and photos of the city of Warsaw, Poland . A few weeks later the German armies laid waste to this world-class city and its wonderful architecture. Luckily carefully secreted plans surfaced in the postwar years and the city was able to be restored to its prewar splendour.
During the war years the magazine brought information about Canada’s war effort. Among them was an article about the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan (July 1940). In those years our country not only produced guns and tanks and aircraft but the soldiers to maintain and man them on the battlefields, on land, at sea and in the sky. Canadian industry built the famous Lancaster bomber among other war planes. I used that article for an essay which I had to write for Grade 6 at Regal Road Public School in Toronto and then presented it as an “oral composition” to the class. So rich in information was my essay that my teacher took me aside and questioned me whether my father, still a foreign national, was a spy.
Following the war I was particularly interested in a story about Imperial Airways that flew flying boats, the Caribou, Cabot and Golden Hind, as the first trans-atlantic mail and passenger service. Those huge four engined aircraft with ship shaped hulls to land and take-off from water, flew from the St. Lawrence River at Boucherville, east of Montreal to Southampton, Britain.
The magazine also carried stories about the development of Canada’s northland . I was enthralled by the pen and ink drawings of transportation on the Mackenzie and Coppermine Rivers where barges were pulled manually by rope harnessed crews on shore.
This truly Canadian publication not only enriched our understanding of our new environment but also of the world. Its stunning photography, first in black and white and after the war in full colour, was truly a window on the world. I well remember my first viewing of the art of the Group of Seven in stunning colour on its pages.
Recently we have had to do some downsizing of our possessions - too many books for sure - in the course of which I came upon a bundle of Geographicals which we had first acquired on our pioneer farm. When I showed them to a friend he suggested that I list them on E Bay, where they would fetch a good price from a collector. I refused, they are priceless to me. I hope that my granddaughter will value this archival treasure as I do and recognize it as part of her personal heritage.
I sincerely hope that the Canadian Geographic will not fall to the economic hammer as have so many publications but continue to publish informative and colourful articles and pictures about this land and our global environment and history.
Thanks Canadian Geographical Journal and your more recent incarnation the Canadian Geographic. As they are wont to say in Ole Limey, “Carry on Canada!.”
SQ 0410/2013
