by Paul Voisey
University of Alberta
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Harlo L. Jones. O Little Town: Remembering Life in a Prairie Village. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1995. Pp. 236. ill. ISBN 0-88755-633-7.
Memoirs of boyhood have come to form a small, yet distinctive, genre in the literature of the prairies. Invariably, they are awash in nostalgia, filled with childhood adventures and misadventures of the “we made our own fun” variety. They commonly focus on material circumstances and technology, and delight in contrasting them with present-day conditions. Harlo Jones, who describes his childhood and adolescence from the late 1920s to the early 1940s in Dinsmore, Saskatchewan, sixty-five miles from Saskatoon, does not deviate from this formula.
The author painstakingly recreates the physical layout of the stores, train station, school, church, and virtually every other public building in a town of 200 souls. He instructs the reader on how everything mechanical inside them worked, with careful attention to the provisions for heat, water, and sewage. Electricity and automobiles receive special consideration since the author’s father ran an automotive and farm machinery business, and also operated the town’s often inadequate power plant. Plentiful too, are the obligatory references to gopher hunting, rafting on sloughs, curling, baseball, hockey, threshing, mail-order catalogues, storms, dances, radio, and the movies. While less prominent, character sketches of the town’s eccentrics dutifully appear.
Since the adult world is presented through childhood eyes, much about that world is left out. There is little reference, for example, to the impact of the Great Depression on the town and surrounding area, but as the author explains, children were often oblivious to the economic plight around them, and given the ubiquitous pallor it spread over the prairies, it seemed to them a normal and natural condition. In spite of the substantial presence of the author’s father in the business affairs of the town, for example, it was not until age 18 that young Harlo discovered that his father was deeply in debt, largely because his customers had been unable to pay their bills. Similarly, there is a shortage of social commentary, but when it appears, it is often revealing, as when the author describes a social snub to a Chinese resident, or when a young nurse occasions scandal by smoking in public.
The author claims that his children’s questions about the olden days inspired the book, but one suspects that its appreciate audience will be those who also grew up on the prairies during the Depression. They will find the book a pleasant read. The prose is clear and often imaginative, as when Jones recalls Clydesdales with hoof prints “the size of dinner plates,” or throws a stone at a “particularly saucy gopher.” Serious students of prairie history will not learn much, however, having heard it all before.
Page revised: 26 September 2012
