Winnipeg
2011/08/18
Spent a full day in Winnipeg today, partly for memory rehashing and partly for new-stuff tourism.
I don’t have very many memories of Winnipeg, actually. I’ve been through a number of times and we lived here for a month or so one winter when my father was trying to find work. It was not a terribly happy time.
First order of the day was to try and relocate the happy places, so I went for a walk downtown. Tried a burger from VJ’s – unique flavor but overall I didn’t like it. Then spotted some kind of wall-crawling contest going on near the corner of Portage and Main:
There were two obviously inexperienced people rappelling down the face of this building while an announcer across the street egged them on. Not sure what that was all about, but at least someone found a use for the Mountain Equipment Co-Op store that mysteriously exists here.
The first location I was looking for was the former storefront of Doug Sulipa’s Comic World. I mentioned in a previous post that while we lived on the farm I discovered and got addicted to The New Mutants comic series, while it was still in its late teen issue numbers. Comic World had a huge storefront on Portage Avenue at the time – if I remember right he claimed to have 100,000 back-issues in the store, and I believe it. Comic nerd heaven! Thanks to Doug, I back-filled every missing issue. Even better, he had arcade games in the store. The only one I remember playing was Argus, which I still really like for its music. If I ever collect the musician powerup I’ve always wanted, Argus and Black Tiger will be tied for the first video games I remix the music of.
Anyway, I’m pretty sure the old storefront is gone, now replaced by part of this new mall:
And right across the street, this fancy new building:
stands where I believe the other notable location was: Mother’s Arcade. I always thought of Mother’s as the most famous and professional arcade in Canada, probably because it’s the only Canadian arcade I ever read a magazine review of (I have since gone through all my old video game magazines trying to find that review, with no luck).
I didn’t get to spend a whole lot of time in Mother’s, but it was a nice place. The front was all fancy stonework with columns and looked like it had once been a bank. Inside was nicely decorated in sleek futuristic lines like you’d expect from an arcade. The game selection wasn’t really to my taste though – they had Dragon’s Lair, which was debuting to much fanfare at the time. They even had a secondary screen on top of the cabinet so a larger crowd could watch. I played it once and decided it was little more than an interactive slideshow, and thus not really a game. They also had some uncommon games like Bubbles and Joust 2, but I mostly ended up playing Xevious.
There was another arcade not far away, off the wrong (ie north) side of Portage, but I can’t recall where it was. My mother was nervous about leaving me there, but they had a better game selection. There was a vertical-scrolling helicopter game that I no longer remember the name of, but played because it had an enormous screen. But the real star of that arcade was Altered Beast, which I couldn’t get enough of to the point of making my mother angry by staying in there past the appointed hour. It had such good graphics! And sampled voices!
Next destination was the Western Canadian Aviation Museum, which I’ve never been to before. It was somewhat interesting and I took a lot of photos which will mostly have to be sorted out some other time. It is a little cramped though – they need more space to properly display their collection. The biggest surprise was seeing an Avrocar there – also known as the Flying Pancake, though due to budget overrun it never flew more than a meter off the ground:
I then went on to Bird’s Hill Park, which I’ve only visited a few times before but had fond memories of. It has a network of paved bicycle paths going through a variety of fields and forests, like this:
If you’re a kid on a bike, this is a really neat place to camp. There’s also a shallow lake with a wide beach that is great for wading and building sand castles. The park is also home to an annual music festival, though I don’t remember if we ever attended that.
One of my most notable nightmares is associated with this place too. When I was a kid I watched all sorts of science fiction television series, including Space: 1999. One episode though, titled Dragon’s Domain, scared the snot out of me. Here was a large, man-eating tentacular horror with a single giant eyeball with a glowing brain behind it, and it could appear at will in any open doorway with almost no warning. Anyway, somehow that monster got associated with this park and for two years I had a recurring nightmare that I was fleeing several of these creatures in a (non-extant) convenience store located in this park. I got so used to the dream recurring that I eventually dreamed myself up an axe and fought back against the monsters, and the nightmares stopped.
Back to the present. After noodling around the park a bit it was supper time, so I went back into town and had a burger at Baked Expectations. It was good, but not outstanding as burgers go. But I did get another dessert, this time the carrot cake:
It was very good as carrot cakes go, but I liked last night’s chocolate cake better.
Returned to my room to offload the day’s pictures, and was pleasantly surprised by an intense lightning storm. I managed to get a few exposures from my window:
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Brandon to Winnipeg
2011/08/17
Not a terribly eventful day; just a short drive to Winnipeg, where I plan to spend two nights as there are some museum type things I want to do there.
Some of the farmers in this area grow sunflowers:
I took a detour to check out the Spirit Sands desert in Spruce Woods park, but sadly the access road had been washed out – apparently the Assiniboine river flooded rather badly this year. I did get to check out another, non-sandy hiking area nearby though. Weird landscape:
Just grass, sage and trees – almost no mid-size shrubberies.
I like this area. When we were shopping around for our farm, my mother and I looked at property near here. I thought it was neat that it was basically just small trees growing out of sand, and there was sand everywhere. Obviously we didn’t buy the place since it would have been impossible to grow anything there, but it was neat anyway. I found the iron foot of an old claw-foot bathtub near a ruined house on that property, and it might still be in our shed on the farm to this day.
Continued on to Winnipeg, and made the mistake of driving downtown at rush hour. Aggravating. Got a room for the night, then got a dessert from Baked Expectations at the recommendation of a co-worker – and boy was it good. I will get more desserts there tomorrow, the next day and on my return trip.
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Russell to Brandon
2011/08/16
Concluded my business in Russell and Angusville this morning. I dropped by the Russell nursing home to see if I could find Wanda. She wasn’t there but I left my card for her. Also: I really do not want to end up in one of those places! Horrible.
Rossburn
Brief stop in Rossburn to document the usual places. Here’s main street:
This town is actually holding on better than I expected; only a couple fewer businesses in operation than last time I was here.
Most prairie towns have at least one faux Chinoise restaurant, as a result of the railway work and the forced resettlement of Japanese during the war. This down has two. We often ate at this one:
They had good sweet & sour chicken balls (I didn’t know chickens had balls!) and best of all, a game room. Played lots of Donkey Kong Junior here.
The other place across the road:
I didn’t like the food or the game selection quite as much, but they had one real oddity: the Hercules pinball machine, which had oversized balls.
There was also a proper pool hall and arcade, in the foreground building here:
I don’t remember playing any notable games there though.
On one of the side streets was one of the town’s two grocery stores, which I think was called M&M. I liked going there because they sold lots of interesting collectable cards and stickers; I bought a lot of Wacky Packages stickers plus some video game themed ones that would be good on Ebay today if I hadn’t actually, you know, stuck them. Inside the now-ruined camper on the farm. The Wacky Packages were a major inspiration for my parodical sense of humor.
Interestingly, the M&M storefront now bears a sign identifying it as an arcade. I didn’t know about this change. Sadly, it is in the past; I looked in the window and the store is empty.
Wasagaming
One of our favorite getaway destination when we lived in Manitoba was the town of Wasagaming, on Clear Lake in Riding Mountain National Park. There is a huge and excellent campground there which we used often. It’s only about a 90-minute drive from the farm so it was pretty convenient.
I find Wasagaming a really relaxing place. Most of the commercial buildings are log cabin style, and there are lots of nice big trees around – it feels more like a resort than a town. There’s a nice beach with sand perfect for making castles (a favorite activity when I was young).
Beside the tennis courts they had these giant chess/checkers sets that were great fun for kids:
Sadly the chess pieces seem to be missing, and the boards are no longer in very good shape. Down at the other end of the tennis courts was a playground that I really liked, and while there is still a playground there none of the original equipment remains.
The lobby of the theater had a Gauntlet machine in it for a while – I spent many hours and quarters in there playing co-op with other kids – co-op video games were a rare and novel thing back then.
Wasagaming is also where I had two of my most unpleasant dining experiences, which affected me for a long time. Across the road from the theater was a restaurant/deli that is no longer there. I got a ham sandwich that turned out to be spoiled, though it tasted fine. In the middle of that night I suddenly sat bolt upright and painted the inside of the camper with it.
The second one was at this place, just around the corner:
I loved milk, chocolate or otherwise, when I was a kid. But the glass of milk they served me here had a… thing… at the bottom. I have no idea what it was. It was a transparent, gelatinous blob of something. Sort of like an egg white. That didn’t belong there and I was grossed out. I didn’t drink milk again for two years, and actually rarely ever drank it again at all. Actually, I recently found a very similar blob in a carton of milk in Vancouver. Didn’t disturb me quite as much since I only use milk for cooking now – there was no danger of drinking the thing – but it brought back the bad memory.
Another bad experience I had in Wasagaming concerned a comic book. One camping trip I hadn’t brought anything to read with me, so I begged some money from my parents and went into one of the tourist shops to buy a comic. Their selection was really weird though; everything they had either didn’t interest me or I already had. So I took a chance on a title I had never seen before. I don’t remember what it was, but it was awful; violent with graphic blood and gore. I had never seen anything like that before and it really upset me.
Despite these bad experiences that really stand out in my mind, I still love this town and plan to stop here for a night on my return trip.
Just outside of town is this weird conglomerate establishment called Sportsman’s Park.
It’s a campground, ice cream & burger stand, amusement park, car wash, weekend flea market, arcade and who knows what else. We actually attended the flea market a few times, and once I foolishly sold some of my books and comics for money.
But the real highlight of this place was the arcade. It was a really good arcade. Lots of games. The one I remember as most characteristic of this place was the underrated classic, Pengo. But I also played a lot of Double Dragon and Street Fighter 1 & 2 here.
Surprisingly, the arcade is still here. Sadly it’s about one quarter the size it used to be, and the game selection is pretty poor, but I dropped a quarter into Wonder Boy and actually did better than I ever have before.
After having a stroll around Wasagaming and enjoying an ice cream from the same store I did as a kid, I headed on down to
Brandon
Brandon is Manitoba’s second-largest city, and being just under two hours from the farm it was where we went for our semi-monthly big shopping and supply runs. We always stayed overnight at the Colonial Inn, and I did the same this time. They used to have games in the swimming pool area, and I played a lot of Klax there, but this time around there was nothing.
We also lived in Brandon for a while, in the winter of 1992-1993. Having left Toronto due to the recession having cost both my parents their jobs, we ended up back at the farm but didn’t want to spend the winter there, and hoped my father could find work in Brandon. So we rented this trailer in a trailer park at the south end of the city:
It was miserable. It was cold, my room was completely unfurnished and really ugly, and there was no money to spare – seldom even a quarter for a video game.
This being on our way back west after Toronto, I did have my ‘386 PC at this time, and I spent this winter and the follow couple of years writing programs in an attempt to make some money in the shareware marketplace. One other good thing that happened here is that I discovered a local radio station that played some pretty decent techno at night – that helped get me through the horrible depression of that winter.
On today’s return visit, I can no longer find our tailer; the part of the court it was in has been overwritten by shopping and industrial businesses. The trailer court itself, though, has grown and is actually pretty nice now, as trailer courts go – decent yards with fences and hedges and lots of large trees.
Just north of the trailer court is one of Brandon’s largest malls. It’s even bigger now, but it is remarkable only in that it’s where we used to walk for groceries when we could afford them, and I occasionally got to play Trog and Aeroboto in front of the Safeway there. Trog was a good game even though it was basically just Pac-Man with humorous claymation.
And north of that mall – actually sandwiched between the mall and the Colonial Inn – was an arcade in the basement of this building (left of the McDonald’s):
It was a dark, smoky place and I never ventured to the back, but I did enjoy the unconventional soundtrack and gameplay of Mad Planets and also played lots of Mappy – still one of my favorite games from the era, both for its gameplay and its catchy music.
A few blocks further north, on the other side of the Colonial Inn, was yet another arcade. I can no longer finds its location, but the best game they had there was Super Dodge Ball, which turned out to be surprisingly fun for a sports game. I was attracted to it by its use of the Double Dragon character art style.
Continuing the arcade tour, at this still-extant but mostly empty mall downtown:
I played some Flicky and Pooyan in the mall, and there was also a chain arcade here called Long John Silver’s. They had a couple other locations including Portage La Prairie. I played a bunch of Street Fighter II there, plus a unique game I haven’t seen anywhere else: Blob. It must be pretty rare since the KLOV doesn’t know about it and I can’t find any screenshots in GIS. I quite enjoyed it though.
Oh yeah, and at a campground at the north end of the city they had Granny & the Gators and The Pit, which I played because it was weird but didn’t really approve of because the graphics were merely C64-quality – I suspected it wasn’t really an arcade game because of that. Brandon was a great city for arcades back in the day.
Here’s the old passenger train station – my father and I bid a sad but hopeful farewell to my mother here one winter, as she went to Toronto on her own to try and find work and establish a beachhead there for us. It seems to be undergoing renovations now.
Brandon was also home to the restaurant that provided my all-time favorite dessert, but as I blogged previously, that site is now a smoking crater.
One last thing about Brandon – this downtown corner:
The camera store where my parents bought me my first SLR (a Pentax ESII) is a few blocks from here, but that’s not the interesting thing. For some reason I associate this corner – actually a particular view of it that I could never have seen in person – with date and time manipulation while programming. Whenever I work with dates and times while programming – especially with the C# DateTime and TimeSpan types – this corner of Brandon pops into my head. Weird, huh? I have no idea how that association could have been formed. It might have even been formed by a dream.
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My first late friends
2011/08/15
Many fond memories of my time at the farm in Manitoba have to do with the friends I made in the area. Two of them were Mark and Sonia, siblings born a year apart, from the nearby Olynyk family – close neighbors at 1.5 miles away. They were also very close to my age. Sadly, this is my only surviving photo of them, taken from the attic window of our house:
Cropped:
Left to right, Mark, Sonia and me.
They were good kids – Mark was earnest and good-hearted, and Sonia had an uncommon intelligence that she mostly hid but you could see in her eyes. We often went to each others’ places for play dates, but most often they came over to our place, because primitive though it was, it was a better place for us to socialize.
I lost touch with them when we moved away to Toronto, and I don’t recall if we re-stablished any contact during the brief period we returned in 1992. A number of years after we again left and moved to Calgary, I heard that they had both passed away. Sonia had needed a liver transplant (cause unknown, but I doubt she was a drinker even in her adult form) and her body rejected the transplanted organ, killing her. Mark fell off a roof he was working on, and suffocated as a result of the severe asthma attack that ensued.
On today’s return trip, I learned from a neighbor that almost the entire Olynyk family had been wiped out one way or another. Their older sister Laureen had died, though I don’t recall the cause of death now. Their father Peter fell down a well, was unable to climb out and died of exposure. The remainder I don’t know about, but apparently only two of the youngest children survive and are living in Alberta.
I was given the location of their graves – within sight of their home – and went to visit them one last time. The cemetary:
Turns out they all were married before their deaths. Not surprising; being single in your late 20s is unheard of here.
Sonia and Laureen’s graves:
Mark’s grave is just off to the right. His headstone:
Grave marking technology has advanced. Thanks to their headstones, I now have more recent photos of them both. Sonia:
And Mark and his wife Victoria, whom I never met:
When I received the news of their deaths in Calgary, it didn’t really have much impact on me; I had been out of touch with them for most of the last ten years already. It was sad, yes, but it didn’t upset me all that much – I feel kind of crummy saying that, but I’ll trust that you know what I mean.
Standing there in this little country graveyard, knowing their bodies were just a few feet away from me under the dirt, was a bit different. It was a little creepy actually, but it also reminded me much more strongly of how vibrant and alive and physically real they were when I knew them, and of how easy it is to associate self with embodiment. I have to remind myself that the bodies buried here are empty and useless now; it was the information content therein that made them the people they were, and the sad thing is that that information is now irretrievably lost. All I can do now is try to hold onto what remaining memories I have of them.
Occasion to once again curse our greatest enemy, death.
On a brighter note, the other neighboring family I hung out with, the Melnyks, are doing fine. My old playmate Joey is married, working in Brandon and buying a house in Forrest. One of his elder sisters, Jackie, is working at a flax plant south of Angusville and has three boys and the other, Wanda, is working at the nursing home in Russell. Joey’s older brother, Wally, is still running their farm and is married and has three daughters. I talked to Wally on the phone and his wife and eldest daughter in person, and visited Jackie briefly at work. Will try to establish contact with Joey before moving on.
Russell
2011/08/15 – one part of several to come; lots to cover about this day. Might take me a few days to catch up with it all.
In the early 1980s my father was working in construction in Calgary, but saw the end of the boom coming. My parents wanted to buy some land to live on, so my mother and I spent a lot of time travelling around looking at properties. In 1982 we bought 80 acres near Angusville, Manitoba, and moved there. More about the land in a later post.
Angusville being a tiny town, the two nearby towns that we went to for supplies were Russell and Rossburn. I’ll post about Russell first because that’s where I arrived first on the current road trip.
Unlike most prairie towns that are shrinking, Russell is holding on. A couple of buildings have come down and a couple have gone up, but more or less everything is the same as I recall. Except for the main street, which now has the future standing over every corner. Top picture 1992ish, bottom today:
Detail on the arches:
There are some new businesses though – there never used to be any chain restaurants here, but now there is an A&W, a Tim Horton’s and a Subway. The old Russell Inn restaurant is still around and still fairly good, and that’s where I prefer to eat.
The Russell Inn was founded 20+ years ago specifically as an attempt to stave off the slow death of the town by making it a tourist haven. They’ve also developed a ski hill nearby. That plus the town’s location at a major crossroads seem to have done the trick, but it means the town is really counting on the Inn and the tourist trade to stay alive.
Fond memories ensue.
Russell is where I did my driving test and first got my driver’s license – I actually learned out in the country in my parents’ vehicles though. I did my driving test in my father’s 3/4 ton pickup – not an easy thing to parallel park, but otherwise I had no problems. I grew up riding in the front seat all the time, so I was very familiar with the particulars of driving long before I got behind the wheel.
The remains of the town theater (actually there were two, the other being a drive-in on the outskirts; it died first). Disney likenesses probably not authorized. This is where I saw the first and best Transformers movie, and also saw Baby and Old Yeller (man, that one got me good).
The laundromat at the end of the main drag. We came into town every two weeks like clockwork to wash our duds here. For a while they had a Zaxxon machine, but I mostly killed time a few blocks away downtown at:
P&D’s Pizza (now an empty lot). P and D were a young husband and wife team who operated a pizza/burger joint and arcade here. The restaurant was nice because it had high-backed booths with lots of room in them, but of course I was mainly here for the games. They rotated through lots of games and I spent lots and lots of money on them. P&D’s was still around when we briefly returned in 1992, and there were newer games then. The main ones I remember from both periods were:
- Radical Radial
- Slap Fight (wish I could find working ROMs – loved this game)
- Mach 3 (impressive visuals but not much of a game)
- Xain’d Sleena
- Exerion
- 3 Wonders
- Street Fighter II – usually with a crowd of native kids around it. We had a grand time beating the crap out of each other in this game.
For the times when I wanted a different selection of games, there was a pool hall right across the street, in the grey stone building here:
Tougher kids hung out here, but they never hassled me except for one time one of them challenged me to a game of pool. I lost.
This place is where I first saw the original Street Fighter – boy, was that a difficult game! Also super popular – the controls were often busted. They also had (at various times) Blasteroids, Black Tiger (which I mastered so well during my time in Toronto that it became a way to kill time on the cheap), and Extermination, which was a rather unique vertical-scrolling shooter that I’ve never seen anywhere else and would like to play again.
I mentioned the ski hill – it’s about 20 minutes outside of town as Asessippi Park – and yes, I’ve already made all possible jokes about that name so we can take them as read, OK? Anyway, I also went back there today. We used to go for picnics, fishing and swimming there. Here’s the “beach” and swimming area:
The lake isn’t natural – there is a dam offscreen to the left. My father often took me fishing below the dam. But near the picnic area there was a delightful little stream, with a miniature concrete dam on it. I used to love to play in the stream, making more dams out of gravel. To my delight, it’s still there exactly as before:
Slow on the uptake department: I always wondered why this little dam was here. I just realized today that it was for kids, and meant as a play-sized version of the much bigger nearby dam. Duh.
Today yielded enough things to fill another post or two, but it’s late and I need sleep. Will resume when I can. But here’s today’s map (sorry, haven’t had time to look into the centering problem yet).
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