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11 No 911 in the 1950s
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
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eleven No 911 in the 1950s I’d been trying for two days to get around to ironing half a dozen of Jim’s white shirts, which I’d dampened and rolled for a second time the previous day. I was thankful, however, that unlike most farmers’ wives, I didn’t have to heat flatirons on the cookstove. But as I set up the ironing board and plugged in the iron, I found myself thinking about our experience with the Fogan family. In trying to get them some help, we’d become painfully aware of how limited resources were for the many social and health problems in the community, for which no one had a ready solution. I had just unrolled my first shirt when I heard a curious noise outside. I pulled out the iron cord and rushed to the front window, but couldn’t see anything because of the trees lining the road. I dashed upstairs and looked out across the farmer’s field. A helicopter had landed. A large sled, pulled by a couple of horses, was making its way slowly across the field. When the sled got within a few feet of the helicopter , the door opened and a stretcher carrying a well-wrapped figure was taken out and loaded on the sled, which turned around and started back toward town. At the end of the field, just off the main street, Charlie Bromley, our undertaker, whose panel truck was used both as a hearse and an ambulance, met the sled. The stretcher was moved to the truck, and the truck drove off. I wondered where the stretcher would be taken. To the hospital? Or, oh dear—I didn’t want to think. I rushed downstairs and phoned Jim at his office. I told him I’d just seen a helicopter land in the field across from the house and someone on a stretcher had been taken off. He said, “I don’t know exactly what’s happened. But an hour ago, Mrs. George came in to tell me that when she plugged the Mayerthorpe hospital phone into Edmonton, she heard them asking for a helicopter, and then heard George Biddle from Anselmo telling Edmonton how to land on his farm. Something 47 about his wife having a baby. He must have come into town on horseback , because he’d never get his truck through the snow.” “George Biddle! I hope everything is okay. He must have been frozen coming all that way on horseback—sixteen miles.” “Well, that’s all I know at the moment,” said Jim. “I’ll call you when I know more.” I returned to my ironing, worried about what could have happened —and hoping I wouldn’t have to wait long before Jim called back. One thing about ironing is that when you’ve done as much as I have, you can do it almost mindlessly and have the luxury of being free to reflect. I was pregnant with my first child at the time, and as I ironed I found myself wondering what it would be like to have a baby with no doctor and no hospital. An older woman in the congregation had told me she was three years old when she came with her parents in 1905, the year Alberta became a province. She said that when she was growing up, there was a nurse in the community who helped women deliver their babies. The nurse had died a few years previously , but the small log cabin she’d built for this purpose was still in place, the door unlocked as if ready to receive patients. I went in to see it one day. The birthing room had a single bed, a washstand with a large china bowl and jug, and a small table holding her record book. This book had the names of the mothers, the date of the baby’s birth, the weight of the baby, and a notation as to whether the women had paid her or not—the standard rate apparently being one dollar and fifty cents. Our first nurse at Surprise Lake Camp, a woman about forty-five, told me she was born in that cabin in September 1915. Her parents had arrived early that summer to begin to clear the land. They’d spent their first winter in a large tent, protected by a surrounding wall of log slabs, in an effort to keep out the worst of the wind and snow...