The video was made of the band as they performed at various venues, however the music accompanying the video is not their work.
The Deverons
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Music Combo on Local Scene
WINNIPEG FREE PRESS. SATURDAY, AUGUST 29, 1964
By DEANNE TREMAYNE
Not every popular singing group learns music by just picking it up. A good many of them go through a long and tedious series of lessons. But a Winnipeg group, the Deverons, say they just learned by ear. Although they are young they can certainly put on a great show. Burton Cummings, leader of the group, is 16: He plays piano, sax and vocal. Derek Blake 16, plays guitar. Edd Smith 16, is on bass, Ron Savoie, 17, on drums and Bruce Decker, 17, guitar.
The Deverons are not all that crazy about the Beatles. "We think the Rolling Stones are the greatest. We don't try to copy anyone," said one of them. "We try to give the kids what they want and if that happens to be Beatle numbers then that's what they get."
But whether they like the Beatles or not, it was during the Liverpool group's brief visit to Winnipeg recently that the Deverons — and one member in. particular — achieved the greatest publicity of their career to date. It was Bruce Decker who was the ambitious young lad who came close to getting inside the Beatles' plane before took off to resume its flight to Seattle, Washington.
The Deverons are currently making Winnipeg's Cinema Hall swing Thursday evenings. They hope to be even busier, with school dances, when the school year starts next month. And they hope they may be offered a recording contract in the near future. The Deverons certainly display enough energy. Who knows? Maybe if they can channel it in the right direction we'll be hearing a lot more of this local group.
By DEANNE TREMAYNE
Not every popular singing group learns music by just picking it up. A good many of them go through a long and tedious series of lessons. But a Winnipeg group, the Deverons, say they just learned by ear. Although they are young they can certainly put on a great show. Burton Cummings, leader of the group, is 16: He plays piano, sax and vocal. Derek Blake 16, plays guitar. Edd Smith 16, is on bass, Ron Savoie, 17, on drums and Bruce Decker, 17, guitar.
The Deverons are not all that crazy about the Beatles. "We think the Rolling Stones are the greatest. We don't try to copy anyone," said one of them. "We try to give the kids what they want and if that happens to be Beatle numbers then that's what they get."
But whether they like the Beatles or not, it was during the Liverpool group's brief visit to Winnipeg recently that the Deverons — and one member in. particular — achieved the greatest publicity of their career to date. It was Bruce Decker who was the ambitious young lad who came close to getting inside the Beatles' plane before took off to resume its flight to Seattle, Washington.
The Deverons are currently making Winnipeg's Cinema Hall swing Thursday evenings. They hope to be even busier, with school dances, when the school year starts next month. And they hope they may be offered a recording contract in the near future. The Deverons certainly display enough energy. Who knows? Maybe if they can channel it in the right direction we'll be hearing a lot more of this local group.
Sunday, August 1, 2010
Sunday, June 6, 2010
Friday, May 28, 2010
Burton Cummings and The Deverons
…At seventeen, Burton Cummings was already a local star with his band The Deverons. He had talent, good looks, a teen following, and one of the most exciting live shows in the city with Burton able to win over even the toughest audiences to his side through his antics, jumping about on stage and standing on pianos. There were other keyboard players, some more talented on their instrument than Burton, like The Shondels’ Mike Hanford, but no one could hold a candle to Burton’s stage dynamics and youthful punk bravado.
Born on New Years Eve, 1947, Burton Cummings grew up an only child on Bannerman Avenue in Winnipeg’s tough, multicultural North Ed. His father abandoned him and his mother Rhoda before he was one, and so the two of them moved in with her mother and father, the Kirkpatrick’s. His grandfather died when Burton was seven. Rhoda Cummings worked at Eaton’s downtown department store in the finance department, and though her single income was meager, she managed to provide her son with everything he needed for a proper upbringing, except a father. “You can’t miss what you’ve never had,” related Burton in a 1981 interview. “So I didn’t miss having a father, except on Father’s Day when all the kids in class were making cards for their dads and I’d get bummed out because I didn’t have a dad to make one for. Or the first day of school when you had to stand up and say what your dad did for a living. That was a nightmare for me. I didn’t have the guts to say I didn’t have a father, so I’d make something up.” Still, he grew up amid the comfort of a close-knit extended family that enjoyed get togethers where everyone played something, mostly piano, as did his mother who also sang. At a very early age, Burton began piano lessons. “I started piano at age four. I loved rock ‘n’ roll but I didn’t much care for classical piano. I hadn’t put the two together yet. But the minute I found out I could play Diana by Paul Anka that was it. Next thing I knew, my mother couldn’t tear me away from the piano.”
In school, Burton starred in three productions of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas at St. John’s High School and sang in the church choir. His interest in popular music was piqued at a tender age, fostering both an obsession and a dream. “I started buying records very young, about seven or eight years of age. My mother had a pile of 78s, forties and fifties pop stuff like Teresa Brewer, Perry Como, Patti Page, and Gail Storm, so there were lots of records in the house. I was fascinated by records very young. You could hear it, put the needle back and hear it again and again. I had stuff like the Kingston Trio, The Battle of New Orleans by Johnny Horton, Everly Brothers stuff. My mother gave me Hound Dog and Don’t be Cruel for Christmas one year, so I must have been seven or eight then. Once I started buying records I went nuts. I would cut lawns and deliver newspapers to save money to buy more records. I remember fats Domino blowing me away. He had such bounce to his voice and I’d never heard anyone talk like that. People in Winnipeg didn’t talk that way. I started thinking, ‘What a great way to make a living, making records.’”
It was Burton’s alto saxophone, however, not the piano, that brought him his first taste of being in a rock ‘n’ roll group. That group was The Deverons, formed at St. John’s High around 1962 by Burton’s classmates. “Ed Smith and I were really good buddies from school,” recalls Burton. “We were inseparable. Then suddenly he started going to these band practices and I was really jealous. I thought, ‘Shit, I’d like to be in a band too.’ But, no matter how much I hinted, I wasn’t invited.” Undaunted, Burton started hanging around their practices, gradually insinuating himself into the fledgling group, first on saxophone, then a bit of piano, and finally as lead vocalist and front man. “They were really into The Ventures and Fireballs, guitar instrumental stuff. Lead guitarist Derek Blake was an instrumentals freak. I had joined the band playing a bit of sax. There were hardly any vocals, it was mostly instrumentals. I would come out and to maybe Wild Weekend by The Rebels on sax, maybe Crossfire by Johnny and The Hurricanes, and sing Walk Right In or Come On Let’s Go by Richie Valens and maybe a Buddy Holly song. Then I’d have to leave the stage. I didn’t like having to leave the stage. So one night instead of leaving I went over and started playing the piano along with their instrumentals, just acoustically and I liked it. I knew all kinds of things to play like Telstar, Bumble Boogie, and Baja. And the kids went nuts! Suddenly the repertoire grew by a hundred songs. After that I went out and bought a fifteen dollar De Armand violin pickup for the piano, fastened it to the back with thumb tacks and plugged into one of the guys’ amps. Now I didn’t have to leave the stage. From that moment on, the band became mine.”
By 1964 The Deverons were more than North End favourites having recruited members form St. Boniface and St. James. For Burton, music had become both his obsession and salvation. “Music was the only think in my life once I was in the band. I just ticked off the minutes in school from Monday to Friday. I couldn’t care less about anything until four p.m. on a Friday, the it was. ‘We’re on tonight!’” Still just high school kids, they were a major attraction on the community club circuit and frequent performers at the recently opened downtown teen nightclub J’s Discotheque. Arriving at the venues early, Burton would check out the usually well-worn and out-of-tune upright pianos at community clubs, locating the dead notes in order to work around them. As fellow Deveron Bruce Decker remembered it, “Burton had to make all sorts of chord inversions around the dead or out of tune notes on these lousy pianos but he was such a good player that it never passed him.” Burton himself helped to put a few pianos out f their misery with his Beatle boots. “All the community clubs hated me because I scratched up their pianos.” In mid 1965, The Deverons were signed to the Reo label, a subsidiary of Quality Records, and released their debut single, a ballad entitled Blue is the Night, backed by Burton’s original composition, the harder edged She’s Your Lover. Burton found the A side on and obscure album by the You Know Who Group. “I must have been the only one to buy their album and Blue Is The Night was a ballad on it played on an acoustic twelve sting guitar.” The Deverons’ arrangement replaced the guitar with Burton’s Hohner portable organ. Recorded in a late night session at CKY radio’s tiny studios, with deejay Darryl Burlington producing, the record became a local hit, selling about 10,000 copies. It success brought the band up a notch or two among Winnipeg bands. “Probably we were next in line with Chad Allan and The Reflections in terms of ranking below,” states Burton. “We were never a threat, they were always a number one, but we were right up there.” The Reflections and Deverons shared a stage together for the first time in mid 1964, opening for Gerry and The Pacemakers at the Winnipeg Arena.
As Bachman recalls, “The hot band in Winnipeg at the time was The Deverons with a little punk lead singer named Burton Cummings. Everywhere they went he got incredible write-ups because he would stand up and dance on the piano. He played a rock ‘n’ roll show at the Winnipeg Arena opening for a much more famous international act. They had a grand piano and he got up and danced on top of it with his Beatle boots, scratching and marring the top of the piano. He got a lot of press for that and was a real little outlaw at the time around the city. And he had an excellent voice. I don’t think there was another choice. We just said, ‘Let’s get him!”
It was late December when the five members of The Deverons journeyed south to Kay Bank Studios in Minneapolis to record their second single, Burton’s and Bruce Decker’s poignant ballad Lost Love. Bob Burns was producing the session, flying there and back while the band traveled the 1000 miles round trip by train. At the session, Bob mentioned nothing of The Guess Who’s current dilemma. Burton relates the tale of his offer to join the band: “I had just come back from Minneapolis. It was freezing cold. The Deverons had gone there for a recording session for Lost Love. Something had gone wrong with the train car that we were returning on and we were five frozen little kids, just a mess. It took something like seventeen hours to get home. I just wanted to get home and go to bed. I did manage to get to bed for about an hour and a half when the phone rang. It was Bob Burns, The Guess Who’s manager, and he said, ‘We have an important meeting and I’d like you to come down to my office immediately.’ My initial reaction was, ‘Good God, can’t this wait a day? I’m exhausted and cold, I’ve got no voice.’ But he insisted it was very important. On the way down in the taxi I figured that maybe The Guess Who were going to use some of their power and experience to help The Deverons, sort of help from the big guys. Then as I got to the office I walked in and Bob Burns was there with Jim, Randy, and Garry. And they just came right out and said, ‘How’d you like to join our band?’ I think I said, ‘Gee, fellows, I’d love to but The Beatles just asked me to join last week’ and I walked out the door. I reacted like a smart ass. I obviously thought it was a cruel joke to play on a young lad. I then came back in and realized they weren’t kidding and I said ‘Yes’ right on the spot. I really didn’t think twice about it. They were the biggest band in the country. Although I had tremendous allegiance to The Deverons, there is that old adage about being true to oneself. I didn’t think about Bruce, Ron, Ed, or Derek, I thought about me. Gift horses are rare animals and you shouldn’t look them in the mouth.” The offer came completely out of left filed but Burton jumped at it, giving The Deverons two weeks notice. They were certainly devastated by the news but bore him no ill will. By the start of the new year and his eighteenth birthday, Burton Cummings was a member of The Guess Who.
Excerpts from American Woman The Story of The Guess Who
Written by John Einarson
Born on New Years Eve, 1947, Burton Cummings grew up an only child on Bannerman Avenue in Winnipeg’s tough, multicultural North Ed. His father abandoned him and his mother Rhoda before he was one, and so the two of them moved in with her mother and father, the Kirkpatrick’s. His grandfather died when Burton was seven. Rhoda Cummings worked at Eaton’s downtown department store in the finance department, and though her single income was meager, she managed to provide her son with everything he needed for a proper upbringing, except a father. “You can’t miss what you’ve never had,” related Burton in a 1981 interview. “So I didn’t miss having a father, except on Father’s Day when all the kids in class were making cards for their dads and I’d get bummed out because I didn’t have a dad to make one for. Or the first day of school when you had to stand up and say what your dad did for a living. That was a nightmare for me. I didn’t have the guts to say I didn’t have a father, so I’d make something up.” Still, he grew up amid the comfort of a close-knit extended family that enjoyed get togethers where everyone played something, mostly piano, as did his mother who also sang. At a very early age, Burton began piano lessons. “I started piano at age four. I loved rock ‘n’ roll but I didn’t much care for classical piano. I hadn’t put the two together yet. But the minute I found out I could play Diana by Paul Anka that was it. Next thing I knew, my mother couldn’t tear me away from the piano.”
In school, Burton starred in three productions of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas at St. John’s High School and sang in the church choir. His interest in popular music was piqued at a tender age, fostering both an obsession and a dream. “I started buying records very young, about seven or eight years of age. My mother had a pile of 78s, forties and fifties pop stuff like Teresa Brewer, Perry Como, Patti Page, and Gail Storm, so there were lots of records in the house. I was fascinated by records very young. You could hear it, put the needle back and hear it again and again. I had stuff like the Kingston Trio, The Battle of New Orleans by Johnny Horton, Everly Brothers stuff. My mother gave me Hound Dog and Don’t be Cruel for Christmas one year, so I must have been seven or eight then. Once I started buying records I went nuts. I would cut lawns and deliver newspapers to save money to buy more records. I remember fats Domino blowing me away. He had such bounce to his voice and I’d never heard anyone talk like that. People in Winnipeg didn’t talk that way. I started thinking, ‘What a great way to make a living, making records.’”
It was Burton’s alto saxophone, however, not the piano, that brought him his first taste of being in a rock ‘n’ roll group. That group was The Deverons, formed at St. John’s High around 1962 by Burton’s classmates. “Ed Smith and I were really good buddies from school,” recalls Burton. “We were inseparable. Then suddenly he started going to these band practices and I was really jealous. I thought, ‘Shit, I’d like to be in a band too.’ But, no matter how much I hinted, I wasn’t invited.” Undaunted, Burton started hanging around their practices, gradually insinuating himself into the fledgling group, first on saxophone, then a bit of piano, and finally as lead vocalist and front man. “They were really into The Ventures and Fireballs, guitar instrumental stuff. Lead guitarist Derek Blake was an instrumentals freak. I had joined the band playing a bit of sax. There were hardly any vocals, it was mostly instrumentals. I would come out and to maybe Wild Weekend by The Rebels on sax, maybe Crossfire by Johnny and The Hurricanes, and sing Walk Right In or Come On Let’s Go by Richie Valens and maybe a Buddy Holly song. Then I’d have to leave the stage. I didn’t like having to leave the stage. So one night instead of leaving I went over and started playing the piano along with their instrumentals, just acoustically and I liked it. I knew all kinds of things to play like Telstar, Bumble Boogie, and Baja. And the kids went nuts! Suddenly the repertoire grew by a hundred songs. After that I went out and bought a fifteen dollar De Armand violin pickup for the piano, fastened it to the back with thumb tacks and plugged into one of the guys’ amps. Now I didn’t have to leave the stage. From that moment on, the band became mine.”
By 1964 The Deverons were more than North End favourites having recruited members form St. Boniface and St. James. For Burton, music had become both his obsession and salvation. “Music was the only think in my life once I was in the band. I just ticked off the minutes in school from Monday to Friday. I couldn’t care less about anything until four p.m. on a Friday, the it was. ‘We’re on tonight!’” Still just high school kids, they were a major attraction on the community club circuit and frequent performers at the recently opened downtown teen nightclub J’s Discotheque. Arriving at the venues early, Burton would check out the usually well-worn and out-of-tune upright pianos at community clubs, locating the dead notes in order to work around them. As fellow Deveron Bruce Decker remembered it, “Burton had to make all sorts of chord inversions around the dead or out of tune notes on these lousy pianos but he was such a good player that it never passed him.” Burton himself helped to put a few pianos out f their misery with his Beatle boots. “All the community clubs hated me because I scratched up their pianos.” In mid 1965, The Deverons were signed to the Reo label, a subsidiary of Quality Records, and released their debut single, a ballad entitled Blue is the Night, backed by Burton’s original composition, the harder edged She’s Your Lover. Burton found the A side on and obscure album by the You Know Who Group. “I must have been the only one to buy their album and Blue Is The Night was a ballad on it played on an acoustic twelve sting guitar.” The Deverons’ arrangement replaced the guitar with Burton’s Hohner portable organ. Recorded in a late night session at CKY radio’s tiny studios, with deejay Darryl Burlington producing, the record became a local hit, selling about 10,000 copies. It success brought the band up a notch or two among Winnipeg bands. “Probably we were next in line with Chad Allan and The Reflections in terms of ranking below,” states Burton. “We were never a threat, they were always a number one, but we were right up there.” The Reflections and Deverons shared a stage together for the first time in mid 1964, opening for Gerry and The Pacemakers at the Winnipeg Arena.
As Bachman recalls, “The hot band in Winnipeg at the time was The Deverons with a little punk lead singer named Burton Cummings. Everywhere they went he got incredible write-ups because he would stand up and dance on the piano. He played a rock ‘n’ roll show at the Winnipeg Arena opening for a much more famous international act. They had a grand piano and he got up and danced on top of it with his Beatle boots, scratching and marring the top of the piano. He got a lot of press for that and was a real little outlaw at the time around the city. And he had an excellent voice. I don’t think there was another choice. We just said, ‘Let’s get him!”
It was late December when the five members of The Deverons journeyed south to Kay Bank Studios in Minneapolis to record their second single, Burton’s and Bruce Decker’s poignant ballad Lost Love. Bob Burns was producing the session, flying there and back while the band traveled the 1000 miles round trip by train. At the session, Bob mentioned nothing of The Guess Who’s current dilemma. Burton relates the tale of his offer to join the band: “I had just come back from Minneapolis. It was freezing cold. The Deverons had gone there for a recording session for Lost Love. Something had gone wrong with the train car that we were returning on and we were five frozen little kids, just a mess. It took something like seventeen hours to get home. I just wanted to get home and go to bed. I did manage to get to bed for about an hour and a half when the phone rang. It was Bob Burns, The Guess Who’s manager, and he said, ‘We have an important meeting and I’d like you to come down to my office immediately.’ My initial reaction was, ‘Good God, can’t this wait a day? I’m exhausted and cold, I’ve got no voice.’ But he insisted it was very important. On the way down in the taxi I figured that maybe The Guess Who were going to use some of their power and experience to help The Deverons, sort of help from the big guys. Then as I got to the office I walked in and Bob Burns was there with Jim, Randy, and Garry. And they just came right out and said, ‘How’d you like to join our band?’ I think I said, ‘Gee, fellows, I’d love to but The Beatles just asked me to join last week’ and I walked out the door. I reacted like a smart ass. I obviously thought it was a cruel joke to play on a young lad. I then came back in and realized they weren’t kidding and I said ‘Yes’ right on the spot. I really didn’t think twice about it. They were the biggest band in the country. Although I had tremendous allegiance to The Deverons, there is that old adage about being true to oneself. I didn’t think about Bruce, Ron, Ed, or Derek, I thought about me. Gift horses are rare animals and you shouldn’t look them in the mouth.” The offer came completely out of left filed but Burton jumped at it, giving The Deverons two weeks notice. They were certainly devastated by the news but bore him no ill will. By the start of the new year and his eighteenth birthday, Burton Cummings was a member of The Guess Who.
Excerpts from American Woman The Story of The Guess Who
Written by John Einarson
St. John's High School Salad Days
Winnipeg Free Press
Friday, June 21,1985
ENTERTAINMENT
St. John's
salad days
It was the time when the school's
stars were young and innocent
By Doug Whiteway
TUNICS. PINCH the memory of any of the women back in town for St. John's High School 76th Reunion this weekend and what springs forth immediately is a reminiscence of tunics. In the golden years when the school was St. John's Tech, the girls wore the navy blue uniforms with a white blouse, black stockings and black oxfords. And they had to be worn every day. No excuses. And no makeup, either. A girl who showed up in anything but a tunic and a scrubbed face had better have a note from her parents explaining why.
Fashions came and went, and hemlines with them, but tunics could be no more than six inches above the knee. Not many days went by without some reckless female being forced to her knees to prove to a teacher that her tunic was regulation length. If the skirt touched the tiles while the knees were bent, then it passed inspection. If not, trouble.
Shoulder stitches
St. John's High Reunion chairman Janet (Olin) Boonov (class of '54) remembers girls who gathered their tunics at the shoulder so the skirt was lifted. If caught in a raid (they had raids for these things), they could drop the hemline by undoing the shoulder stitches. Then sew them back up at night.
There may have been minor skirmishes over the length of the tunic. But no one questioned the idea of wearing one. "I think they were fantastic," says Eileen (Morris) Jefferson (class of '37) in Winnipeg from Vancouver for the re-union. "We were freed from any ties of how you looked."
Perhaps it's the contrast to modern life at St. John's High that stimulates discussion of school uniforms. At a long table in a school hallway, alumni crowd around, registering for the three-day 75th anniversary gala celebration which officially begins tomorrow (unofficially last night at Kelekis Restaurant) with the renaming of O'Meara Street to Monty Mall Street. It runs through a full schedule of sock hops, softball and a sit down dinner for 4,300 at the Convention Centre, and ends Sunday with breakfast at the school.
Is that you?
As they cluster with old friends ("my god, is that you?"), they can't help but notice the current crop of St. John's schoolgirls in their fluorescent shirts and bubblegum pants, the Madonna makeup, and wonder at the change time hath wrought. Today, high school is a fashion parade. In the old days, fashion was kept well away from the school yard.
On purpose. A microcosm of the North End of the '30s, '40s and '50s, St. John's Tech was an amalgam of rich and poor, ethnic and Anglo, immigrant and native-born, which could have meant a school divided into exclusive and explosive cliques.
But wise and scholarly G. J. Reeve, principal from 1925 to 1952, kept the girls in uniform (the boys weren't fashion-conscious, any- way) while other schools were liberalizing dress codes.
At Reeve's school, class distinctions stopped at Church and Salter where the red-brick 40-classroom structure stood. And he picked teachers who followed his lead.
"We grew up where there were Ukrainians and Jews and nobody drew a distinction," says Provincial Court Judge Ron Meyers (class of '52). "We were all alike, and the teachers had every reason to harbor prejudice in those days. I don't want to get maudlin but I would say Reeve was a saint."
The school this remarkable man presided over and left as a legacy to succeeding generations produced an abundance of talent in its heyday. What Winnipeg high school reunion has been able to mount for its alumni a 2%-hour stage product-ion, A Galaxy of Stars that includes two Hollywood producers (Allan Blye and Aubrey Tadman), two opera stars (Morley Meredith of the JVlet, Norman Mittleman of the San Francisco Opera), a rock star (Burton Cummings) and that TV host of hosts, Monty Hall — not to mention an 80-voice choir primed for Gilbert and Sullivan and the old school song, Jerusalem?
And did we mention the sports stars who came from St. John's? The supreme court justices? The judges? The politicians? The United States senator? And the professionals? Should illness overtake someone at Saturday's dinner and a cry of, 'Is there a doctor in the house?' be heard, 400 doctors will rise.to the occasion. If someone slips on a banana peel and feels inclined to sue, 400 lawyers will present their cards.
In the crucible that was the North End of the '30s, '40s and '50s — a bit of urban geography in a slice of time which seems to have passed now into myth —the drive to achieve and excel (and in many cases, to get out) was tangible. Most of the students were children of immigrants who saw in education the key to advancement in a new and less oppressive society.
"It was probably the demographics of the situation," muses Rainbow Stage's flamboyant executive producer Jack Shapira (class of
'43), who describes himself as a shy lad, "one of the three virgins of high school."
"We were all children of parents who came from Europe. We had to prove ourselves."
Medicine was the goal. "Everyone was going to be a doctor in those days," says Morley Meredith (class of MO), who didn't and went on to be a Metropolitan Opera star instead. Why the vagaries of the entertainment business should at- tract so many of these children of security-conscious immigrants seems inexplicable. Could it have been a literal interpretation of the school motto, Usque ad Astra — Up to the Stars?
"I don't really know," says Hollywood producer and writer Allan Blye (class of '53), who abandoned two years of architecture at the University of Manitoba to become a singer and then a producer of such TV hits as The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, the Sonny and Cher Show, and Bizarre. "People ask what was it about the North End that produced such an array of people. There was just such an environment."
Peerless teachers
The shrug is palpable in his voice. What is it about a time and place that produces a concentra tion of excellence? Parental encouragement and peerless teachers help. Many point to Elsa Handel — "a dynamic little lady," says Meyers —who presided for years over the musical productions, discovering and encouraging talent. Meyers says Norm Mittleman, the San Francisco Opera star, was about to try out for the Bombers but Handel persuaded him to stick with singing.
But alumni say St. John's was more than academics and doing well at school. In a pre-television age, in an age before kids had cars and after-school jobs, and mobility, and money, school was the hub of social life.
"We spent 80 per cent of our waking hours at Tech," says Blye. It was on teams, and in clubs, in school politics and the operetta, as much as in the classroom, that students found their direction in life.
"I'll tell you what was special — most of the girls married the boys they went to school with," says Clare (Rasch) Pudavick (class of '41), who remembers her husband- to-be waiting outside the chemistry room to catch a glimpse of her, and remembers skipping out of class to consume the best jam busters in town at Salter Drugs. A dozen years later, in Boonov's time, the hang-out had changed to College Drugs, known as Room 41 because the school rooms ended at No. 40.
"I wasn't a skipper," Boovov says, but when a teacher she re- members as "Mr. Allison" said to her in his Scottish brogue, "get your hoot, and your coot, and get oot," she got oot and had to go somewhere other than home.
Many returning to Winnipeg for the first time in ages see a school that isn't the school they went to. The charming post-Victorian brick pile was torn down in the mid-'60s to make way for the baby-boom bulge. Seeing today's St. John's, a squat, fortress-like structure, was "a shock," says Los Angeles chiropractor Harold Reuben (class of '29). "It isn't the same thing and it couldn't give the same spirit. The old school was a symbol of the fellas and the gals and people of the north end of the city who were immigrants or the children of immigrants."
School is the people
But Boonov says "the school is the people, not the building," and those who hear her agree. Rhoda (Kirkpatrick) Cummings (class of '38), mother of Burton Cummings (class of '66) sighs over memories of meeting friends on the now-gone big high front steps with the curved balustrade but remembers the athletics, and the teachers, and the fun. "They were wonderful years, the best two years of my life."
The people who went to Tech in the golden years are convinced of its unique place in the social fabric of the city, not to mention their hearts. Never again, they suggest, can that grafting of striving and innocence in a safe little corner of the world bear such rich fruit. "It was," says Pudavick, "a very romantic time."
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