HUNTING

I have a copy of a picture of Dad taken from The Toronto Evening Telegram, a newspaper which no longer exists. It was taken in Italy in 1944 of him preparing to go out as a Sniper, to do some work, it was taken by a newspaper reporter. I had tried in 2001 to get an original copy of it through the Sun Newspaper who have all the Telegram's old pictures, but they were unable to find it within the dates I gave them.

Yesterday I decided to go to the Toronto Reference Library to look through old papers to see if I could see the pictures, they are all on Micro Film now.

I took the bus and subway to the library and was instructed by a very patient lady on how to do it and who also almost fell over when I told her that I wanted to look at papers from June to Nov. 1944. Her only comment was that's going to take a long time them showed me which drawer to look in.

I started with June 1 1944 looking through to Nov.15 1944. I chose those dates because I knew that he was made Sargent in June and was SOS, "struck off service" on Oct.26. He had been wounded 4 times and the rules were that after 3 times you were allowed to go home.

The price of a kitchen stove at Eaton's in 1944 was $ 25.00 and shoes were $1.70.

I started at 10AM and got through to Nov 15 at around 1.30 when I quit.

I took the Subway to Yorkdale just in time to see the bus leave so got a Timmy and waited an hour for the next bus.

At home it suddenly occured to me that if the picture was taken around Oct. by the time it actually got to Toronto from somewhere in Italy via England then boat to Canada in those days could take a couple of months.

Next week I will go back and do Nov.16 to Dec 23 1944... he got home 1 or 2 days before Christmas.


WHAT A CHRISTMAS THAT WAS.