Waking up from the Canadian dream

For years in Ken Dryden’s 1950s youth, a future of better prospects and exciting new possibilities was almost taken for granted

In his new book “The Class,” bestselling author Ken Dryden looks at Canada’s coming of age through a unique lens — class 9G at Etobicoke Collegiate Institute (ECI). With few exceptions, this group of students (which included Dryden), stayed together throughout their high school years. Almost 60 years later, Ken Dryden searched them out and found almost all of them, to see how they are, what life has been like, what life feels like, after all these years. In this exclusive excerpt from the book, after experiencing the exciting possibilities of the immediate postwar years, for Dryden, his classmates, and especially their parents, by the mid-1950s, some doubts begin to set in.

As Canadians, we now had more than we’d ever had before. For most of history, most of humanity had only what kept them alive, and often just barely, and not for long. Then, in the early years in this past century, more of us, our grandparents and parents included, had a little more, and with that a chance to think about not only today, but about having even more in the future. Then the First World War came, then the Depression, and our parents could see how things might not always get better, but might get worse, and remain that way. Then the Second World War. But when it was over, better came. And better and better. Average people like them didn’t need to live in rundown neighbourhoods anymore. They could move to somewhere spacious and green, to live lives that might be excitingly, unimaginably different, and

still. These were our growing-up years.

And the real miracle of this: these new houses and cars and appliances could be paid for out of one paycheque, because in this postwar world fathers were making more money and mothers didn’t need to be “gainfully employed” at all. Fathers could focus on their work, on “getting ahead.” On being better “providers.” On being better fathers. Mothers could stay at home and focus on their families, on being better homemakers, nurturers, family-makers. On being better mothers. Kids could focus on learning, doing, developing, on “getting ahead” in our own world. On being better kids. What an unbelievable opportunity for everyone! For fathers, mothers, kids, for Canada, the U.S., the future. In all of history, nothing had ever been like this before.

Of course, all these material things were really so much more than that. New and bigger houses offered a chance for kids to have their own room. For 12-year-olds to live as 12-year-olds, to stay up later, have more time and space for homework, read, listen to the radio, to live in their own 12-year-old’s mind and not have a nine-year-old brother or sister in the same room ruining everything. For nine-year-olds to live their own best nine-year-old lives and have a room of their own too. Nice new cars offered a chance for fathers to get to work a few minutes faster and home a few minutes earlier to have more time for their families. Nice new fridges, stoves, and washing machines offered mothers a chance to spend more time helping their kids with their homework, being at their schools to get to know their teachers, the principal, the woman who ran the office.

These were good things, weren’t they?

“Father Knows Best,” “Leave It to Beaver,” “Ozzie and Harriet” were on our TV screens to show us what life could be. To us, and to millions of other viewers, the Andersons, Cleavers, and Nelsons weren’t living suffocating, stifling lives, the way we now think of those lives. These were fathers, mothers, kids, families having a chance to be more than and better than what they had been, were supposed to be, and wanted to be. These weren’t the rich, those to the manner born who had no connection to the rest of us. This was us on our TV screens.

All this for fathers to be better fathers, mothers to be better mothers, kids to be better kids, people to be better people, families to be better families. This was a good thing, wasn’t it?

We did get our new houses in our new suburbs, and they were nice and clean. And we did get our new schools, and our new churches and playgrounds and cars and fridges and stoves. And we got new TVs too, this miracle thing that allowed us to see real people in a different place at the same time — what could possibly be next? But then, by the late 1950s, came the question that until then not many commentators felt they had the right to ask: How come this new house of yours is the same as my new house? How come your new suburb/school/church/playground/car/fridge/stove is the same as my new suburb/school/ church/playground/car/fridge/ stove? How come when new and different finally are possible, we get new and not different? Why, when unimaginable and exciting are possible, don’t we get either? And how come, with all this more we have, it seems we’re only as happy and unhappy, satisfied and unsatisfied, fulfilled and unfulfilled as we were before? How come as fathers and mothers and kids, with all this time and opportunity to get ahead, we seem no more ahead? And when all of us and all of this is supposed to be better, but isn’t, why, in some ways, does it feel worse?

This was a good thing, wasn’t it? Our parents were turning 40, we were turning 10. It was becoming a “yes … but” time. There were now more stories in newspapers and magazines about divorce and broken homes. The numbers were rising. Not by much, but rising. What was going on? Many of our grandparents and parents thought they knew why. They had lived through hard times, they had learned to do without and to help others as they in turn had been helped by others. But in these times, as more had become more possible, things had become more important, and people, and families, less. There were also more articles about kids — the scourge of “juvenile delinquency,” the clothes they wore, the music they listened to, the way they talked, their basic, well, lack of respect. The way they seemed to think that life should be handed to them on a silver platter.

There were more articles about religion, about its place in this world of candy-store satisfactions, about how, after millennia of tough times, these good times, these possibilities, this gift from God had, for some reason, somehow, been bestowed on us. Yet how do we show our gratitude? We build beautiful new churches, we attend them more often, we seek religious meaning and inspiration wherever we can find it. In 1955, between September 18 and October 16, night after night, for almost a whole month, Billy Graham preached to Toronto audiences. More than 356,000 people in all! More than half as many as would watch the Toronto Maple Leafs in Maple Leaf Gardens that entire season. My parents were there, and, age eight, I was too. Yet theologians and commentators saw something else. They looked at how we lived on non-Sabbath days and asked: Yes, but do we truly believe? Or, in this time of science that had given us new cars and stoves and other ways of explaining the origins of our good fortune, do we go to church simply because we think we’re supposed to, because others do? And really, truly, all this more that we have, what is it for?

And really, truly again, what is the more that we think is there, that must be there? Instead of cars with big fins, Levittowns, Etobicokes, and Elvis, is it more Shakespeare, more Mozart, more of everything great, where all of us exposed to great come to love great, can’t get enough of great, and become great? What is within human possibility? What can we be?

My classmates and I were three and four years old in the early 1950s, and teenagers by the end of the decade. During that time we grew and learned, discovered things we liked and loved and didn’t like or love. Whatever had gone right in our lives until then would continue to go right tomorrow, it seemed, because why not? Whatever hadn’t — mothers who didn’t understand us, teachers who weren’t nice, kids who were mean — might be different tomorrow, because why not? We weren’t optimistic or deluded, we were kids, and from all we had lived and knew, that’s what life was like.

As for Canada, the breathless energy of the postwar decade was abating. Lots of big new resource projects continued, but there were fewer of them. Lots of immigrants still wanted to come to Canada, but the war-decimated countries of Western Europe had rebuilt themselves and were creating exciting futures of their own, and more of their citizens decided to stay. Things were good in Canada, and were going to get better, but maybe not as much as we had thought. Ads in magazines and newspapers now were more about lifestyle, about the products themselves, about how they would make our lives better, not about how Canada would.

Sometimes when you focus on tomorrow, as we did, you also don’t see what’s right in front of you. And while we Canadians of the 1950s had seen massive new developments, and all the riches that were coming out of the ground, our ground, we didn’t see so clearly the U.S. companies that owned these riches and controlled our livelihoods, that had in their hands the health of our communities, the well-being of our families, our very independence. In the late 1950s, something happened that opened our eyes, at least a little. The Avro Arrow.

Canadian engineers had a reputation internationally in mining and resources, in those fields most central to our economy. But they also had a history in aviation, one that had been enhanced during the Second World War. As kids, especially us boys, we had grown up mesmerized by stories of Spitfires and Messerschmitts, F-86 Sabres and MiGs, and of the fearless test pilots who in postwar years had broken the sound barrier. Every Labour Day weekend as a child I went to the Air Show at the Canadian National Exhibition to see a flypast of the fasbetter

test, sleekest, loudest, most awesome new planes, including our own CF-100, which, we knew, had broken the sound barrier. The threat in these Cold War years was Soviet nuclear bombers; the answer was high-speed interceptors. As the arms race escalated, better, faster interceptors were needed. The CF-100 evolved into the CF-103, and when that wasn’t enough, design work began in 1953 on the CF-105, which would become the Avro Arrow.

In its first test flight, in 1958, the Arrow soared to an altitude of over 50,000 feet and reached a speed of Mach 1.98, almost twice the speed of sound. On the same day the Soviets launched Sputnik. Not only did Sputnik get all the news attention that day, but more significantly, it would change a way of thinking. Bombers go fast, missiles go faster. The future was intercepting missiles with missiles.

More successful test flights of the Arrow followed. But then, on February 20, 1959, prime minister John Diefenbaker announced its cancellation. On Black Friday, as it was called in the aviation industry and beyond, nearly 15,000 workers lost their jobs. The cancellation of the Arrow took on huge symbolic meaning in Canada, and the stories surrounding it have only grown with time. The plane that had flown at almost twice the speed of sound was dismantled, its plans were destroyed, as if all traces of it had to be wiped away.

Why? One story that circulated was that the Americans didn’t want the Arrow’s technology to fall into the “wrong hands,” and with Cold War allegiances ever shifting, anybody’s might be the wrong hands. Even Canada’s own allies were suspect.

That was just one story. And with all the theories, the conspiracies, it quickly became hard to know just how advanced the Arrow was, how important it might have been, what really had happened.

But in many ways, it didn’t matter, and doesn’t matter, how much about the Arrow was fact and how much was myth.

What was, and is, important is how the Arrow story came to be understood. This was Canada’s giant leap into the engineering and technology of the future, from which more and more would be learned, from which we would get better and become more important players on the world stage, from which we would realize all that promise and possibility of the postwar years. The Arrow is what we had in us to be. Now it was gone. Because of the Americans.

The cancellation shook Canadians’ confidence. It brought home some realities.

Yet most of our parents were unaffected by it, at least then. Life, a pretty good life, went on. By the end of the 1950s, as we were about to enter ECI, lots of things about us may not have been what we wanted them to be, but when seen through the eyes of our now 70-plus-yearold selves, we had nothing to complain about. Everything was ahead of us. We were ready.