First time in Canada

Readers of this blog know that I was born and raised in the Chicago area. After leaving home thirty-some years ago I lived in more than one place in the course of pursuing higher education. The one constant is that I have always lived close to the Great Lakes, which have come to define what I consider to be my homeland -- a homeland which just happens to straddle the boundary between two countries.

I visited Canada for the first time in October 1967, at the tender age of 12. Our family made the long drive to Montréal, with nine people (!) packed into a Buick Electra, to visit Expo 67, the world's fair which would close in 21 days.


Jeffrey Stanton

At the time, it seemed to me that the differences between the United States and Canada were more pronounced and obvious than they are now. Even street signs were different, as these were the days before the adoption of internationally standardized street and road signs. Canada had not yet gone metric, and we still had one- and two-dollar bills, special editions of which were printed to mark the centennial. Here is a passage from the incomplete journal I kept of our trip, dated "1967 OCT. 6":

When we entered Detroit we were all very excited, for we knew we would be entering Canada very shortly. When we were about to go into Windsor we went through a tunnel under the Detroit River. . . . I saw that Detroit and Windsor had a little of U.S. and Canada in each. [?] The streets of Windsor were lined with province seals and centenial [sic] flags.

On we drove. Everyone was getting tired and hungry. We stopped at this store called Met and had something to eat at their snack shop. Everything in this store was truly Canadian and so were the words: centre, neighbour, theatre, etc. They had some tote bags for carying suvenirs [sic] in. I bought a expo67 tote bag. (We got our money exchanged for Canadian).

The trip was not entirely successful, and it narrowly missed being an unmitigated fiasco. For some reason our parents were not in the habit of reserving rooms in advance, so we were not always able to find places to stay immediately upon arriving, especially when we got to Montréal itself. Moreover, we hadn't anticipated that our visit would coincide with Canada's Thanksgiving weekend. This meant that the fair was more crowded than usual as visitors were taking advantage of the last holiday before its closure. We wandered around for two days, riding the minirail a few times but visiting no pavillions, the lines for which were too daunting. After that we turned around and drove home.

One thing did come from our visit, however. Jacqueline Kennedy was visiting Expo at the same time, and my father succeeded in taking home-movies of her. She was wearing a red dress and sunglasses, despite the overcast day. She was surrounded by secret service men. This was not quite four years after her late husband's assassination and two years before she married Aristotle Onassis.

Little did I know at the time that I would one day be living and working in this country, which I have come to consider my own in virtually every way.