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Aubrey Griswold: as remembered mostly from stories he told to his grandchildren:
My Granddad joined the army right after high school about 1924. He had made a crystal radio when he was sixteen and listened to the first radio broadcast from Chicago on it from Regina, he even had his picture in the paper (as the only one in Regina to have heard a radio broadcast), so he figured the Signal Corps was for him. When he joined the army and they asked what his name was and he said "Aubrey", they said that it sounded too much like a girls name and that from now on he was "Gris" and everyone called him that for the rest of his life - to 94 years old.
According to my memory, (a long time ago) he helped build the first radio station in Ft. Smith so he would have been there in the fall of 1925, in the web pages on your site you mention him and that he was a corporal at that time. He always 'kidded' that he was up there to spy on the Japanese, to intercept messages from them to Europe.
In the summer of 1924 he went to training in Camp Bordon, Ontario. All the men would go into Barrie for an ice cream cone and that's where he met my Grandmother, Nona Smith. He was to marry her a year later Sept 1926, and she came to Regina by train and after they married they went by barge up the Mackenzie River to Fort Chippewyan and then drove to Fort Smith. Nonie with her blond hair and blue eyes was a real novelty to the residents of Ft. Smith at the time and they showered her with beautiful wedding gifts, one she wore all winter, especially for dog sled rides. She also had a book called something like “How to make homemade style food from canned food".
They lived in a little white bungalow that had a wood stove in the kitchen with a big cistern on the back of it. Granddad said they were the first people in Ft. Smith to have hot running water as he added a pipe to it, pushed it thru the wall and put an outdoor style faucet on it, just above the bathtub.
Grandad had a Model T he had brought up by barge to Ft. Smith to travel what he said was a whole 17 miles of road in the entire area in total. One winter day when it wouldn't start, he hooked his dog-team to the front of it and had them pull it down 'main street', until he could get it going.
He was also friends with Wop May and Punch Dickens. (the bush pilots)
I don't know how long they were up there altogether, long enough to send their girls out to private school. All of the way through the depression because when you asked him what the depression was like, he'd reply he doesn't know; that they didn't feel it up north. The army cheques came the same, the bush pilots came the same and food came in the same (in cans). The only knowledge that they had of the depression was letters from relatives, and Gris and Nonie thought they were exaggerating. From there, Granddad built another radio station in Maple Creek, Saskatchewan before finally retiring (at least from the army) to Calgary.
Granddad always said that " the safest place to be during a war was in the army", he was told that he was "too valuable to the army as a teacher, for the new signal corpsmen, to be sent overseas" (and I think he taught a lot of them). He retired a sergeant-major in December 1946 , after 21 years in the army. He stayed in the radio business in Calgary until he was 'laid-off' (the company went out of business) at 86 years old. In his lifetime he saw radio's to TV's come in - all the way to learning all of the computer chip parts.
He was also a Master Mason and was honored as the longest-standing member in Alberta, so we nicknamed him the 'grand pooba'. Lifetime and charter memberships are granted to members who have been exemplary in community service throughout their active membership of at least 35 years.
He was a fair and intensely honest man who would always help his fellow man to the best of his ability.
--- Deb Cousins (granddaughter). |
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