How did you meet?
Mary Lou: Bob was at RMC at that time and I had a girlfriend who had a boyfriend at RMC, but her mother would not allow her to go by herself...
Bob: ...different times…
M: ... so I got a blind date.
B: It was the time of Asian flu or something?
M: They picked some guy, but he had the flu.
B: Yeah.
The thing was that you helped your buddy on these blind dates: if your buddy’s girlfriend was coming and she brought another girl with her, you accepted that you would escort this other girl. So this fellow got sick and I wasn’t, so … I ended up...we met... yup
M: Their relationship never got more than that, but ours did.
B: Because you weren’t supposed to be married and going to college at that time, we were married the day after graduation.
Bob and Mary Lou Moulton
M: During the Second World War, I was living in Toronto and Bob was in Owen Sound.
B: I guess one of the things that happened to me was that, during the war, my brother and I were looked after by our grandparents, so we, as children, had the experience of living with older people, rather than with younger parents, because they were away.
M: Tell why you were living with your grandparents.
B: Because my parents were away doing war work in Toronto. …
And that was not uncommon... that just seemed fairly normal. Other kids were [in situations] like that too. A lot of us were brought up by grandparents for that stage of life. I supposed that affected us in some way, in that we missed the experience of living with our own parents, but lived with family so...
M: I’m sure they got up as much as they could to Owen Sound to see you.
B: And then as I got older, I often wondered how my grandparents looked after us, two young boys … but that’s the way it was…
M: They worked in a ...
B: Oh yes, my mother was a riveter. [My father] was a cabinet maker and he worked on the wooden aircraft: the Mosquito Bombers, in Toronto. So as a child, from time to time I went with them to visit them in summers, in Toronto. That was a big experience coming from small town Ontario to go down to Toronto and see things. Street cars... never seen a street car before.
Because the war was on, lots of things were rationed. Each family got stamps, for butter and milk and meat, that sort of thing. It was a national rationing system.
M: I remember my mother and my grandmother trading: my mother would need more butter for something and they would trade stamps.
I can remember my mother sending us down to get...ivory soap [when] it came in at the supermarket. They must have rationed it, because it was a big deal.
B: So the cokes and the chocolate bars and the candies and all that kind of stuff just wasn’t really available. It wasn’t that we were smarter about what we ate or anything, we just didn’t have that much choice. We had lots of exercise because gasoline was rationed and you walked or rode a bicycle most places. So again it wasn’t that we were better at exercising it’s that that was the way things were…
M: One of the things... is patriotism, during the Second World War. There were the bad guys, and they were really bad, and we were all so good, weren’t we, in those days?
B: A lot of propaganda.
M: A lot of propaganda ... in all our entertainment. You know, about how bad the Germans were, about how bad the Japanese were, we heard that all the time. It must have been terribly hard for Japanese and German people living in Canada…
B: It wasn’t too long after that the Russians all became the bad guys, and then the Koreans, and then the Japanese were the good people.
M: Do you feel patriotic? We certainly did. We marched. Some of the games were the boys [were] soldiers... marching on the street, as play.
B: All the entertainment devices and distractions that young people have today, we didn’t have those, we had different recreational things to do: lots of board games and things like that, cards, and the radio was the one sort of mass thing that we had.
M: I can remember listening to Lux Radio Theater. Every Monday night they used to do one of the current movies. And that would be dramatized on the radio and we would all listen to it. That kind of stuff. That was a big deal in those days.
B: There were always people in uniform. All the neighbours had men and women in the forces, so the sight of uniforms were around us all the time. In fact, where I came from, in Owen Sound, there was a Polish army contingent training, which was kind of neat for us. We had this group of Polish soldiers; it was very different to have a group that different from us living and working around. At Meaford, the army had a tank range and I remember relatives, cousins of my father, visiting my grandparents when they were training at the tank range during the war. So there was a renewal of family contacts because of the people moving around during the war.
M: I can remember collecting pots and pans. We brought them to the school for any kind of extra metal that you had, they wanted it for, I guess I don’t know what they used it for, What did they use it for?
B: Well they did a lot of scrap metal.
In my case, my grandmother was English; she had moved from England to Canada, but her Father and her brothers and sisters were still in England so I can remember her making up parcels to send to them in England of goodies and things like that. And also getting mail back and forth, this is kind of… interesting because this is my great-grandfather who is writing to his daughter during the war.
M: My mother used to get, from the Red Cross, wool and they would knit socks and all that kind of thing and send that to the men overseas. She did a lot of knitting. And my father he went door to door selling war bonds. That’s all I can remember - the war bonds. He didn’t go overseas, he wasn’t in the Army, but he did that kinds of thing.
So everyone was involved. Even the children were all involved.
B: Yeah, because you used to buy war saving stamps as children at school.
M: Yeah. I don’t remember ever cashing those in, do you?
B: I also remember during the war that the older people, amongst whom we were living, [an] occasion when one of their sons was reported killed, that everybody in the neighbourhood knew about it. It was a real neighbourhood reaction to the thing. And as the war went on, it got worse.
I was eight at the end of the war. And on VE day all the schools marched up to the main street and we all participated in the VE Day celebrations, but that was organized through the school board.
I didn’t realize it at the time, by this time my father was no longer working in the aircraft industry: he’s now been drafted and he’s being trained not too far away, in Orillia actually. Then the atomic bomb comes along and the war with Japan ends and at that time I didn’t appreciate that that was a fairly significant thing for all the people who were being lined up to shift to the Pacific. So they have a different attitude toward the atomic bomb, people who avoided invading Japan, than people who had not experienced what the war would have been like if it had gone on as long as it might have gone on.
One of the things I recall, sort of in retrospect, because there were shortages after the war, [was] that people were quite pleased to get household appliances and things that became available once they switched over from making machine guns to making washing machines. So that was kind of, I think for adults, a positive time: they were getting stuff that they had not had before the war. Cars were another big thing. I mean my father was very much into getting good used cars and things because they had not been able to get that during the [war] time. And housing; housing especially was hard to get after the war.
M: Your father built their house, didn’t he?
B: Yes he did.
M: Literally.
B: Well, he and his friends helped, together
M: After the war we were frightened of nuclear war, weren’t we? We really were frightened.
B: Yeah, they had drills and things.
M: Yeah, they had drills in the school that we’d have to get under the…
In Unison: ...desks.
B: I’m not sure what they would have protected us from!
M: I can remember in Toronto that, during the time they had polio scares (in those days they didn’t have the vaccine or anything). My parents used to send me to my grandparents in Guelph to get away from the city. For a couple of summers that was a real scare. Things they don’t have to worry about now.
B: People were quite fearful of [polio], other diseases too. Polio was the worst, and of course with the American president having had it… it was big concern for parents. There was a girl in my block that developed it. It was pretty scary. But they used to quarantine people with diseases.
M: Oh yeah, I forgot about that.
B: You’d end up with a notice on your door, put by the public health service.
M: Was that for measles?
B: There were several childhood diseases that they quarantined people for. And that was a pretty effective thing to do.
Why did you join the army?
B: I initially joined the Air Force and then I transferred to the Army. Well in my case it was a way of getting a university education. A lot of the guys in my class, it was the same thing. We came from a sort of working class background and it was an opportunity.
I went to CMR french military college first and because of the cold war they sponsored [me]. They paid tuition and a small stipend as well, and they required that we serve for three years after so there were a lot of people going through at the military colleges and at the universities as well in those days, back in the fifties
M: Bob was sent to the British army school at Bovington in Dorset to study armoured vehicle technology.
B: Going to England was kind of interesting because it was like a step back in time that we had coal-fired fireplaces and a coal-fired range, whereas in Canada we had electric and stuff like that too.
Things were just starting to get better for the British at that point; they were just starting to be able to afford cars and things that twenty years earlier we had in Canada, but in Britain … war recovery. And they had rationing much longer than we had. And national service, their draft.. I guess by the time we had got there is had ended, but it just had ended. So most of the young men had served in one of the three armed services in Britain.
M: I was there too and so was [our daughter]; [she] was two when we were over there and oh yeah, it was a real experience.
B: In the winter of '62-'63 was the worst winter they had for years. The snow stayed on the ground for six weeks, and we were in the southern part of England!
M: We would get up in the morning and the water in the toilets would be frozen: now there’s cold! Bob used to go to bed with a balaclava on.
B: Yeah it was cold! You only had heat with the little fireplace or in the kitchen. So that was interesting - we were fortunate we did it when we were quite young.
M: Yeah, it was an adventure, it was really an adventure. And we knew we were only there for a year, while Bob was on course, so…
M: The world today is so different, how can you give advice?
I suppose the things we did and what we remember are of interest, but how do they adapt it to their way of thinking?
In our day, if you had a degree of some sort, then you had a job for life. I mean there was never any worry about getting a job. That [is] certainly different now.
B: I think coping with change is something that you either learn to do and get along with it, or you get stuck, so it’s good to be open to change…
M: Of course as the older you get the harder it gets to adapt to change. You like to keep [things] the way things are.. it worked.
M: I went up to grade 13 and part of the curriculum was you either took cooking and things, or you took Latin. And I did Latin because I wasn’t really interested in cooking. But when we were first married we lived in an apartment building in Barrie and my mother gave me a wringer washer - you could bring your own washing machine in this apartment - I had it downstairs-
B: - but she didn’t show you how to use it.
M: She didn’t show me how to use it. I never did anything at home before I was married; my mother did everything: she did the laundry, she did everything. That’s just the way life was in those days, for us, but anyway...
So I was doing the laundry down there and I put too much through the wringer, and I blew the fuses for the whole apartment building!
And Bob came home, and he came downstairs and said, “Say something in Latin.” Ha ha!
B: Well, it made sense in those days to take latin, but now it’s all gone.
M: He is the most patient man you could ever imagine.
