by James A. Onusko
WILFRID LAURIER UNIVERSITY PRESS
2021/$85.00/260 pp.
Recently, at a Calgary school originally built for baby-boomers, my kids watched with fascination as a metal-detector was deployed—unsuccessfully—to locate a time capsule buried in the schoolyard 60 years ago. While the treasures the children of 1962 deposited for posterity remain unrecovered, James Onusko’s Boom Kids gives us a pretty good sense of the kinds of things that might have been on their minds.
With a focus on the Banff Trail neighbourhood, then on the outskirts of the city’s northwest (adjacent to land eventually chosen as the site for the University of Calgary), Onusko draws on a series of interviews as well as school newspapers, yearbooks, police reports and memoirs to craft a portrait of what it was like to grow up in Calgary between 1950 and 1970. No two childhoods were perfectly alike, obviously, but the children of this suburban community lived in similar, roughly 900 ft2 houses, went to the same schools and navigated the same culture, with its deeply embedded notions of gender, ethnicity, class and race.
This was a generation of children raised in relative affluence compared to their parents’ childhoods in years of Depression and war. As Onusko points out, this “had a profound and positive impact on everything from the organized activities they were offered, to the food they had available, to the institutions that provided them with good educations and comparatively good health care.”
If some of Onusko’s informants were better off than others and the ethnic diversity in the neighbourhood was, as one put it, “pretty thin,” there were clearly gendered differences in the experiences of boys and girls. At the same time, girls could and did push back against expectations of dress and behaviour. Onusko notes an increase in feminist views expressed in school newspapers and elsewhere in the later 1960s.
Youthful residents of Banff Trail were not oblivious to the wider world. The atomic threat of the Cold War loomed over their childhood, albeit some took that threat more seriously than others, with some of Onusko’s interviewees seemingly at some remove from the conflicts and upheavals of their times. School bomb drills were a “bit of an adventure,” one told Onusko. “We had all these hot bikes, so we could get home in two minutes. You just hoped they didn’t drop an atomic bomb in January and you’d have to put your snowsuit on.”
Riding their hot bikes to play with friends at the neighbourhood park or catching Bill Haley and the Comets at a dance at the Stampede Corral were among the many good times the once-kids of Banff Trail remembered. Some of these recollections have at least the whiff of nostalgia, which, in the words of British historian Raphael Samuel, is “a process of selective amnesia” in which “the past becomes a historical equivalent of the enchanted space which memory accords to childhood.” Onusko uses a variety of sources to complicate the image of a suburban idyll. There was obvious sexism, racism—directed particularly against Indigenous kids—and violence both inside and outside the home. Onusko finds evidence of rebellion, delinquency, gangs, drugs and sex. None of the above was particularly prevalent in the Banff Trail neighbourhood, but none was wholly absent either.
Perhaps some decade the time capsule at my kids’ school will be found. By then, they may be old enough to read Boom Kids to learn about the way their grandparents’ generation grew up. Some aspects of that experience will seem very strange to them (girls weren’t allowed to wear pants?!) but others—say, the joy of playing with friends away from the prying eyes of adult supervision—will be entirely familiar.
Kirk Niergarth is an associate professor of history at Mount Royal University.
