As little kids we were little aware of what industries kept the city economically functioning. In the 60s I did not think of it much either, except in terms of where I might be able to get a job.
We knew what our parents did . Many in my cohort had dads who had served in world war II. A lot of the students at Viscount Bennett were living in the military housing at Currie Barracks when their dads were career military.
Many of our parents got jobs in construction, transportation and it turns out that many in my cohort had parents in the oil and gas industry or its many spinoffs. Agriculture also was a key source of income for our relatives, those back on the farm still or those who in the city still kept connections with the farm.
My father worked in various jobs, operating a grain elevator in southern Alberta, delivering gas in a little red truck to farm communities and then in the 50s in the city doing construction, rototilling, and eventually selling real estate . He sold houses, and hotels and yes, farms. It became his specialty area to help farmers purchase large tracts of land all around Alberta and Saskatchewan. Had he not worked in construction he might not have been as knowledgeable about what to look for when buying a home. Had he not been raised on a farm he for sure would not have been as sensitive to the priorities of farmers. It all works together.
Calgary it turned out was a ‘boom and bust ‘city, having surges of deep economic woes and others of surges in success. My cohort saw some of those stages and heard of others
1905 – Alberta becomes a province
1908 – the city built a racetrack for the Dominion Exhibition
1911 – Hudson’s Bay Company building and Grain Exchange are huge sandstone constructions here
1913 – Burns Building is made with steel frame departing from the sandstone of earlier times
1913 – Canadian Pacific Railway set up Ogden locomotive repair shops, the only such site between Vancouver and Winnipeg
1914 – Turner Valley Oil discovery . Within a few months 500 oil companies had been set up in Calgary
1918 – post war recession hits
1921 – 11% of all Calgary men are unemployed
1929 – Pat Burns has a meat packing plant in Calgary and others in Edmonton, Vancouver, Regina and Prince Albert Saskatchewan. It provided jobs to a lot of people and food to many provinces.
1942 – Ogden Shops locomotive repair temporarily transformed into an armament factory during the second world war
1947 – Leduc oil discovery. Another boom.
1950s – Fred Mannix , mining and construction company leader
1950s – Max Bell, Peter Bawden, Frank McMahon, famous oil men
1950s – Ralph Scurfield, real estate developer
1953 – There had been oil and gas companies in Calgary for years. Hudson’s Bay oil and gas had an office on 7th avenue SW in 1925. By 1953 entire buildings downtown were occupied by small oil and gas company head offices.
1960s – C. Don Wilson, prominent house builder in Calgary
1960s – Eric Harvie – Calgary oilman opens Heritage Park and starts Glenbow museum
1960s – Jack Gallagher, Maurice Strong, prominent Calgary business leaders
1967 – Calgary has such a boom that it has the most millionaires per capita in all of Canada.
1967 – Calgary has the most cars per capita in all of Canada
1979 – Calgary has the most new office space in the country, more even than in New York City
1979 – High rise apartments are under construction at a fast rate.
The spin offs of a successful economy were huge. My husband’s father was a silk screen printer, creating ad material for the growing businesses. Grocery stores thrived as people arrived and could make purchases. Housing surged in post war times and our cohort saw that.
But the downturns also hurt. In the 1970s there was a huge slump in the market and we also saw that.
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