A long-time Thompson resident and author of the book ‘“Where You From?” The Building of a Northern City: Thompson, Manitoba’ entertained an audience of about 30 people with tales of the city’s early days at the Thompson Public Library April 15.
Wayne Hall, who came to Thompson in 1961, recalled how people who were too young to drink could get beer and what made Thompson such an interesting place to live in the years before it officially became a city in 1970.
Although Hall had many amusing stories to tell those who came to hear him speak, “Where You From?” was written as a history and required painstaking research to fact check various assertions.
“I had to be able to prove it,” Hall said. “Nobody else had written it down before so that's basically why it took seven years to find everything that I needed to write that.”
As for why he wrote the book, Hall said it was a unique moment in history.
“It was a once in a lifetime experience and that is why I wanted to put it all on paper. Am I an author? By no stretch of the imagination. I just put a lot of facts down on paper.”
He cherishes his memories of Thompson so much that he wishes his own children could have had a similar experience.
“Thompson was so dynamic, there was so much happening,” Hall recalls. “You could walk to work in the morning and when you walked home in the afternoon, right after your shift, it was a different picture because there was so much being built so fast. It was just a great, great place and I’ve said before I often wished there would have been a Thompson to send our boys to.”
Described by the library’s Michelle Pegus in her brief introduction as “a man of many hats,” Hall had numerous jobs since arriving in Thompson, including working in a pool hall below where the Strand Theatre is today, working in hotels, working for the government and, of course, operating his own business, Wayne Hall Delivery.
When he first arrived in Thompson, however, he got a job at the refinery, but he didn’t last there long due to a medical issue.
“I got an infection in my flesh,” he said “It went right to bone. I went into the hospital around mid-December and they cut the end of my toe off. After I got out of the hospital, I wasn’t going back.”
Talking about being 20 in Thompson back in the 1960s, Hall said he practically felt old. But being young also had disadvantages, like being unable to purchase alcohol. But where there’s a will, there’s a way and people found a way to get free beer.
Alcohol wasn’t allowed in the Inco camps where the mine workers lived, so they would often buy 24 bottles and drink them in the woods before heading home to sleep. If they couldn’t finish all the beer they bought, they would bury it in hopes of finding it again another day.
“The hitch was that they were burying in the dark,” Hall said. “Us younger guys were going back and looking in the daylight. We used to save up enough beer until we has enough for a party.”
Planning for parties was a necessity when liquor had to be ordered from a liquor store in The Pas by telegraph. It took two days to arrive.
“Wednesdays were the best day, your most favourite day to put your order in,” he said. “They came in on the train on Friday.”
Finding parties, on the other hand, was easy: you just walked around until you saw a bunch of “Thompson Oxfords” — rubber boots — outside a home’s door.
“I went to so many parties in this town, “Hall said. “Lots of times I didn’t even know who the homeowners were.”
The important thing was not to drink so much that you couldn’t tell which boots were yours.
“You would turn them down about that far,” he said, indicating a distance of a coupe of inches with his fingers, “and you would write your name on the inside of them.”
Although Thompson remains a remote city that takes a long time to reach from larger cities, it was far different in the 1960s, with a trip to Winnipeg via The Pas and Highway 10 taking something like 14 hours. Highway 6 from Thompson to Ponton was gravel when it was first built and there was one particular area that was swampy, so a grader was at the site and would wait for a number of cars to arrive and then go through pushing water and mud to the side so the cars could come through behind it. Then it would turn around and do the same thing for people headed in the opposite direction.
Hall said he did some things in his younger days that he didn’t realize were dangerous, like driving to drop off his friend at the Pipe Lake Mine after attending a party and then driving back without any proper winter gear in the vehicle.
“It was 40 below. If something happened to occur, you would not be talking to me today. There was no traffic on the road whatsoever. That was the dumbest thing. Well, not the dumbest.”
Looking back on his 60-plus years in Thompson, Hall said it provided him with opportunities he might not have gotten if he hadn’t come here.
“I don’t have a lot of formal education,” he said. “I have Grade 8. But I did things here I could never do anywhere else.”
