In 2002, enrolled at Mount Royal College in a Women's Studies class, we were asked to interview a woman in our life and write their biography. Leading up to grandma's 75th birthday, I would like to share what I wrote.
Part 1/9
Evelyn Jessie Keenleyside, born October 5, 1936, was named after her parent’s friend Evelyn Cooney and her father’s older sister, Jessie. Her mother’s name was Sarah Hazel Stauffer and her father’s Dean Phillips Crandlemire. She was born in the Hospital in Kelowna. In those times women were routinely given anesthetic without the choice of opting out and so Sarah did not actually see Evelyn until they day after she was born. Evelyn revealed that in the morning, Sarah could hear the nurses coming down the hallway saying “oh look at this beautiful baby, she’s got the most perfect head” and she continued with “and that was me”. Her father was not in the hospital for her birth or for that of any of her siblings and her mother was kept for several weeks after childbirth for monitoring as was typical in the 1930s.
Evelyn’s father’s family was Baptist and her mothers’ were Seventh Day Adventists, but she was not baptized into either. To explain why she wasn't, she tells this story:
My father had very definite ideas about what you should do if you belonged to a religion. He felt that if you were a member of a church you shouldn’t dance or play cards or drink, all of which he liked to do. If you were going to join a church you had to do those things, so he didn’t join.
Her family did go to several different churches in Alberta during the war years. Despite the fact that Dean, her father, would not join the church he was still very active in the community. After Dean returned home from the war he and a friend of his built the United Church in the Okanagan Center. It was a small wooden church that they had donated all of the wood and labor for. Evelyn was ultimately baptized as an adult and joined a church at 18 by her own choice.
No comments:
Post a Comment