Evelyn's Biography (part 5/9)

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 5/9

Evelyn’s family had very strong values. There was an especially heavy emphasis put on helping your neighbors. There was always a huge garden when they were living in the Okanagan and half of it was given away to friends and neighbors. When there were problems in the town – no matter what town they were living in, people would often come to her parents for someone to talk to. The family was very community orientated. For further examples of her family values we look to her family when they moved to Golden B.C in 1953.

Whenever mom and dad did something [to help someone out, and the person that they helped said that they didn’t know how to repay them], the comment was just to pass it on.

So, one time when I was going down to our cottage in Windermere, I had my three youngest kids with me. I had a car accident. I went off the side of the road, and I over corrected and there was a little ditch there and [as] my steering had just been fixed so it was really sensitive, and I went right across to that little gravel pit that’s just before Brisco. All I could think about was that I had to get back on the road, I should have just stopped there and I would have been fine. [So], I tried to get back on to the road and I rolled the car right over on its top and back. It was a Ford station wagon, so it was a big one. Some people stopped to help me, and brought us to the Brisco store to phone the police, and everyone was fine, a few little bruises but that was all. Geordie (this is Evelyn’s oldest son) was talking to the people, telling them all about his grandpa Crandlemire. The women said “Crandlemire, is that Dean Crandlemire? I once went to Lottie Crandlemire, which was Dean’s mother, and she helped me. When I asked her what I could do to repay her she said just pass it on.” She said that she was so happy to be passing it on to her granddaughter.

Her father was involved in building the swimming pool and the curling rink as well. He was also on the hospital board. Evelyn was the leader of the Canadian Girls in Training with the United Church. The group was a Christian training group, similar to Girl Guides and Brownies.

As a youth she worked very little except for babysitting in the summer time for neighbor mothers who worked in the orchards. When she started she got 25 cents an hour. She also worked one season in the orchards, but she hated it so much, so she never did it again. Pay was based on how much a person picked so there were no wage differentials between males and females. For entertainment there was a hall where you could play badminton, but if she wanted to go to a movie they had to drive to Kelowna B.C. In the summer her and her friends spent every afternoon at the beach lying in the sun. There were school dances, but for those they had to take the bus. “One time the bus broke down, so there were about five kids who had to walk five miles over the hill back home. Thankfully someone that we knew picked us up along the way”.