This is the first in a series of articles created to pay homage to the senior citizens living among us. They are our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, and they have much to teach us through their colloquial storytelling and colourful life experiences.
George Hodgins is 98 years young and a senior living at the Niverville Credit Union Manor. He’s a soft-spoken, gentle-spirited man whose greatest joy comes from the visits of family and friends. He keeps boredom at bay by socializing with neighbours through weekly card games of Bug Your Neighbour, monthly birthday celebrations for manor residents, movie nights, and interacting with the inquisitive daycare children.
George moved to Niverville four years ago when he and his wife Eleanor gave up their home in Kennedy, Saskatchewan to be closer to their daughter, Ellen Byggdin, and her family. In August 2018, the love of his life was taken from him, the scars of which are still tender and raw. They’d been partners through thick and thin for 67 years.
George met Eleanor in his small farming community of Fairmede, Saskatchewan. She was a pretty young schoolteacher who’d been boarding with his brother while teaching in the area’s tiny rural school. She stole his heart immediately and, before long, the pair were partnered in a lifelong union. They settled on his family’s farmland, raising four children in a 600-square-foot home with only meagre amenities to get by on. But they were rich in love and family ties, sharing land, farm equipment, horses, and resources with parents and grandparents all around them.
As a father, one of his greatest hardships was keeping the children adequately clothed through the tough winter months. At times, he says, they needed to rely on help from their parents.
“Two of my brothers slept in a porch and their bedding froze to the wall,” muses daughter Ellen. “I slept with my mom and Bruce and dad pulled a hide-a-bed from the wall to sleep on. For six years, Dad never got to sleep with his wife. It was quite a thing when we got the new house when I was 12.”
Their primary income was derived from selling cream from their livestock and grain from their 1,200 acres of field. The family survived on the food they raised: chickens, ducks, beef, vegetables and fruit from their own orchard. George carried in drinking water and carried out the makeshift toilet every day. He dedicated long days to farming through the heat of summer and frigid temperatures of a northern winter without the amenities of electric heat, light, and air conditioning. He remembers the thrill of electricity lines reaching his rural area in 1954. For the family, it was life-altering.
Even so, travel was difficult in the winter months. The family car was put on blocks in the fall to preserve the tires. Occasional trips into the local townships and to neighbouring farms required hooking a team of horses to an open “stone boat,” or a closed caboose, when they needed to travel as a family. Telephone lines were wont to break during heavy snowfalls and George and his neighbours regularly found themselves out repairing these lines to keep communications going.
But it wasn’t all hardship all the time. George and Eleanor invested their time in keeping the family active and entertained too, playing games of jam-pail curling, cards, and crokinole with neighbours at the local school. Occasionally they’d head to Kennedy for some old-time waltz and pattern dancing accompanied by local musicians on the accordion, violin, and guitar. These are the memories that still bring a smile to his face.
Ellen has memories of her dad clearing a nearby dugout throughout the winter months where he taught each of the kids how to skate and play hockey.
As a youngster in the early twentieth century, George grew up the middle child of seven in the same area in which he later farmed. He fondly recalls close intergenerational connections as both sets of grandparents lived on either side of the family farm.
From a young age, he was responsible for feeding the chickens, collecting eggs, and carrying in firewood. Later he would be put to work harnessing up to 21 horses before breakfast in order to ready them for the day’s fieldwork. In fall he’d be in the fields stooking straw to be loaded into the threshing machine.
If times were hard, he wasn’t overly aware of it. He shared a straw mattress with two brothers. By springtime, the mattress was so compressed that it had to be restuffed once new straw came in off the fields. He was one of the lucky farm kids, though, allowed to attend school until Grade 10.
“I remember it was lots of fun going to school, but I just foolishly goofed around,” says George. “I didn’t even get my Grade 10. I thought it would be great to help on the farm, but it wasn’t all roses in 1937.”
He recalls losing a brother to illness, a fairly common occurrence during those times. It was winter and the child died en route to the nearest hospital, just 21 miles away. It took four hours to get there on that frigid winter day. Much later, George and Eleanor would lose their second son to a rare disease which would introduce a whole new level of loss and heartache to their lives.
By the time George was 20, World War II had broken out and men were being conscripted. Two of his brothers headed off to war. George’s parents appealed to the government to keep him at home to help on the family farm.
“They both came back, but my oldest brother, his mind was bad,” George recalls. “He was in Italy at the worst part. He rode a motorbike to take messages to the front lines in the dark. When he came back he wasn’t the same at all. He was schizophrenic and always quite different.”
One of George’s fondest memories of growing up will always be that of the local 4H Club, showing his prize calves and attending events with the area’s families.
“Way back in 1934, they formed the 4H Calf Club and I’m the only living member of that now,” George says proudly. “I’ve been to 80 different 4H fairs since then.”
The same 4H Club still runs today.
“We took Dad home one year and we bought a new sign for the school that Mom had taught at,” says Ellen. “There were 40 kids at the 4H fair that year and they circled around Dad and took a picture and gave him a plaque.”
For 12 years running, George also participated in the Terry Fox Run.
“I liked what he stood for,” says George.
A cancer survivor himself, George always encouraged family participation too. One year, he and his granddaughter Abby joined the run on horseback.
Looking back on her dad’s life, Ellen will always have fond memories of George as a father and husband. “I think one thing that’s cool was that his land included land that had never seen a plough, so it was virgin prairie,” Ellen says. “Every spring he picked Mom crocuses. He never missed, even when he walked with a cane.”
