Journey through the past

Crescentwood

Fort Garry

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 29/04/2024 (690 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The ways in which Winnipeg has changed in one lifetime are rather astounding.

So much so that F.W. Orde Morton decided to put pen to paper and document the Winnipeg he grew up in during the years immediately following the Second World War. The result is Winnipeg Made Me: Growing Up After World War II, which is out now from Heartland Associates.

“I became aware that many of my contemporaries were starting to die or suffer from dementia, which made me realize if I wanted to do this, I better do it now,” admitted Morton, 83, who grew up in Winnipeg and now lives in Toronto in his retirement.

“I wanted to emphasize the massive changes that have happened in one lifetime. I have a strong sense that we’re at the end of an era, and will be living in a very different world. And maybe already are. I wanted to put on record what life was like then, and hope people enjoy reading about it and give an understanding of Winnipeg and Manitoba and how they came to be the way they are today.”

As a child, Morton attended Grosvenor School and Kelvin High School, attending the University of Manitoba before heading out to Toronto in 1961, and later Oxford University in England as a Rhodes Scholar.

“Since then, I’ve had a very complicated life, with at least four different careers,” Morton said with a chuckle, adding he spent time with the foreign service, as an academic, as well as in administration of two multinational companies.

Still, Morton would visit Winnipeg regularly while his parents were still alive. His father, William, a distinguished historian who wrote a number of books on regional and national history, died in 1980. After his mother, Peg, died in 2001, he still made frequent visits, his last being in 2016.

“I’m 83 and now have limited mobility,” he said. “So travelling now is a big deal.”

Written as a memoir and laid out in the style of a local history coffee table book, Winnipeg Made Me is a colourful, thoughtful trip down memory lane, complete with plenty of eye-catching archival photos and images.

“The city has grown not only physically, but also as a society,” Morton said. “There’s more integrated ethnic groups that make up Winnipeg than when I grew up. Looking back, I was astonished at how the people I knew were overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon.”

In one section of the book, Morton also delves into his realization as a youngster that he was gay, which was a difficult topic for discussion in the early 1950s in Winnipeg.

“That’s an area where change has been enormous. In some ways, I can hardly believe how it has changed,” he said. “It’s always a major development, but back then it was a subject people didn’t mention, unless it was unavoidable. It was very hard to find out anything about it. There was no Wikipedia, and libraries tended to keep books about it in restricted areas. I wish I had taken my parents into my confidence. I didn’t, and I think that was a mistake.”

Now that Winnipeg Made Me is available, at McNally Robinson and online, Morton hopes it will stir discussion. He added that he is eager to hear from readers.

“I very much hope people enjoy it, and I would be very interested in comments and criticism, and corrections even,” Morton said. “Nothing’s perfect.”