|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Site Index |
Available by subscription only, Insight Into Government is Alberta's independent, weekly newsletter on policy and politics. On this Web site we have provided a free sample of Insight Into Government, subscription and contact information, related links, as well as the feature column below which is available only online. All material on this site remains the copyright of MSL Publishing Ltd. |
|
|
Excerpt from Alberta Premiers of the Twentieth Century: By the mid-1940s, the family of seven was living in a three-bedroom apartment in what was known as the GECO development in Agincourt, Ontario, just north of what were then the city limits of Toronto. The building was an old General Engineering Co. warehouse cut up into units to cope with an emergency housing shortage. It was “a very tough place to live,” Getty would recall in his unpublished autobiography. “The walls separating the units were paper thin. There was barbed wire, gravel, and garbage, with residents of the tenements being looked upon as outcasts.” The main pastimes for children in the development were hockey and basketball played in a makeshift gym equipped with a bushel basket with its bottom cut out. Getty started playing football by throwing pieces of newspaper tied up with string in the cinder-paved yard of GECO. His father loved playing family hockey and football when he could. His mother Beatrice had been a national lawn bowling champion. His sisters called him Porky as he poured eggnog into his tall, skinny frame in an effort to beef up for the school football team. His heroes were the stars of the Montreal Canadiens and a football great named Royal Copeland. Sports was a passion. Its values of toughness, perseverance, loyalty, and teamwork became personal guideposts. If anything counted more than sports it was his family. “We didn’t sit around the dinner table talking politics,” Getty recalled in the autobiography. “A lot of sports. A lot of family things. We were very tight-knit and did everything together . . . We supported whoever did anything . . . We all participated. I loved my family.” |
