Memories Of Our Great Towns

A warm-hearted memoir of a childhood spent living in various mining towns in the Kootenays throughout the 1930s and ’40s. When young Shirley Doris Hall and her family moved to BC’s West Kootenay region in 1927, the area was a hub of mining activity. Shirley’s father, a cook, had no problem finding work at the mining camps, and the family dutifully followed him from town to town as his services were sought after. For Shirley and her brother, Ray—described as both her confidant and her nemesis—mining camps were the backdrop of their youth. The instant close-knit communities that formed around them; the freedom of barely tamed wilderness; and the struggles of the Depression years and the war that followed created an unlikely environment for a happy childhood. Yet Shirley’s memories reveal that it was indeed a magical time and place in which to grow up. Children of the Kootenays paints a lively portrait of this forgotten period in BC history—of mining towns that are now ghost towns—told from the unique perspective of a young girl.

The volume Memories of my Town is an exploration into how town dwellers experience their environment in a complicated way .As people in urban milieus relate themselves to the environment, this takes place on many levels, where especially the time level becomes problematic. The urban buildings and settings can be looked upon as a kind of collective history, as carriers or witnesses of times past. But it is only the town dwellers that experience urban time itself, the time they live in, but through their memories also times past. In this past some elements take symbolicaly dense expressions. Through reliving and narrating their experiences the symbolically important factors in the this urban relationship will be outlined for investigations conserning three towns, Helsinki, the capital, Viborg, the ceded and lost Carelian town, and Jyväskylä, a town with dense commercial and civilisatory dimensions in the middle of Finland. The symbolic aspects are the kern in all the articles of the book Memories of my Town. The aim of the book and its articles has been to use different theoretical concepts as guidelines in analysing the different narrative texts. Thus the articles are to be seen as independent contributions to the scientific discussion about places, urbanism, memories and narratives. The ethnological outlook is on the other hand an outcome of the joint project Town Dwellers and their Places., whereby the articles substancially relate to one another. Thus the book can also be seen as a joint result of this urban project, which was sponsored by the Finnish Academy.

Memories of My Town is an exploration into how town dwellers experience their environment in a complicated way. As people in urban milieus relate themselves to the environment, this takes place on many levels, where especially the time level becomes problematic. The urban buildings and settings can be looked upon as a kind of collective history, as carriers or witnesses of times past. But it is only the town dwellers that experience urban time itself, the time they live in, but through their memories also times past. In this past some elements take symbolically dense expressions. Through reliving and narrating their experiences the symbolically important factors in this urban relationship will be outlined for investigations concerning three towns, Helsinki, the capital, Vyborg, the ceded and lost Karelian town, and Jyväskylä, a town with dense commercial and cultural dimensions in the middle of Finland. The aim of the book is to use different theoretical concepts as guidelines in analysing the different narrative texts.