Keep in touch, p.2
Keep in Touch, page 2
Born on March 11, 1906, Albert Phillips, first-born son of Albert Brotherhood and Grace Amelia Silcox, carried on his young shoulders a heavy burden. As a lad, he was often called upon to deflect his father’s mood swings and sudden violence toward his beloved mother, and he carried his responsibilities valiantly. Still, he was so affected by his fraught home life that at a young age, he cast aside his given name, Albert, and became known only as Phil, or formally, Phillips. After completing high school in Toronto, then graduating from Dominion College in the city, Phil worked as a clerk with the Trusts and Guaranty Company, but the business world was not to hold him. Like many of his forebears, he was drawn to a career in the church and planned to enter the University of Toronto.
But love, in the person of Marjorie Emily Cecilia Walter, would find him first. In 1926, Phil met Marjorie at a youth church gathering in Toronto. Born in 1908 on a farm in Wallace Township, in the Listowel region of Ontario, she had recently come to the city to find work as a housemaid. Feeling isolated by her work and her shy nature, Marjorie sought friends in the familiarity of the church, which she had attended since her Toronto relocation. It is here that her path crossed with that of Phil Silcox.
Two seemingly more dissimilar soulmates could not have been found. Marjorie’s German Evangelical farming heritage contrasted markedly to that of her beau’s more educated British Congregationalist/United Church background. Marjorie’s grandfather, Johann Peter (Walther) Walter, born in 1809, in Eschelbach, Germany, and his wife, Katharine, had immigrated to Wallace Township in 1854. Soon after their arrival, Peter purchased 175 acres (70 hectares) of bush at two dollars an acre in the Listowel area. He built a one-storey, 25-by-25-foot (7.6-by-7.6 metre) log cabin for his wife and the five children who would be born. Now the patriarch set about to earn a living from the fertile Canadian soil.
There was no life of leisure for these newcomers. The Walter family history, They Farmed the Sixth of Wallace: The Story of the Walter Family in Germany, Canada and the United States, sheds light on farming life in pre-Confederation Upper Canada (Ontario): “The persistent day-after-day, month-after-month, before dawn to after dark ministry to livestock in the blistering heat and bitter cold of the climate of Wallace, in sickness and in health, for mile after mile, furrows were plowed, crops were harvested and load after load, bushel after bushel of farm products were hauled to market. There were endless chores to be done; repairs to the equipment, bullrings, fences, timbering and the clearing of land were tasks to be accomplished as long as one’s energy held out …”4
A God-fearing evangelical Christian, Peter Walter also lent his back to the building of Zion Evangelical United Brethren Church, completed in 1863. He was named one of the first trustees of the congregation.
Peter Jr., born in 1843; his wife, Veronica; and their nine children became the second of the Walter family to farm the “Sixth of Wallace,” a county road. Peter was reported to be illiterate but was skilled at figures and could “quickly add long columns of numbers in his head.”5 Ultimately, the Walter homestead passed on to Peter and Veronica’s son Cornelius Walter. To Cornelius and his wife, Annie Berndt Walter, were born five children: Earl Berndt Wesley, Ethel Margaret Victoria, Leslie Elton, Marjorie Emily Cecilia, and Anita Matilda Permella. After Annie’s death in 1914 due to complications in childbirth, Cornelius married Margaret Zinn. The couple moved to Waterloo, Ontario, in 1924, where Cornelius worked in a barrel factory, as a furniture maker, and in house construction.
Work for the five Walter offspring was difficult to find after the family had left the farm. It is believed that Marjorie had attained some high school credits but had not graduated. With employment prospects at home limited, in 1934, at age twenty-six, she moved to Toronto to find work as a domestic. It is here that she found love with a young man with plans for the ministry. The couple was married on September 25, 1935.
Chapter Three Of Locusts and Thistles and Stinky Milk
On his graduation in 1936 from Victoria College, University of Toronto, Phil Silcox and his bride, Marjorie, relocated to Montreal. There, he achieved his ordination as a minister of the United Church of Canada. Phil now looked forward to a life in the service of God and community. Ironically, in following in the steps of his illustrious and legendary grandfather, J.B., famous for his “Grit and Grip” sermons, Phil’s journey would lead him initially to the wide-open spaces of western Canada. He had accepted the position of Pastor in the small settlement of Briercrest, Saskatchewan, population less than a hundred, some forty miles (sixty-four kilometres) southwest of the town of Moose Jaw. He would minister to four churches in the Briercrest circuit.
Marjorie, now pregnant with the couple’s first child, surely felt anticipation and uncertainty at the road ahead as she prepared to travel to western Canada by train, a journey of three days and nights. North from Union Station in Toronto, through farmland, into dense Ontario forests, then west, skirting Manitoba’s lakes and bush … and the final push to the parched wheat fields of Saskatchewan. A relocation of greater contrast, from beginning to end, could scarcely be imagined. In a letter to family in Toronto, Phil Silcox called Briercrest “a plain village on the bald Prairie, which was balder in those days.” And, in a later reflection on his first ministerial posting, Reverend Phil wrote, “Only the most intrepid would dare to venture so far into the wild Indian Territory and buffalo pastures.”6
Yet it would appear that “this plain village on the bald Prairie” was home to a veritable Depression-era celebrity. Briercrest was the childhood home of noted Canadian poet Edna Jaques.7 Edna had moved to the community with her parents in 1902, at the age of eleven. A precocious girl, she had begun composing poems as soon as she learned to write and, as a teenager, had published her first poem in the Moose Jaw Times. By the age of twenty, Edna was recognized worldwide for her patriotic poem “In Flanders Now,” which raised over a million dollars for World War I relief. The poem was read on November 11, 1921, at the unveiling of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Washington, D.C.
By the time Reverend Phil and Marjorie Silcox had moved to Briercrest in 1936, Edna Jaques was a nationally admired published poet, in demand for public-speaking engagements across the continent. In later years, both Phil and Marjorie would speak fondly of their friendship with her.
* * *
Besides being wild and untamed, Saskatchewan, and to a lesser extent its neighbours Manitoba and Alberta, had been in a prolonged drought for a number of years. Through the mid-1930s, the province had been known, pejoratively and throughout the world, as the Dust Bowl. Drought had devastated the landscape, the economy, and the lives of its inhabitants — especially farmers. The life-draining drought was compounded by massive infestations of cutworms, sawflies, and grasshoppers. It is estimated that 750,000 farms were lost in Canada during these Great Depression years, with the majority of them in southeastern Alberta and southern Saskatchewan. One westerner described the dire horror of prairie life during these dark days:
My son came running into the house greatly excited, “Come quick, Mom,” he shouted, “there’s a big black cloud coming in the sky.” He ran out ahead of me and pointed to the western sky where sure enough there was the blackest cloud I have ever seen on the horizon. It was moving very quickly and the edge of it was rolling along. But it wasn’t a rain cloud; it was the dried topsoil of a hundred farms lifted into the air. When it was light enough for me to see the forms of the cattle I knew it was safe to open the door, so once again I looked outside.… Everything — land, air, sky was a dull grey colour … our feet sank in sand and we breathed and tasted sand. Such a mess. In the wake, clouds of grasshoppers came in millions, eating whatever was left: crops, gardens, even clothes left on line to dry. The cloud of locusts passed with a mechanical hum.8
Briercrest was an overwhelming challenge for the recently arrived Ontarians, but Phil and Marjorie surely showed that “Grip and Grit” sentiment. Home would be the Briercrest United Church manse (reported to be the only brick structure of its sort in southern Saskatchewan). But mere brick and mortar were no deterrent to prairie winds and swirling soil. Marjorie Silcox later recalled, “We had to cover all the windows with newspaper to try to keep the dust out, but it was hopeless. And there was no point sweeping or dusting. The dust came in as soon as it was cleared out.” A severe shortage of water compounded the dry conditions. “Water was so scarce,” Phil later recalled, “you wasted none of it. You kept the water you bathed in; you then washed your clothes in it; then you washed the floors and if there was any left, you gave a small drink to the parched plants out of doors.”
While Marjorie battled the elements, awaiting the birth of the baby, Phil cared for the souls of the community. Each Sunday, travelling dirt roads and often in blinding sand or snow, Reverend Silcox set out behind the wheel of an ancient DeSoto sedan. He’d follow a forty-mile (sixty-four kilometre) circuit taking him to Saskatchewan churches in Tilney and Baildon, as well as Briercrest.9 Marjorie worried that Phil would be on one of his treks when the baby came.
Part Two Of Spirit
(1937–1956)
Chapter Four First Child of the Parish
If the sweltering summer heat and parched wheat fields of the Depression-era Prairies were not sufficient to deter fresh settlers from the call to “go west, young man,” then the blasts of winter vanquished the dream. The province of Saskatchewan had dipped to a bone-rattling -35ºF (-37°C) on January 28, 1937, when David Phillips Silcox entered the world.
Two weeks before, the babe’s mother, Marjorie, accompanied by her pastor husband, Phil, had taken the train from their rural home in Briercrest to Saskatoon to await the birth. Given the treacherous nature of the prairie winter, it was a judicious decision. After seeing Marjorie safely settled in a boarding home, Phil returned home to minister to his church community and to await the blessed event.
On January 28, 1937, at seven pounds, fourteen ounces (3.6 kilograms), David Phillips Silcox greeted the world and remained with his mother for several days in Moose Jaw before both returned to the parsonage. It would have been a joyous occasion, as the baby was the first born to a serving Briercrest pastor in the church’s history. Phil recalled the mood of the settlement on David’s arrival: “Better neighbours were never found anywhere, and they loved the ‘First Babe of the Manse.’”1
He would have to be a hearty lad, though, to survive in this drought-stricken, grasshopper-ravaged prairie settlement. Here, fretful mothers stuffed rags in the chinks of their windows and doors to battle the winter cold as well as the summer dust that seeped through any crack and cranny. Reverend Phil recalled of Depression-era Saskatchewan that “nothing grew except kochia, [tumbleweed], Russian thistle and stinkweed. Army worms ate the thistle, grasshoppers mowed down the kochia, and the lean and hungry cattle ate the stinkweed, which gave their milk an arsenic flavour.”2 David, breastfed for only two months, suffered chronic diarrhea from the tainted cow’s milk. A bout of measles and a fall “headfirst from David’s carriage onto a hardwood floor” only added to the worries of the pastor and his wife.3 No doubt, Phil’s call in late 1938 to serve as Assistant Minister at St. Andrew’s United Church in Moose Jaw brought relief from the rural child-raising worries.
* * *
Moose Jaw was a rough and tumble town of twenty thousand pressed hard against the Trans-Canada Highway, forty-eight miles (seventy-seven kilometres) west of Regina. Once christened “Canada’s most notorious city,”4 legend holds that the notorious American gangster Al Capone spent considerable time hiding from authorities in Moose Jaw’s underground tunnel network. Although residents of the prairie town cared little about the whereabouts of the American crime king, they contended daily with the sounds, sights, and smells of coal-fired locomotives rumbling incessantly through the centre of town.
In the wide-open prairie, outside the hardscrabble towns, there was little escape from the elements. Phil Silcox described Moose Jaw as “plagued with grasshoppers, thrashed by hail storms and almost frozen stiff.” He laments, “One long spell saw temperatures go no higher than between −50C and −30C. What a beginning! What a world! What a life!” Home for the family would be a modest row house abutting the Canadian National Railway line and adjacent to the Moose Jaw train station. Marjorie lamented the loss of her small Briercrest garden, where she had toiled daily, fending off the ravaging grasshoppers.
With Canada’s declaration of war against Germany in September 1939, the economic prospects for the little town and the province at large improved. Under the initiative of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, the wide-open spaces of Saskatchewan (and to a lesser extent its neighbouring provinces, Alberta and Manitoba) were designated as air training arenas. Within weeks, over twelve hundred pilots and engineers representing Great Britain, the U.S., France, Belgium, and Poland arrived to begin training and flight manoeuvres. The prairie landscape came alive with the sights and sound of war, as de Havilland Tiger Moths, Cessna Cranes, Hawker Hurricanes, Fleet Finches, and their pilots went through their paces. With the influx of men and war machines, the economy of the Canadian West received a life-giving boost. Accommodations for pilots arose seemingly overnight; stores, businesses, and dining establishments, long-shuttered during the Dust Bowl, were reopened. And down-at-the-heels settlements from Calgary to Winnipeg breathed freely once again.
Nearing four years of age, young David Silcox, with energy and imagination to spare, gravitated to the park across the street from the family home. A fine location to look skyward and watch the show above! One on occasion, at least, the lad’s shoes sprouted wings. Unbeknownst to his mother, David put on a snowsuit, hat, and mittens and set off to “find Papa at his Jesus Church.” Years after the adventure, Phil recalled the following delightful memory:
I was working in my office at St. Andrews when the handle of the door rattled. I opened the door to find David — alone. Looking down the empty hallway I saw it was empty.
“Where’s your mother?” I asked my son.
“Home.”
“Who brought you here?”
“Nobody. I just came.”
I called home and Marjorie answered the phone.
“Where’s David?” I asked.
“Outside playing,” was her calm response.
“Well, there’s a little lad that looks just like him standing in my office!”5
Papa fills in the rest of son David’s Magical Mystery Tour of downtown Saskatoon: “He had crossed the #1 Highway, made his way two blocks down Athabasca, crossed the widest street in Western Canada, through the business section to the Church; somehow he opened the heavy door, which admitted him to what he called ‘the Jesus Church,’ walked down the long hall, up the stairs to the second floor, and to my office. Dave was like that!”
Reverend Phil’s light-hearted description of his oldest son as “like that” surely points to the lad’s sense of adventure — a trait he would carry throughout his life. But it appeared also that David was accident prone. A second head injury, in his fourth year (the first occurring when he was two and “fell out of his carriage”), raises questions about parental supervision. Phil reported in a letter to an Ontario relative that “Dave fell off the couch and hit his head with a crack on the hardwood floor.” The microscope unfortunately falls on the beleaguered young mother, Marjorie. A second son, Graham Cornell, born on June 7, 1938, joined David, with a third, Kenneth Charles, following on June 6, 1940. Isolated, away from family and friends, in a challenging environment, Marjorie Silcox’s motherhood experiences were surely fraught with frustration — and distraction.
But the family’s avoidance of medical care after David’s fall also raises questions. In the letter east describing his oldest son’s fall, Phil reported, “He gave a momentary appearance of convulsion, rolling whites of eyes. No bad after effects.”
Their time in Moose Jaw was coming to an end, and one speculates that Marjorie Silcox, mother of three, celebrated the news. As the war entered its second year in Europe, Canadian clergymen were volunteering for active service overseas. And with it came the repositioning of ministerial staff. In January 1941, with his oldest son approaching four years of age, the Reverend Phillips Silcox was transferred east. His new position would be serving the Lord in the gold mining town of Bourlamaque, Quebec.
The young family was on the move again.
Chapter Five Out of the Dust Bowl, into the Woods
The township of Bourlamaque, situated in the northwest of Quebec adjacent to Ontario, had flourished after the discovery of a gold vein in 1923. With the news came the arrival of thousands of treasure-seekers from Eastern Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Lamaque Gold Mines claimed ownership of the precious find and swiftly created the company town of Bourlamaque, fifteen miles (twenty-four kilometres) east of the mining site. Mining management personnel, as well as doctors, teachers, lawyers, and store owners followed.
Social hierarchy defined the planning of the settlement that grew around the mining site. Substantial wooden homes were constructed for mine managers and other professionals. Basic log houses were hastily put up for miners. Wisely, both structures existed side by side in integrated neighbourhoods, thus avoiding the social issues that had led to crime in other, less enlightened mining towns of the time.
The spiritual needs of the residents of Bourlamaque were also considered in the hastily developed town. While the majority of residents were French Canadians and worshipped in the town’s Roman Catholic churches, Presbyterians, Baptists, and Anglicans, as well as adherents to the newly amalgamated United Church, were represented, too. Rev. Phillips Silcox, late of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, was among the earliest United Church preachers to live and work in the settlement.6
