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    Beyond the Floathouse: Lifelong Learning with Friends and Family: The Floathouse Series, #3
    Beyond the Floathouse: Lifelong Learning with Friends and Family: The Floathouse Series, #3
    Beyond the Floathouse: Lifelong Learning with Friends and Family: The Floathouse Series, #3
    Ebook173 pages2 hours

    Beyond the Floathouse: Lifelong Learning with Friends and Family: The Floathouse Series, #3

    By Myrtle Siebert

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    About this ebook

    Beyond the Floathouse, Lifelong Learning with friends and family is the sequel to Gunhild's Granddaughter. In this book a very shy, ordinary girl, who grew up enveloped by an insular loving family and surrounded by a world of water, finds education is a significant key to a multi-faceted career. From teaching to entrepreneurship to home building to volunteering, her path continues with a focus on learning new things. She travels widely with family and friends, finding ways to raise her own children with an awareness of important life lessons that were taught to her.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMyrtle Siebert
    Release dateSep 3, 2016
    ISBN9780988070929
    Beyond the Floathouse: Lifelong Learning with Friends and Family: The Floathouse Series, #3
    Author

    Myrtle Siebert

    Myrtle grew up in a floathouse in Port Neville inlet on the remote BC coast. All mail and supplies arrived every two weeks, via the Union Steamships, school was by correspondence, taught by mothers, transportation was by boat. At 9 years of age she entered a one-room school at Rock Bay, and then high school in Campbell River, where she was a boarder/babysitter in different homes each year. She credits a high school principal, a very lucky break, and a 5-year industry scholarship, for opening the way to UBC enrollment, age 16. This logger’s daughter found a career beyond the expected marriage and motherhood. Her home economics degree opened doors to a variety of careers: teacher, business owner, home builder and decorator, and now gardener, mother and grandmother.  Myrtle honed leadership skills through volunteering, begun within CFUW Nanaimo, and currently with CFUW Victoria and CFUW Saanich Peninsula. With so much gained from that one scholarship, we can understand her passion for volunteer fundraising in aid of higher education. In 1992 she joined ITC, now POWERtalk International, and has advanced in her membership up to level 4, Accomplished Communicator.  For more detail and purchasing information, please visit Myrtle's page at http://www.myrtlesiebert.com

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      Book preview

      Beyond the Floathouse - Myrtle Siebert

      This book is dedicated to my long-time husband,

      Dale Siebert,

      who, since the end of university, has been beside me on

      this journey of lifelong learning.

      Supportive of my careers, a partner in home and garden construction projects, an attentive father to our children

      he is now a proud and involved Granddad.

      Copyright © 2016 by Myrtle Siebert

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the publisher.

      ISBN: 978-0-9880709-2-9

      Editors: Suzanne Schrader, Esther Hart, and Linda Clement

      All photos on the cover and  inside of the book courtesy of Myrtle's family

      Cover design by Iryna Spica

      Typeset in Haarlemmer with Scotch Roman display at SpicaBookDesign

      Printed in Canada

      Note from the Author

      Writing memoir is always a challenge, and over the years I have read many and noted author’s comments about those difficulties. Until now I have been writing primarily non-fiction and about people who are no longer of this life.

      I hope that those still here with me, especially close family members, will understand that I have tried to respect privacy issues, and for the most part have included stories in this work that have been told before and that a good many others have already heard.

      I have accepted as my own the philosophy once explained to me by a respected memoir instructor, in whose class I worked at the Victoria School of Writing. She is Sharon Butala, author of many prize-winning books including the memoir Perfection of the Morning. Butala tells about a whole new life that she began when she moved to a Saskatchewan ranch with her new husband. We asked her why she had said so little about her son, whom she had left in the city with his father, Sharon’s gentle reply was, That is his story to tell, this is my story.

      Campbell River High School graduate.

      1. Advanced Education – 1955-1960

      The scholarship gave me entry into a new world of possibilities for which I am forever thankful. Although I later learned the scholarship awarded to me had no other candidates, it was still mine and I was determined to run with that fact. Without the scholarship my choices would have been to work in a menial job and then get married, with the expectation of babies to follow soon after. Up until the spring when Principal Phillipson suggested I apply for a scholarship I had never even contemplated university.

      Mom and Dad had not considered university for me either. Aunt Elsie finished Grade 12, which was the highest level of education either side of my family had achieved. Dad had agreed it was probably a good idea for me to have something to fall back on. His terminology meant if my husband died or left me. Our family knew little of either experience. Now the choices were expanded, and though I still wasn’t sure I wanted to be a teacher, this was the place I needed to start. And so I began.

      September, 1955

      I’m standing with several hundred mostly young people, in a line that doesn’t seem to be moving. This is the first day of registration for classes at University of British Columbia and thankfully it’s restricted to first year students. Tomorrow, and for the rest of the week, all of the other students wanting to register will form one long queue. What must that be like? If I can finish the process today I won’t have to find out.

      In my hands are the papers that were mailed to me with instructions, Bring these documents with you to complete the registration process. I’m still trying to make sense of the first-year student handbook that also came in the mail. Secure in my purse is a document saying I am entitled to a $2,000 Crown Zellerbach Scholarship for each of the next five years, provided I maintain a necessary grade standard. The letter, on the company’s official green-logo letterhead, indicates the first year portion of the money will be deposited as soon as I am registered. I’m looking forward to seeing how this process unfolds.

      I have some money saved up from the summer working in Pat’s Style Shop, but that will not go far without the scholarship. Mom and Dad have undertaken to pay my room and board at Fort Camp. Two young fellows standing with me are puzzling over some of the same pages I am. Obviously friends, one asks the other, When there are so many sections of English 101 available, how does a person choose which section to take?

      And what about those sections offered at 8:30 AM on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday? his friend asks. Who would choose that schedule?

      I am about to learn the answer. Three of my first year courses – chemistry, physics and bacteriology – have weekly two-hour afternoon laboratory sessions associated with them, leaving me with fewer time choices for the other required courses. English 101, with both literature and composition sections, is required. My English 101 will most certainly include a Saturday morning.

      The line snakes slowly forward, around an intimidating ivy-covered administration building whose basement apparently houses a cafeteria – the sign says CAF. Today I can’t begin to anticipate the hours I will spend in, it drinking dreadful coffee stewed in huge urns.

      The boys and I strike up a conversation. From Nanaimo, they are both named Alan and this is their first day here too. They took the CPR car ferry from Vancouver Island yesterday, as my parents and I had the day before. Because we needed to first make the two-hour drive down island from Campbell River, we needed to leave home earlier in the day.

      My first impression is that the boys are overly sure of themselves, but as the hours tick by my suspicion that they’re bluffing is confirmed. Being here with both Alans and others in the same line for the four hours of this registration process makes me feel a bit more comfortable. I’ve made my first friends in this entirely unfamiliar place called university, located in the enormous city of Vancouver. An association with one of them will last for years and extend to his parents and sister. There is no going back, I’m here for the long haul and ready to accept whatever the University of British Columbia and this big city offers.

      For my first day in Vancouver my parents drove me across the city from Uncle Bill and Aunty Gladys’ Vancouver home on Wall Street. Located near the Pacific National Exhibition grounds and overlooking the train tracks along Burrard Inlet, it serves as our stay-over place whenever we are in the city. Mom and Dad deposited me at the steps of Isabel McGuiness Hall on the Point Grey campus, where my letter indicated a room had been assigned to me. I signed in with a senior student don and found the room on the ground floor that she indicated. My folks helped to carry all my things in – tin trunk of clothes, books and paraphernalia – and then left, promising to return in time to take me for dinner.

      Fort Camp is the name given to the compound above Wreck Beach that included the three women’s dormitories and the men’s accommodations, in army huts hastily built for service men during World War II. Mary Bollert, Anne Wesbrook, and Isabel MacInnes Halls are recently-constructed two-floor concrete structures, each with a girl from a more senior year chosen as don to oversee the resident girls’ comings and goings. The men have no similar restrictions. All camp residents are provided with meal passes to eat together in the same cafeteria-style dining room.

      Adjusting to dorm and campus life was a constant challenge. My roommate, Fran, was in much the same financial and social position as I was. Her dad was a logger too – they lived in Courtenay – and, until we came together at a reception for Crown Zellerbach scholarship winners earlier that summer, we had not met. Neither of us knew any other girls staying in the dormitories so we agreed to request a room together. It turned out well for both of us; we developed a friendship that has lasted to the present day.

      Being dressed in acceptable clothing was always difficult. Some of the girls in the dorm had a whole collection of cashmere sweaters, which they wore with real pearls or other obviously valuable jewellery. I had managed to save enough money to buy several Dalkieth-brand cardigans to wear over a peter pan-collared blouse or dickie, alternately with my basic grey worsted skirt or my treasured and expensive fully-pleated Aljean-brand tartan.

      Myrtle and Fran in new winter coats.

      Most of the girls owned multiple pairs of shoes; I had one pair of saddle shoes that I kept carefully polished, and a pair of blood-brown penny loafers I reserved for best. They wore nylon stockings; Fran and I wore rolled-cuff white bobby socks. For rainy days my choice was either pair of shoes or my ugly-but-serviceable winter boots.

      To add to those obvious differences between us, a lot of the girls were rushing for a sorority placement with all the socializing and secrecy that it involved. I had a hard enough time figuring out what was expected of me as a frosh student subjected to frosh hazing that fall. I never did understand the appeal of belonging to a sorority.

      Crazy frosh clothing.

      Reflection:

      It is hard to express what an enriching experience that first year at UBC was: meeting people with exposure to new concepts, fresh ideas, unfamiliar ethnicities, different lifestyles and constant noise. I quickly realized there was a whole wide world waiting to be tested. Ideas about marriage were reassigned to the distant future. I went home for the 1955 Thanksgiving weekend, and with finality returned the ring I had accepted the previous Christmas but removed after wearing only three months.

      With the first year over, exams written and the tin trunk packed up, I returned home for the summer. Mrs. Painter, my high school friend Joe’s mother, managed the Campbell River Resort on the riverbank, having sold Painter’s Lodge when Mr. Painter died. She hired me for the summer tourist season.

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