Interviewee: Cal Brandley
Interviewer: Mark Durtschi
 
Mark Durtschi: My name is Mark Durtschi it is presently the 16^thof December 1996. I am sitting in Cal Brandley’s living room with him. Mr. Brandley I am just wondering if maybe you could tell me a little bit about your family and your roots in Stirling and perhaps something about your grandpa. 

Cal Brandley: Thank you, I was born in Stirling January the 25^th1928. I am very fortunate I guess to be alive in that it was on a Saturday that the doctors from Lethbridge came down on the train in Stirling. One Stopped in Stirling and the other went on to Milk River. In the afternoon the train would come back and take them back to Lethbridge. But the 25^thwas a day of a blizzard and the roads were all covered. Anyway then went down to get the doctor and they met him at the Depot and they met him with a team of horses. My mother and dad were quite old when they got married and my dad at this time was forty five and my mother was thirty six. This was their first child. The doctor came and delivered me but I was weighed on his scales at two pounds one ounce. He said this is an incubator baby if I can get it back to Lethbridge I think that I could save the child. But because plain and simple the child would die on the way to Lethbridge so I cant do that. You will just have to let this child die and have another child next year. That is the way that things were left. My grandma Selk on my maternal side who had had twelve children lived some six blocks away from where we lived. She got wind of this and she got over all of the snow drifts and the snow up to her waist and got up to our place. She said this is ridiculous. They put me in a shoe box, which was the size that I was and the big cook stoves that had the old ovens at that time. They brought down the oven door and put cotton me. Probably an old wives tale system helped me out but anyway they would continually bathe me in Mustard water. They worked with me and I lived.

Mark Durtschi: They bathed you in Mustard water?

Cal Brandley: That was her remedy and who is to question it, I lived you know. She later on when my wife and I had our first child the little girl had colic and it really keeps you going. When my Grandma Selk came up I said Grandma how you ever had twelve kids, this child takes all of my time. My Grandmother said well it doesn’t matter if you have one or twelve they take all of your time. She was quite a lady in the town of Stirling. Meanwhile back at the ranch incidentally after that on all of my birthdays that I can remember, January the 25^thwas always cold in Stirling, very cold. It is interesting; my office in my later years was at the research station in Lethbridge. There they did a project about ten years ago of following the weather over the past hundred years. They had history of the Lethbridge area for the last hundred years. They found that January the 25^thon average was the coldest day in our area. So that is the day of my birthday so I believe that wholeheartedly, I don’t question it at all. Anyway meanwhile I think that I should give you just a little history and the background of the families so you can kind of see how things have evolved as they had. My grandfather was living in Richfield. He was the mayor of Richfield at this time and the Mormon Church had entered into a contract with the ARI railway which was a branch of the CPR and what they had agreed to do was to open up, the Lethbridge area had a large track of land that they couldn’t sell. The story behind that is that the CPR put one of their rights for putting a railway across Canada they got one section of land which is 640 acres budding onto the railway track in every township. Our grid system is on townships and that is every six miles they got a section of land. So when they went to sell this land to settlers from the States and from Europe they found out that the Settlers that there would be two families coming together and they would ask to buy some land. They would say yes we have a section of land here and then six miles down the track we have another section. They would say well no we don’t want that, we want to be next to each other. So they made arrangements with the government to kind of land bank. We would forgo our sections in a lot of areas and they decided to take it in the Lethbridge. Little did they realize that Lethbridge is the starting of the Palliser triangle and is semi aired? Palliser who was in our first survey was quite a stooped Environmentalist he wrote maps and comments on every section of land that he surveyed. He talked about the vegetation on it. But anyway he said that they land in Sothern Alberta here is not fit for man or beast. What he meant by that the high rainfall and high wind velocity the two together that people will never succeed. He isn’t just a fly by night fellow his opinions are still brought up in environmental meetings. Anyways so they got this big area of land and they didn’t know what to do with it. Finally, Cards in Cardston, who was the founder of Cardston, he brought up the idea that what they need to do is put irrigation into Lethbridge and in this area. But nobody knew anything about irrigation, not the railway company. But the Mormons knew something about irrigation, not that they were great thinkers or anything but in Utah they either learned about it or died. So they went down and made a contract with the church in Salt Lake. They agreed that if they would come up and colonize two towns and that they would provide workers to work on the canal. It was to be that they had to have a man with a team of horses and a scraper; he got two dollars and eighty five cents a day plus an acre of land for every day that he would work. So the first migration came to Stirling, they were going to go to Lethbridge; they had first come from different places in Idaho and Utah. They were coming to Stirling and they first had to stop in Great Falls and change from the wide gauge railway to the narrow gauge railway. Change all of their belongings and everything over there. Then they came to Stirling, they were going to unload in Lethbridge but somehow word was out that Lethbridge had a bylaw that said that Mormon men were not suppose to be on the streets of Lethbridge after seven o’clock at night. So they decided to unload in Stirling. Stirling had no faculties for unloading at all. All it was was a little depot. What they did is they tipped a tank wagon upside down; it was part of their luggage and jumped the horses from the top of the cars down on to the top of the grain wagon and down. After this, more faculties were developed and all of the migration that came to work on the canal got dropped of in Stirling. What they did is they pitched their tents there and then they went on to Cardston to work on the Kimble dam or the other canal. They pitched their tents and left their wives and children there. Then in the fall they came back after they couldn’t work on the canal anymore. Then they took their wives and children, many of them settled there, many of them went on to Raymond, Magrath and other places. They two places that were colonized were Stirling and Magrath. Raymond was colonized by the Knight family. Anyway my grandfather was quite an interesting fellow in that just this year, in 1996 Utah was celebrating their end of the year centennial of becoming a state. My grandfather is the seventh signer of the Utah constitution. He could bring a group of people to Stirling to colonize it. Then the church, instead of him going up and working on the canal, the church had him stay in Stirling and sort of look after all of the women and children. He opened a general store there, so he stayed there. My father when he came up, my grandfather brought his twenty two children with him, he had been a polygamist, and he had four wives. Never more that two living at one time but he had four wives. His one wife stayed in Utah, she didn’t want to come to Canada and his last wife who was a Zaugg, and she came up with the twenty two children. My father was fifteen at the time. He had always liked livestock; he had eight head of calves and two cows and a team of horses when he got here.

Mark Durtschi: How old was he when he got here?

Cal Brandley: He was fifteen

Mark Durtschi: And he already owned all of this livestock.

Cal Brandley: Well they pretty well had to in large families like that they all had to sort of enterprise their own. My grandfather had at that time the largest department store out of Salt Lake in Utah but he wasn’t the greatest business man in the world, he was more of a spiritual man. But anyway they came up here; my father brought the mail from Maybutt to Stirling, which was his job for about five years. He also because many of the general authorities of the church would want to go to Cardston they would come and drop off at Stirling. They would stay at my Grandfathers house over night and then get to Cardston. My father on many occasions and many other people did it too would take them to Cardston by horse and buggy. I guess that we don’t realize what it was like exactly but in winter time it was quite frightening at times. They would set their sights with old chief. Today we look at road allowances and we have roads and fence lines, well there was none then. I guess the snow got drifting, they said it was very similar to being on the ocean. All you could see is drifts and snow and there were no geographical features at all to tell you where you were. But anyway that was a bit of a challenge for them. Anyway I didn’t realize that this would end up going into the Stirling history. One of the things that I found that I fell prey to after I got to be a lawyer, I would have somebody phone me from a senior citizens home and say I knew your grandparents or I knew your father. My mother was only three when she came to Stirling, she came from Idaho. My father and grandfather, they all came from Richfield Utah. But anyway they have said I knew your grandparents, I need help now, you have got to come and help me. So that is what I did but anyway that wasn’t all that bad. That is how that happened because there were a lot of people that started out in Stirling. Most of the Mormon migration to all of Sothern Alberta with the exception of Cardston which came overland ten or twelve years before, in fact the population of Stirling in 1901 was greater than it was for the next forty years until the population caught up again with what it was. That was because of the migration to work on the canal.

Mark Durtschi: Could you tell me a little bit about the laying out of the village of Stirling.

Cal Brandley: This was according to the church architects; they are the ones that set out the grid system for Stirling and Magrath. When they first came they had no idea, my aunt Anne tells me that when they were told to come to Stirling, they looked at the maps ad Stirling wasn’t even on the map. In fact it rarely is even in later years. This of course was all the North West Territories at the time and anyway when they passed the road that leads straight east of Stirling they saw a little shack almost but it was a depot, one of the station agents lived there. When they got down there, there was a big sign that said Stirling. Stirling was a little distance that was really Maybutt and developed into a little town in later years. They talk about how wonderful the grass was at that time; my dad was in agriculture with cattle and that. He said that the grass was up to the horse’s belly, they couldn’t believe that they landed in a garden of eaten, of course the next year it didn’t even grow. The bald head parries, I can see where he got it from there was just very little grass because of the weather. When they got to Stirling they had a way that Stirling should be laid out, they had the architectural plan from the church and began laying it out immediately. That is why we have the grid system that we have in Stirling and I think that it was laid out well. 

Mark Durtschi: The village grid of Stirling existed before the first man ever arrived.

Cal Brandley: Yes, they had a general plan, it wasn’t designed just for Stirling but this is the plan that we follow with the Mormon communities. My grandfather was later mayor and that is because of his position and that but he saw that all of this was done. That is how it all got started. They followed it very distinctly, they were very careful with it. The canal then two years later was washed out and the Kimble dam and everything.

Mark Durtschi: Could you tell me a little about that?

Cal Brandley: Well it was washed out so they had to change the system and that and change some of the designing and things. It was basically put through but it was almost all of the work that they had done for two years was washed out. One interesting thinks that I am influenced on the legal side of things which I shouldn’t be so much but anyway that seems to have been my lot. At the time of the Mormons working on the canal and getting the acre of lands a day for working on the canal which they got from the CPR. They gave it back to the church to each ward, and then the wards would sell that land back to others. That is how they financed the wards for a while.

Mark Durtschi: That was voluntary I presume.

Cal Brandley: Oh yes, however when the land was resold the church had them put a restricted covenant on the land that said if this land in the town of Stirling, Raymond, or Magrath if they ever open a body house or a beer parlour in the town, in the area that the land is to revert back to the church.

Mark Durtschi: What is a body house?

Cal Brandley: A house of prostitution. So therefore that is the covenant, it is rather interesting. If you want to see it in practice terms, after the war the army and navy in Cardston wanted to open out a lounge for them and serve liquor at this center but they had this problem. So they had their best authorities in the service in that time and they were probably the best lawyers in Canada at that time because most of them were in the service. I looked at it and they said yes that restricted covenant is still good. If you notice they built it to the south of Cardston, out of the town limits. That shows the force of the restriction. Anyway, my father got his homestead in the Wrentham area as many Stirling people did, they could have gone to Clareshome or to Wrentham but since Wrentham was close to Stirling they took out a homestead. What a homestead is, they got a quarter section of land for ten dollars but then they had to develop it, in two years they had a home built on it. There were also different restrictions that they had to qualify for, after ten years then they got it.

Mark Durtschi: That seems like a much easier way of getting land to work on the canal.

Cal Brandley: Oh yes, well they didn’t come up to work on the canal really to make money on the canal, it was an obligation that the church had imposed and then got the people to come up and most of them were actually called. There was a calling to come up and colonize the towns of Stirling and Magrath. Anyway, they opened up these homesteads and they could have gone to Clareshome my father often said after we had come from Stirling having a drought in the middle of July. He drove through Careshome and they were still green, he wondered what would have happened if we had gone to Clareshome but anyway they didn’t, they went to Wrentham. In fact the town of Wrentham was where my dads homestead was, and then he later wanted to build a hamlet there so he traded for a quarter section of land with the government down on the coulee. It was originally the Wrentham. Anyway, my father had during my years of growing up it seemed once a week but of course the longer things are the more they change in your mind. He was always called in to us during the thirties, when people just couldn’t afford doctors. He had a great power of healing; I wish I had that power. I had seen him bus people in and told them to rise from their bed and they sat up and then healthy. It was amazing, in fact his prayers, I remember my sister would have convulsions and she would be out for two to three hours. One time he went to phone the doctor to get him down but the phone was some two and a half miles away on the highway, we were on the farm out of Stirling. I guess about a mile away I could still hear him preying on his horses; he was going to get the doctor. Of course he knew the people in Wrentham and Warner because he ran cattle on the open range. That was open range at that time, where the homesteads were, that was open range and you could run your cattle there where you wanted to. I remember this during my childhood and this is not significant at all but it just shows you how things have changed. A gentleman had got a contract to plough eight sheers, to plough on each side of the railroad track from Lethbridge to Medicine Hat. But the river from the railway was approximately seven miles away. So he was being done by horses and by the time that he would drive the horses to water every morning and back to took half the day. So he was asking my dad, can you tell me is there any slews or any water holes along the line that would be closer to the track. Today when we drive down to that area you wonder how water could have been a problem. It was very much a problem. When I was young people would say, if you don’t have water you don’t have a farm. But now we even have water piped to the farm so it is quite different. Around Stirling we didn’t have very good water; it was very high soda content. A lot of cisterns were built but they were headaches because you had to haul water in a little metal tank to fill your cisterns, water was always a problem. Everybody that I remember in my age we all, in the thirties that water was the big problem to keep the water going, there is the way that things went from there. So in my family there were three children, I was the oldest and I have two sisters. We lived on the farm in Stirling until I was about twelve years old and my dad decided that we should live in Stirling because I was in quite a few things and he seemed to be always driving me. So we moved to Stirling. Before that though I rode a horse to school, they had a school barn, what they called a school barn and it was owned by the school. It was just across the road on the north east corner on the school grounds, just across the road from there. It had a big fence around it, only the students that had horses there were allowed to go there. We rode a horse to school on all of the good days the bad days we got rides but we rode them during the good days. I didn’t think too much of it but when I tell my family about it they can hardly believe those shorts of things. That was the situation there

Mark Durtschi: Can you tell me a little about what life was like out on the farm. What your house was like, what farming was like?

Cal Brandley: One thing that during the thirties we didn’t have land conservation or the way of farming that they have now. The really drifted, the land was broken, the physics theory it said force equals weight times distance and you get these little soil particles in the air and if they get going for a mile they would really have quite a bit of force by the time. So the fences during the thirties, the dirty thirties they called them, we just didn’t get rain. I remember my father saying the thing at that time was not that they didn’t get the rain but the fact that massive clouds would come over and it looked like it was impossible not to have a great rain storm. For some reason the wind would shift and they would go on by. So they had very dry conditions then. We had a lot of drifting, to show you what would happen, where the fences were, I guess the soil particles would hit hose wires and drop. That sounds funny because those wires were just three barb wires but they would hit there and drop. Most of the time there was a good foot of soil below all of the fences. Our neighbours one time, this is later in 1939, they put a new fence in and I said to my dad when are they going to finish that fence, when are they going o push the dirt up to the bottom wire to cover it. That is the way that most of the fences in Stirling were. The snow sort of followed the same pattern of drifting as the sands did. Lots of people, almost every winter would have to dig out of their homes, that didn’t happen all of the time but quite often it did. There were no trees, nothing to stop the movement of the winds and the snow. You would get snowed in and you just couldn’t move because when snow blows it packs so hard anyway. We didn’t have sufficient road and the equipment wasn’t possible to, the vehicles of those days it was impossible to get them through. So the horses were used a lot of sleighs. They were trying to convert over to the modern area of cars and tractors but the snow was really and problem. The rains were quite bad too around Stirling they have what is called a very heavy soil, like gumbo soil. That would wrap around as you drive around that would just build up around the tires until pretty soon the tires couldn’t turn anymore because the dirt would be up there. They had a real problem in fact we just live about a mile and a half of what we call the sunshine trail that is the road coming from Lethbridge to Coutts. It was a gravel road and that was very unique, that was like your hard surface now. Once you were on the gravel road you wouldn’t get stuck very often. So when some bad snows a lot of people would just leave their cars right near the road. So if an emergency came up or something they would be able to reach help. Everything revolved quite a bit around transportation and we didn’t have much. The train was used very little, the train was very slow and one conductor tells me an interesting thing is that he was from 1900 to 1939 he was a conductor on one of those lines that went down through Coutts. As soon as the train crossed the line at Coutts they had to put their stoves up higher, their thermometer for their stoves up higher because that was the rules. It didn’t matter if it was a warm day or a cold day that was what had to be done. But it was really nice in Stirling, I thoroughly enjoyed it. During the 1940s we were very fortunate in that we had a lot of young people who were my age that were just a little too young to go in the war. In Stirling we had quite a few people that were very good in Sports so we had teams that we went all over with the basketball team. It won the Alberta championship and they would be out at Victoria Composite high school which was a school then of three thousand people. We had a student total population of less than two hundred, that was from grade one through twelve. Everybody pretty well played on these teams because if you didn’t, you didn’t have enough people to play. It was our salvation because it kept us busy. So we were very lucky in that respect as for myself when I was young I was quite nervous, I guess I got it from my father. Anyway, I stuttered so bad that nobody could understand me until I was about eight years old, they still don’t understand me. Anyway, they had more of a reason then, until I was about nine years old. In fact one time I talked in church and I was asked about a month ahead of time to talk in church, in had my talk all prepared, my parents helped me. When it come the time to go to church my dad said what about your talk, I said well I have got it aced, I said it to you about five times. He said yes but maybe you should take your paper along.
 
Tape 1 Side 2
 
Cal Brandley: He said maybe you should take you’re speak along just encase you forget. I said well I don’t think ill need it but I will bring it. I got before the public to give the public and went to give the talk and nothing happened. No words came. After half an hour, at least it seemed a half hour; it was probably about a minute or so. Finally my dad came up and he said I think if Cal could have spoke to you this is what he would have said. So he took my talk out and read it to the group. The only reason that I mention that is because in later years for about twenty years I lectured throughout Alberta for anywhere between 3500 to 5000 people a year. When I think of live as compared to one I was never a good speaker but compared to that I am a very good speaker. So anyway that is the situation there. In the old days in Stirling, the days that I remember, at the rodeo we had in Stirling every year on the 24^thof July my father had a very strong voice and he had a megaphone. He would announce the events from his horse and go up and down both sides of that. But in church if some people were a little quite or didn’t speak to loud he didn’t hear them because they had no microphones or anything. With my father you heard him all of the time, he would always have something and the people in the back row could hear just as well as the people in the front row. But anyway that was a problem in our church in the days that not s many people didn’t really hear what was going on. It sounds funny now that we have our audio system so well. That was one of them. I remember when the ice started in what was the new school, the old school had burned down which was very serious. They kept the bricks which had originally been made from the coulees what was below what was the Nelson lived. That is where they made the brick and they used them again in this school. I attended Gault School District number 647, I remember that was cut in glass just above our door and that is all I ever knew about that. But anyway it is interesting a lot of my children now said well I took a couple of classes with your son or your daughter. Once I started grade one we were all in the same class together right through grade twelve because of the population. It was interesting that we did have one in our class that was not a Mormon. It is quite different today in that.

Mark Durtschi: Was he just another one of the bunch?

Cal Brandley: Oh yes, we didn’t specify one way or the other. In retrospect I remember that I guess we were all Mormons pretty well, it was a Mormon community and we were pretty well all Mormons.

Mark Durtschi: Something interesting happened while you attended school and that is before and after you attended school boys generally didn’t go to school any more than eight nine years. But you and your class completed high school and then went on.

Cal Brandley: It is rather interesting, everyone has more secondary education, they all have degrees or they all have trades.

Mark Durtschi: Why do you suppose that happened?

Cal Brandley: I don’t know, probably principal or teachers, I don’t know. I put a lot of it to sports in that we would really work hard. This is during the war when gas was rationed. So they get a father to take you to another town you see, that was pretty tight, he had to forgo some gas to do something else. You had coupons and gas was rationed. So we did all sorts of things we bought bikes and all sorts of things. Maybe that had a little to do with it what we went through but there were many before us there were a few before us who had done quite well. I think that they served as a real role model. Sullen Low is a very great teacher here in Stirling, he was later an employee of the provincial treasure and then the head of the social credit party in Ottawa, and he was very good at encouraging students to excel. With myself there was Cal Mercury that came to teach, he only taught two years but he showed me that you could use your enthusiasm and how to use it. Not to get you in trouble with your enthusiasm but how to direct it and how to get things done, I will be forever grateful to him for that. Not only was that he the only Cal that I ever knew up until that time. I was the only Calvin. My grandfather had known Calvin Coulees and my grandfather thought that it was his right, he had been in the stake presidency he was the bishop of Stirling for many years. He thought it was his lot to name every child, to give them a blessing and a name. Anyway he would change, they would tell him the name he wanted but he would change to a more appropriate name at the time of the blessing. He warned my mother ahead of time that I was going to be called Calvin Coulee Brandley and she wanted me to have her maiden name. As it turned out that is the way that it happened. Back to these students, I will tell you one other thing that made things tough is during the war the Japanese would come and work in the Sugar beets We had a large migration in Stirling of very excellent students because things were up against the wall for them. I know with not too much studying that I would have a good enough grade that I didn’t worry. But when they got there I had to work night and day just to get through because they really raised the academic standard of our class. Not that they were so brilliant or anything but it was their dedication to work. They just really worked hard because they had nothing else. They were a bit of an influence. I thoroughly enjoyed living in Stirling in fact people said if you could do it all over again what would you do and I said live in Stirling. But of course some of the things we didn’t realize that were hardships. Life is compared to what as life is compared to doing alright. There were a lot of families that, particularly widows, we had no government programs to help them out or anything, they really worked to survive. Everybody in our town would remember them on Christmas and Mothers Day and a few things like that. For the most part of the year they were really on their own. It was difficult for them.

Mark Durtschi: Didn’t the church program help for a bit.

Cal Brandley: Well the welfare didn’t come in until 1935 you see and this is before that, then it took quite a while before it really filled down to the warts. It was alright but they had really a hard time. It is so nice to not see that happening anymore, there is a different atmosphere. Now there is one thing towns do have a bad thing, I saw it in Raymond, I saw it in Magrath, and I saw it in Stirling. As certain people say today that you get tagged with a certain name, we were then too, some young people will say well he is so and so’s son he will never amount to anything. I don’t think that they really realize what they are doing. It wasn’t class distinction or anything else, the only way that young people could get out of that mode that they were set in to be to get an education. That is the only way to rise above it. Because if they stayed in the towns they were classified that the rest of their lives. I don’t know how it happened but it did, it was just so. If they would go away and get educated and move out that is the only thing that would lift them out of that class system that they were put into, it is too bad that that happened. But anyway, that is my observation, so education has been a real boost to the small towns I think. I think that you do kind of get an inferior complex from a small town when you hit to big cities and that is hard to overcome. Everybody has it just a little bit of course one time I found something that helped me out. I was never thought of that but I had been working during the summer, I had stayed away from Stirling for about a month and a half. My dad had a large ranch in Brooks and I was up there, when I came home in the fall and Stirling had said we are going to go away to university, have you ever thought about it. I hadn’t, anyway all of the sudden I thought well maybe I will go to university. When I am down at university I was living with a fellow from Lethbridge here and we were roommates. He said to me, I was having a little trouble on one of my math problems, he said well don’t you remember we took that in high school, I said I don’t remember taking that. I don’t remember much math from high school; math was probably one of the hardest subjects that I ever took. He said that right you come from a small town you probably didn’t have the teaching faculties that would teach that. He was probably right. I said before you feel too bad for me I said I was on a basketball team, a baseball team, and a hockey team, were you on a school team. He said no, well that’s because there was too many students, I was but it was just because we needed to students to make up the team, everybody needed to play. I said I was president of the high school, why, because there just were too many of us wondering around.  But anyway those things all helped you out so I appreciate the help, I had a time there. I had trouble in school on one respect though; my dad was the chairman of the school board for the whole time I was in school.  When they would have school meetings sometime they would say Cal is doing alright but he could do a lot better. Then I would get the following lecture that I should be doing better. I said but dad I am doing well enough to get through. He said yes but he said you could do better. There were about three people in the group that were so academic that they had lost touch with reality, I said would you like form me to be like so and so. No he said, that is alright then, you just make sure that you keep working and get through. So that was my saving feature but it wasn’t, it is not too commendable but that was my saving feature through school. Anyway that was my early life in Stirling. The sunshine trail, this is the road that they called the sunshine train and it became quite famous during the war because when the Americans were afraid of the Japanese taking over Alaska they shipped many troops up to Alaska. Of course the roads weren’t there but they took them to Edmonton and then the built the Alaska Highway which is almost impossible to build where they build it. They passed all of these troop trains and all of these truck caravans passed by this sunshine trail. It became quite famous; it was a main artery for troop transportation during the Second World War because of Alaska being located where it was.

Mark Durtschi: Is that the same thing as the Alaska Highway now?

Cal Brandley: Well it was never tagged the Alaska Highway, it was the sunshine trail from Coutts to Lethbridge. So during the war we followed all the equipment and then the railway you see. Stirling was originally going to be a great place railway wise because we had three railways come together there. From Foremost, Coutts, and from Cardston, they were going to build a round house for all of the CPR’s they were going to build it there. So they started selling lots and everything and they started subdividing.

Mark Durtschi: You’re talking about Maybutt?

Cal Brandley: Maybutt, they started subdividing Maybutt and they did, many families owned them. In fact I worked with a fellow in about 1955 which we wrote to all of these people that still owned in Maybutt, they explained what Maybutt was and decided of they wanted to sell them. They were marketed in those days as being great investments; Maybutt was to be the boom town of Sothern Alberta. If they did get the round house it would have made a difference but the round house was finally located in Lethbridge. So that was it but life in Stirling for me as a young person was very good, I thoroughly enjoyed it. it is a different residence there now, I don’t know a lot of the people I have to say who is  such and such because the original families they all stayed there but then their children didn’t stay because the land in Stirling. I think what the CPR said is lets put this water to land that can do the very most with it. So they didn’t try to Taber where they had very light soil you see. They tried to say in the more heavy soil areas, that were a mistake with irrigation because they didn’t have probable drainage, the heavier lands take a lot more drainage. So a lot of the land went to alkali. The land wouldn’t support the numbers that it had originally. So most of the young people moved away, some of the children stayed but their children all moved away because it just wasn’t the agricultural economic base there to support them. So when they moved then the town changed a lot. When I was there I was still with the first generation of people that had came to Stirling, we found it quite interesting. I knew everybody and everybody knew everybody else. That is one of the things but it was rather enjoyable.

Mark Durtschi: Can we go back, you have highlighted many areas, and talk about the depression a little bit. What the depression was like for you in Stirling and for those around you?

Cal Brandley: For me I didn’t really know too much about the depression in that we always had enough food to eat. I talked to a group one time and I would say we are the only generation to ever live in Alberta. You see, you only go back three generations, four generations is about the longest for Alberta, not just for Canada but for Alberta. I said we are probably the only generation that ever live in Alberta. The biggest problem wasn’t only to get food on the table. During the depression that was the problem, it wasn’t how you dressed or how stylish you were or how big a car you had, it was just feeding you family. That was the biggest worry of the fathers in the family was to keep food on the table for the family. Now as I said we didn’t worry to much, my dad always had farmland so we had plenty to eat all of the time. I remember that we were only a mile and a half away from Maybutt and they would have trains come through. A lot of the people, not bad people but the people on relief, people just couldn’t get jobs, everything stood at a standstill during the depression. It was such a waste of time of talent because nobody had any money to use your talents, to develop anything. So a lot of times you would get on trains and just ride you know for something to do. The CPR were always stopping trains and checking people over and the detectives, Stirling was one of the make their rates. In the meantime people would drop off a lot of transients and they would see a farm and they would ask if they could do work in exchange for something to eat. It just wasn’t very great. The people here in Stirling didn’t suffer to greatly in that most of them had gardens and different things. I am sure that a thousand dollars a year was more than adequate for the total income for a family. 

Mark Durtschi: Do you suppose that especially during those times that most of everybody ate almost exclusively off of their gardens and their farm animal.

Cal Brandley: Ya, pretty well and right from the time that Stirling was created you pretty well had to work with your neighbours, if you didn’t have good neighbours you couldn’t help each other out. You couldn’t run into town and get things done, you had to get things done somewhere else and we really had to depend on each other. Therefore I think that it brought them quite a bit closer together because I know when a barn went up about forty people would turn up. Even the graveyards, when they graves were being dug, there would be ten, fifteen people out digging graves because there was that community spirit of we all work together. I don’t think that it is any admirable spirit, I don’t think it was there and nowhere else. It was a product of the times. Right from the homestead they all had to work together to survive. That carried right through until the 1950s when they had adequate income to go and do other things. In my mothers family it was rather interesting, there was seven girls and five boys, each one of them sort of specialized in something, even after their married lives. If there was some sewing to be done they would bring it to my mother. If she was going to have a party and wanted someone to cook a real special cake she would go to one of her other sisters and they would cook the cake. Another would do the deserts, another would do certain things. They all sort of specialized in certain things because of the family that they lived in. But that was just typical of other families as well I mean they carried it on I am sure ten or twenty years after they were married.

Mark Durtschi: I suppose that even in Stirling there was a lot of labour trading going back and forth because there wasn’t really any money.

Cal Brandley: They wouldn’t have enough money to pay the taxes on the land, so what they would do is if you would get a team of horses and a wagon you would bring it to Nelsons that is just North of Maybutt there. There was a gravel pit there, and they would haul gravel into Stirling. What they would do is use two by twelve’s sides for a wagon and a floor, and then they would fill us up with gravel and haul it into Stirling. Then they would move these boards that would be the way of unloading the load. That is the way that they would pay their taxes for the labour they put in.

Mark Durtschi: The village pays them?

Cal Brandley: Yes, that was done all during the thirties, well you are a product of your times I guess and Stirling was no exception. The 24^thof July was always a real big celebration it is to bad that it’s not anymore but the time has changed but four years it was the salvation for Stirling. Everything was kind of planned towards the 24^thof July. Then we would also have school fairs which was quite interesting in that they were like the real country fairs, they would show cooking, they would show sewing and all of these other things. The school would sort of sponsor. The whole thing is in a small community like that you use all of the faculties, there was never to much talked about, there was never any talk about well this is not your faculty this is our faculty. We didn’t have that many that you could really argue over. I remember during the war my mother was the head of the bond drives they would raise bonds and sell government bonds to help the government effort. All were products of the time, I remember she tells me one story, she was teaching a class, this was about 1912 they were still passing the sacrament. They were still drinking out of this one cup that would go around. Her class they said was the first ones, they raised money and bought I think two trays with cups in them.

Mark Durtschi: Did you ever experience this yourself?

Cal Brandley: No, I saw it but I guess that was before me. But it shows that in fact they said in the second year after they got to Stirling, My grandma Selk told me this that some big governor general came and he stopped in Stirling, he was making a tour. When he came in and they plaid god save the king they didn’t stand at first. It wasn’t because, he took it at first that there was disrespect but then he realized that they just didn’t know that they were all Americans pretty well and they didn’t know what god save the king was. Immediately when they were told they all stood and were very embarrassed about it. There are a lot of changes that went on, they had to adjust. My grandfather, he planned in Utah when you farm down there you plant you crop at the end of February because of the year. Well up here in February it was their first year here. In the fall they had broken up about eighty acres of land and coming February the weather was beautiful, there was very little frost on the ground that year because it was so dry during the summer time. Anyway they planted these forty bushels of oats, of course it was lost but that was because they used the faming technology that they were used to. So a lot of things changed, our pioneers had to learn how to love with the elements that is what they had to do and we ha the elements here. It was really tough living, you see none of the houses had insulation in them so you had the whole focal point during the winter was the kitchen stove. They let down the oven and that would provide the heat. At night you would really have a lot of quits over you because you would be sleeping in these cold rooms, heated a little bit from the kitchen stove but ventilation wasn’t too great. Then with no insulation the wind would blow right through them. In fact during the summer time the women would put clothes on the inside of the windows, the windows that were tight because the dust would still blow through. There was dust in the air everywhere; it was a real dusty time. Luckily our farming habits have changed.

Mark Durtschi: Do you think that has more to do with our farming habits rather than the weather?

Cal Brandley: Well sure, the two are related, we had to changed, and we had to learn how to live with the elements. How could we farm and put up with the winds and all the rest of it and we are still working towards it. There were no trees, we were on the bald headed parries, and there were no trees, so all the trees that you see were planted. In Stirling we pretty well gone through them now the cottonwood trees were planted because they are fast growing, they didn’t need a lot of water. They grew fast, they had a life expectancy of about thirty to forty years then they all rotted down. They surly give a lot of protection. That was a cool thing in the summer time now and then a group of us would go over to the station agent and they would let us ride on they had a powered thing that went up and down the track but they let us ride them and that would be cool. Going that fast through the area, that was a real highlight. Stirling was quite important in that it had the CPR dam which is south of Stirling during my life was a place that we all swam out. It came from about four miles underground and there was a water tank there in Stirling. The trains were steam engine and they all had to get water, they all stopped in Stirling that was a very important thing to make it to Lethbridge. It was one of their main things. That was very important to them.

Mark Durtschi: Was that water tank there right at the beginning?

Cal Brandley: Yes, well as soon as they built the dam, I think they built the dam in 1912 at least that was a figure that I used to see on the side of the cement.

Mark Durtschi: Could you tell me a little more about the activities that took place on pioneer day?

Cal Brandley: Well on pioneer day in the morning we had a parade; it was really quite a good parade. Then we would have a big program in the community hall or in the church hall, it took the entire town. We had radios but they were just the teardrop radios where you had to get your ear up pretty close to them to know what was going on. So people’s talents were really appreciated because that is about the only way that you had fun. Stirling had very good talent, musically there were people, the Erickson family were very good, and they were very talented musically. It really helped out a lot. Anyway they would have this great program, then in the afternoon you would go and there would be a big rodeo. There would be a stand for selling pop and ice cream, see in those days we didn’t have refrigeration, they would bring ice cream down in these big things packed in ice. We would all have ice cream, it was a big thing, sounds funny but it was quite a big thing to have these great big ice cream cones on this thing that is one of the things that I remember. The rodeo and everything was quite a good thing.  Then sometimes they would have baseball games to on the park there. The park was quite a focal point for Stirling there it wasn’t as nice as it is now, they didn’t have a swimming pool there but it was nice. It served the area quite well. We would get big crowds, it would be packed. All these different organizations in the schools and in the church all had floats so that helped out quite a bit. During the thirties many of the people paid their tithing in what they said was in kind, what that means is that instead of you bring eggs or chickens of anything that you might have that was not to easy to sell and you would bring it in and the church would distribute it to people that needed it. So it served a very good purpose. In fact the home that I lived in, in Stirling after I got married in 1950 my dad had this home out on his place on one of his farms.
 
Tape 2 Side 1
 
Cal Brandley: Which had been a home and we had moved it to Stirling. It was a tithing house for Stirling, which was just during the thirties that they paid them in kind they did it ever since they started Stirling. A lot of people would pay in kind; it would be whatever they had.

Mark Durtschi: Was the tithing office something that you remember?

Cal Brandley: No, it was before my time, I knew it was a tithing house and it was there. My grandfather on the Selk side was big man, he was quite tall at least to a little fellow like me and my grandmother was quite short. My grandma Selk got quite well known, she would turn butter twice a week and she would deliver it thought the town. If they could pay her fine, if they couldn’t she was right happy to help people. She knew all of the people and was always ready to help them out. I remember one time my grandpa killed a beef and he said we are going to have a nice roast dinner today because might be last one that we have because if Emma keeps on the rest will be given away. Grandma Selk did give a lot away in that town, she was quite the girl. She had a little shuffle that she would walk around town in; she was all over town helping people. That was one of her attributes.

Mark Durtschi: Do you think it was like that in every community?

Cal Brandley: I think so; there was probably somebody who rose to the occasion. I see quite a bit of similarities between those days and when I go to Raymond Magrath and Hill spring I can see the similarities. We had basketball teams that would go there and that were how you kind of got to those areas. I could see somewhat the same patterns that we had.

Mark Durtschi: So people were just geared to help people.

Cal Brandley: It all started when they had to, then they just carried on you know. They just about helped each other; no man was an island in those days. Now you can live rather independently if you wanted to but in those days you couldn’t have those services provided to you so you either had to do them yourself or get someone to help you with them. The times were for people to do a lot of things but there was beneficial results too you know. But still there were problems, I never thought of Stirling as having two wards you know we just thought we were very lucky just to get our church filled. We never thought what an increase would be. When I go to Stirling I am quite amazed by what I see. Academically when you ask about Stirling and why some classes did better or not so much better than others. Stirling has not been to badly all along, we have had good teachers all along, I think that we are lucky and there are quite a few. If you ever went through and saw the number of people that went on to a further education there are a lot of them from Stirling that went on for a further education. Anyway was an interesting place to live, I enjoyed it; I never thought that they would have hard cover streets in Stirling.

Mark Durtschi: Could you tell me a little about what your house was like when you were growing up?

Cal Brandley: It was originally a two story home that had two rooms downstairs and two rooms downstairs. The house that I had on the farm yes, it was originally two rooms down and two rooms up, about 1935 it was made a single story house and five rooms downstairs and two upstairs were developed. There were a lot of homes that were developed in those days. Every where you went you saw the home where they built the room or two rooms. Then as families came they extended on to it. They were very common at the time, people had a lean to, and for extra space you see. My dad owned the property where my grandpa owned when he was in Stirling; we owned it until we sold it about the 1950s. His sister in law lived in that place, she had lost her husband.

Mark Durtschi: Wasn’t that also the first house in Stirling.

Cal Brandley: I think it was the first house in Stirling. I thought that perhaps it may be preserved some day but it wasn’t. It was kind of a lean to too. A lot of entertainment went on in those two houses. Not because I don’t think of the people to much but because my grandfather was the head of it. These people from Salt Lake would come up and they would stop with the bishop. So my grandfather knew very personally all of the authorities of the church, not because he set out to meet them but because they stayed at the place. Stirling had no hotel you see, in those days I don’t think that they stayed in hotels anyway. It was quite a social life there.

Mark Durtschi: Your grandfather really founded Stirling in many ways. He was the focal point of the whole town for many years. Could you tell me just a little bit more about him from your perspective?

Cal Brandley: Well I get it from both my dad and my mother in that my mother worked for him for fourteen years in the general store. He had a general store and he also was collecting the taxes for the town. He had been the mayor off and on for many years and that sort of thing, so things did focus around him just because being in the different areas there. My mother tells me during the first world war is that she said it was really careful when people got a telegram. No body had a telegram in those days, when someone got a telegram they would come to the store you see. He would bring it up to the store because people from Stirling didn’t go to Maybutt to much, it wasn’t their trading center.

Mark Durtschi: Was the telegraph office in there?

Cal Brandley: Yes it was, that is when the CPR put through their railway they also put through a telegraph line right with it. That was some forms of communication to keep in track. So therefore the deal was that they would bring the telegraph up to the store. Then when the people would come to get their mail it was all through the post office you see. So they would come there and get the telegrams, she was a post mistress; I think it was because that was kind of the focal point of everything. That is why my grandfather was involved in quite a few things is that. But of course he was silly minded too he, my dad was much more mindful of expenses than my grandfather ever was and my dad had to help out quite a few times. But any way that was just because of the roles that they were playing in a community. One little side effect is rather not to Stirling but to how people have changed now days is that my mother had worked for my grandfather for fourteen years at his store. My grandfather was helping other people and doing other things. When they got married we come to Lethbridge to buy groceries on Saturday my dad would stop in front of the store, it had nothing to do with the store he just didn’t like shopping. My mother could go and buy anything that she wanted in the store but when it came time to pay my dad would write the check. Not only that, he was there with about six other men who were all chatting and doing the exact same thing. Why the women couldn’t write their own checks I will never know but that is the way that things were. My mother never sought to challenge it she just thought that was the way that it was. I though with all of the groceries that you have ordered in your life and you had to go through my dad now, I just didn’t understand it. The whole thing was that was the way things were done. In those days a lot of things were just because more than have you ever sat down to thing about why things are done this way. Because they just did things to get them through, it was kind of a survival deal for a long time with the early pioneers. The way that would work best is the way that they did it; they didn’t question it to much. It was tough, we always had Christmas programs in school and all the other things but most of the communities came because there was nothing else for them to do. They couldn’t say well I got the TV on. Although in the time of the radio I remember about 1938 or 1939 Charlie McCarthy came on and was very popular over the radio. So the bishop finally changed. We would have Sunday school and priesthood at ten in the morning and church at seven o’clock at night. That program came on until, I am not exactly sure, but it seemed like it lasted until seven. So they put church a half hour later so that the people could listen to Charlie McCarthy and come to church. So you can see that technology did creep in, different ways of doing things did creep in but for a long time there was nothing else to do in Stirling than go to functions. Elodia Christenson was with drama there in Stirling there. She did an excellent job in Stirling, we had drama there that was second to none, and I don’t know how she got the degree of excellence that she got out of the people. It was excellent, just excellent the way that they did it. Incidentally when I was talking about sports and how we got started on sports and everything, it was interesting in the school the two janitors at the time, one before and one after, we had four people in Stirling who were western Canada boxing champions. A lot of us brought our lunches to School and the janitor was there so he would help us during the noon hour so quite a few got to be boxers, Glenn Adamson, there was Albert Clark, there was some of the others, DeLay Clark, and Bill Tillick. But sports really played a very important role in my life and in the life of many other young people, it wasn’t good, I was on the teams because I had to make up numbers. If you didn’t have nine players on a baseball team, you didn’t have a team. But just to give an example of how things changed to is that with our baseball team, I guess this would be the early forties. Some of the kids said this is only the second time that I have eaten at a restaurant, it just goes to show they weren’t pleading or anything, and it was just a new experience. I if I recall we were getting a full meal with soup and pie for forty five cents. When we played in Lethbridge it was the Rich Café. The whole thing is in those days they had a pioneer mentality but you made due with what you had. So you really didn’t go out and do a lot, you did your own entertainment at home. You were the families that were talented and you would gather around the piano and spend many evenings. That is why drama excelled so much it would be packed houses every night that the drama was on. Stirling was very fortunate in fact they had a band which was kind of interesting and during the war we went to Calgary to play in the Calgary parade, now you have to be auditioned, during the war they invited us to come and play. There had been a band in Stirling for many years; they had carried on for many years. I played in it but people weren’t so much better than me, I didn’t have any musical talent but quite a few of us were in it. That is when we went to Calgary.

Mark Durtschi: Do you remember who lead the band?

Cal Brandley: That was Leave Erickson, bishop Erickson was. Willis Fawns was very Strong in the band too, before that there was an Ogden, Tom Ogden’s dad but he had been a band leader in Stirling, that was years ago, during the 1920s. Band had always been quite big in Stirling, every 24^thof July had to be lead by the Stirling band, and it just wasn’t the 24^thof July without the band. There were quite a few cultural things in Stirling.

Mark Durtschi: It was a community band, not a school band?

Cal Brandley: Ya, they didn’t have school bands in those days.

Mark Durtschi: Were there many grown-ups in the band.

Cal Brandley: It was mainly grown-ups in the band. Then when they built the church where the big recreation hall which is now torn down, that was a big community project, it was fostered by the church but anybody who had any building talents spent many hours building that. The first that I remember, the first hall was a screw hall; it was about where the school is now. The high school was a little to the north to where the school is, it was more in the corner, more in the north west corner of the school grounds. It was a large two story building, it would have about eight rooms or better in that, you see we would have two grades in the same room, one and two would be in one room and three, four, five and six would be in another. But anyway this hall had a very low ceiling, so if they passed very high it would hit the ceiling. Basket ball has always been a very big thing in Stirling, right from its inception, they had to shoot in such a way they wouldn’t have big arch shots. They would kind of spin with their finger and it would go up and hit the backboard and come back down through you see, they had to because of the height of the hall. 

Mark Durtschi: Did that give them some kind of an advantage over the other team?

Cal Brandley: A little bit ya, although I remember my dad was a great fan, he never played any sports but he thoroughly enjoyed sports and he had such a loud voice that if he got cheering for them everybody could hear them. He told me about Albert Spackman, he said he was the greatest ball player that I have ever seen. He could hold the one person off with one hand and shoot with the other, this was in the days that I was told that basketball was a non-contact sport I thought how silly that was. But today we are very close to that again so I guess we could say what goes around comes around. We had a racetrack in Stirling too and they would race these horses every 24^thof July, it was quite a narrow track with sharp corners but horse racing was quite a big thing. They didn’t have 4H clubs or any riding clubs or anything. They would compete in; I forget what the name of the race was.

Mark Durtschi: Barrel racing

Cal Brandley: They didn’t have barrels and there would be four or five competing at the same time. They would have people stand up as pivots to go around. They would go around this turn and come back. There were different forms of horsemanship, there are a lot of good horse people in Stirling at the time, there were no bog cattle ranches around Stirling at the time of course at first was the only mode of transportation. It carried on for a long time.

Mark Durtschi: Your dad had a big cattle ranch too.

Cal Brandley: Ya, he arranged that in the Wrentham area and then he bought a big ranch over at brooks.

Mark Durtschi: Don’t you have a lot of memories about that ranch?

Cal Brandley: Ya, my dad was successful with cattle but he was successful because he would have them graze as long as he possibly could. At the time I hated cattle when I was in high school and in grade school because in this nice weather you could just let the cattle graze but the minute that a big storm came in you had to get out with the cattle because otherwise they would drift miles away. I saw my dad come home many time with his face all frozen because he had been out with his cattle. In those days you didn’t really put up to much hay with the blue gamma or the buffalo grass as they call it. It had sufficient nutrience in it that the cattle could get to it. But in the period between a snow storm and a Chinook, the Chinook would clear the land, and then you had to be with your cattle watching that they didn’t drift away and then you would loose them all. One interesting thing though when we originally moved to brooks there were roads, there were trucks and you couldn’t get these cattle liners because they just weren’t around. But you could ship cattle to Medicine Hat and then change trains and go back up to brooks so this wasn’t to successful. He drove 350 head of cattle up there in the spring, they left just a little too late, and the storms came. They started calving on their way up there. If she doesn’t claim it right away you have to catch her and get her to claim it. They had a terrible time. Anyway when he got to the bow river over there just before they came across this long bridge, it was a very long narrow bridge. It had been a conversation for nearly a year of how they were going to get these cattle across the bridge if they ever did get up there. Anyway, they got them across, my dad talked to a man who owned a home right next to the bridge and big rancher right there. Anyway they talked. It was rather interesting, within two weeks after that this fellow he was talking to up there had a heart attack and died, The other fellow was taking his fish line before it froze in the winter and took it out over the river as it was melting and he drown. My dad went into a coma and was unconscious for a week. It was kind of the kiss of death there for a while; we didn’t know what had gone on. He always raised cattle and he always had a lot of cattle around. He could work with the cattle very well, I don’t know how he did it all the time but he did very well. It was a hard life, a very hard life. So it was mainly open grazing during the winter with just a small amount of feed for the emergencies. He lived a very hard life.

Mark Durtschi: I presume that you were in Brooks many of those summers?

Cal Brandley: Lots of them yes, I remember as a younger kid in the Stirling area, which is where it happened. After he got to Brooks he had a problem. He was at what they call castles just west of brooks where they now have a large. This was during the war and in brooks they had a lot of irrigation but all of the boys went to war and the farmers didn’t have and labour to help them out. So they just let the alp alpha go to seed and they sold the feed. That was quite an undertaking; we did that three times until they got sufficient feed up there for the cattle. It was interesting though moving to picture butte from there on almost to the bow river we would talk to people about driving cattle and I had helped on a couple occasions. You talk to people as though in the spring they would be working the land. Of course you could always talk to people because nobody was in to big of a hurry in those days. They say I done own this land, it is owned by somebody and they left years ago. First of all I burn off the crop in the spring, they didn’t realize it but that game them just a little bit of nitrogen in the soil. We would burn it off and just plant it. Then if it is a good year we would just harvest it, if it isn’t we have just lost a little seed and some labour. Most of the people didn’t own their land, it was so interesting to drive through and that was in the forties. The country has taken a real change, agriculture has taken a real change in Sothern Alberta and that wasn’t that many years ago. I guess that I developed a love for cattle through my father, I couldn’t help it I guess because he in fact one of his close friends whop was also a doctor told me in the large families that you dad was in they didn’t receive to much individual attention because they just didn’t have enough hands to help. So you dad probably liked cattle so well because that was part of his family. Maybe it was true, I don’t know. He knew cattle and liked cattle.  

Mark Durtschi: He had fifteen cattle before he ever moved up here.

Cal Brandley: It is rather interesting. But anyway, he always liked that kind of stuff. I didn’t know about going to school and all of the sudden I decided I would go. What had happened is that some of my friends in Raymond said look lets all go to BYU; they have got one place that is vacant. In those days if you had a vacancy it would be that you would have to share a bed with somebody else. They said well we have half a bed still open, the fellow who was going to come can’t go anymore so you can come live with us. This should have been planned six months ahead of time and I was doing it in about a week and a half, in those days to get a visa to go to school you had to spend two days in Calgary with an American consulate. During this time I met a fellow from Lethbridge named Jeff Peterson. I hadn’t met him before. He was going to Hawaii, we talked things over I then hurried and I got to fly down there because I was late for school. Not too many people flew in those days, only army personnel were about the only people that could afford to fly in those days. Anyway I got to fly from here to the Salt Lake and I was riding with a fellow who was quite a high officer from Alaska. I felt sorry for him and said where you are going to stay tonight he said I don’t know. I said I am at the hotel Utah which was the thing in those days. He says well you had better come with me. We got there and said we don’t have any vacancy; we haven’t had vacancy for years. So anyway they got me in a sample room. The next day I got on a bus and went to Provo, when I got to Provo Hawaii the fellow who wasn’t going to come to school came to school so there wasn’t any room for me. In those days Provo had hardly any accommodation for students at all. They used to run about 2500 students, now they are almost up to 3800 that were in 1946. The first night I stayed in a small hotel in Provo there and the next day I am walking the streets. First I went to the school to see if they have got any, went to the church groups, no where, there were just no vacancies. So I was going to have to go home, I thought this is the first time I have ever left home and now I have got to phone my dad and tell him I have got to come home because I can’t find a place to stay. I was just about to go and phone and I ran into this Cliff Peterson. He happened to recognize me and he said Bradley was a terribly place but there is half a bed there. All I had to say was that I don’t know what an angel looks like, I have never seen one but he was just about as close to an angel as anything I have ever seen in my life. We got into a close friendship and I lived with him for four years while I went to school. So I graduated from the Brigam Young University with a major in political science and cultural economics. Then I married in 1950. After that I went to the University of Alberta for one year and a cousin of mine was in a big law firm in the and my dads sisters son was in a big law firm in British Columbia and said why don’t you come to British Columbia and graduate and then you can work in this big law firm. In those days a law firm that had three members was a pretty big law firm and their firm already had forty two people in it. You could specialize in what you want to and it is just wonderful. That was the idea and I transferred to UBC and graduated.
 
Tape 2 Side 2
 
Mark Durtschi: So when did you say that you graduated?

Cal Brandley: I graduated in 1954 with my law degree from the University of British Columbia. I then wrote the bar exam in BC. I had been farming all along, since 1950 so I would get the crop harvested and be a few days late for school. Then when the exams were over I would rush home and start farming.

Mark Durtschi: How much farm land did you dad have?

Cal Brandley: Dad had a fairly large, about three sections. Dad kind of quickly got sick so I did it. I continued to farm that much land but some I rented out. I have had two jobs all of my life. Anyway I came back to Alberta and passed my bar exam here and practiced in Lethbridge. Then an opportunity came and the minister of agriculture from Sothern Alberta and said we are opening up a legal department of agriculture and we need some one with an agricultural background, would you be interested in doing it. I said no, I wasn’t really interested in going to Edmonton. The fellow I was arguing with said why don’t you go, the people that you will meet in Edmonton will be assistance to you the rest of your life. So I went up there for three years. I was commuting back and forth, I would come home every weekend and my dad was very sick and I decided I am going to come home and stay here. I no sooner did that and my dad died. Anyway the government got me again and said you can do the same job and cover the province, it will let you hop right out of Lethbridge. So that is what I did for twenty nine years, I would fly to Edmonton every week. I had to spend at least a day up there and possibly two or three depending on how much work had to be done there. Then I traveled the whole province for them so I would fly as far as I could and then after that I would rent cars and drive to the different things. Quite a bit of my work was boiled down to bringing people up to date on what the agriculture laws were because they were much easier to enforce if people knew what they were and understood them instead of just coming up out of the blue and saying you are breaking the law. That got to be an awful lot of my work.

Mark Durtschi: How did you accomplish that, did you talk at public gatherings?

Cal Brandley: That is basically what it was, as I said I talked to 3500 to 5000 people a year which I quite a few meetings. On different subjects too, I would talk in the morning for an hour and a half to two hours. Another group in the afternoon for a couple of hours and another group at night for a couple hours it was hard work but it was interesting. I found one thing that was hard on me when I got into law, the people that I was with would always be criticizing, they would say Cal you are doing twice as much work as the rest of us are doing and you only get half as much pay. But I was raising a farm where if I sold a bushel of wheat I wanted full value for it but if I went and helped someone out it was just labour, it wasn’t worth anything so I didn’t charge for it. If the neighbour couldn’t get his crop in you just go over and help him out. I kind of looked at that in law, I would say well I didn’t do that much work, they would tell me they are suppose to pay so many dollars for that. They say that your time is valuable, I never got that. When I got this government job and then they asked me if I would work again for them that is what I like because I could help people out and I didn’t have to charge them for it. It was just a perfect fit for me. I couldn’t have had a better deal. Health wise has hurt me quite a bit in my life, no me but my wife had cancer. She got cancer at the age of thirty five, we had three small children. In those days cancer and death were pretty well synonymous. I thought what can I possibly do with three young children and my wife is defiantly going to die. Anyway, we went all over North America to get the best help that we could for her, I don’t know if it helped that much but she lived for twelve more years. If you got four years behind you with cancer then you could smile. We nearly had four years with no problems and then she had to have another cancer operation. She had three cancer operations during the twelve years. When she finally died, she died of a heart attack which is interesting but it was brought on because all of the heart condition, then that was one death. The second death, when she died I had a son of fourteen and he and I lived together until he went to university and went on and got married. He has been married three years. We were working together and we were farming together, he had a very good job as an engineer. He got a blood clot in his leg and they were doctoring it and they went to his head. They had diagnosed it wrong and he died. So death has played quite a role in my life. It did originally in that with my parents I think I had them to look after a little bit, probably sooner than would be in that life is interesting. Usually most people marry in their twenties; there are different times when they go through different periods. My dad was forty five when I was born so he was almost an old man before I, well old men in those days were sixty five. So I would spend more time with them, not that I wasn’t rewarded but it just came a little ahead of time. Anyway, those things happen but the death has been really quite hard, it has changed my whole life; it has been hard to live with. Life will go on with me, without me, or in spite of me so we will carry on from there.

Mark Durtschi: You never remarried did you?

Cal Brandley: I remarried once, I married a very lovely lady but we had problems. We had one problem that we just couldn’t get over. Life would have been different had that been successful a swell we both thought that it would and we both worked hard at it. It is not that we both didn’t try. In fact we are very good friends again today, we still do a lot of things together but it was a bad thing. I was very lucky with my first marriage and with my second marriage, we were only married for four years but it was a very good marriage. When you marry you are trained for everything else but not for marriage. So I think that with your first marriage you are very lucky to get a good person because you don’t know what you are really looking for. It was just by luck that I got a very outstanding wife. In my second marriage I thought well now I will be smarter but I don’t think that you are any smarter the second time then you were the first. You are just as infatuated with the second courtship as you are with the first. But anyway I am quite proud of one thing with my second marriage is that she had four young children and every one of them had got through university, they are all graduates of university now. My children are all graduates of university, not that that is a great accomplishment but it gives them the background I think that you will be able to make the changes in life that you require. They will have a little bigger life, a little bigger understanding. All education ever did for me was show me how much I didn’t know because it just opened so many fields and I there were so many more things to know about that I never realized. So that has been a benefit to me. That is pretty well a story of my life I guess. 

Mark Durtschi: You went over your job with the government I maybe about thirty seconds there. How were until you were received by the farmers of Alberta.

Cal Brandley: Very well because I am here again, not because of me but because of my background. Because I was farming I knew the problems that they were facing, I could discuss their problems with them, talk on a one to one basis. The examples I would give in explaining things to them were farm examples that would mean something to them and then something to me. What I also did, I drafted all of the agricultural legislation. During thirty years I had pretty well written it all, either amended it or wrote a new axe. We have a hundred and three agricultural axes and I pretty well wrote them all. Then the other big part of my thing with the government is what their rights and wrongs were. The other part of the government is that I would go out and lecture and tell people about the laws that have been passed, either get information to start with about it or before we passed the legislation or would tell them about it after it was passed. I tried to teach preventive law rather than curative law. I tried to show them the problems ahead of time so they could start ahead of time rather than after. Since I was traveling the whole province it is interesting, every year brings a certain new problem. Maybe I heard about it in Milk River or something but by the time that I had researched it and am up at high level somebody would be asking the same question. I had the law firm say you are really qualified. It wasn’t that it was my work force to give me the opportunity and force me to learn these things; I could be up on these things because it was a full time occupation. This is a little bit of a personal experience but I was with the government, I was with the ministers, I had fiver different ministers of agriculture. I was very close to them because they were responsible for getting laws through legislation to be passed. One time, like if new legislation was being passed, what would happen is the executive councillor, the cabinet ministers would be together and then the minister would say this is a new proposal. The others would see how it would affect their acts, to make sure that it was all compatible. Anyway at this one meeting I and the minister of agriculture had worked nearly six months on getting feedback, I had taken the act to three or four different farm organizations to see what they thought of it. Mr. Hanworst who was the minister of Agriculture at that time said to present it and Mr. Manning the premier of Alberta; he was the primer longer than anybody else in the British Commonwealth. He would say have you thought of this, it was an obvious problem, we and many other people had gone through this proposed act and it was so obvious, it should have hit us right in the face, he didn’t have any background at all. He just read it over for the first time, saw that and asked us about it. Anyway after the meeting was over I was really impressed, I had seen a genius almost. We got laughing about something and finally I said well Mr. Manning you know all of this oil you have hit sure hasn’t hurt your government has it. He turned on me and he said look Mr. Brandley I would like for you to know that that oil was left there for a god fairing government to discover. I discovered right then there was a very fine line between sanity and insanity. Anyway, my job was most interesting and I got to work on both ends of the stick, usually you don’t do that.  I got to work with the people that were formulating the laws and I got to work with the farmers on the other end that had to live under those situations. It was most interesting.

Mark Durtschi: You spent many years in government; are there any other instances that you would like to relate?

Cal Brandley: One time I was terribly lost and I went to a farm in Northern Alberta, there were still quite a few where their transportation system kept them isolated a lot longer. Many of the older farmers would have the real heavy sweaters that come up the front and a cap that came over the head. I pulled into this one farm and said can you tell me where this place is. He said sure but you said two years ago you talked about so and so, is he still alive today. So they didn’t meet a lot of people. In fact they did a survey once on the department of agriculture and I was more known than anyone in the department of agriculture. But the reason wasn’t me; it was because of the work that I was doing allowed me that kind of thing. I was talking in church the other day and I spent about a week getting the talk ready and it wasn’t a good one. I got thinking, I don’t know what has happened to me, I had six standing ovations, and two of them were when I talked to over a thousand people. You don’t get many standing ovations so you kind of remember them, in fact they shock you. I am not sure why they did it now, I did even a better job at another place and they sat on their hands. I thought well I can talk and get a thousand people to give me a standing ovation and I can hardly give a talk in church so I don’t know what the deal is. It was quite a challenge in those days because to get people to come out and see you had to be up on the law, there is no doubt about that. As the farming public lawyers more and more the questions that were asked were lawyer questions just as much as farming questions. I had to be up on it but my work allowed me to do that. When you draft legislation you pretty well know it, so that gave me a benefit. It was an interesting job and I thoroughly enjoyed farming, I always found fun in farming so I lived a pretty good life but when my son died I kind of gave up on everything. I sold the farm in a hurry because somebody wanted it and I just thought well I will just let them have it. I didn’t realize in my work as a lawyer I tell people that death is a very traumatic situation, don’t do any major change for at least a year. But I jumped in and did a lot of things and I regret it now but it is alright. I took retirement at the same time; I just did too many things at the same time. I wasn’t all that rational but those things happen and I am very lucky about one thing, both of my daughters were supposed to be sons but at the last minute they turned out to be daughters. It didn’t go all bad because I found that daughters turn to their dads, more than a son does. Sons seem to baby their mother more. My two daughters spoiled me and now one has four daughters and the other has two daughters. I am very fortunate in life, I am grateful to my family.

Mark Durtschi: Just one more question about your life, this may sound like a self serving question. How well do you think that the department of agriculture has served the farmers?

Cal Brandley: Well it has gone a great change and there is more than one way to climb a mountain. The way that the department of agriculture is eighty percent different then when I worked for them. When I worked for them they were helping a developing agriculture, they had set out to help farmers that didn’t know anything about farming and work with them. Today they are dealing with quite a sophisticated farmer and the services are provided by the different companies that provide services. The fertilizer companies the seed companies, they are advising the farmers more than the government, and the government is sort of backing out of that. I think it might be a mistake but they are getting the information through that. The last five years are different then the government that I worked for. Although legislation is somewhat the same although it is a different type of legislation, before the legislation was geared to take in a small farmer, now it is pretty well the big farmers that they deal with. I was one time lecturing with an Earl Butts; he was the former secretary of agriculture for the U.S. government. He had been up here for five lectures and needed someone to help fill the time. Since I came for nothing I was told to go with him. I didn’t think that he was too brilliant of a man, which is what I heard from the president of the United States. But as it turned out he had been the dean of the school of agriculture and Purnell University for years. He was a most interesting lecturer. After we lectured for a while he said Brandley you are a Mormon aren’t you. I said ya, how can you tell. He said well I can tell from some of the examples that you give. He said I worked for Benson and that was one of the smartest men that I worked for my entire life. He brings up the story; he had a great knowledge of the past. When he was giving a lecture he would show had it had been acquired all through the generations. So don’t rule out agriculture, it is here to stay, the only thing is it is changing and will you be able to stay. That is your biggest problem, will you be able to keep up with agriculture because agriculture will be here but will we be part of it, which is the big problem. That is happening today, I don’t know what is going to go but it is a real challenge. When he told me about Benson I said I wish Benson had been the president of out church as he is now. He said just a minute Brandley, don’t you rule that man down, and he is still a brilliant man. I thought it was rather interesting that a non-Mormon would be correcting a Mormon. I use this phrase all of the time, I say where I get all of my Stirling qualities was from Stirling. Stirling was named after one of the large shareholders in the Canadian pacific railway from England. He is from Scotland and in fact there is a Stirling Scotland. His castle is still in Scotland, people have told me about visiting this through the years. It is a beautiful castle and it was named after Lord Stirling who Stirling is named after. What they did in those days they named the different little sidings, because of transportation here again which has been very important in our lives the elevators were pretty well placed every ten miles. That was just about as far as you could drive a tem of horses and a grain wagon to and fro. That is why they were set up like that, and then to get names for them, a lot of them were named after people shareholders in the Canadian Pacific Railway, that is how we got ours. There is not other significant reason for us having that name.

Mark Durtschi: The place was named before we ever came.

Cal Brandley: That is right, so that is how that was

Mark Durtschi: Just one last farming question. Farms are getting bigger and bigger because they require more land to make a living. Any ideas on how farming is going to go in the future?

Cal Brandley: About fifteen years ago I got to go to a meeting in the Easter United states but it was one that was designed about farming in the future. At that time, that was about 1980, they were saying that there used to be three types of farmers, the small farmers were a thing of the past, the middle sized farmer and the large farmer. The small farmers always had trouble because you can’t generate sufficient income to make a living. The middle sized farmer was the best because he could give the land the necessary time because time is of an essence in farming in Alberta. He could cover the numbers of acres that he had and do a pretty good job of it. The large farmer was in problems because he couldn’t get over the land, he couldn’t manage the labour to get the greatest return because there were just too many acres to overcome. But now with large equipment there are only going to be two types of farmers. The small farmer will still be around because he has now got another job to supplement his income and the large farmer. The medium sized farmer is going because to equipment is so expensive and so far they have not developed medium sized equipment that will do the job. The large farmer is doing very well because he has got, now with this large equipment he can get many acreages in a short period of time. It is defiantly to his advantage. So they talked about this for some time. They said that the medium sized farmer just can’t spend a hundred thousand dollars for a tractor and do a hundred acres of land, that wasn’t a medium sized farmer but that was the principal. So finally I said well what you call a large farm. He said at that time ten sections of land, that is 6400 acres approximately. It is interesting as time went on after that I noticed in the early nineties that most of the people that I talked to were farming about that size of land. Not that they owned it, they might only own a half section but they rented that much land. In farming we have two different kinds of people, the people that have the expensive equipment, they have got all of their money tied up, and they can’t afford land. Then we have the land owners who have got so much money tied up in land that they really can’t afford the expensive equipment and put all of that money in technology. So we are getting the two different kinds of people, the land owners and the land farmers. That is probably the trend that will continue. It is continuing right now, we can ever see it in the Stirling area; some of the farmers there are large. So that is the way that things are going to go. Anyway, in Stirling I thoroughly enjoyed it and when I go back now there are not too many people. When I ask where somebody lives sometimes they have to go back two generations to tell me.

Mark Durtschi: Okay, going back now, you mentioned that you had some Japanese kids in the school.

Cal Brandley: Well in our Grade twelve class changed to twenty seven students, we were fourteen and then we changed to twenty seven. They were Japanese students. I was in Grade ten at the
time of their migration. They were very much in the schools.

Mark Durtschi: Which camp were they in?

Cal Brandley: Well they didn’t have to be in a camp here, they could come and work in the sugar beet fields and live in the homes provided by the sugar beet owners.

Mark Durtschi: Did their whole family live in Stirling?

Cal Brandley: Yes, they usually in very run down little houses with just rooms for summer people. They lived the whole year there. They formed a very important part of our system. In fact about ten years ago I was invited to talk to some Japanese people because they have Japanese organization here. The guy who was the president of them he and I went to school together. I said look I will excuse you for the Japanese war, I have got over that. But one thing that I will never excuse the Japanese for is a standard of education that they brought to Stirling. Before you people came I hardly had to work at all but after they came I had to work very hard to stay where I was. I will never forgive you for that. We had a lot of Japanese; Stirling at that time was quite a sugar beet area. Another big thing that happened during the war is that a lot of farmers if you farm you didn’t have to go in the war. So a lot of farm owners, because nobody else could run the farm had to produce food. So a lot of the farmers were farming but the sugar factory couldn’t get the people to work year round because most of the people had gone to war. So they had what they called the campaigner to get the sugar processed in the fall and in the early part of the winter. The café in Stirling was full of people talking, there were lots of people in Stirling that became a very important part and a significant part of their income too. This is where they started breaking away from strictly agriculture to having a supplemented income. It provided quite a service to the area.

Mark Durtschi: You weren’t living in Stirling when the Sugar beet factory closed down was you?

Cal Brandley: No, but I know that in the forties it had an impact, before that we had a few people working, but just a few people from Stirling. This would take, I don’t know the numbers but I know a lot of times there would be six to eight cars full of people to go and work in Raymond. It just happened that there were a lot of small farmers there, in some areas they wouldn’t have come because they had larger farms and they were too tied up but with the smaller farms of the Stirling area they took up that challenge. 

Mark Durtschi: With the Japanese, do you suppose that life was fairly hard for those families in Stirling?

Cal Brandley: It was hard on them but they were brought into the System a lot faster than in a lot of places. I remember a club here in Lethbridge for years and we had three Japanese in that. They were in different localities. They said that there was racial discrimination against them, they just couldn’t be anything, and they weren’t allowed to go to anything. In Stirling they seemed to immigrate very well. I don’t know why, maybe the school or maybe our principal got us thinking that they were students too. Something happened because they were quite well immigrated into our system. Although they physically had things hard they didn’t have mentally any things to bad. They played on the basketball team, they played sports, and they were in everything. They were just like new people came to town. They were very hard workers, very hard workers, very humble, they weren’t boastful, and they fit right into the situation. In fact Harry Quan who I had known, I helped him get his Canadian citizenship years ago and he has never forgotten it. He had come over in a different name as our system required many of the Japanese people who come over do. They couldn’t say they were married or single. It was kind of lethal; the government said if they declare themselves we will allow them to become Canadian citizens so this was really great for them.
 
Tape 3 Side 1
 
Cal Brandley: So I had said to Harry, he had been the head of a co-op farm and had been doing very well. They owned a whole level of a big hotel over there. I said well are you sorry you came over here because you have to work so hard. He said well I would have had it better over there but my family would have the opportunities that they had in Stirling. I think that is the way that oriental people were accepted in Stirling, but they worked hard for it, they just weren’t right accepted. They worked hard for it, anything that was public that people needed help for they were always there. But your physical things like building a building or adding on they were always right there. They formed quite a part of the community for a while.

Mark Durtschi: I find it interesting that they were so well accepted when their motherland was at war.

Cal Brandley: Well see we weren’t at war but the Americans were. We were in the war and put all of our efforts towards Europe, towards England. We never thought about the Japanese war being our war. Indirectly it was but it didn’t have the impact, if it had been German, no. My dad was born in Switzerland, the German speaking part of Switzerland. When my dad went to racer it was what your father was, everybody had a racer during the war to get a card and all of this. He was classified as a German because his father was from the German part of Switzerland. His father spoke Swiss but he was from the German part of Switzerland. Since Switzerland was neutral you were either French or German. My grandma Selk was from the French part of Switzerland so she was considered as French. So my father said look, the Germans have caused two wars now within so many years of each other. He had a definite hatred for Germans. He was ready to fight when they called him a German. In fact he phoned Sullen Low who was in Ottawa to say look into this for me. This is terrible he said, would you check it through to see if they are right here because I am not German. So we had much greater feelings against the Germans than we had against the Japanese. There is one thing about the Japanese that I cant find anything to back it up so it is just my thing, but I know that a lot of the Japanese people that I was with they were students and we were with them all of the time. They said well I have got an uncle over there who they had left but he just doesn’t do anything so they didn’t have to worry about him. So there was a selective, the ones who were more progressive got out of there; otherwise they could be hurt in war or could help the Japanese in their war effort more than the others. When I asked if there was anything to justify that, to verify that I couldn’t find anything so maybe there is not. I know those in Stirling were all quite important people. Now there were some that went into camps up at Banff that had quite a place up there for them. But these are the ones who would work the sugar beets, they came to Stirling and they came to Raymond and other sugar beet communities. Then they were such progressive people that they carried on but in Stirling I think they were accepted. Now maybe I was too blind to know but they just seemed to fit in. I didn’t put my arm around them as a brother or anything except quite often I was invited to their homes. You would eat raw fish, which was quite an experience that you had to have. Now in later years when I go to different places one thing that impressed me when they came over is that they had complete respect for their parents. Their parents were in revered, it didn’t matter who the parents were, and that was their culture. They were, it wasn’t just the church says this or something else, they were revered. Their father and mother were just up on a pedestal all of the time. When I go to their homes now I see that their kids treat them just about how they treat me. I say of all the things, of all of the cultures you shouldn’t have dropped that is one of them. That was just exceptional, why didn’t you pick up our American ways when you could have picked up better things. Anyway they did that. That was a big part in Stirling for a while.

Mark Durtschi: Okay, changing directions just a little bit as far as the war goes, what are some of the other ways that the war affected Stirling?

Cal Brandley: Well we fell into an era of better crops, better rain fall. You could sell the crops so people were better financially off. So the water helped us market our products. It gave us an economic boost in Stirling. We did loose some people to the war from Stirling; I don’t think it was that high, percentage wise it wasn’t as high as a lot of the other people. We didn’t have anyone in the Dieppe Raid that pretty well whipped our all of the Canadians in that one encounter. It didn’t hurt us to much it was just the rationing and everything else that we were subject to. My mother kept talking about Jell-O; I didn’t know what Jell-O tasted like because we couldn’t buy it during the war. But after it was over my mother bought Jell-O and we had Jell-O for supper and dinner there for nearly a year. We got a little tired of it. We had quite a few things that were rationed.

Mark Durtschi: Did rationing really affect your family that much?

Cal Brandley: Ya, the basics were rationed; sugar was rationed so you had less of hat. Other than that things were just about the same, you were still producing for yourselves. That was still in the era where they were producing quite a bit for themselves. But the poverty of the thirties was over; it was starting to go over.

Mark Durtschi: Could you explain how the irrigation came into town?

Cal Brandley: What the deal was they decided that Magrath which was the representative of the AR railway which was the CPR decided if they had decided if they had convinced them that they needed water. If they had water they could sell this land, this land bank that they had here in the Lethbridge area. So they went down and talked to the church. They offered the 45000 acres of land if they would send people to come up and work on the land. They turned it down and they said we are a religious group not a colonization group and they turned them down. Two years later they went back with a second plan and said well if you come we will pay you so much money. We will pay you for each man that comes to work, we will give them $2.85 a day plus if they will provide a team of horses and a scraper and a man plus an acre of land. The church said that they would do that. In that they were required to colonize two towns which they had specified as Stirling and Magrath. So that was the second one. The first 45000 acres they turned down. The second plan they went for and then that is how the migration really came. So there was a time in Sothern Alberta where it just shows how things change. I remember in my day when we went to Calgary we were in the IOF hall, that was the chapel in Calgary. The Sunday meetings were in the IOF hall. They didn’t even have one there, Edmonton was the same in the later years, the late thirties and early forties. All of the Mormon population was here in Sothern Alberta. But now as they start moving to the bigger cities the populations up there are more than is in the South. Which has changed because the Pioneers have died off and we were going through an era now where the children of the pioneers are now dying, so things have changed?

Mark Durtschi: What could you tell me about irrigation in Stirling?

Cal Brandley: Well irrigation made two types of farmers, there was the dry land farmer and he is the one that is dependent on the weather. There was the irrigation farmer who was sure that he would get a crop but because of the way that the flood irrigation was the only system that they had at that time, they couldn’t have grey acreages. So they were usually small mixed lines with the irrigation but they knew that they were going to get a crop. They knew that they would get a crop whereas the dry land farmer he was completely subject to the weather. But irrigation made a big influence; it helped the population greatly because many of them were on small irrigated farms. At that time eighty acres of irrigation was quite a big place and then it got to be a quarter sections. That is what irrigation did; they could get equal production out of two acres that the others could get out of a large area. It was varied, they didn’t have the center pivots, they didn’t have the irrigation system, it was all what they used to say was the idiot stick and that was the shovel. They would just flood irrigate. It was very good, however when they brought this water to these good lands the lighter soils are better for irrigation because the drainage isn’t as big of a problem. The draining system in the area, they didn’t figure that out at that time, they did nothing about it. It was finally almost self defeating. So much of the land was going to alkali, then it was absolutely non productive. Just to give you an example in the town if you dug a post hole around you place you probably had water in the bottom of a two foot post hole. The irrigation system in Stirling that they did their gardens and everything with, they had ditches to ever part of land. These ditches carried water all summer, it was rather nice in fact back in Provo Utah they still have the water going down the things but it did raise a very high water table in Stirling. In those days most of the materials that you would build your basements out of wouldn’t withstand alkali so most of them leaked. The cisterns would all leak, eventually the salts from the alkali would work their way through the cement. So it was a real problem. It was finally solved and I don’t think they realized that it was going to be this significant but when they brought water to Stirling they put in the water system. That cut out a lot of the leakage and the water table has gone down, now it isn’t near the problem that there was then. That just kind of over shows just how serious the water problem was. We were losing land to alkali, acres and acres of land to alkali. It was becoming absolutely infertile. Irrigation was a very big part of Stirling and after that is why they all came in the first place. But it was very hard work. As farmers got a little more successful lots of them would go and try to get more dry land where they could mechanize it and do much more than they could with the irrigated lands. Mechanisms came very slow with the irrigated lands because they were smaller acreages and they couldn’t buy the machinery, the machinery wasn’t developed for them as fast. They had problems. Although there two or three people in Stirling who were quite inventive in making al sorts of machines to help with the work there, with their specialty crops, mainly sugar beets. But anyway so irrigation did have a lot to do in Stirling, incidentally in 1950 after I got my first degree in the winter I didn’t have anything to do so I decided mid application I got accepted into a masters program at the University of Alberta. A year later I decided that I liked law better and so I went in law. Anyway, I was going to use the Sothern Alberta as sort of a history as to what had happened to the Mormon families that had originally came here and follow through their progress and what they did. I thought that it was quite interesting; I had fifty families that I was working with. This is in 1951, over fifty families I was working with there were only two of them that had irrigation as part of their income. The rest of them were down to dry land because of the problems with water and the irrigated crops, everything was back, and you would top the beets by hand. You shovel them onto the wagons by hand, you did everything buy hand. So you hoed them by hand and planted them otherwise. Anyway, it was very difficult work, as I just said it was very interesting in that two of the fifty families that were involved still had irrigation as a large part of their operations. They7 had all gone heavily into dry land. But they came for irrigation and they got irrigation, they provided an income for a population if it had jut been dry and wouldn’t have supported that number of people. Sop irrigation has been an important part of Stirling but there have been side effects to it. Some of the bad side effects were the drainage within and outside the town. But then Utah had the same problem. If you look at them it is quite interesting in that they have got their grid system in sections and every section the draining system is cut down. It is their draining system because they lost all of their land.  It was heavier land and they lost it as it all went to alkali. We experienced the same thing in Stirling and Raymond areas; they were just not good areas for heavy, intensive irrigation.

Mark Durtschi: Can you tell me a little about the source of the Social Credit party?

Cal Brandley: Ya, it was very interesting, we had the UFA before that, and the United Farmers of Alberta were in power. This man Aberheart came up with the idea that he had followed Major Douglas in England’s book and follows his book which said you can write your own money. That was social credit, so what he decided to do, the story is that you write a check and give it to one man, he gives it to another many and finally it comes back to the original man that wore it and he tears it up because all of the service is provided. But anyway he was going to provide his theory. This was in the thirties when starvation was still prevalent, that every man women and child in Alberta would receive twenty dollars a month.  For food and shelter, he wanted food and shelter to be covered for everybody. Everybody should have good food and shelter. It was funny money and everybody economist in the worked laughed about it. In fact when I went down to university in Utah they didn’t know much about Alberta but they knew Alberta had that funny money. That was the social credit deal and they actually issued some of their own money. They were going to form their own bank and run it. But what the problem was that under the BNA banking is a federal matter not a provincial matter so we couldn’t have a bank here. So that is why they formed the provincial party hoping that they would get the vote of Canada hoping that they would change it so that the banking was in the province. Alberta would have their own bank so then Major Douglas’s theory on money could be put into effect. I don’t know why but it raised controversy. Anybody that had any money detested it because they would loose all of their money providing for the others. Those who didn’t have it thought that it was wonderful. They promised that if they got in power they would cancel all of the debts too. If anybody had a debt they would cancel it out so you could have a new beginning. Because a lot of the land had been lost during the depression to the companies, they were just farming a family farm for the mortgage companies. A lot of people wouldn’t even run for them they didn’t want to be part of that. One man in Stirling was very strong against the Frank Coffin. He was a fairly successful farmer there in Stirling and he was in the loaning business quite a bit. He would use his own money to loan out to other people. In fact it said that he owned all of Broadway, all of the businesses in Raymond on Broadway. Anyway when the social credit government went in which was absolutely, no body thought that they had a chance, no body would admit that they had voted for them. Nobody would do anything and they got in. That night I remember being woken up at about ten o’clock to this honking. In a little community that only had about three street lights I hear this honking and these cars were going around and around. What it was that the business men in Raymond had come over in about twenty cars and were driving around the block honking their horns every time that they passed Hanks house because all of the debts were going to be forgiven.

Mark Durtschi: Did that come to pass?

Cal Brandley: No, it didn’t come to pass, what they did is they killed their credit with everybody. So they had to pay as they went, so they turned out to be a most interesting government. The reason that they stayed in power for so long is that they appeal to the radical person because they said just as soon as we get the power we will do this. They appeal to the conservatives because they were paying their way as they went because of their funny money ideas you see. So they turned out to be a very effective government. You don’t usually get both ends of the voting population with you but that is the way that they got there. They turned out then to be a very good government for years in Alberta. Now they did issues during this time, they issued what they call chin plasters, these twenty five cent pieces where you could, they issued their own money a little bit. Stores didn’t have to accept them but some stores would and some stores wouldn’t. They did a lot of things. William Aberheart was the one the started, in fact his big convention just out of Lethbridge here and each candidate that wanted to run, he interviewed them. But he had each constituency nominate three candidates to run. Then he would talk to them and he would choose one and that is the one that would run under the banner of Social Credit. Everybody knew that it was just an exercise in futility because no one would ever win. I think that the example in Stirling just shows the impact it had. It was big things in those days and in those days there were two things that were always talked about, religion and politics and the weather, those are the only three things that ever carried on a conversation.

Mark Durtschi: How do you feel that the citizens of Stirling assimilated themselves into Canadian Society?

Cal Brandley: Well they were very much influenced by the United States for a long time. Then of course they send their students back to the BYU so they had been quite close to America. It has been a healthy situation; they had the better of two worlds. See how things were done in the United States and also see how things were done in Canada. I done remember ever standing up and saying we have got to rid ourselves of Canada or the United States. These terrible Americans, we should not be following them. As you hear now over the CBC about people thinking that the Americans are so terrible, we never had that at all. Those original families all came from Utah and Idaho so our very base was American. But they changed and took on the Canadian way of life, they had to, they had no choice. There have never been anti feelings about the United States. Luckily there hasn’t been too much of Canada against them. Although the Mormons seemed to follow a Social Credit Government, many of them were Mormons; we got branded with the Social Credit government for quite a while. Not that the Mormon Church ever told anybody how to vote but in the Mormon Communities the Social Credit Cavities won. It was kind of an interesting story with Sullen Low who later turned out to be the minister of finance for the Social Credit party. I remember him coming to our house one night about ten o’clock at night, he knew my dad quite well because my dad was chairman of the school board. He said I have a chance to run for the Social Credit party and I want to run but I don’t have $250 to pay the entrance. Dad said well what about your brother in Cardston, he couldn’t help you. He said I am sorry but he feels so strongly about the Social Credit Government that he just can’t help me.  Before the night was over I think he took off in the morning, he had our old Model T Ford and he had to be in Edmonton the next morning about ten o’clock or something to get his nomination in or he couldn’t have run. My dad said I would love to lend out money but I just can’t give you money for who you are representing.

Mark Durtschi: Your father felt the same way.

Cal Brandley: Yes, exactly the same way, everybody did. Of course I was in the United States during Truman’s time. I didn’t talk to anybody that voted for Truman and he won.

Mark Durtschi: As we are nearing the end of this interview, is there anything else that you would like to say about anything.

Cal Brandley: I think that we have covered everything. I haven’t lived to interesting of a life but anyway I have been very lucky. For somebody who never thought of going to university to go as long as I did, maybe it just shows how incompetent I was. I heard people tell me if you were half as smart as your dad you would really be something, I said I know that but without this education I would be even that much dumber so don’t be to tough on me. My dad was quite a self educated man. His hobby was to talk to important people on their level, not just be talking to them but to be able to carry on an intelligent conversation with them. But anyway that was my dad, everybody else can tell the exact same stories about their dad. Not all people are the same so we look through life differently. I guess I can say that I was born of goodly parents and carried on from there.

Mark Durtschi: Well I would like to thank you very much; this I feel is an extremely valuable contribution to the project, thank you.

Cal Brandley: Thank you.

Transcribed by Clinton Dovell