'Ernie' and 'Peter' were names used.

Samuel Ernest Low used the nickname "Peter" from the time he was a young adult. He explained that this came about when his brother Alex (ID=163) started calling him Peter as a joke. Before this time he was called Ernie and some senior members of the family still refer to him by this name.

Peter was born in Ottawa, Canada on 8 June 1903 and was raised there. He attended McGill University in Montreal, where he obtained his degree in Engineering, apparently as the youngest graduate of McGill at that time. He later moved to the United States where he became a Patent Attorney for Alcoa in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He became a citizen of the United States in 1941. During World War II, Peter and Martha came to Canada where he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force. Following the war, they returned to Pennsylvania, and he returned to work for Alcoa. They had been living at Natrona Heights, Pennsylvania for many years when Peter died on 9 November 1984.

Martha Frances Myers was born in Indiana, USA on 10 April 1916. She and Peter married on 2 October 1939.

The Manifest for border crossing for him includes following details:
Port of crossing: Buffalo NY.
Date: 9/2/25 (probably 1925-09-02)
Occupation: Grad Mech Eng.
Height: 5 ft 8-1/2 in. Hair: Brown. Eyes: Blue. Nationality: Can. Race: Scotch.
Place of birth: Can Ottawa. Money shown: 110.
Last permanent residence: Can Montreal. To Pittsburgh Pa.
Ever in US: no.
Going to join relative or friend: cousin Ed Neill.
Time remaining in US: Perm. Purpose: seek work.
name and address of nearest relative: mother Martha - 20 Pansy St. Ottawa Ont.

Martha presented a program on their lifestyles in Canada during World War II to several groups. Following is an edited version of her notes:



LIFESTYLES IN CANADA DURING WORLD WAR II
========================================
by
Martha Frances Myers / Low
(From a program presented several times to various groups, based on her experiences with her husband, Samuel Ernest "Peter" Low, when he served with the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War II.)

It wasn't until World War II was threatening to start that I discovered the intensely patriotic part of my husband, who had been born in Canada and was naturalized an American citizen on St. Patrick's Day in 1941.

Indications of war were very plain to me in 1938 when I spent seven weeks in Europe with two friends. On September 2 we were to sail for home, but on September 1 Neville Chamberlain had taken his umbrella to the continent, where he met with Adolf Hitler and made a decision for the world. He called it "peace in our time." He was later viewed as weak, but at least he gave England a year to prepare for war, and our ship was allowed to sail the next day on schedule.

A year later, on September 2, 1939, I was curiously with the same two friends in my apartment in Oakmont, when
Adolf Hitler's voice came over my radio. My German was good enough to understand most of his speech. Hitler had broken the Munich agreement and had gone into Poland. Of course it meant war, and the fervor of the German crowds cheering Hitler frightened us all. The next day Prime Minister Chamberlain declared war on Germany. England, as well as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and all the British Empire were now at war with Germany.

Peter, a patent attorney with Alcoa -- it was my company too -- and I were married on October 2, a month after the war began, and in his proposal he had said that it was in the back of his mind to enlist in the Royal Canadian Air Force, if it looked as though he could help. I agreed that it would be his decision, whether or not we were married.

The MONTREAL STAR was delivered to our home every day, and by August, 1941 the plight of England Looked bad. As we prepared for a Canadian vacation to visit his relatives in Ottawa and Montreal and to spend a week in the Laurentian Mountains at St. Jovite, Quebec, the ax fell: "Was it all right if I enlisted while we were in Canada?" The very serious implications were clear: He might be maimed or killed, but it was something he needed to do. I said, "Of course. Do it."

Our plan was to have both of us enlist, I in the WAF's, but the recruiting officer said that the policy was to separate couples if they both enlisted, and I could serve the war effort better if I was able to be with Peter in Canada. I certainly agreed to that!

Although he was a patent attorney, Peter was also an engineer, a graduate of McGill University in Montreal. His qualifications indicated he would start out as a P/O (Pilot Officer), the lowest rank in the commissioned forces, equivalent to second lieutenants in the United States. He would hear from the RCAF within two months, as to his assignment.

Back home in Oakmont, we made arrangements to store our new furniture. The call came in late October. We had a few days to make final preparations. Then we drove to Toronto where the manning depot was.

In Toronto we found a rooming house in an old section of town near downtown. We were forbidden to do any laundry -- not even my silk hose, so that had to be done surreptitiously, in the middle of the night. Toronto is a beautiful jewel of a city today, but in 1941 little had been done to make it glamorous. The electricity was even strange to me. It was 25-cycle and the lights flickered constantly. It was almost impossible to read after dark when using electricity.

Peter spent his days at the manning depot, and once I went to see him and the other new officers drilling in a field, learning the commands and all that they would need to know as officers, commanding a flight or a squadron of enlisted men. Nearly all of the new officers were wearing their smart Air Force blue, tailor-made uniforms with stripes indicating rank and USA, Australia, or New Zealand patches on their upper sleeves, if they were not Canadians. Being mostly Canadians, they had been able to see a tailor and be prepared for the day when they were called up. And among them, there was Peter marching in his brown shoes, brown slacks, and brown Harris tweed jacket. He stood out like a sore thumb.

So the first order of business was to see a tailor, as nothing was issued to officers. While we were in down- town Toronto shopping, we stopped in Simpson's to buy me a little V-for-Victory pin. It has the three dots and a dash, the Morse Code letter V. Often on the radio, V for Victory was set to music -- da, da, da, dah --Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. While we were in Simpson's, there was great excitement among the clerks, for the Governor- General of Canada was arriving with his wife, and everone had been alerted.

At the door was an enormous limousine with a chauf- feur, who opened the door for the Duke of Connaught and Princess Alice of Athlone, his wife. They were tall, slender, and very English looking. We had a good look at them because they, also, were shopping for jewelry, but what they were buying was out of my range!

By her appearance, Princess Alice was distinctly an upper-class English lady. She was the niece of Queen Victoria, and the Governor General of Canada was the King's representative in Canada. The scraping and bowing for this couple amazed me.

This brief encounter with the Princess seemed a singular thing, but oddly enough, I was to meet her again, 2500 miles away.

There was little for me to do in Toronto. I was there for too brief a stay to take the job that Dr. Francis Frary, Alcola's director of research, had arranged for me with Dr. (Sir Frederick) Banting, the inventor of insulin, at the University of Toronto, as a chemist.

So I drove our 1941 Ford coupe back to Indiana to visit with my parents. It was a good thing we had a late model car, as it had to last to the end of the war. Much later, a few cars were finally available in 1947 and we were lucky to get one of them.

While I was in Indiana, my brother brought the bad news one Sunday -- Dec. 7 -- that the Japanese had struck Pearl Harbor. I started to compute in my head what this might mean to Peter. Would it change his plans any? I couldn't call him but he called me, this time from Montreal, where he was now attending the RCAF Aeronautical Engineering School for six months.

The next day I drove north. As I approached the Canadian border I heard President Roosevelt declare war on Japan on the car radio. It was an emotional moment. A few hours later I heard him declare war on Germany. The border patrol gave me close scrutiny, as they did everyone leaving the States on that day. It didn't help that I was carrying a German camera. I had to carry a special permit for it and for the car, since I was staying indefinitely.

I was impressed with the four-lane highway leading out of Toronto --the Queen Elizabeth Way (opened by the present Queen mother in 1939). It was better than any I had seen in the States up to then. But it began to snow, heavily, and it went on all day. There were no snow tires then and no salt on the highways. By eleven P.M. I finally made it to Peter's brother's home in Montreal West.

Peter's school was in Outremont in the French or eastern section of Montreal, and he had a long streetcar ride. In the afternoon I played bridge with my sister-in- law, Eva Low, and her mother, Mrs. Ramsay, from Edinburgh, Scotland. Mrs. Ramsay was a real wit, and she made wonderful raisin pies by using bacon drippings for her shortening in the crust.

We soon found our own apartment in downtown Montreal on Guy Street and Lincoln Avenue near St. Catherine Street. We stored the car for $35 per month near the St. Lawrence River docks, as few people kept cars going in the winter. Our apartment cost $67.50 per month, so all we had left of Peter's officer's salary was $49 for food. But we managed very well and even ate out once a week. A flashing sign outside our window advertized Aylmer's vegetables with a picture of a yummy steak, baked potato, and peas that starved us until we could get our own steaks on Saturdays for $1.25 each.

Although Quebeckers are bilingual of necessity, the French and the English were not too congenial. Peter's sister (Libbie), who was a private duty nurse at Montreal General Hospital, loved French food, but she always made the French waitress speak English, even though she, herself, knew French. And it worked both ways. Montreal was 75% French then, and it is more like 90% now.

Everything was more expensive in Canada. Cigarettes were 15 cents a pack in the States and 65 cents in Canada. American cigarettes were $1.00 there. We soon switched to Canadian Players. That was when we were still smokers. And the service men had no advantage of a PX, as the American service men did. They also were paid less.

Fortunately for us, my father sent his usual Christmas check and we had our savings at home for emergencies and eventual travel, when we'd be posted. Alcoa also was kind enough to send an unexpected check for that first Christmas away.

Our apartment was interesting. It was a second floor, walk-up. A visitor might wonder where the bed was. One pulled out a large drawer in the buffet and voila-- a bed that filled the apartment. To the left, opening onto a fire escape, was the kitchen. The stove had three gas burners, so it took some imagination to cook, as one burner was always for the teakettle, to make tea. The refrigerator was an ice box and the ice man came every day, but our ice was usually melted before he got there, because of poor insulation in the old box.

The window at the back was very entertaining, as the children and cats and dogs played in the courtyard, and in good weather people hung their birdcages outside for the canaries and budgies to take the air.

We had a large bathroom, where I did the laundry in the bathtub and hung it all around the bathroom on strings to dry.

The only telephone was in the office, and if we got a call from Peter's brother for Sunday dinner, we would get the message and call back. As a result, people normally just dropped in, and if it was relatives from Ottawa, it would be Sunday and they might find Peter in bed in the middle of the apartment, as he studied very late every night and got up at 5:30 A.M., six days a week. It helped that our Guaranteed Pure Milk Co. milkman came early, as he had a horse named Pete, so he would say "Giddyap, Pete, S'advance, Piet!", and Peter would get the message and fly out of bed. I did go to the barns and see Pete and the other beautiful horses one day, as my brother-in-law, Jim Low, was treasurer of the Guaranteed Pure Milk Co.

I was patriotic too, so I looked for a volunteer job a few hours a week. A junior league-type lady informed me that to be a volunteer I would need to sign up for a full- time job or at the very least, half a day each day. So I took the street car every day up the mountain to V-Bundles of Montreal, similar to Bundles for Britain, where I was the secretary to the director. I worked from 9 to 1 P.M. and carried my lunch. The office was located across from
the world-famous Basilica of Ste. Anne de Beaupre. I wrote letters asking for clothing and helped arrange entertainment to gather people who might help us clothe the bombed-out families of London. After work, at Guy Street when I would alight from the street car, the conductor would say, "Gee - Guy. Prenez-garde - Be Careful!" Everything had to be said twice for the two languages. But it was always said first in French.

At work I also answered the telephone, sometimes in French, although V-Bundles was mainly an English enter- prise. In the afternoon I sometimes met other RCAF wives for tea at one of the many Lyons' restaurants. A pot of tea and toast with cinnamon butter was 15 cents plus 5 cents tip, and we could sit as long as we liked. I also taught myself to ice skate with Peter's college hockey ice skates at the rink of a private boys' school in the neighborhood. The boys had to sharpen their pencils a lot at the window and laugh at me "cracking the ice," as the Canadians said when you fell down, until the schoolmaster caught on. An adult who couldn't skate looked funny to Canadian children who can skate as soon as they can walk.

The RCAF School had a dance at midterm, and we got to see where the school was and also be introduced to the Fairey Battle airplane that our husbands worked on to learn Aeronautical Engineering. It was inside the gymnasium and quite a sight to see. We would later see Fairey Battles at the next station, where they would be used as gunnery planes.

During winter, the Canadian children were always taken out for air, no matter how cold it was. Their cheeks would be red as fire with cold, but they looked extremely healthy and they wore beautiful hand-knit sweaters, usually with a picture of an airplane or a dog or a cat, knitted right into the sweater by a skillful Mummy. Most Canadian women went out to tea in winter, they wore outdoor lisle hose over their silk stockings for warmth. Then on arrival at tea, they would remove those gracefully, and lay them with their coats, to be put on again before leaving.

When spring came, snow drops and crocuses and grape hyancinths peeped through the snow, and it was beautiful to see a few green blades of grass too.

One of the wives with a telephone invited the rest of the wives to tea in June on the day the men were to graduate. We waited by the phone for news of assignments. Peter and I had asked for the West, thinking of beautiful Vancouver and Victoria, where the rich English retire to.

Instead, we were assigned to Dafoe, Saskatchewan in the West, but in the middle of the Prairies! Eva Low
said, "Poor Martha. Her complexion will be ruined with the Prairie sun." Jim Low, by coincidence, had been a banker in Dafoe in earlier years and he knew all about it. Dafoe was a village of 95 souls on the railway, with three grain elevators, a bank, a general store, but no church. We would be going to #2 Bombing and Gunnery School, and Peter would be Aircraft Maintenance Engineer and C/O of Motor Transport. As it turned out, he and his airmen would be responsible for keeping all the cars and trucks going in weather that reached 67 degrees below zero. And all supplies came in by truck from 13 miles away at Dafoe, where they came to by train. Hundreds of people could starve if the trucks couldn't get started.

After we'd stored our furniture, we left Montreal in June and drove to Southern Indiana for Peter's leave. Then it was 1600 miles from my parents' home in Indiana to Dafoe, Saskatchewan. We allowed four days for the trip, stopping to see my sister in South Bend and nearly suffocating in the only tourist cabin we could find in Rochester, Minnesota, because we left a space heater on. It filled the room with carbon monoxide and we couldn't get the window or door open for some anxious minutes.

We had picked a secondary road through North Dakota, and in that state it meant it was not even gravel. It rained all day and soon the mud road had only two furrows in it. When we met a car, the one who was most chicken at the last moment would get out of the ruts and gun the car, hoping to get it back on the road. We had 85 miles of this and part of it was after dark, so it was a relief to reach Fessenden, N.D., a small village with a tiny hotel and about 500 inhabitants.

After dinner there and booking a room, we investigated a spirited crowd in the hotel's tavern where there was dancing. There were many rough-looking men dressed like cowboys, and some of them had guns in holsters. What a nice touch of the Old West, we thought. But all at once an argument broke loose over a woman, and one of the men pulled out a gun, and we left immediately.

Saskatchewan is directly North of Montana, so from North Dakota we angled across the border, going farther West. A hundred miles north of the border we came to Regina, Saskatchewan. It was a fairly large city, and we passed the headquarters of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and saw the men in red uniforms seated on their horses and drilling in a field. Later, we would see them passing through Dafoe on business.

It was another 100 miles North to Dafoe, so we were getting close to the timberline. A few miles before we reached Dafoe, we had a flat tire, and Peter walked back for a mile or so to get help, leaving me with the car.
When he told the man where the car was parked under a tree, the man said "I know just where it is. There's only one tree between here and Dafoe."

Dafoe was quite a let-down, even though we had been warned by Jim Low. Even the two Quill Lakes that looked so nice and blue on the map, were so caustic, that white salts evaporated from the hard water and lay on the shore like white sand. The lakes were good for nothing excepting the bombing and gunnery that would be safely done there by the RCAF School that we were going to. Politicians are at work, too, in Canada, and the government had located the station half-way between Watson, 13 miles to the North, and Dafoe, 13 miles to the south, making it very inconvenient for everyone, but satisfying the local residents.

After checking in at the station, Peter drove us to Watson, where there was a tiny hotel without running water or electricity. The powder room for women AND men was a chemical watercloset for all, on the second floor.

We had a water pitcher and a washbowl in our room and I made the terrible mistake of washing my hair in it, as I was not able to rinse the soap or the hard water out of it. The mosquitoes were awful in Watson and huge, but the Chinese restaurant was good. In Canada, if there is one restaurant in a village (Watson had about l00 people), it will be Chinese, and they will always have celery, even if they don't have green pieces of any other vegetable. The Chinese came to Canada when the Canadian Pacific Railway was built and they were laborers.

There was a good general store in Watson, and some of the officers and wives lived in town, but we were having a one-room house built for us in Boom Town, across from the RCAF station. The house was 10 feet by 20 feet and was actually a granary for wheat, built on sledges so that it could be easily moved to another spot to store wheat when the war was over. Peter had an extra room built onto ours that was 6 by 6 feet and it was to house the woodstove for cooking and heating.

When we moved in, a few days later, the house was unpainted and there was no foundation, which didn't matter in summer, but it would be a cold problem in winter. The cookstove had four "burners" or plates, but only one could be removed to stir and build the fire. The oven had no racks and the oven door had no catch, so that when I baked an apple pie - the best I ever baked - I put firewood in the oven for a rack and propped the door closed with another stick of wood. A fire was difficult to build because wood was scarce and it was VERY GREEN. All the aged wood had been used up. It cost $6 for half a cord of wood when you could get it. We had a pot-bellied heating
stove in the main room that had no firebrick lining, so a fire would not last. Also, we had no coal, so in winter we had to take turns getting up every two hours to put more wood on or freeze to death.

We had two coal oil lamps, one an Aladdin that we splurged on, as it had a mantle and gave better light. We couldn't have a radio until we sent for a battery operated one from Eaton's. It took an A and a B battery and was cumbersome and expensive. If we had only had today's transister, cheap radios! It was in Dafoe that I first heard Bing Crosby sing, "White Christmas". Even then, I knew it was destined to be a hit.

Our powder room was a Chic-Sale shack in the back yard among our birch trees. We had the only trees in Boom Town. It was very private and a good thing, as the privy had no door, so that you could look out and locate the wild strawberries in the woods before going back to the house. In winter we added a chamber pot for under the bed, as it was not pleasant to light a lamp, put on a coat and boots, and walk to the outdoor convenience when the temperature was anywhere from 30 degrees to 67 degrees below zero.

Everything was scarce and the largest pan we had was a dishpan. The laundry had to be done in it and in winter, when we had to use flannelette sheets, the sheet would absorb all the water in the pan! We slept in Dr. Denton's sent by my mother. Water was delivered twice a week by a horse-drawn tank wagon. It cost 5 cents per pail and our water tank held 6 buckets. That had to last until the water man came again. In between I collected rain water in a barrel to wash our hair. On water days, the fresh water tasted great!

A farmer named Mr. Seaman came every morning with milk, which was unpasteurized, so that it spoiled before noon in summer, as our only refrigerator was a hole we dug in the ground and lined with boards. The milk had to be drunk for breakfast or be made into something that would keep because it was cooked. I don't know why I never pasteurized the milk myself by boiling it. Perhaps I hated to build a fire in the summer heat.

Many days in summer it was close to l00 degrees in the shade, and if it was my turn to have the officers' wives for our Red Cross knitting group, I would have to build a fire in the cookstove to make tea. Of course everyone else had to also, until Ed Rogerson scrounged a special room for us in the officers' mess, where we had running water and electricity, and a REAL bathroom once a week.

Saturday dinner was wives' night at the mess, and we had FANTASTIC dinners. We wore long dinner gowns, as
there was dancing later, and on a muddy or snowy day we wore boots and carried our dancing slippers. The C/O would always toast the King and the President of the United States before dinner began, and it was all quite formal. When there were wines served, it was because every officer had turned his liquor ration card in to the mess and also his food card. The men, like Peter, who ate meals in their homes had to split the wife's ration card to feed two persons.

The dances were interesting because many of the officers were from Australia and New Zealand, as well as from England. Their accents were different and their conversations were unusual and refreshing.

The rent for our house was $40 per month. A lot of the people thought this was astronomical, and we had a campaign to educate the politicians to have it changed. I became a correspondent for the Saskatoon newspaper, writing articles about Boom Town, and we all wrote letters to the editor. We soon had action and our rent was reduced to $8, which was all the house was worth. Then we saved money like mad!

One of our problems in the house was that we discovered mice one evening. We baited a trap with cheese and immediately it snapped. Peter held the mouse delicately by the tail and disposed of it. By the seventh mouse in an hour, he was getting very professional about it. That was the last mouse, as Mr. Seaman brought us a kitten that we named Skeeter. He was white with black spots and he had a black moustache, just like Adolf Hitler's.

Our C/O's wife was Gee for Greta Lowe-Holmes, a member of the English gentry. Gee was beautiful and lovely, but she had no idea how to handle her beautiful 6 year old son, so he was a real terror. Up to that time in Dafoe, he had been in the care of a nanny. Gee informed the officers' wives' group that a celebrity was coming soon to visit, and that we might need some instruction, since the visitor was ROYALTY. Of course it was to be Princess Alice of Athlone. Gee showed us how to curtsey. She told us we were never to turn our back on royalty and merely to back away. Never to change the subject, and I don't know what all. I didn't listen too carefully, as I didn't intend to show up, having already seen Princess Alice in Toronto. But the Protestant padre's wife, who was very shy and retiring, asked me if I would please go with her, and I agreed.

When we got to the officers' mess, Gee once more briefed us. She said, "Line up according to your husband's rank. I'll be first as the C/O's wife and Wing Commander, Squadron Leaders' wives next, Flight
Lieutenants' wives next, Flying officers' wives next, and then the Pilot Officers' wives." That made me last in the line. Princess Alice was to enter and greet Gee first and me last. Lo and behold, the Princess came into the wrong door and got ME FIRST, and I was the one who had to remember how to curtsey and all the rest. Gee nearly flipped, but no one let on that an error had been made.

Mostly we had a good time at Dafoe and knew it would be a time to remember. There was an open sewer down Officer's Row, along the road, but gorgeous wild pink roses grew abundantly out of it. Magpies flew everywhere and were spectacular in their black and white garb. On 48 hour passes, Peter and I would take walks around the country and carry a lunch. The horizon was perfectly flat and the only scenery was fields of wheat and blue flax. Wildflowers were abundant and I painted water colors of them, as they were so different from our wild flowers.

Once we took the train to Saskatoon for a "48". We stayed in the hotel and took six baths a day, because we couldn't take running water baths at home.

Once a month we could use our rationed gasoline to take 5 or 6 people into Watson to shop. That was a real event. Once we went to see a woman who did beautiful cut- work embroidery. I bought a linen luncheon set for $5. She was a Ducaboor, of Russian descent. There are lots of Ducaboors in Saskatchewan.

The business of the RCAF station went on all around us. The drogue planes, painted in stripes like Oxydol boxes and were called Lysanders, would pass over our house pulling a target in the air, headed for Quill Lakes. A Fairey Battle would follow to practice gunnery over the lakes. One day a pilot was in trouble and he dumped his gasoline over Boom Town. With all our fires going, it was a very dangerous thing to do. There were crashes that Peter was called to in the middle of the night. And we would spend the night getting his uniform presentable again. Of course to heat the irons for pressing or ironing, I had to build a fire first. Some of the wives had an alcohol iron that could be lighted for heat, but I never had one of those. I had 3 plain irons that took turns heating on the stove.

We had tragedies. One neighbor's house caught on fire and burned to the ground at 30 degrees below zero. The station's firefighters came and fought it and nearly froze to death. One airman, his wife, and two children died from carbon monoxide because their house was too airtight with the stove burning wood. They lived two doors from us. In winter we had only 5 hours of daylight - 10 am to 3 pm. In summer it was light from 3 am until l0pm at night.

The only fresh meat we had in summer, because the grocer didn't have refrigeration, was partridge, prairie chicken, or pheasant that some friend had shot for us.

After eighteen months in Dafoe it was our turn to be posted. Peter was to go overseas with #39 Reconnaisance Wing, departing from Halifax for England to be attached to the RAF. We had a few days left at Dafoe and we decided to blow our Canadian gasoline ration tickets on a trip to Prince Albert, about l00 miles north, above the timber- line. My own concern was that I would not have a child of Peter's, should he fail to come back. I had lost two, less than full-term infants, but I decided that this was the time to think about it again.

It was sad to leave our friends at #2 Bombing and Gunnery School, but we drove what few belongings we had - camera, silverware, my Fanny Farmer cook book, our golf clubs, and clothing - back to Indiana for Peter's leave. By the time we drove him to Indianapolis to catch his train to Halifax, we knew that he might have an heir by the middle of May. I remained in Indiana with my parents.

To shorten a long story, Peter's voyage across the Atlantic was very dangerous and it took l6 days. On arrival in England he had a serious case of pneumonia that hospitalized him. But I never knew about it until the war was over. I sent him a letter saying that Heather Jane Low had been born on May ll, l944, but he didn't receive it for six weeks, as he had gone to the continent by glider plane on D-Day plus 1 and he was ahead of the lines most of the time doing reconnaisance work with his Wing. The first time I heard from him after Heather's birth was on the Fourth of July weekend to say that he had survived the invasion and that he had received the happy news about Heather. I received l3 letters in one day. In between, I tuned in CBL, Toronto's radio station, to hear Lorne Greene give the ll o'clock news, so I could know what the RCAF was doing. They were seldom mentioned in the American papers.

Peter was mustered out of the RCAF in December, l945. He had been scheduled for China-Burma-India until the Japanese war was over. He was a Flight Lieutenant and had been recommended for Squadron Leader. I met him in Montreal and we were in Indiana for Christmas. He went back to work at Alcoa and it was seven months before we could find a place to live, as housing was so short. We moved to Natrona Heights on July 4, l946. I have always felt it was a happy accident that we came to Natrona Heights, for I have loved the people I met in this area.