Participant B Interview

The participant has requested to have his name taken off the record.

For the sake of preserving his wishes, the participant will hence worth will be referred to as "Participant B." ■ Jump to the full interview

A bird’s eye view of the city which I was unable to get a piece for comparison however it still does give an impression to what the city would have been like when Participant B was growing up.

Participant B was born and raised within the town of Guelph. He has lived in and around Guelph his whole life working as a machinist, amongst other trade jobs as well. He was born in 1949, placing him right in the middle of the growth that Guelph had experienced. During that time the town would go through a boom in population and industry. (Participant B, 00:45) He had watched as the down had developed and expanded throughout the years, talking about how he and a few friends used to watch the construction workers as they worked on numerous different projects. He cites this as one of the reason he had an interest in practical work saying that:

“I’d hangout at the jobsites, ask questions. [pause] Then there, there was only one guy who would say go away, go away. The of them were… yeah you can watch just don’t get in the way, y’know, I respected that. That’s how I learned most things.” (Participant B, 18:17)

During the interview, we had discussed what Guelph was like as he remembered it,[1] observations made about the changes including how most of the activity was with the downtown core (Participant B, 02:57), a lack of a mall (Participant B, 02:52) and the changes such as the what was once the fire hall becoming the city hall (Participant B 03:49).

The discussion on the changes that Guelph had undergone gave me an idea to have the comparisons of what Guelph was like from when Participant B was growing up and to what it is like now. I had pulled some photos of what Guelph used to look like from the Guelph Public Library Archives, and had then gone out to take photos of the same location in order to possibly illustrate what has changed and what had stayed the same. in order to possibly illustrate what has changed and what had stayed the same in order to add an illustrative element to Participant B’s oral history.[2],[3]

Wyndham Street in 1960 (left) compared to Wyndham Street in 2019 (right).

St. George Square in 1965 (left) compared to St. George Square in 2019 (right).

The images showcase little ways in which Guelph has changed, examples being the larges signs that are attached to the building that are now “La Reina” and “Frank and Stein's,” and the building across from where the photo was taken on St. George Square is now a Scotiabank. These changes are relatively minor and would be expected over the fifty-year period. It is interesting to note than that most of the buildings are the same within the photographs taken. These images are meant to complement the history of what Participant B is discussing within the interview, the synthesis of the two mediums to take the oral history out of the hypothetical[4] and back them with substantive images to corroborate what is said. The synthesis does not provide one with and with an understanding of the event that occurred as a written source would[5] but instead convey a more atmospheric understanding to what the town would have been like.

Despite this, there is the fact that the imagines do not show a dramatic change within the town, it should be kept in mind that these are the some of the most populace areas within the oldest part of the town itself. The images do showcase a subtle change however, not just the ones on the buildings but in the cars, and the camera that the photo is taken with. We see changes within the technology around us and those in turn have the capacity to affect how we see the town and its history as well.

Other topics where discussed during the interview included some of the activities that he had gotten up to while living in Guelph. When he was young he been big into road racing or cross country, which he had fond experiences with, remembering his time participating in races in locations such as Hamilton and Toronto. He discusses having consistently being placed within the top 10 within the races but never being able to place first. Other races he talks about participating in are ones that used to happen along Wyndham Street (see above) every year, which showcases an event that the city of Guelph no longer runs anymore, possibly due to the expansion that the town had undergone or just simply that it stopped happening as different people stopped trying to run it every year. He also mentions that as he got older him and his friends would spend their time at the pool bars that they used to have in Guelph, this speaks to something else that was lost between then and now as the downtown no longer has any dedicated pool bars any more. Both of these stories showcase ways in which Guelph has transformed over the years.

Participant B had not spent his entire life in Guelph however he had taken a trip out to British Columbia by himself when he was 18 after a few of his friends had bailed on him. He had then spent the next few months hitchhiking his way back to Guelph often times finding work on farms for the day and getting paid for it allowing to continue on his trail back. During this time, he would come to work as a miner for a few months, stories he recounted about his time working there paint a grim and precarious picture, telling of some of the accidents he had seen while working there and how he did not want to stick around and this would spur him on to continue back on his journey to Guelph.

Fast forwarding a little bit into the interview and the discussion of work and education are brought up again. Participant B had worked on the side doing renovations for people’s basements in Guelph. He had decided not to a trades school or to take up an apprenticeship as he felt that he could have learned more simply from doing, making mistakes, and then learning from those mistakes. As a result of this however he found that the majority of the work he would have to do would have been under the table. The skills he had learned from this side venture would help him when he moved to Ariss right outside of Guelph with his wife and had fixed up the home they had bought. The house would be where he resided up until moving to the Norfolk Manor.

The stories of Participant B life and the ways that they are presented here can hopefully illuminate the process of change and development in a relatively localized way.[6] Through this we can see the ways in which; the town has changed throughout the years, what does and does not remain the same, and how other elements such as technology may affect how we may remember places and how it changes are perception to what has changed. An oral history such as this can provide an insight into what a town was like, the ways in which it has changed and how we as the listener may perceive it going forward.

The full interview with Participant B can be found here.

Click here to read the interviewer, Sebastian Hutton's page and reflection on this interview.

Endnotes

[1] Field, Sean. “Memory and History: Understanding Memory as Source and Subject ed. by Joan Tumblety (review).” Oral History Review 42, no. 1 (2015). https://muse-jhu-edu.subzero.lib.uoguelph.ca/article/580907.

[2] Portelli, Alessandro. “The Peculiarities of Oral History.” History Workshop Journal 12 no. 1 (1981). https://doi-org.subzero.lib.uoguelph.ca/10.1093/hwj/12.1.96.

[3] Zembrzycki, Stacey. “Sharing Authority with Baba.” Journal of Canadian Studies 43, no. 1 (2009). https://doi.org/10.3138/jcs.43.1.219.

[4] Portelli, “The Peculiarities of Oral History.”

[5] Becker, Carl L. Everyman His Own Historian. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1966.

[6] Sheftel, Anna and Stacey Zembrzycki. “Who’s Afraid of Oral History? Fifty Years of Debates and Anxiety about Ethics.” The Oral History Review 43 no. 2 (2016). muse.jhu.edu/article/631338.