Letter: The Homeless at Our Door — Then and Now
Suzanne Sloan on her mother's Winnipeg house in the 1930s, the people who slept on its basement floor, and what that history asks of us now.
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
I commend Tamara Sargent on her letter to readers of The Owen Sound Current, concerning the conditions and challenges to our city’s homeless. They are not all miscreants, addicts, and wanton polluters as some wish to believe.
In fact, probably the majority are simply casualties of the times, just as were the thousands of hobos of the Great Depression of the 1930s.
It was during that time my father, a mining engineer, was unemployed for two years. When the company he had worked for did call him back he was sent to Winnipeg to hire a crew, and purchase equipment to be flown into the northern wilderness to open a mine.
He rented a house and left his pregnant wife and infant son in Winnipeg, instructing her to advertise for a nanny/companion. Although my mother had 38 replies to her ad, some with glowing references, Beatrice, a sixteen-year-old hobo, was hired.
Beatrice and her two brothers were the oldest children of a farm family on the Canadian prairies — the dust bowl, as it was known, where drought had racked the land and ruined the crops. Desperate to feed themselves and their other children, those three were sent away, to ride the rails, in search of work.
They had already hopped on and off freight trains from Saskatchewan to the Maritimes, and back to Winnipeg where Beatrice saw my mother’s ad in a discarded newspaper. She applied and her obvious love of babies got her the job.
Shortly after, I was born.
As my mother later told me, many homes were broken into by desperate hobos seeking food and shelter. Never ours. Beatrice’s brothers, still riding the rails, spread the word of their sister’s good fortune. Her Winnipeg address brought many homeless to our door. Beatrice took command, offering a meal in return for snow shoveling, wood chopping and other household needs.
It was one night when the house was cold, Mother went to the basement to stoke the furnace, only to count 17 homeless sleeping on the floor. The word had spread that hers was a safe house, understanding of their need. Beatrice always sent them on their way after breakfast and chores were done, with a hard boiled egg in their pocket.
‘That was another time,’ you might say.
‘That would never happen today!’
But how quickly the tides of time can change. With global warming, political unrest, tariffs, and AI replacing many tech workers, it is all too easy to foresee loss of employment increasing the number of unhoused. With the lack of a permanent address, how will they then find work?
History repeats itself in many ways. Do not malign the homeless before you understand their story and their need. Pressure politicians to speed up housing permits and donate time or money if you can, so those homeless have a roof over their heads and an identity once more.
Suzanne Sloan
Letters to the Editor do not necessarily reflect the opinions or beliefs of The Owen Sound Current and its editor or publisher.
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Many thanks Suzanne for taking the time to write this moving letter. I believe it is prescient. Our society is indeed facing big trouble. It is important to acknowledge with gratitude those who are working in the homeless and drug addiction field. And those trying to get more affordable housing built, and those feeding the hungry at O'Share.
But as your letter reminds us, there is an informal role for everyone - residents and businesses - in making life a little less miserable for those caught up in this nightmare. Small kindnesses matter.
But so does the big systemic picture. Both those who look away and those who try to do their best are frustrated by the lack of County and Provincial (and Federal) action. We can all do more to push our elected representatives: MPP Vickers, MP Ruff and our city councillors.