ABSTRACT
Okay, I was born in Regina, Canada. My father was a hardware merchant in town, fairly prosperous. It was a small city then of about forty thousand. He'd never gone beyond ninth grade in school. He had to go out and get a job to support his mother because his father had died, left the family pretty destitute. This was in St. Mary's, in Ontario, and he'd learned the hardware business and eventually had his own hardware store in Regina. During World War I, he was very successful. It was a time when farmers were selling wheat and buying everything, and he did pretty well. He married my mother, who was a nurse from Caledonia, near Hamilton, in 1906. He was a Presbyterian, but he wasn't working very hard at it. She was the Church of England type and a little more devout than he. And I guess religion had a good deal to do with my early childhood. I remember I was taught to pray at night before I went to sleep. I stopped doing that by the time I was about ten or eleven. But we weren't devout in any particular church. We didn't go to church very often. I didn't read the Bible much. I didn't understand it, except the New Testament, which the family was pretty fond of. We used to read the passages in the New Testament that have the ethical principles of Christianity very clearly stated. You know, treatment of the poor, the formula for primitive socialism is in there. I guess that made an early imprint in my mind.
