Although nobody I asked recalled Alex ever saying so, her friends seemed to think that wanting to be a stewardess might, indeed, have been her motive in applying for nursing school. Otherwise, it’s hard for me to understand now why somebody like her, a girl eager for life and freedom, would have chosen to do nurses’ training. Nursing students had to live in dormitories, and follow strict curfews and rules of conduct; nurses’ training was a little like joining the army, so rigid was the hospital hierarchy, with doctors at the top of the medical staff, and student nurses and orderlies at the bottom, and a parallel structure in the non-medical with managers and staff at the top, and below them, ward clerks, kitchen and laundry staff, and cleaners. The nursing program was designed to keep the trainees children, not only through the requirement of living in a dorm and being in by ten on weekdays and eleven on weekends, but through the uniforms themselves, which signalled rank, and which also were designed to disguise the blossoming bodies of these young women, and which even hinted, sternly, of the nunnery.
Trainees wore caps simplified from the days of Florence Nightingale, and they were starched until they were stiff and pinned firmly to the back of the head. At City Hospital the uniform was a finely striped, girlish, pink-and-white full-skirted dress with a stiffly starched white bib apron worn over it, and with white cuffs and collars, like the cap, starched until they could stand alone. They must have been uncomfortable to wear, and were the height of impracticality as they were required to be pristine at all times, meaning endless washing, starching, and ironing by the hospital laundry. But not only were they a proud emblem of office, they acted also to establish a limit, a buffer zone, between nurse and patient. I can only think that this, too, had to have stemmed from the Florence Nightingale era when nursing was viewed as most improper work for young women.
There were attractions, however, for young Saskatchewan women to enter nursing training rather than university. Girls lived free in the dormitories, and their uniforms and other necessities were provided, while families of university students had to pay for their children’s room and board, as well as for tuition, fees, and textbooks. A number of young women must have entered the nursing profession because their parents were anxious for them to have training “to fall back on,” but couldn’t afford to send them to secretarial school or to college, and this may have been one of the reasons that a girl as clever as Alex didn’t acquire a university degree. Or else, bright as Alex was, and she was very bright indeed, academics was simply not where her interests lay.
Alex wouldn’t have known it when she set off for Yorkton in the fall of 1958 to join her class of fifteen young nurses in training, but soon those Victorian dorms would be history. The reason that young women didn’t have to pay tuition and got their room and board free was that the three-year program included, in the end, one full year of providing virtually free labour to the hospital where they trained. As one former nursing instructor in those days told me, a touch of the old anger still in her voice,”The hospital service component always had a way of taking precedence over the teaching component.” But already, senior nurses were meeting with government health committees to begin a movement to take control of their own professional training.
Eventually, nursing training would be severed from hospitals, the program would become two years instead of three, and the dorms would be shut down. When Alex entered training she was part of the transition program where teaching was centralized, and for a three- to six-month period each year all the students would go to either Regina or Saskatoon to take classes, where they could devote themselves to their studies and not have to work in hospitals as well. I asked several nurses whether Alex and her class would have gone to Regina or Saskatoon—Yorkton is closer to Regina—but some said one, and some the other. In any case, her program was three years long, and aside from during the centralized teaching period, she was in Yorkton from the fall of 1958 into the summer of 1961.
Alex’s second-oldest sister, Pearl, lived in Yorkton with her husband and children, and sometimes Alex and her girlfriends would stay overnight with them when they had stayed out too late and missed their curfew. More likely, though, they had all signed out to spend the night at Pearl’s—whether Pearl knew this or not—because missing a curfew was a serious business, one that, if done too often, could get you sent home. (In the early fifties, when my mother caught those nurses sneaking in the window at the sanitarium long after curfew, all of the nursing and sanatarium hierarchy were involved in the disciplinary action.)
Alex would drop in to visit Pearl and her nieces and nephews sometimes by herself, and sometimes she also must have babysat for Pearl’s children. During this period, after having become close to her older sister Ann—five years older—in the last years at home, before Ann left for good, and then close to her oldest sister, Marie—eighteen or so years older—during the four years of high school when Alex lived with her in Saskatoon, she now began to grow closer to Pearl. Alex’s was a close-knit family, despite the ten children and the large differences in age between the oldest and Alex, the youngest, and it’s clear that Alex was welcomed, protected, and loved by her big sisters, and probably also bossed by them, as they acted as stand-ins for her parents.
I found this dictum in the Yorkton nursing school’s yearbook for 1960, when Alex was in her second year there:
Golden Rule for Nurses
Do unto others as ye would
That others do unto thy mother,
Angels themselves can do no more.
And yet, when she graduated, instead of applying to an airline—which nobody seems to have heard of her doing—Alex took a job nursing, and so I am inclined to think that in the three years after high school, the idea of stewardessing began to seem less attractive. Perhaps that was because after going through the very hard work that nursing training was in those days, she had begun to value her profession for itself, and to want to practise it not just when there was a plane crash, or when some businessman had too much to drink and needed an aspirin. Maybe the delight in being a beauty queen and the attentions of so many young men had confused her. Or, maybe she had just been biding her time, trying to sort out all the imperatives we thought we had no choice about, and to find what it was she really wanted, how much she would risk, or dare.
In those years Alex blossomed into a very attractive young woman, and men began to pursue her. Her family thinks that she had no special boyfriend, but chose to go out in gangs of girls and boys, but others remember her dating regularly. One Yorkton man I talked to remembered going out on double dates with Alex and her escort, and his girlfriend, who was also a student nurse in Alex’s class. He described Alex as “cuddly,” a girl who thought nothing of hugging men she knew if she ran into them on the street, or at a party, long before hugging was the commonplace it is today. She was little, he told me, and with a cute figure (having slimmed down by then), and men flocked around her. After thinking for a moment, he added that she was perhaps more naïve than the other girls. After another pause, and with some emotion (common among the men who had known her when telling me about her), he said, “I always thought of her as a precious little jewel.”
Everybody describes her vivacity, her enthusiasm, and her general delight in being alive, and nearly everyone, both men and women, seems to have liked her, and enjoyed her company. One nurse, though, who had trained when Alex did, remarked to me that she always thought of Alex as one of those girls who “could do no wrong,” meaning that she was recognized by everybody as something special and perhaps got away with things other girls couldn’t have, that she was sometimes treated with special consideration. Not everyone shared that view. One of her nursing instructors, Alice Bittner, now retired but for many years supervisor of the operating rooms at the Yorkton hospital, who took the students on a three-month rotation there, recalled Alex as not standing out in any way as a student nurse, but as a pleasant, willing, quick, and hard-working “little girl.”
Although I never did find one person who had disliked Alex—or, at least, would say so—one of the women who also grew up in Endeavour and graduated from the same nursing school a couple of years after Alex did, remarked, “Every class had one of those girls: very pretty, lots of boyfriends, always cheerful.” She went on to say that she didn’t think that Alex had had a lot of close girlfriends. “Other girls didn’t want to get too close to a girl so pretty, one all the boys wanted to be with. She went out in a group; she was always cheerful and fun, but I don’t believe she had any really close friends.” Alex’s 1960 yearbook class note reads,
Being in by 10—what a shame
Grand little nurse she’s going to be,
For she is our Queen you see.
As if to underline the pleasant, good-spirited and capable young woman she undeniably was, in 1961 when she was still in training in Yorkton, the family’s priest, Reverend B. Shwartz, published an article about her in the Ukrainian Herald, in which he praised her for being an exemplar of Ukrainian girlhood, in that she spoke the language, attended church faithfully, was making something of herself. Alex, he wrote, brought respect and honour to her parents and her family, and to Ukrainian society as a whole. It was perfectly true that Alex was all these things, but nonetheless it was a commonplace for Ukrainian girls to be fluent in Ukrainian and to be churchgoers in an age when most people went to church, and often, as members of the first Canadian-born generation, their families worked hard to be sure their children acquired an education. This article was written, I think, after she had been singled out as “special” by winning her first beauty contest. I can’t help but suspect that the good priest, as with all the men who saw her, was charmed by that exceptionally pretty face.
It seems to me, though, a girl of the same time, that this must also have been, if only unconsciously, confusing to her: on the one hand, to be achieving independence at last and to be loving every second of it, to feel the world opening up to her, and on the other, to be celebrated as an exemplar of a severely traditional view of womanhood. Many girls of that period remember well this inner war.
I was only eighteen and nineteen when I went to work for five months each of two summers at the same hospital where Alex would start her career as a nurse. I was a summer-replacement ward clerk and I rotated for two days on each ward to fill in for people on vacation. This included, in my second summer, the operating room, a terrifying place with rituals I had no notion of, a place, I now think, I probably should never have been—not because I couldn’t cope with the actual work I was supposed to be doing (although sometimes I couldn’t) but because I was completely ignorant of simple medical matters that operating staff needed to know. I remember the day that a doctor had to take the phone from my hand—I was supposed to be booking surgeries—and say “gastroenteroscomy” for me because I’d never seen the word before.
On all the other wards it was my mundane task to deliver diet cards to each patient each day, which they would—if they were able—fill out and return to me. There were rules about what rooms I could enter with or without knocking, and what signs I could safely ignore, but once I walked in on an elderly man who was dying of bowel cancer, and a senior student nurse who was changing his dressings. When I pulled back the curtain surrounding his bed to slip through, I saw his pain, I saw the bloody, diseased abdomen, I saw the old man seeing my shock, and especially, the way he looked away from my appalled face with a kind of hopeless resignation, to stare at the ceiling. On another occasion I was told to deliver a message to a doctor who was in a room with a patient who had just suddenly, virtually inexplicably, died. I remember the doctor sitting in the nursing station with the chart open on his lap and saying plaintively, painfully, to no one, “But I just saw him; I was just here. As he stood with family by the bed, I couldn’t stop myself from staring at my first dead human being.
And there was the day a four-year-old boy was brought in unconscious and alone, to the pediatric ward. All that long summer afternoon a senior intern on the other side of the glass sheet between the boy’s crib and my chair and desk worked to save the child’s life, as we gradually learned that he was a foster child, that he had eaten fertilizer left out on the lawn, and that a neighbour had found him and called an ambulance. The intern set up intravenous drips of mysterious substances, he discussed in muted tones what to do with staff who came round, he gave injections, he slapped the boy’s face gently and called his name again and again; his anguish was controlled, but palpable. Hours later, the child never having regained consciousness, the intern gave up. The child was dead.
I saw other things: a woman recovering from a beating by her husband so bad that she didn’t leave her bed for a week, a man to whom she would soon return, the nurses talking about her in hushed tones in the nursing station; the nurse who wore long-sleeved sweaters over her white uniform even in summer to hide the big black bruises on her arms; the doctor talking to the police on the phone in the ward office where I sat diligently putting blood pressures and temperatures into charts for a woman who had come in claiming she’d been raped, and him telling the police officer on the phone that she’d had “multiple” intercourse, the implication being that she was—probably—a prostitute. Apparently she was beneath consideration; she would get no help, sympathy, or justice.
I was merely a summer-replacement ward clerk, and I saw things I will never forget; I saw them when I was as young and green as anyone could possibly be, and I saw them without support or explanation. The things I saw changed me forever. How very much harder for young women such as Alex and her classmates, who would be the ones with their gloved hands inside that raw, bloody abdomen, who would be handing equipment to the senior resident, and cleaning the befouled bed afterwards, and for whom it would be mandatory not to show their fear or their horror. What a bizarre notion—that they were “little girls,” that they had to be guarded and protected, kept virginal and under control, even as they were being taught to gain rigid control over their own instincts and emotions, including revulsion and compassion, even as they were companions to suffering and death.
I have said that I remembered Alex as a plain girl, and that others remember her as having a pleasant face, but that no one who went to high school with her would describe her during those days as a beauty, or saw any reason to expect that she would soon become one. But a beauty queen she definitely was. First, in 1960 she was chosen by her own Student Nurses’ Associations to represent them in the Kinette’s Ice Carnival in Yorkton. She won, and was named the Queen of the Ice Carnival. She was then picked by a local service club, who named her Yorkton Wheat Queen, to represent the city of Yorkton in the 1960 Saskatchewan Wheat Queen competition; there she was runner-up. Less than a year later, in 1961, after she had graduated from nursing and had returned to Saskatoon to live, her sister Marie and others, without telling her they had done so, entered her in a Saskatoon radio station’s beauty competition being held to promote the upcoming concert by a not-yet-famous American country-and-western singer named Johnny Cash.
Alex was chosen to be his “Girl in Saskatoon,” and in front of fifteen hundred people in the Saskatoon arena she was crowned, given an armful of long-stemmed red roses, and then she smiled up at Cash as he sang “The Girl in Saskatoon” to her. It was a humorous song, but in the newspaper photo of Alex holding her flowers and gazing, starry-eyed, up at him, it’s apparent she hadn’t noticed the silly chorus: “I’m freezin’ but I’m burnin’ for the girl in Saskatoon.” (I am told that when Cash was informed that his pretty “Girl in Saskatoon” had been murdered, he never again sang that song.)
I know that I must have seen in the newspaper that Alex had been chosen to be Cash’s “Girl in Saskatoon,” but I have no memory of it. Maybe I ignored the account because by that time I cared only about jazz, or maybe I saw it but didn’t recognize that pretty girl smiling up at Cash as someone I’d once known. Not having read the article, I wouldn’t have known that Alex had moved back to the city, and anyway, my focus was the university campus, while hers was City Hospital. The wide river flowed between them; our paths would not have crossed.
I have wondered about this transformation of Alex’s from ordinary-looking to beautiful, more than I have wondered about any other of the many unknowable details of her inner life. She was a short, dark, plump, pleasant, but essentially ordinary girl much like all the several hundred others of us in high school, and suddenly, only a year or two later, she was a girl so pretty she became the Yorkton Wheat Queen. Some of it is easy to see: she lost weight, and with her new, attractive body she grew more self-confident, more mature.
Her face and body were not the material of beauty queens of the period. Blondes were the movies’ favourite, and Alex was dark—she had dark eyes, dark hair, and she lacked the greatly admired, pale complexion of the blonde. Her face (by this time) was heart-shaped, rather than the classic oval we’d all been taught was most beautiful, and although she had a small nose, a dainty chin, and an exquisitely shaped, full mouth, she lacked the perfect, unapproachable, willowy beauty of a Grace Kelly. The category Alex fell into was the same one that the queen-of-cute, Debbie Reynolds, belonged to, as did the very blonde, pretty, baby-faced Sandra Dee and Carol Lynley.
I think that her beauty-queen-calibre looks stemmed more from the rich colour in her face, from the brightness in her eyes, and from the glow of excitement and pleasure that she could not help giving off, than from any perfection of form, although that was present too. She hadn’t expected any of this; she wasn’t raised to this. She had been brought up to be decent, hard-working, and responsible, and not to assume that life owed her more. Her character shone through that pretty face, her surprise at such wonderful good fortune, and the hope that went with it for a dazzling future. This, rather than that overweening pride and self-awareness in their own good looks that you sometimes see in the faces of famous beauties as they pose, in a practised way, for the camera.
In a widely circulated newspaper photo of her sitting on the hood of a car, her left arm propping her into a sitting position, her left leg stretched out before her, her right leg bent at the knee, her gaze directed away from the camera—you can almost hear the photographer saying, “Good, now lift your chin, a little more, more—that’s it!” before he snapped the shutter. Her right arm is extended straight from her shoulder and downward (she wears a wide bracelet on her wrist) so that her hand rests, fingers spread, on the shin of her right leg, and it is easy to see that the sophisticated wartime-pin-up pose designed to emphasize her slender waist and nicely shaped bosom was not one with which she was entirely comfortable. More sophisticated girls would have arched their backs provocatively, gazing not forward but up at the sky—or been persuaded to do so by a photographer—in order to emphasize their breasts. Not Alex; despite the pose, her back is straight, her feminine contours present but not flaunted.
Today the idea of beauty contests looks faintly embarrassing. They had been around since about 1906, the Miss America pageant since 1921 and the Miss Canada, a swimsuit competition, since 1946, but in the fifties they were tamed into decorous events. Every time you turned around, there was another one—Miss Wheat Queen, Miss City of (fill in the blank), Miss Campus Queen, Miss Ice Carnival Queen, Miss Hospitality Industry, Miss Indian Princess—each one beaming sweetly, a triumphant glitter in her eye, her tiara sparkling, her bouquet of American Beauty roses cradled in her arms the way it was assumed she would soon be cradling an infant.
Candace Savage, in her book Beauty Queens: A Playful History, says that young women entered beauty pageants as a way to “break open a life.” That is, so much of the world was then closed off to girls; you could be a wife and mother, you could be a teacher, a nurse, or a secretary, you could clerk in a store, and the chances of living outside that tidy life laid out for you were, for most girls, few to none. But win a beauty contest and suddenly you were something special, you became a star, at least for a little while, you basked in attention, especially that of males, and often of powerful males, who saw you as a prize to be won, and who offered you opportunities you would not otherwise have had. You might even be noticed by the wider world, and find yourself in some exotic place doing exciting things. Or so the contestants hoped.
It seems to me that the very omnipresence of beauty queens and beauty competitions was a response to the prevailing cultural notions about women and their place in society. At some level, I think that this was a genuine effort to show proper reverence for the best in womanhood, an honouring of the idea of female purity, and a natural outgrowth of an age that, the rest of the time, did not much cherish the humanity and individuality of women. But the subtext was always pointing to the perfect “Moms” of television with their hair so well coiffed it looked shellacked, the chaste perfection of their attire, their unflappable calm, their wise love for their husbands and children, and especially, their complete willingness to sacrifice their own lives for them. Implicit in the “Miss Perfect Womanhood” of beauty competitions was the expectation of the marriage and children that would follow, not the science lab the winner would rule, or the law office she would command, the learned tomes she would write, or the art she would create.
I think, too, that beauty competitions were meant (also unconsciously) to replace the lack of real power of women, to offer them some modicum of it. Women might safely be allowed the power their beauty brought them because it was undeniable, an age-old female attribute that had always been cherished, honoured, and rewarded.
But, ultimately, beauty always is in the eye of the beholder; and among forty or fifty beautiful young women there was no sure way to choose who in purely physical terms was the most beautiful. It simply couldn’t be done. Not to mention that Christian ethics, to which respect must be paid, made clear that physical beauty was worth nothing if the soul was not beautiful too. And how to measure the worth of the soul? By asking silly, unanswerable questions of the contestants, by turning a beauty pageant at least partially into a popularity contest, by looking at the quality of the lives the young women claimed to be leading outside the world of the pageant? It is no wonder that before long young women entered beauty contests not as mere ego-fulfillment, but in a calculating way, and while playing the role the pageant organizers required of them, fixed their eyes on the future to which the prizes and the measure of fame might more quickly bring them.
By 1961 Alex had been a beauty queen three times. Even if she didn’t suffer from excessive vanity, she must by then have begun to think of herself as someone special, as someone who had been singled out by life for the best it had to offer. Alex must have come to see herself as a rare flower, and her expectations would have begun to blossom.
The combination of Alex’s good looks and her sheer happiness and innocence were genuine, and everybody who gazed at pictures of her face on the day that her body was found saw that. Saskatoonians who didn’t know her responded to that eagerness and sweetness, and it broke their hearts when they thought of her terrible death. It wasn’t just the fact of its being too early, nor of her small place in the city’s history as the victim of the first murder of its kind, nor even of the unspeakable way she died, in pain and terror, screaming and fighting to live, that made her death unforgettable. It was also that the killer had obliterated the innocent happiness that people saw shining in her face; in his fury he had obliterated her goodness and innocence. People knew that only pure evil could do such a thing, that that was why he had done it: because evil always wants to—has always wanted to—destroy innocence. Alex, only by virtue of her beauty, had gained a measure of fame, and without meaning to, she radiated the aura of someone raised by the gods above the common herd.
In 1959 Alex’s parents celebrated their fortieth wedding anniversary at a Yorkton hall their children rented for the occasion. It was the last time the entire family would be together. By the following year, 1960, when Alex would still have been training and enjoying her life in Yorkton, her parents had sold the farm where they had raised their children, and from which each day for eight years Alex had trudged the two miles to Bear School and two miles back again. They moved to an acreage a couple of miles south of Saskatoon. By that time, her father would have been in his mid-seventies and her mother near that age. After that, in the last year of her training, Alex occasionally would travel the 125 miles from Yorkton to visit her parents near Saskatoon. But after graduation in June 1961, she was hired to work as a nurse at Saskatoon City Hospital, to begin in mid-September, and once again, she would live close to her parents.
The summer of 1961 was a devastating drought year. June was the hottest and driest month ever recorded in western Canada, with an average yield of only 8.5 bushels to the acre. The Wiwcharuks had picked a good time to leave farming. At that time in our history, if farmers in Saskatchewan were doing poorly, the entire province felt it; the whole economy would be affected, and a kind of depression would fall over the countryside, and be felt in the cities too. Only children, able to run in paddling pools in backyards or to spend the long, hot days at public swimming pools in Saskatoon, as well as teenagers whose most serious interest in life was getting a tan, enjoyed the unrelenting heat. If Alex was fortunate in having older siblings who loved her and took care of her, she was lucky, too, in being able to spend much of that baking summer at Marie’s cottage at Emma Lake, helping her with the children and the housework when she wasn’t suntanning or swimming.
It is strange that when she was hired for her first job as a professional nurse at Saskatoon City Hospital, although she had graduated the previous spring, she didn’t have the designation Registered Nurse, or simply R.N., as did her three roommates, all of whom had graduated with her. They would tell the coroner’s jury that Alex was studying for her exams at the time of her death, but it is strange that she was the only one of them not to have acquired those precious initials. She was bright and fully capable of passing her exams if she studied, and the fact that she hadn’t earned the R.N. makes me wonder just how committed to nursing she ultimately was. Clearly, Alex knew her future did not depend on being able to write those two letters after her name. Or maybe already nursing was palling for her and she was dreaming of something else. Or maybe she simply planned to study and to write—and pass—those difficult exams the very next time there was a sitting.
We all viewed our graduation day from our professional training with both great relief and some trepidation that we might have a hard time measuring up in the real world. But we knew, as Alex too must have, that childhood was behind us forever; we would soon be working as professionals with heavy responsibilities, and living, in Alex’s case, for the first time in her life, not with her family, or in a carefully monitored, rule-governed situation but in whatever way she chose and could afford. It looked to all of us, as it must have to Alex, that the world was finally becoming available to us, and that we would have many, many years ahead in which to live out the unknown but satisfying futures we were beginning to make real.
Freedom meant, to us, having our own money and a small apartment, staying out as late as we felt like, maybe even all night, and for some of us, finally, because there was no longer anyone watching our every move, daring to sleep with our boyfriends. When we were in grade twelve the assumption among us was that a girl was still a virgin—except for those few who had “reputations”—and the very few who had proven they were not by becoming pregnant and dropping out of school before they were expelled as “bad influences” on the rest of us. Otherwise, we left high school as virgins. After that, once we were out of our teens, and certainly by the time we were twenty-three, as Alex was at her death, most of us were not. By then, even the most carefully brought up of us, at twenty-three, if we were not married, had become sexually experienced. Not necessarily greatly experienced, but having shaken off the guilt our earlier lives had instilled in us, we had willingly, in some cases even eagerly, given up our virginity.
As to whether Alex was a virgin or not at her death, I found it borderline impossible to even ask the question of people who loved and admired her, and in any case, those who might know, still heavily invested in that fifties mentality which said that a sexually active, unmarried woman is a defiled and shamed woman, would never tell me. Besides, a woman murdered as young as Alex was, forever after, could not be seen as anything but “pure.” And so I didn’t ask, and not having access to the material in the files of the Saskatoon Police Service, I couldn’t find boyfriends to ask, and I couldn’t find out what rumours, scurrilous or otherwise, the police had tracked down to their sources.
By 1960 the first contraceptive pill, Enovid, was in use in the United States. By 1961 Canada had approved it for use across the country, but only for therapeutic purposes (birth control was illegal here until 1969). But sometimes young nurses were asked to participate in drug trials, and who knows but that Alex might have been a part of one of them, and if she had access to contraceptives, the old fear of pregnancy that kept many a girl a virgin would have been alleviated. I wanted to know if she was a virgin or not, because I wanted to build a complete picture of her, I wanted to explore her psyche, to see her as one of us, and yet, because of her beauty, as in a different class. With apologies to those who loved her deeply, and looking only at the probabilities, I suspect that by then she was not. And yet, the possibility remains that even in 1961 when Johnny Cash was singing to her, even in 1962, even at twenty-three when the killer attacked her and raped her, that until that terrible moment, she was a virgin.
By August 1961, within a few weeks of Alex moving back to Saskatoon and beginning her first job as a nurse, I was about to start my fourth year of university and had just been married. My husband and I were both students and therefore poor, and by the spring of 1962 we’d moved from a tiny rented basement apartment on Saskatoon’s east side, across the river again and into a slum apartment above a hardware store on the corner of 20th Street and Avenue A (its name was soon changed to Idylwyld Avenue and the hardware store torn down). Much to my surprise, eight years after leaving it—I had hoped forever—I was back living in what seemed an unchanged Riversdale on Saskatoon’s working class west side.
The city itself had changed a great deal, though. According to the federal census, its population was now almost 96,000, although in 1960 the Star Phoenix had already declared it to be 100,000. Our new University Hospital, the third hospital in the city and by far the largest and most prestigious (one day to be called “Royal”), had finally opened its doors, as had a new city hall, and our first shopping centre out on Taylor Street at Clarence Avenue. When I began university in the fall of 1958 (and Alex left Saskatoon for nursing school in Yorkton), there were only about three thousand full-time students at the university; by 1962 there were six thousand, and new buildings—sans crenellated towers and gargoyles, but still built of that beautiful fieldstone—were popping up all over the campus.
Saskatoon still had a low crime rate, people were still not afraid to go out at night, parents did not worry about their children playing unsupervised on the streets and boulevards, and driving them to school to keep them safe rarely occurred; parents did not routinely lie awake nights worrying until their teenagers, off at some party or dance or movie, returned. (Or if they did, it was not that a gang or a mugger might accost them.) People often remarked to each other what a great place to raise children Saskatoon was then—big enough to provide good schools and cultural opportunities, but small enough to be affordable, safe, and cosy for its residents.
As well, Saskatoon’s homicide statistics were hardly alarming. As I’ve said, there had been no murders in the forties, only four in the fifties, and in the year of Alex’s death there would be only one other. Province-wide, the story was the same. In 1961 there had been fourteen murders, and in the year of Alex’s death, thirteen. The country as a whole had low murder rates. In 1953 the Canadian population was only fourteen million, and there were 149 murders nationwide, making Canada generally a safe place to live. In 1961 there were 125, and in 1962, with John Diefenbaker from Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, in his last year as prime minister and a nationwide population of eighteen million, there were 265 murders, an increase of forty percent, but one typical of all Western nations, and one that would soon be followed by a drop that has held steady ever since.
By the early sixties, Saskatoon’s character began to change in other ways, most noticeably as a result of the federal government’s expanding immigration program (in response to a new climate that would not allow racial and ethnic discrimination) which brought people from African nations, the West Indies, and Southeast Asia into its ethnic and racial composition. This was the period, too, when First Nations families began to move into Saskatchewan’s cities because of the desperate poverty on the Reserves. (University of Saskatchewan historian Bill Waiser suggests that as farms began to mechanize, there was less need for farm labour, work which many First Nations men had done.) Eventually, those small houses that my friends from St. Mary’s School and Tech and I had lived in, and where people like Roy Romanow and Bill Davenport had been raised, would be occupied by First Nations families. Slowly, they would take their place on the lowest rung of the social ladder, and racism, once directed at Ukrainians and other Slavs, Asians and the first Black farmers, would now be aimed at them.
Some new freedom for women was in the air; discontent with the wide range of discriminatory practices and policies against women and with the sexual double standard was about to come to a head, and the behind-the-scenes work of the forties and fifties that would lead to the so-called sexual revolution was completed.
In the world of science, perhaps most relevant of all to Alex’s life and death, only months after her murder, Watson, Wilkins, and Crick were awarded the Nobel Prize for their long work culminating in the determination of the molecular structure of DNA, a discovery that would usher in the possibility of cloning human beings, of world-shattering new medical possibilities, and that, ironically, might make it possible one day to identify Alex’s killer.
We know it now as a pivotal moment in North American history, the moment when the foundations of the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, the hippie era, the era of the hydrogen bomb, the space age and other technological innovations including the personal computer, the genetic revolution, and, of course, the women’s movement, were laid. That period remains so clear in my mind that it is hard for me to believe that people who today are middle-aged were either not alive then or were toddlers, and view the early sixties as the Dark Ages. I still remember clearly my sense of having emerged from the shadow of pioneer times to claim our places in a new, exciting, and wider modern world. In my memory of 1961 and 1962, the sun was always shining, and we were all very busy, doing interesting things, moving forward, we thought, from that tremulous and dark beginning, to a future that seemed boundless and unquestionably connected to the great world beyond our province’s borders.
That was the summer I worked as office help for the Saskatoon Construction Association, then located on Duchess Street within a few blocks of Mead’s Drugstore and Alex’s suite. She could easily have been walking south on 7th Avenue to go to her job at the hospital on Queen Street as I was walking north two blocks over on 5th Avenue to my job, or perhaps we’d walked in the same direction at the same time but separated by two city blocks, and had no idea of our proximity. I didn’t venture beyond the office into that area where she lived. I can imagine that I might have strolled over to Mead’s once or twice during my lunch hour on some errand, but when my day was done, I headed as fast as possible in the opposite direction back to the apartment, my new husband, and my new life. Alex’s path and mine never crossed.
She disappeared on May 18, 1962. While her family and her friends were searching frantically for her on the 19th, the unforgettable Marilyn Monroe was singing her famously seductive “Happy Birthday” to President Kennedy. By August, Marilyn, too, would be dead, the world, while offering certain undeniable benefits to pretty women, being also very hard on them. I was living in that seedy little apartment on the west side on June 1, 1962, when, having already read with only mild interest of Alex’s disappearance, and with a great deal more interest of Monroe’s version of “Happy Birthday,” I opened the newspaper that morning and read that the night before, Alexandra Wiwcharuk’s raped, battered body had been found.
I looked at the newspaper pictures uncomprehendingly, filled with something deeper than mere astonishment. Alex, that quiet, pretty, small Ukrainian girl from high school, and before that, from a pioneer farm on the edge of wilderness, had metamorphosed into a professional woman and a beauty queen, surprising enough in themselves, and now, she had been killed—suddenly, shockingly—killed. Murdered.
Staring at her picture in horror, the people of Saskatoon must have seen in Alex’s glowing face their daughters, their sisters, their beloved ones. Perhaps, too, what they saw was themselves when they were just twenty-three, full of eagerness and excitement. No wonder citizens took her death so personally, no wonder pity rose from that deepest well of unnamed desire and love, of true humanity unsullied by the baseness of scurrilous rumours. No wonder none of us has ever been able to forget.