HHS is thrilled when current and past Highlands residents share their memories of the neighbourhood with you. In this latest chapter of our oral history series, former HHS board member and newsletter contributor Anita Jenkins talks about her extensive social activities in Highlands, the importance of preserving historic houses, and her adventures in gardening. The interview was conducted by Julie Rak, with transcription by Louella J. Janzen Pick, and has been edited for length and clarity.
JR: This is an interview with Anita Jenkins. I am Julie Rak, the interviewer, and this is October 1st, 2022. Anita, take it away. The interview is about stories to do with Highlands: things you remember, anything you want to tell us. Do you have some special memories or funny memories or even tragic memories about your time in Highlands?
AJ: I’ll start by telling you what I discovered after I moved here and didn’t know that there was a connection. My great uncle was Wellington Gimby, C.W. Gimby, and he had a historic house, but it’s been torn down now. He built it in about 1912, and I didn’t know anything about it. I had heard of Wellington Gimby, you know; he was an entrepreneur like all those Highlands movers and shakers that went to the United Church, and when that house was torn down, I didn’t protest, like so many of the heritage people do, because I’d been in the house, and it had never been kept up; and it just would have needed millions of dollars’ worth of help. And people when they buy a house, they can’t do that. They’re just wrecks. So that was the first connection: my aunt said, “Oh, I’m so glad you’re in the Highlands, and Uncle Wellington lived there.” So then I got here, and I guess, like everybody, one of the first people you meet is Ted Smith.
[LAUGHTER]
AJ: Yeah. So he welcomed me, a very kind man, and like another person I met, this is with the Highlands Historical Foundation, was Ernst Eder, of course, who owned La Bohème. And then I took yoga from his ex-wife, Carole Eder, in the community hall. It just became a little rural village, you know, and I knew Nancy Power. And she was well named, Power.
JR: (Laughing)
AJ: And she had a personality. She was quite assertive, and she was good to me in her own way. But she would tear a strip off me when I wrote an article and she didn’t think it was right. Anyway, now Nancy Power’s heritage is—and I didn’t know this. Like, she didn’t brag, but she had bought the Roxy Theatre and given it to [Theatre Network]. Or she owned it and gave it to them, and now there’s a theatre in there called Nancy Power Theatre.
JR: Yeah. I went to so many shows at the Roxy, and I didn’t know that she had done that.
AJ: No, none of us knew. She didn’t say.
JR: She did not say. But she was a real friend of the arts. Now we have new people in her house who are trying to restore it. And they told me recently they want to honour her legacy as well as an arts donor, and I really like that.
AJ: She was very involved. She was a judge for the Sterling Awards, and she went to all the plays. She stayed in her house almost till she died because she had a full-time caregiver.
JR: Yes. I remember talking to Nancy, because she was always on the porch, nearer to the end of her life, with her dog. She was always out there. So are there some people in Highlands who really come to mind? Is there anyone you want to talk about? Bet there is.
The Sheldon (Power) house
AJ: I always get a walking buddy wherever I live, try to, although now that I’m this age I almost think I should walk alone, because I have to watch my feet and I get distracted, because I could fall down. But anyway, I always find somebody to walk with, because that would make me do it. So my walking partner was Ruth Carr, and she owned the B & B on, I think it might be on a street called Streetside Gardens.
JR: I didn’t know about this.
AJ: Yeah, I think it’s 64th Street, right about here, I think. Anyway, they’ve moved. She’s older than me, and they’ve moved to a seniors’ townhouse thing. But she was pretty colourful —her house was beautifully appointed, and she served people breakfast and all those things.
And then Kim [Blair]. I think Kim still lives here. She was a massage therapist and she’s an artist, too. She does art, and so did Ruth Carr. Kim and Ferd. You never met them?
JR: No.
AJ: Ruth and I used to walk on Ada Boulevard, and that’s very nice, and so I try to come over here once in a while just to walk on Ada Boulevard. It’s a nice walk.
JR: So you’re still doing it, right?
AJ: I walk around Boyle Street where I live now.
JR: Boyle is one of the oldest areas in the city. There’s still a lot around.
AJ: Yeah, I know. I’m doing the same thing there. [Writing for the Boyle McCauley News]. It’s a newspaper, it’s not a heritage paper [like the Highlands Historical Foundation Newsletter], but I sneak in. I have a sidebar with the history of the Alex Taylor School. That’s the EC4 place now, so I write about something that qualifies as news, but I sneak in the history, because it’s very historic over there.
JR: Yes, it is.
AJ: And what else did I do in the Highlands? I just had a very big social life. Oh, I joined the garden club. I didn’t know anything about gardening.
JR: That’s fantastic.
AJ: That was a very active, very active garden club. Like, there’s a tremendous amount of really good gardens around here.
JR: Yes. What was it like to be in the garden club?
AJ: Weird. But I learned a lot, because—I didn’t even know that when you plant annuals you don’t just dig some dirt out of the garden. You go and get this potting soil. So I was at that level. It’s like a man learning to boil an egg, you know? Men who don’t know how to cook.
JR: From a certain time, yeah.
AJ: And so they taught me a ton of stuff, and they talked all the time about how to get rid of snails or slugs, and whether to put out cans or dishes of beer, and, you know, they were really into it, just going on and on about it. They’d say, Oh, well, in February we’re going to have slides of gardens just to lessen the pain of not gardening.
[LAUGHTER]
AJ: And I said, Oh, I kind of like that it ends in September, you know. And my husband had given me a garden book from Lee Valley Tools, like what real gardeners write when the tomatoes ripen and all those things in a journal, a gardening journal, and it was a hard cover, big thing. My husband gave me that, not realising that I was never going to do that. So I used it for—it was ten years, and I used it just for writing about some event each day that was not garden, but just my life.
JR: That’s interesting. So you used it like a diary almost, or a journal. AJ: Yeah, yeah.
JR: About when was this that you were doing that?
AJ: 1990s or 2000. So I dig it out every now and then, and I say to him, you know, On this day we were doing this, and it’s very interesting. I told them at the gardening club that I had been given the Lee Valley garden book, but I was using it alternatively. They were too polite to say, but they were, like, we have to expel you from this group.
JR: That’s so funny. That’s hilarious that the gardeners felt like you weren’t being serious enough.
AJ: And then I finally stopped going, because I was too obnoxious. They said, “Okay, now, we’re going to make wreaths,” and I’m not a craft type. I read and write. Probably you’re the same, like an academic. I’m not an academic, but I act like one. And so making wreaths is not on my list of things to do [like] knit or anything like that.
JR: No, I don’t do those things either.
AJ: When they said, We’re going to make wreaths from dried flowers, I thought, see ya!
JR: Was there something else you did in Highlands that was social?
AJ: Well, the Highlands Historical Foundation. And Dave Cooper was the editor, and their family members lived on 111th Avenue in a littler house than the Magrath mansion on Ada Boulevard. And I think he still might live there. He was an editor at the Edmonton Journal and he got permission to use the equipment to lay it out, and then we had a printer. Most of the time it was properly laid out as compared to some community league things.
JR: From your time with the Historical Foundation, what was the thing that really sticks out in your mind? Like, is there a house that you really felt you learned more about? What was the most important thing you did there?
AJ: Well, the people in the houses. I learned about the packing plants. There were two kinds. Well, many kinds of people here, because there were houses built after the war and some in the ’30s, but I was sort of focusing on those 1912 houses, and it was these—a lot of the Eastern Canadians coming to turn a dollar, and that included Wellington Gimby, my relative, and the streets were paved with gold for them.
The Ukrainian farmers and so on, they struggled a lot. European farmers had a terrible time. But the people with money and business sense came to the Highlands and went to the United Church here, and they were kind of an elite group. They had cottages at Pigeon Lake, and there’s photos of them wearing suits at the lake. Yeah. And they had a bridge club, and they had servants, you know.
JR: Yes.
AJ: Oh, I met Traer Van Allen. His father George was an MLA, and he lived on 111th Avenue, and he was a psychiatrist in New York, but he was very fond of this community, and there’s articles about the family. And he’d come back, and he got to know me and bought me lunch at La Bohème, and he just wanted to be—like, he’d seen my articles, I guess, and he wanted to be connected to the Highlands. There was nobody for him to come to see hardly at all, except there was the son of one of—a neighbour, you know, the neighbour was a judge or something, and his son lived by the museum in Old Glenora, on Wellington Crescent. His name was Don [Marshall], and he wasn’t interested at all. Like, I’d have lunch with Van Allan and this Don guy, and Allan was so wanting to go back to his childhood and that in the Highlands; and Don couldn’t care less, you know.
JR: Very interesting.
AJ: Well, that’s how people can be.
JR: What do you think is something you want to leave us with? You were here in Highlands in the ’90s. You’ve written a lot about the history of Highlands, so is there something that gets overlooked that you think, we should be thinking more about?
AJ: We had to move because of my husband’s health, and I was very
happy here; but I’m a person who can move on, you know. You have to. And I don’t know whether it’s because I knew I had to move, or just something else, but I got tired of NIMBY.
JR: For the recording, that would be Not In My Backyard.
AJ: Yes.
JR: And what was bothersome about that?
AJ: It kept happening all the time, like, nobody can drive on my street except the people that live there; and there’s too much traffic from the golf course. It was quite a scene. And they—they’d knock on the door and say, How are you voting on this bylaw to change it to one-way? And I said, I live in the city. You know, like, roads cost money, and people can drive on them, and stuff like that. And then this guy named Ron Graham that lived here—
JR: Oh, yes, I know him.
AJ: Yeah, he died. So you know that? You know who he is? JR: Yeah.
AJ: Jodine Chase’s husband. And he wrote to the community league newspaper and said, “much as I love the Highlands, sometimes I like to leave it.” You know?
JR: (Laughing)
AJ: About the road. I guess that comes with the territory when some people love their neighbourhood and they’re all involved like we were.
JR: Sometimes it means they want to protect something or not change it.
AJ: Some don’t want to change anything. Ada Boulevard, what the City did, everybody got alarmed, always alarmed.
JR: Yeah. So just to end with this, is there any message you have for those of us doing historical preservation work now that you think we should know about?
AJ: Well, you’re just very lucky to have all that stuff to preserve.
JR: I think you’re right.
AJ: Yessy Byl says that this is the largest collection of viable historic houses in Alberta. There’s just so many of them. Like, in other communities they have historic houses, but not this huge number.
JR: Thank you. And we really appreciate your insight and all the things you have to say about living here, the good, the bad, the ugly.
AJ: You can edit. Because I am very, some people call it forthright, and some people call it downright rude.
JR: Well, we like this kind of rude. Thank you very much.
AJ: Well, yeah. I mean, why do an interview where you’re all pussyfooting?
JR: So thanks to Anita Jenkins, and thanks for coming and talking to us. That concludes our interview.
Highlands Historical Society 