Last week when I was the master of ceremonies for the Festival of Trees Father/Daughter banquet at the Western Development Museum in Saskatoon I had a chance to reacquaint myself with 1910 Boomtown. I find I don’t play tourist in my own town very often and enjoy seeing parts of Saskatoon that tourists like to see when visiting. I like history. I like to be reminded of what it was like a long time ago. For one thing, it makes me grateful for what we have today. Today you can barely find a person who isn’t carrying, and probably using, a smartphone. I’m told that in 1906 when Saskatoon first became a city it was the first place in Canada to install an automated dial telephone system. The headline in the paper read, “A phone system that always works”. It was the city’s new “waitless, cussless, out-of-orderless, girlless telephone, where everyone is his own operator”. The paper even offered instructions on how to use the new-fangled phones where you put your finger in the notch next to the number and turn the dial. Now about the only place in town you can see a dial phone is at Boomtown. Not too many reminders of the early 1900’s left. There are still a few buildings dating back that far and we have the Traffic Bridge, sort of, in a way, if you stretch your imagination. It kind of looks like the original, almost.
That’s Coffeetalk. I’m Vic Dubois.