Eveline Garneau (née de Jong) was born in the Netherlands. At one year of age, she and her parents immigrated to Alberta in June 1960. They met with family who lived in Barrhead, and Eveline’s father, Jelle, found a job in Edmonton, so the three of them moved, first of all, to an apartment in a building situated where the Muttart Conservatory currently is. Then, in 1962, following the birth of a second child, they moved to an old farmhouse with a massive yard in Britannia-Youngstown. Garneau grew up and has spent her life in Jasper Place; since 1986, she’s owned Signworks Plus situated just south of the Jasper Place Transit Centre on 100a Avenue.
In this video clip, Garneau describes the neighbourhood that she knew as a child and the vast double lot surrounding the house.
Family photos in the clip supplied by Eveline Garneau. About the second photo: “Dad built us the best backyard playground: a very tall swing set, a huge covered sandbox and a playhouse. It was truly a kid magnet and most days we had the whole neighbourhood over. We would give singing concerts from the top of the playhouse to all the moms sitting in their lawn chairs. Sprinklers would cool us off each afternoon and, of course, Koolaid popsicles!”
Aerial photo: 1965_vol11_no181. Courtesy of the City of Edmonton Archives.
Eveline Garneau’s mother, Teuna (Toni) de Jong, wrote letters to her own mother in the Netherlands about the family’s life in Jasper Place. Garneau and her family have translated and transcribed many of these letters, and have allowed the Project to publish excerpts in the Community Stories section on the website.
In this clip, Garneau talks about the neighbourhood, some of her neighbours in the community and where the children played.
Eveline Garneau also mentions going to Youngstown Elementary where she faced challenges because of not knowing English but learning it quickly; attending Britannia Junior High, which was half a block behind their house, and then ending up at Jasper Place Composite High School. She remembers the high school fondly, despite the vast number of students there, because she was able to focus on art classes, and played on sports teams, especially volleyball.
Garneau tells colourful stories about her childhood in Britannia-Youngstown and Jasper Place: shopping with her mother and siblings all along Stony Plain Road in a Safeway shopping cart, stopping at Ben’s Meat and Deli. She tells stories about walking all the way to Safeway from her house at three years of age; about using her weekly allowance to buy bubble gum at a local corner shop run by the Mah family; about giving concerts with neighbourhood kids from the roof of the playhouse in their yard; and taking swimming lessons at the Broadstock Pool.
She adds to the description of the architecture of the house and, like so many other residents of Jasper Place, having a garden that took so much work, but provided so much: “The garden was a huge part of our eating. Even the groceries that my mom lists in her letters, it’s not telling the price of vegetables, it’s telling that bread was this much or sugar was this much, because we got all our vegetables from the garden.”
Garneau studied for a couple of years in the Visual Arts and Communication Program at Grant MacEwan Community College (GMCC), opened her first shop, Artra Art Supplies, while there in the same place as her current business, and began making props and signs for students at the College. She talks about being associated with the GMCC, first as a student and then as an assistant in a Methods and Materials class, and how she loved the atmosphere there, “There was always music playing and there were always people being really crazy. Theatre people are always crazy, over-the-top kind of expression. So I loved it, I loved it.” Garneau learned from and worked with Alice Switzer, Anne Guney and Leslie Frankish on some of their projects at the Citadel and at City Hall. She also mentions a couple of movies that she’s worked on that were filmed in Edmonton.
In this clip, Garneau talks about her participation in the Jasper Place Gateway Foundation1, a business association that was a precursor to the Stony Plain Road Business Association, and how she was involved in festivals such as Pastels-on-Pavement2 and Dirt Buster Derby3 as well as several seasonal projects that involved the community in many ways.
The JPGF was very active in the community, publishing a newsletter, Gateway West, sponsoring many of the murals that are still visible in the area, such as for Wop May.
Eveline Garneau concludes by commenting on what’s changed in the area over the years, and what’s remained the same:
Big fences. I think anything that’s now being built, a big fence comes with it. We didn’t have that. You used to be able to jump over the fences between yards. There’s lots of changes, so many changes. Where we used to go tobogganing on the overpass that used to be by Mayfield Common, there was an overpass there that had a great toboggan hill on the side of it. When that came out, I know that all of us kids were just crying our eyes out, because they took away our toboggan hill. Some things are still kind of the same. Youngstown School has had a facelift but it’s still Youngstown School. Britannia is the same. Broadstock Pool has had some changes but it’s still the same. A lot of the things that were big parts of my life are still the same. The little things have all changed. It’s still a friendly neighbourhood. I’m glad that I talk to my neighbours. I know that that’s not in every neighbourhood. But maybe that’s just me.
1 Andy Ogle, “Stony Plain Road heads for image makeover,” Edmonton Journal, June 15, 1997, pp. 11-12.
2 “Concrete canvases [Pastels on Pavement Festival, with photo]”, Edmonton Journal, August 22, 2003, p. 55.
3 “Merchants to kick off Stroll-the-Stony campaign,” Edmonton Examiner, April 27, 2001.