Right, Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians by Dave Jaffe. Chapter 25, Part One of "A Woman Who Walked Away.

   A Woman Who Walked Away. Chapter 35, Part One by Dave Jaffe.
 


    "Your father always believes in hard work and never quitting," Roberta's aunt Frieda  once told her. These words of wisdom were told to Roberta when she and her family lived in Toronto in the early 1960's.  Yet to Roberta, a teenage skeptic all her father's hard work and never quitting attitude didn't seem to help her family.
     Here was her father Leon Stern, a short moustached  man who was earning about $60 a week
, working as a salesman in a furniture store. He was Frieda's brother. Roberta's mother, Esther filed records in a hospital. Meanwhile the whole Stern family which included Roberta's younger brother Harvey and her older sister Marilyn just scraped by. They were squeezed into a two bedroom apartment in Toronto's east side. Harvey slept in the living room while the two sisters shared a small bedroom.
    Day after day for five days a week, Roberta got up and made her way to Fraser Collegiate High School. There, Roberta took typing classes, gym workouts, biology and other subjects. Roberta loathed the high school with its cliques and hierarchies. "It's horrible there," Roberta repeatedly told her mother. "I loathe it." The only subject that turned Roberta on, was social studies. Roberta did like hearing about history and government.
    Once Roberta graduated from high school, off she went to slave away at an insurance office. She didn't like the work there either. It bored her and paid very little. "There must be a better life than this," she told one of her friends. So she started saving money and after a two years on the job, she quit and headed off to Vancouver.  "Vancouver?" her mother asked when Roberta told her parents where she was going. "Its far away and all it does there I'm told is rain."
      The rain that often flooded Vancouver streets didn't bother Roberta as much as the snow did in Toronto. And she didn't tell her folks that one of Vancouver's main attraction was its distance from her family.
Once in Vancouver,Roberta found a room in a rooming house in Vancouver's West End.  Then she moved across the Burrard Inlet to Kitsilano. It was 1966 and the hippie movement was in full swing.
      "Tune in, turn and drop out," the guru of LSD Timothy Leary was telling the young people of North America.  Roberta's dark hair, trim figure, big brown eyes, and medium height attracted quite a few men. Also she shortened her name to 'Bobbie'. It sounded more free. and less pretentious. than 'Roberta'. Soon she was dropping acid and smoking hashish. She wore jeans and raggedy sweaters. She also went down to the local welfare office to get money to live on.
     Fifty years later Roberta or now 'Bobbie' read a piece of journalism  by Donald Trump's strategic thinker Steve Bannon that the cultural shifts in the 1960's was responsible for all the subsequent troubles that the U.S.A. ran into. "Maybe yes, maybe no," Bobbie thought. "But the 1960's sure was a hell of a time.: