Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

I came across this photo of the Montreal Canadiens team photo from 1957-58.

I was 10 and hadn't yet seen much hockey on tv. In reality, if we even had a tv by then, it hadn't been for long. And yet, I could recognize more than half of the players. Of course, this is also partly because I did follow the team, and therefore any number of those players, in subsequent years.

Only on Saturday nights were the games televised. In those early days they weren't shown right from the 8 o'clock start but picked up the feed at 9. Saturday night was,and still is to a great degree, Hockey Night in Canada from coast to coast to coast, as the cry goes.

At first, I wasn't allowed to stay up for the whole game because Sunday loomed, and that was a big and important day. I think for a few years, I was only permitted to watch the second period and be in bed by 10.

We had to get up early on Sunday to catch the bus although in the very early years of this church trek, it had been a streetcar. We would have to transfer from one bus (or streetcar) to another to get all of the way to church. I expect that we were out of the house by 9, and probably earlier, to get there by 10. Both of my parents were Sunday school teachers, he of the men and she of teenage girls. I received a diploma for 7 years of close to perfect attendance.

I kept the diploma for many years, even into adulthood, but then it disappeared from my life. However, you can find anything on the internet, and this is what it looked like.

You would receive the diploma in the first year and stickers for the next 6 years.
I could purchase that diploma on Etsy for $24.39CDN if I were so inclined.

Sunday school was followed by church, which likely ran from 11 to 12:30. It was a Pentecostal church after all, so it must have lasted for an hour and a half. After then, there would be some time for socializing, so we'd probably begin to wend our way home around 1 o'clock.

Then it was the hour long bus (or streetcar) ride back home. Usually, Mom would have put something in the oven and timed it to cook while we were away. That means that we probably were not having lunch until at least 2 clock, close to 6 hours after breakfast.

Those bus rides were not a lot of fun, particularly in summer. We'd be sweltering in our Sunday best, carrying our big bibles while the rest of the crowded bus would be thronging with noisy, casually dressed older teens and young adults (if memory serves). They were on their way to the amusement park a few miles farther on. Talk about feeling out of place.

Permit me to interject, that we thought amusement parks were sinful places to be avoided.

I guess my parents grew tired of the trek, for when I was about the ago of 12, they opted for small startup assembly that we could walk to. That lasted for a few years until we moved all of the way from Montreal to Toronto and found ourselves back in a big church. But times had changed, and we had a car.

Aside from those summer bus rides whilst porting our big bibles, I don't have bad memories of those long church days, and, if I recall properly, even the bus rides were not too bad in other seasons. As is true of everybody's life, it seemed natural, for that is all that I knew. Overall, I rather liked the church experience as a kid.

It is strange what that one team photo brought to mind, which turned out to be more about Sunday Morning than Saturday Night.