Ted Watkins

My birth took place on December 17, 1931 at the hospital and Golden B.C. I never lived in Golden.

From December 1931 until September 1939 I lived with my mother and father along with my older sister, Phyllis at Brisco in the Columbia Valley. Briscoe is about 40 miles south of Golden. My grandparents, Edward and Lavinia homesteaded in Brisco in the late 1890s.

During the school term of 1938-39 I attended grade 1 in the small red log school house built by grandfather Ed Watkins. It was built to accommodate his four sons and one daughter. The third oldest son was my father, Joseph Edward Watkins.

September of 1939 hour family along with Auntie Annie, uncle Ernie and their family we moved to Stewart on the north coast of B.C. We lived there for one year. While in grade 2 in Stewart I met a lovely fellow student by the name of Frances Marie Oatman. Little did I know that in 1954 that she would become my wife.

The following year or family moved to Premier Mine. Premier was at the top of the mountain where there was a huge gold mine. At that time it claimed to be the largest gold mine in the British Empire. During that school term I attended grade 3 in a picturesque two room schoolhouse perched on the mountainside above the main camp.

Tired of working in the mine my dad found a job working in the smelter at Trail. While dad found a house in Trail we lived with grandpa Wheeler and uncle Bill Wheeler in Skandia, Alberta. From September until December 1941 I attended as a grade three pupil in a two room school in Skandia. It was in Skandia that I met a lovely young lady by the name of Wilhelmina, a.k.a. Willi. We were to become close friends until the early 1950s.

Having found a house we moved to Trail in December 1941 just-in-time for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December the seventh. At East Trail Elementary School I completed my grade 4. Following completion of grade 5 and 6 I began attending Trail Tadanac High School. During the next three years I completed grades seven, eight and nine.

In September of 1947 or family moved to Kelowna where dad had bought a small country grocery store with an attached