MY MOM CELEBRATES 90 YEARS YOUNG!

In 1921 the Bluenose was launched, Prohibition came to an end in British Columbia, Frederick Banting and Charles Best invented insulin, Canadian women exercised their right to vote for the first time and in 1921 Farley Mowat, Maurice Richard, Monte Hall and my Mom, Rose Christine Vedres, were born. There were others, too, of course, but these were some of the more notable ones.
That’s right; my Mom is going to celebrate her 90th birthday on August the 30th. Wow, ninety years. Just think of all the history and all of the changes in the world that Mom would have seen over those ninety years.
Mom was born at the beginning of the “Roaring ‘20’s” but I don’t know how “roaring” it was in Bender or Inchkeith during her family’s stay in those places in the 1920’s. I do know that they left this area for greener pastures in the early 1930’s and Mom’s family, like so many other prairie families, had to endure the “Dirty Thirties” as The Great Depression hit the world.
At the end of the 1930’s Mom was to meet her soul mate in Lowell Hubbard and they were married in October of 1940. The young couple’s marriage began while World War II raged on. The Allies won the war in 1945, Adolf Hitler committed suicide, the U.S. dropped Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and The Cold War began. Other notable happenings in the 1940’s were the introduction of the T-shirt, the microwave oven was invented, the first computer was built, the slinky and Polaroid cameras were invented, the bikini was introduced and Lowell and Rose Hubbard brought a boy and three girls into the world.
The 1950s are sometimes referred to as the Golden Age. Color TV was invented, the polio vaccine was discovered, Disneyland opened and Elvis gyrated his hips on The Ed Sullivan Show. The Cold War continued as the Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union began. The ’50 also saw the Hungarian Revolution unfold, the popularity of the hula hoop explode, Dr. Suess wrote The Cat in the Hat, and Fidel Castro became the dictator of Cuba. Rose and Lowell, having vowed to have only two children, completely broke that vow by following up the four 1940’s kids by having two more girls followed by two more boys and then one more girl in the 1950’s. Nine kids in all!
In the 1960’s we endured the Cuban Missile Crisis, the launch of the first man, Yuri Gagarin, into space, the Beatlemania explosion and the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. The Vietnam War raged on prompting mass protests while “Make Love Not War!” and “Peace” became the hippies’ mantra. Canada unveiled its new flag and Pierre Elliot Trudeau was first elected Prime Minister of Canada in 1968. Lowell joined the United Church of Canada’s Ministry in 1963 perhaps seeking the assistance of God to raise their teenaged daughters and sons through the “Generation Gap” age of the 1960’s.
I just realized that I have almost taken up all of my allotted space for this column and I have only covered half of the life that my Mom has lived. At least it will give you a good idea of how much history can happen in one lifetime. I guess I have two options- 1.) condense the next forty-five years or 2.) make this a serial and continue on with the history for another few newspaper issues. I think I better go with number 1.
I will forgo the parallel history of the next forty-five years and say that Mom and Dad thoroughly enjoyed their life together. Mom lost the “Love of Her Life” in 1990, after having shared fifty years together, and their legacy lives on through their nine children, twenty-five grand children, thirty-five great-grand children and four great-great-grandchildren.
Mom still lives on her own in Medicine Hat and is amazingly healthy and hardy for a ninety-years young individual. It is hard to fathom the number of lives that have been affected by Rose Hubbard’s life. She came from a big family, she created a big family and she will be celebrating her birthday on the 27th of August with so many of the family members that she so cherishes as they cherish her. Happy 90th Birthday Mom!

“In spite of illness, in spite even of the archenemy sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.”-Edith Wharton –(1862-1937).