Description
Mr. McAuley and some friends travel to Winnipeg to join the army.
William Archibald McAuley
William Archibald McAuley was born on February 4th,1921 in McAuley, Manitoba. He worked on the farm while going to school. After graduating, he worked at a neighbors farm for seven dollars and fifty cents a month until he joined the army on September 17th,1939 when he was eighteen years old.
Transcript
All four of us, we all grew up in... we're all about the same age. All chummed around together on Saturday nights in the small towns, you know. We got talking about it, “Why don't we enlist,” because, you know, the war was coming, everybody knew it was coming. So we got together and we went to Elkhorn, Manitoba which is on the main line of the CPR, jumped on top of a boxcar and went to Winnipeg. And we got off in the CPR yards and walked around and walked downtown because we didn’t know Winnipeg. We were just hayshakers, I guess, right off the farm. And we went down the street and walked down and the first people that met us was Winnipeg Grenadiers recruit office and a handsome looking fella with a red sash, he said, “You're just the kind of people we're looking for.”