Carl Dahmer drives past his childhood home dozens of times a month, but he can’t recognize it.
Gone is the farmhouse facing Hespeler Road where he was born in 72 years ago. Today, there’s a Bulk Barn food store on the spot.
The babbling brook he dangled his feet in as a child is now encased in a culvert under a parking lot between the Bennett GM car dealership and Shoppers Drug Mart.
Gone are the orchards, fields and woodlots where he played as a blond-haired kid. So is the barn he remembers going behind to have his first private chat with Helen Durksen, who he would later marry.
“There is nothing left of my history and my birthplace,” said the Duke Street resident, his tone matter of fact.
“There’s no connection left. You feel detachment. There’s no feeling.”
Dahmer was born on the kitchen floor in 1938, the youngest of eight children. All he has left to remind him of his childhood is a Highway 24 sign he bought 20 years ago in an antique store. And bells that used to hang on family horses pulling wagons and sleighs.
His parents, Wesley and Vera Dahmer, farmed 80 hectares (198 acres) at what is now the northeast corner of six-lane Hespeler Road and two-lane Bishop Street. When he was born, Hespeler Road was a two-lane provincial highway and Bishop didn’t exist.
Where a Tim Hortons stands at the corner today was a big old log cabin. It was never part of the farm, but Dahmer remembers it vividly as a popular place for soldiers during the Second World War. By the dozens, they would set up tents in the impromptu campground on the 0.8 hectare (two-acre) property, welcomed by the friendly women who lived at the cabin.
“There were guys in and out of there all the time. They were hospitable,” Dahmer said. “I don’t know what they were doing, because I was too young.”
Later, the “Log Cabin” was well known to a postwar generation as a teen hangout where souped-up cars were displayed, foot-long hotdogs devoured and mischief planned.
On New Year’s Day 1942, Dahmer remembers his dad hitching up horses to a sleigh for a trip north along the snow-covered, concrete highway.
“We went all the way to Pinebush and back and didn’t see a single car.”
Today, almost 50,000 cars a day use the Hespeler-Bishop intersection.
Dahmer remembers running out to the road to wave at soldiers passing in convoys of green army trucks throughout the war.
His two oldest brothers — John and Russell — were in the army and fighting in Italy. He was six on May 24, 1944, when a cab pulled in the laneway. The driver handed a telegram to his mother.
“My mother just cried and cried. She fell to the ground when she got the telegram.”
One of his brothers died in combat.
Two days later, the cab returned with another telegram. His other brother was dead, too.
While that was a horrible time on the farm, Dahmer said there was also plenty of joy. The family may have been geographically isolated from Galt, Preston and Hespeler, but he never felt alone.
“We worked hard, but we were happy,” he says. “We never felt deprived at all.”
Huge dinners with extended family were the norm on Sunday nights. So were community dances and gatherings at the one-room Clearview school he attended on Pinebush Road (it used to stand on the hill behind the Canadian Tire store).
Sometimes, his school teacher was invited over for meals. Other times, he, a sister and a brother would accompany Miss Bradshaw on a bus to see a movie in Hespeler. After Dahmer’s 40-year career teaching in public elementary schools, he knows that’s an unlikely interaction today.
Dahmer remembers how his father was always respectful to any hungry, homeless people walking the highway. “He would say: ‘Vera, give them a good sandwich and food.’ “
With some forethought, Dahmer says, Hespeler Road could have become a grand, welcoming entrance to Cambridge, lined with trees and grassy boulevards. Instead, he laments how it turned into noisy, exhaust-choked wasteland decorated with cookie-cutter signs.
He’s hopeful that in another 70 years, Hespeler Road will grow into an attractive downtown of tall buildings, fountains and outdoor gathering places.
“This Hespeler Road is a disaster, with too many accesses and cars everywhere.”
by Kevin Swayze, The Record
http://news.therecord.com/News/Local/article/751343