11 Drop In, Hang Out, and Crash

At the turn of the twentieth century, many arrivals to the city of Strathcona (which later merged with Edmonton) came by the Calgary Trail and the Canadian Pacific Railway’s spur line. Strathcona and Garneau were among the earliest residential neighbourhoods south of the North Saskatchewan River. Their craftsman-style houses and neighbourhood churches on elm-lined streets accented a varsity character around the U of A campus from the early 1900s.

Garneau United (established 1938) and St. George’s Anglican (1955) were, and still are, neighbourhood churches close to the university.⁷ Their congregations customarily interacted with the neighbourhood and varsity populations, both formally and informally. In the 1960s, the university began to expropriate homes in North Garneau for campus expansion. The city rezoned Garneau for high rises and approved new outlying suburbs, which had, according to a Garneau history, “a profound effect on the community and the life of the congregation. Many church families moved. The community began to change from a more permanent family residential area to rented residences, student dwellings, and high rise apartments. . . . Garneau would need to see itself in a different role than as a residential congregation.”⁸ Older neighbourhoods like Garneau were shifting with demographics and urban changes in a city that, in 1969, had a population of 422,418.⁹ Garneau United considered folding as its congregation aged and waned but decided instead to seek new ways of going forward.¹⁰

Before Reverend Wishart arrived in 1968, the Edmonton Presbytery of the United Church had determined that Garneau United, located at 11148 84th Avenue, was set in “a rapidly changing community” and had a vital role to play there. Three areas were chosen as a focus for its ministry: “1) serving the pastoral needs of the congregation, 2) serving the university in cooperation with the chaplains and 3) an experimental ministry to the surrounding community with particular concern for apartment dwellers. It was further suggested that relations with St. George’s Anglican be encouraged.” Garneau United, despite declining church membership, was attracting “people who [were] desirous of Christian fellowship within a community of believers who see God’s mission primarily in relation to the world.”¹¹ In earlier decades, outreach undertaken by such Protestant church congregations was considered part of the Social Gospel that applied Christian ethics to social problems in the community.

The Reverend Bern (Harry Bernard) Barrett was the minister of nearby St. George’s Anglican Church, at 11733 87th Avenue, which by 1968 was also in flux. A history of the district written in 1971 noted that the previous two years had seen a decisive repositioning of the church from a traditional orientation to a focus on “understanding our mission in relation to the community around us. One example of this has been the pioneering work of Garneau, in cooperation with St. George’s, among transient youth, this counterculture, and the drug scene. The Coffee House in Ramsay Hall is another example of seeing our mission in relation to the community.”¹² Both ministers and their congregations near the U of A campus were also aware of the anti–Vietnam War movement and welcomed war resisters in their midst.

Specific church communities engaged with transient youth and war resisters. By doing so, they bucked conservative attitudes in their respective church bureaucracies, government ranks, and the community at large. The new drop-in project unexpectedly put congregations in the vanguard to serve the unique, sometimes overlapping, populations of transient youth and war resisters in 1969.

The two church communities developed a summer program for young people that operated out of Garneau United Church, hiring twenty-two-year-old Evelyn Battell, a second-year theology student at St. Stephen’s College, to manage it with volunteer help.¹³ At a September 1969 meeting of the Official Board of Garneau United, she reported that the drop-in program had started up in May and was initially attended by about one hundred young people. During June and July, another influx arrived, a large number of them “close to the drug scene,” she said. “Numerous emergency situations were encountered,” she added—typically related to drug use, sexual activity, and money.¹⁴ “Churches on the Southside were contacted, and as a result a ‘plug-in’ was set up to facilitate access to professional services such as legal and medical services.”¹⁵ Asked for help by Garneau United, Metropolitan United Church, located four blocks away, sent a staff member to the Garneau Drop-In to coordinate a “crash-pad” service that provided overnight shelter in private homes because “often some of the young people who came to the Drop-In had no place to sleep except the streets.”¹⁶ Garneau United and the University Hospital Emergency Ward, across the street, collaborated closely to assist youth who were “coming down” from drug use.¹⁷ In total, the Garneau Drop-In had five thousand youth from Canada, the United States, and a few from overseas pass through its doors from mid May to August 1969.¹⁸

Activities at the drop-in were largely youth driven, by kids who “seemed or felt alienated from society,” Battell wrote, adding,

The kids at Drop-In spent their time talking, dancing, listening to music and meeting new people. Sometimes projects happened such as seminars with doctors, lawyers, teachers and police. Every weekend there were dances with a live band, or a folksinger. Once a fellow read some poetry and one weekend we sponsored a rock festival at Mayfair Park (it got rained out). The staff, Dr. C. F. Johnston—Church history professor and interested member of Garneau congregation—and myself and the ministers of the two churches, spent their time talking to kids who had various problems or just needed to talk.¹⁹

The U of A student newspaper reported that Mi’kmaq singer Willie Dunn was giving a concert, singing “Indian protest songs” at the Garneau drop-in on 21 November 1969, with proceeds from the fifty-cent admission to go to the Native People’s Defence Fund.²⁰

Edmonton police on the scene were not always open or tolerant. The churches noted that “hip kids” and transients were “hassled” by the police at the Garneau drop-in on at least one occasion during its first summer.²¹ In August, Battell saw fourteen-year-old “delinquents” and older motorcycle gang members, between 19 and 25 years old, converge on the drop-in, as she later reported to the church’s board meeting. It was not a loving spoonful: “The ‘Hippie’ group did not want to be associated with the newcomers and left.”²² Battell indicated that the newcomers were “somewhat rougher, and the staff felt they did not have the resources or insight to deal with this group and this led to closure of the project about a week ahead of time.”²³ Yet the drop-in program was deemed to be a success, and the joint committee of the two congregations recommended that it continue through the winter months, on weekends only.²⁴

Garneau’s drop-in project had several spinoffs. One was Metropolitan United’s “crash-pad” program, which arranged for overnight “bed and breakfast” accommodations in private family homes for one to three nights. A total of thirty-six homes provided space for 232 young people to “crash” for a total occupation of 481 overnight stays from May to August of 1969.²⁵ According to a May 1970 proposal for a crisis centre, the crash-pad program “brought ‘hip kids’ and ‘straights’ into contact. For the most part this was a positive experience and overcame some of the apprehensions on both sides.”²⁶ Crash pads later led to hostels with names such as “The White House,” “The Kremlin,” and “Fallen Arches.” Hostels were operated by young people with minimum interference by establishment types. The “Heads-Up, Plug-In” referral project focused on legal, medical, psychiatric, and job counselling advice and resources for youth who found regular channels to be closed or difficult to deal with. It was sponsored by Knox United, Holy Trinity Anglican, the Moravian Church, and Strathcona Baptist Church congregations, as well as the YMCA, to extend responsive community-driven services.²⁷

Responding to some Edmontonians’ uncertainty about the transients and the drop-in services, in July 1969 the Edmonton Journal carried a feature about both Garneau’s drop-in and the work being carried out by several Southside churches and the YMCA. “People were equating long hair and sandals with hideous diseases of the body and mind,” it reported. “Nothing could be farther from the truth.” The youth, ranging in age from thirteen to twenty-three, were often students, although “some are drop-outs, others are transients, a few are young people on a cheap trip and others are draft dodgers from the U.S., who usually need jobs and friends.” It was a generation, pointed out one crash-pad coordinator, often viewed “with suspicion and animosity” and whose members “feel they don’t wish to fit into our society.”²⁸ The Journal also wrote about an initiative that summer by Edmonton’s YMCA to help shed its “square image” and offer community services to youth.²⁹

Occasional letters to the editor illustrated the controversy surrounding these efforts to work with street youth. One letter writer saw hippies as drug addicts and deviants. In contrast, a response from Dawson Creek, British Columbia, asked,

Is ‘Hippie’ just a convenient term to call any individual under 30 whom you neither like nor understand? Many so called hippies are merely young and uncertain teenaged children who turn to the trappings and mannerisms of hippiedom, because it’s something new and different from the routine of school and home life. [. . .] In other words, it’s a fad for many which they will outgrow.³⁰

Meanwhile, the province of Alberta was also stepping up its public service role. In 1966, the Social Credit government had passed a new Child Welfare Act and the Preventive Social Service (PSS) Act. The province’s Department of Public Welfare then took over child welfare functions from the municipalities, while the latter focused on administering or enabling the delivery of preventive social services such as supports to youth. In the final decade of the Social Credit era, Alberta was flush with revenue from natural resources and also began to benefit from new fifty-fifty cost-sharing under the Canada Assistance Plan (CAP) that existed from 1966 to 1996. With strong public revenues and progressive deputy ministers, the provincial government was reforming itself and changes with cost-sharing.³¹ In 1969, the province supported the City of Edmonton’s social services department as it broke ground in a number of areas. Mayor Ivor Dent referred to the city’s “total welfare package,” an integrated approach to delivering social services and a community-based project later known as West 10.³² Consequently, Garneau United Church became aware of grant funding the city had available for projects concerning youth.³³

In preparation for an expected influx of young travellers in 1970, the Joint Committee of Garneau United and St. George’s Anglican, supported by city centre churches, developed plans for a crisis centre. At a May meeting, the board of Garneau United decided that the city should be approached with a request for financial assistance, in an effort “to secure the necessary funds to carry out the project to fulfillment.”³⁴ The proposal for the crisis centre mentioned that some five thousand young people had “passed through” the door of Garneau’s drop-in program in 1969. In addition, it identified several existing services for youths, such as the Downtown Teen Centre, overnight accommodation at the YMCA and YWCA, crashing and crisis places, and ways for medical, legal, and drug emergency services to maintain contact with one another.³⁵ The city received the proposal and allocated financial assistance for crisis services in 1970 to be offered through the existing downtown teen centre, Inner Spirit. Given her earlier work at Garneau United, Battell was hired as director of the centre. Ties to the church communities, especially Garneau, were maintained. Several individual congregation members still continued to take in and work with young people following referral from the crisis line.³⁶

Garneau United’s role shifted compared to its first summer in 1969. The church’s annual report for 1970 noted that its “concern for dialogue and bridge building between the generations can now be taken up with real seriousness. The Barricade Coffee House in Ramsay Hall which opened in December is we hope a move in that direction.”³⁷ The intent was to create a space where youth were accepted. Garneau’s drop-in project also served as a catalyst for other church communities and private and public services to become involved with the transient movement.

In the midst of both transient youth and war resister migrations, the Alberta government’s social programs also transformed during the 1960s. Municipal and senior levels of government became more amenable to extending funding and services to young people, as the role of the province expanded. The province had a mandate to respond under legislation to children and youth deemed at risk and in need of protection and, by the late 1960s, was the sole authority for child protection services. For a few summers, one or two provincial social workers functioned on special assignment to assist transient youth at the street level, until youth transiency trends slowed toward the mid-1970s. Regionally, a new Alberta Department of Youth deployed staff to reach out to youth in the late 1960s. This department’s wide focus on conventional recreation and leadership development (e.g., 4H Clubs, Outward Bound) was more for local youth than for transients, but “drug misuse” was also an emphasis, as were drop-in centres, seen as a new approach to “dealing with the problems of youth.”³⁸

Nationally, the issue of transient youth stirred enough concern that the Pierre Trudeau government commissioned the Transient Youth Inquiry in 1969, to investigate why thousands of young people were hitchhiking across the country. It heard a range of submissions, from those in support of youth travellers seeing Canada to those condemning them as moral and social deviants. Temporary youth hostels were recommended as a solution and subsequently received federal funding. Trudeau also saw youth travel as a means to build national unity. But transiency also spurred action by those keen to stamp it out. “Canada’s youth hitchhiking ‘craze’ declined in the mid-1970s,” according to Mahood, “because anti-hitchhiking groups put pressure on the police and RCMP to levy fines and enforce by-laws banning hitchhiking in towns and cities.”³⁹ Yet certain church, non-government, and government services in Alberta had provided substantial support to meet basic needs for a sizable cohort of transient youth and developed a system of community-driven support programs.

Prominent among the transients were American war resisters, who had refused to serve in the US war on Vietnam and moved to Canada. The Vietnam War and war resisters were controversial for governments and church organizations. Canada initially took an ambiguous position on war resisters entering the country, distinguishing between draft resisters and deserters. Draft resisters were welcomed, because, according to David Churchill, they were “the very type of immigrant—young, middle-class and educated—that the government wanted.” Beginning in May 1969, the government also allowed deserters to enter Canada, as any other potential immigrant. In so doing, Canada “went against the common practice of its military allies.” However, African Americans, working class, or less educated deserters had more difficulty seeking entry and were often denied at the border.⁴⁰

In the summer of 1969, the Edmonton Journal reported that five hundred “draft dodgers” lived in the city, and the number of arrivals picked up as Canadian immigration officials no longer questioned the draft status of landed immigrant applicants. It was “easier to get into the country” with Edmonton as a destination, compared to some other places in Canada, and the city had good job opportunities. “Getting jobs is no problem and people are sympathetic,” said a young Californian man resisting the draft. “Here people actually say they would do it too if they were Americans.” The Alexander Ross Society, composed primarily of university students, had taken up the task of providing “temporary assistance and lodging as well as advice to draft dodgers who come here.” U of A’s Students for a Democratic University noted that its Vancouver counterpart was “swamped” with war resisters and wanted to contact more in Edmonton “who might be able to help others moving into the city.”⁴¹

In the United Church of Canada, the call to help war resisters created controversy, with clergy and congregation members coming out on opposite sides.⁴² Locally, members of the board of Garneau United Church in November 1969 expressed concern about “the matter of draft dodgers and our responsibility as a congregation.”⁴³ The decision was made to reach out to take in Americans. The crash-pad, drop-in, and plug-in programs enabled congregations and other local residents to put compassionate principles into action. Nearby neighbours such as Mary and Fred Engelmann—a social worker and political science professor, respectively, both from the United States—also opened their doors to shelter war resisters.⁴⁴

The U of A campus and the neighbouring Garneau district were a local hub for anti-war protest and the peace movement as well. For example, in 1969, a Vietnam War “Moratorium Rally” was held on campus and drew a capacity crowd to a film and panel discussion at the theatre in the Students’ Union Building. The next day, 15 November, a crowd of six hundred gathered at the Alberta legislature for a worldwide peace rally and march to City Hall held in conjunction with the historic anti-Vietnam war demonstration of as many as half a million protesters in Washington, D.C. Reverend David Crawley, of All Saints’ Anglican Cathedral in downtown Edmonton, spoke at the rally and indicated that, as a Christian, he could not support the war in Vietnam, which he felt was unjust.⁴⁵

Although city residents showed considerable readiness to help war resisters and support peace activism, critics were also present. Those who wanted the newcomers gone saw an opportunity in October 1970, when the government of Canada imposed the War Measures Act (WMA) and suspended civil liberties during the Front de libération du Québec crisis; the Edmonton chief of police, for instance, indicated that “he might use the act to run the draft-dodgers out of town.” The effect on war resisters and their allies, Kostash observes, “was not a little paranoia; people huddled in their houses, too frightened even to talk politics on the phone.”⁴⁶ The mayors of Toronto and Vancouver also considered the WMA as a potential tool to clear out draft dodgers and hippies in their respective cities. Additionally, RCMP surveillance of Canadian university campuses and local communities included collecting information on resisters and sharing it with the FBI.⁴⁷

Church congregations and others understood that powerful conservative figures did not look favourably on aiding war resisters and transient youth. However, despite the controversy and debate in Canada, the board of Garneau United Church was clear in encouraging its congregation members to open their doors and welcome them: “We commend the work of those in our congregation who have taken young American immigrants into their homes and helped them to adjust to Canadian life.”⁴⁸

Garneau United Church and St. George’s Anglican Church communities in conservative Alberta became involved, by choice and intent, with controversial mass migrations of transient youth hitchhikers and American war resisters in the late 1960s and early in the next decade. Garneau’s drop-in program operated in a grey area of ambiguous laws, policies, and practices concerning the two movements. Moreover, it exhibited compassionate leadership in a volatile political climate. The program was a catalyst and had many spinoffs that involved public and private services. The ministers, board members, staff, volunteers, and congregations of the two churches acted with strong support from an extensive church and community network. The two congregations came to understand that the community around them had local and regional, national, and transnational dimensions. Certain churches led the way with responsive grassroots community service outreach, and governments followed with public welfare supports to take in transient youth in need. As a result, young people found more places open where they could drop in, hang out, and crash, co-creating these social spaces as active participants in their own conversations, music, and lifestyles in coffee houses and on the road. In Edmonton, as elsewhere, some moved on, but others stayed and put down roots, contributing in many ways to the political, cultural, and social fabric of the city and larger civil society. In 1969, the churches that responded to mass youth migrations demonstrated a capacity to initiate and mobilize a flexible and effective response for youth support, later assisted and emulated in the public sector by progressive social services in Alberta. At a time of challenging questions and restless politics, a kind welcome to wayfarers and war resisters was possible, indeed, intentional, as demonstrated in these interactions of transient youth, communities, and the state.