(The Suburban, March 2011)
By Robert Frank
The first members of the generation that forever changed the world will turn 80 this year and, thanks to her parents’ romantic early postwar reunion, longtime Dollard des Ormeaux, Quebec, resident Diane Campbell, who just celebrated her 80th birthday, is at the head of Canada’s Baby Boom pack.
While most soldiers had to wait a couple of months before they could return to Canada, her father—Gunner Albert Allnutt of the Royal Canadian Artillery—earned a compassionate leave pass, just as World War II ended in Europe.
He had joined the Canadian Army four days after Canada declared war in 1939, then traveled to Sicily via North Africa, where he fought his way north through Italy in bitter, winter mountain fighting against the retreating Wehrmacht.
The Canadians then raced through France and Gunner Allnutt arrived in the Netherlands just in time to help win the war’s final battles.
The moment that peace broke out, he was told that—having served more than five years in the Army—he was to return home immediately.
He cabled his wife Helen, who had left Quebec to help her parents keep their New Brunswick farm going during the war.
Though family reunions were forbidden when troop ships docked in Halifax, Ms. Campbell’s aunt, who was serving in the Royal Canadian Air Force, had access to the jetty and managed to spot her brother Albert disembarking.
A telegram tipped off Helen when to be in Montreal to meet her husband’s troop train when it arrived. Diane Campbell was born nine months later.
“If you define Baby Boomers as the children of soldiers returning after World War II, then Diane is Canada’s first baby boomer,” declared her brother, Robert Allnutt.
Ms. Campbell has always lived at the leading edge of Canada’s postwar expansion.
“There were so many kids that our schools were always new and still under construction when we moved in,” the former schoolteacher recalled.
“We constantly had to change schools as new ones were built to handle the surge. Some elementary students had to study in church basements. In my first year at high school there were 18 grade eight classes!”
“Dollard des Ormeaux was built up around us after we moved here in 1973. There were no buses. To get to Fairview [shopping centre] you had to go through fields on muddy trails.”
