Spanner was the CPR company newsmagazine for many years and LC Gagnon saved some of the more interesting articles for his files. This post looks at commodity handling articles circa 1955-65 and a few other company activities: hotels, stockyards and reclaiming journal box dope.
For the commodity articles, staff writers had to interest readers in the bulk commodities hauled by the CPR, promote the company's essential role in getting them to market, and elucidate how this was accomplished ... along with showing some of the employees involved for a human-interest angle.
As they say in all the professional communications courses: "Use a grabber." In the undated Potash article from the mid-1960s, a gritty, new, in-your-face-Madison-Avenue style was emerging. When I first read this piece I was captivated as the staff writer led me to understand that the Company's efforts are essential in preventing the end of all life on earth.
As you already know, the name pot-ash itself suggests that the earlier sources did not require hard rock mining techniques, but that would have spoiled the creative approach the writer had chosen ...
"Millions of dollars ... if you think that's a lot of fuss (and money) ... a world deprived of it ... soon there would be no food ... hearts would beat irregularly, blood pressures would soar, heart attacks would be common ... he would die ... Man and every other form of animal life."
And so we begin ... with ... The Mystery of PO:
... sadly Page 12 was not saved.
The CPR was in the stockyard business in Calgary from the time it arrived. In 1984, Burns and Canada Packers ended their slaughter operations in Calgary. The trend had been to disintermediate the middleman (eg. public stockyards) by purchasing animals directly from farmers and ranchers and using trucks to transport them to feedlots or slaughter.
Comment: For a place which dresses up and pretends to be The Olde West for 10 days every year, Calgary does absolutely nothing to present this aspect of its history online or within Wikipedia. It was quite difficult to find the actual location of the CPR stockyards. If you find 11th Street SE, 26th Avenue SE, and Blackfoot Trail SE ... the stockyards were in this pocket of land with the rails arcing on its northern boundary. The Stampede Grounds are about 1 kilometre to the west.
If you want a really good downloadable paper in PDF form which discusses and shows the locations of the CPR operations in Calgary and Lethbridge ... and discusses the cattle industry in the region, here's the link ...
... The paper first discusses the geographical and economic parameters of industrial clustering,
and the local Calgary history begins on Page 53 (PDF Page 11).
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From the CPR annual report of 1950, here is the section which includes the stockyards.
The following photos and captions were found on the back of one of the stockyard pages.
Reclaiming journal box dope:
If you choose this career, you won't be able to work 'from home'.
These photos may be from the CPR Ogden at Calgary.
