The Girl in Saskatoon

by Sharon Butala

  Today the idea of beauty contests looks faintly embarrassing. They had been around since about 1906, the Miss America pageant since 1921 and the Miss Canada, a swimsuit competition, since 1946, but in the fifties they were tamed into decorous events. Every time you turned around, there was another one—Miss Wheat Queen, Miss City of (fill in the blank), Miss Campus Queen, Miss Ice Carnival Queen, Miss Hospitality Industry, Miss Indian Princess—each one beaming sweetly, a triumphant glitter in her eye, her tiara sparkling, her bouquet of American Beauty roses cradled in her arms the way it was assumed she would soon be cradling an infant.

  Candace Savage, in her book Beauty Queens: A Playful History, says that young women entered beauty pageants as a way to “break open a life.” That is, so much of the world was then closed off to girls; you could be a wife and mother, you could be a teacher, a nurse, or a secretary, you could clerk in a store, and the chances of living outside that tidy life laid out for you were, for most girls, few to none. But win a beauty contest and suddenly you were something special, you became a star, at least for a little while, you basked in attention, especially that of males, and often of powerful males, who saw you as a prize to be won, and who offered you opportunities you would not otherwise have had. You might even be noticed by the wider world, and find yourself in some exotic place doing exciting things. Or so the contestants hoped.

  It seems to me that the very omnipresence of beauty queens and beauty competitions was a response to the prevailing cultural notions about women and their place in society. At some level, I think that this was a genuine effort to show proper reverence for the best in womanhood, an honouring of the idea of female purity, and a natural outgrowth of an age that, the rest of the time, did not much cherish the humanity and individuality of women. But the subtext was always pointing to the perfect “Moms” of television with their hair so well coiffed it looked shellacked, the chaste perfection of their attire, their unflappable calm, their wise love for their husbands and children, and especially, their complete willingness to sacrifice their own lives for them. Implicit in the “Miss Perfect Womanhood” of beauty competitions was the expectation of the marriage and children that would follow, not the science lab the winner would rule, or the law office she would command, the learned tomes she would write, or the art she would create.

  I think, too, that beauty competitions were meant (also unconsciously) to replace the lack of real power of women, to offer them some modicum of it. Women might safely be allowed the power their beauty brought them because it was undeniable, an age-old female attribute that had always been cherished, honoured, and rewarded.

  But, ultimately, beauty always is in the eye of the beholder; and among forty or fifty beautiful young women there was no sure way to choose who in purely physical terms was the most beautiful. It simply couldn’t be done. Not to mention that Christian ethics, to which respect must be paid, made clear that physical beauty was worth nothing if the soul was not beautiful too. And how to measure the worth of the soul? By asking silly, unanswerable questions of the contestants, by turning a beauty pageant at least partially into a popularity contest, by looking at the quality of the lives the young women claimed to be leading outside the world of the pageant? It is no wonder that before long young women entered beauty contests not as mere ego-fulfillment, but in a calculating way, and while playing the role the pageant organizers required of them, fixed their eyes on the future to which the prizes and the measure of fame might more quickly bring them.

  By 1961 Alex had been a beauty queen three times. Even if she didn’t suffer from excessive vanity, she must by then have begun to think of herself as someone special, as someone who had been singled out by life for the best it had to offer. Alex must have come to see herself as a rare flower, and her expectations would have begun to blossom.

  The combination of Alex’s good looks and her sheer happiness and innocence were genuine, and everybody who gazed at pictures of her face on the day that her body was found saw that. Saskatoonians who didn’t know her responded to that eagerness and sweetness, and it broke their hearts when they thought of her terrible death. It wasn’t just the fact of its being too early, nor of her small place in the city’s history as the victim of the first murder of its kind, nor even of the unspeakable way she died, in pain and terror, screaming and fighting to live, that made her death unforgettable. It was also that the killer had obliterated the innocent happiness that people saw shining in her face; in his fury he had obliterated her goodness and innocence. People knew that only pure evil could do such a thing, that that was why he had done it: because evil always wants to—has always wanted to—destroy innocence. Alex, only by virtue of her beauty, had gained a measure of fame, and without meaning to, she radiated the aura of someone raised by the gods above the common herd.

  In 1959 Alex’s parents celebrated their fortieth wedding anniversary at a Yorkton hall their children rented for the occasion. It was the last time the entire family would be together. By the following year, 1960, when Alex would still have been training and enjoying her life in Yorkton, her parents had sold the farm where they had raised their children, and from which each day for eight years Alex had trudged the two miles to Bear School and two miles back again. They moved to an acreage a couple of miles south of Saskatoon. By that time, her father would have been in his mid-seventies and her mother near that age. After that, in the last year of her training, Alex occasionally would travel the 125 miles from Yorkton to visit her parents near Saskatoon. But after graduation in June 1961, she was hired to work as a nurse at Saskatoon City Hospital, to begin in mid-September, and once again, she would live close to her parents.

  The summer of 1961 was a devastating drought year. June was the hottest and driest month ever recorded in western Canada, with an average yield of only 8.5 bushels to the acre. The Wiwcharuks had picked a good time to leave farming. At that time in our history, if farmers in Saskatchewan were doing poorly, the entire province felt it; the whole economy would be affected, and a kind of depression would fall over the countryside, and be felt in the cities too. Only children, able to run in paddling pools in backyards or to spend the long, hot days at public swimming pools in Saskatoon, as well as teenagers whose most serious interest in life was getting a tan, enjoyed the unrelenting heat. If Alex was fortunate in having older siblings who loved her and took care of her, she was lucky, too, in being able to spend much of that baking summer at Marie’s cottage at Emma Lake, helping her with the children and the housework when she wasn’t suntanning or swimming.

  It is strange that when she was hired for her first job as a professional nurse at Saskatoon City Hospital, although she had graduated the previous spring, she didn’t have the designation Registered Nurse, or simply R.N., as did her three roommates, all of whom had graduated with her. They would tell the coroner’s jury that Alex was studying for her exams at the time of her death, but it is strange that she was the only one of them not to have acquired those precious initials. She was bright and fully capable of passing her exams if she studied, and the fact that she hadn’t earned the R.N. makes me wonder just how committed to nursing she ultimately was. Clearly, Alex knew her future did not depend on being able to write those two letters after her name. Or maybe already nursing was palling for her and she was dreaming of something else. Or maybe she simply planned to study and to write—and pass—those difficult exams the very next time there was a sitting.

  We all viewed our graduation day from our professional training with both great relief and some trepidation that we might have a hard time measuring up in the real world. But we knew, as Alex too must have, that childhood was behind us forever; we would soon be working as professionals with heavy responsibilities, and living, in Alex’s case, for the first time in her life, not with her family, or in a carefully monitored, rule-governed situation but in whatever way she chose and could afford. It looked to all of us, as it must have to Alex, that the world was finally becoming available to us, and that we wo
uld have many, many years ahead in which to live out the unknown but satisfying futures we were beginning to make real.

  Freedom meant, to us, having our own money and a small apartment, staying out as late as we felt like, maybe even all night, and for some of us, finally, because there was no longer anyone watching our every move, daring to sleep with our boyfriends. When we were in grade twelve the assumption among us was that a girl was still a virgin—except for those few who had “reputations”—and the very few who had proven they were not by becoming pregnant and dropping out of school before they were expelled as “bad influences” on the rest of us. Otherwise, we left high school as virgins. After that, once we were out of our teens, and certainly by the time we were twenty-three, as Alex was at her death, most of us were not. By then, even the most carefully brought up of us, at twenty-three, if we were not married, had become sexually experienced. Not necessarily greatly experienced, but having shaken off the guilt our earlier lives had instilled in us, we had willingly, in some cases even eagerly, given up our virginity.

  As to whether Alex was a virgin or not at her death, I found it borderline impossible to even ask the question of people who loved and admired her, and in any case, those who might know, still heavily invested in that fifties mentality which said that a sexually active, unmarried woman is a defiled and shamed woman, would never tell me. Besides, a woman murdered as young as Alex was, forever after, could not be seen as anything but “pure.” And so I didn’t ask, and not having access to the material in the files of the Saskatoon Police Service, I couldn’t find boyfriends to ask, and I couldn’t find out what rumours, scurrilous or otherwise, the police had tracked down to their sources.

  By 1960 the first contraceptive pill, Enovid, was in use in the United States. By 1961 Canada had approved it for use across the country, but only for therapeutic purposes (birth control was illegal here until 1969). But sometimes young nurses were asked to participate in drug trials, and who knows but that Alex might have been a part of one of them, and if she had access to contraceptives, the old fear of pregnancy that kept many a girl a virgin would have been alleviated. I wanted to know if she was a virgin or not, because I wanted to build a complete picture of her, I wanted to explore her psyche, to see her as one of us, and yet, because of her beauty, as in a different class. With apologies to those who loved her deeply, and looking only at the probabilities, I suspect that by then she was not. And yet, the possibility remains that even in 1961 when Johnny Cash was singing to her, even in 1962, even at twenty-three when the killer attacked her and raped her, that until that terrible moment, she was a virgin.

  By August 1961, within a few weeks of Alex moving back to Saskatoon and beginning her first job as a nurse, I was about to start my fourth year of university and had just been married. My husband and I were both students and therefore poor, and by the spring of 1962 we’d moved from a tiny rented basement apartment on Saskatoon’s east side, across the river again and into a slum apartment above a hardware store on the corner of 20th Street and Avenue A (its name was soon changed to Idylwyld Avenue and the hardware store torn down). Much to my surprise, eight years after leaving it—I had hoped forever—I was back living in what seemed an unchanged Riversdale on Saskatoon’s working class west side.

  The city itself had changed a great deal, though. According to the federal census, its population was now almost 96,000, although in 1960 the Star Phoenix had already declared it to be 100,000. Our new University Hospital, the third hospital in the city and by far the largest and most prestigious (one day to be called “Royal”), had finally opened its doors, as had a new city hall, and our first shopping centre out on Taylor Street at Clarence Avenue. When I began university in the fall of 1958 (and Alex left Saskatoon for nursing school in Yorkton), there were only about three thousand full-time students at the university; by 1962 there were six thousand, and new buildings—sans crenellated towers and gargoyles, but still built of that beautiful fieldstone—were popping up all over the campus.

  Saskatoon still had a low crime rate, people were still not afraid to go out at night, parents did not worry about their children playing unsupervised on the streets and boulevards, and driving them to school to keep them safe rarely occurred; parents did not routinely lie awake nights worrying until their teenagers, off at some party or dance or movie, returned. (Or if they did, it was not that a gang or a mugger might accost them.) People often remarked to each other what a great place to raise children Saskatoon was then—big enough to provide good schools and cultural opportunities, but small enough to be affordable, safe, and cosy for its residents.

  As well, Saskatoon’s homicide statistics were hardly alarming. As I’ve said, there had been no murders in the forties, only four in the fifties, and in the year of Alex’s death there would be only one other. Province-wide, the story was the same. In 1961 there had been fourteen murders, and in the year of Alex’s death, thirteen. The country as a whole had low murder rates. In 1953 the Canadian population was only fourteen million, and there were 149 murders nationwide, making Canada generally a safe place to live. In 1961 there were 125, and in 1962, with John Diefenbaker from Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, in his last year as prime minister and a nationwide population of eighteen million, there were 265 murders, an increase of forty percent, but one typical of all Western nations, and one that would soon be followed by a drop that has held steady ever since.

  By the early sixties, Saskatoon’s character began to change in other ways, most noticeably as a result of the federal government’s expanding immigration program (in response to a new climate that would not allow racial and ethnic discrimination) which brought people from African nations, the West Indies, and Southeast Asia into its ethnic and racial composition. This was the period, too, when First Nations families began to move into Saskatchewan’s cities because of the desperate poverty on the Reserves. (University of Saskatchewan historian Bill Waiser suggests that as farms began to mechanize, there was less need for farm labour, work which many First Nations men had done.) Eventually, those small houses that my friends from St. Mary’s School and Tech and I had lived in, and where people like Roy Romanow and Bill Davenport had been raised, would be occupied by First Nations families. Slowly, they would take their place on the lowest rung of the social ladder, and racism, once directed at Ukrainians and other Slavs, Asians and the first Black farmers, would now be aimed at them.

  Some new freedom for women was in the air; discontent with the wide range of discriminatory practices and policies against women and with the sexual double standard was about to come to a head, and the behind-the-scenes work of the forties and fifties that would lead to the so-called sexual revolution was completed.

  In the world of science, perhaps most relevant of all to Alex’s life and death, only months after her murder, Watson, Wilkins, and Crick were awarded the Nobel Prize for their long work culminating in the determination of the molecular structure of DNA, a discovery that would usher in the possibility of cloning human beings, of world-shattering new medical possibilities, and that, ironically, might make it possible one day to identify Alex’s killer.

  We know it now as a pivotal moment in North American history, the moment when the foundations of the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, the hippie era, the era of the hydrogen bomb, the space age and other technological innovations including the personal computer, the genetic revolution, and, of course, the women’s movement, were laid. That period remains so clear in my mind that it is hard for me to believe that people who today are middle-aged were either not alive then or were toddlers, and view the early sixties as the Dark Ages. I still remember clearly my sense of having emerged from the shadow of pioneer times to claim our places in a new, exciting, and wider modern world. In my memory of 1961 and 1962, the sun was always shining, and we were all very busy, doing interesting things, moving forward, we thought, from that tremulous and dark beginning, to a future that seemed boundless and unquestionably connected to
the great world beyond our province’s borders.

  That was the summer I worked as office help for the Saskatoon Construction Association, then located on Duchess Street within a few blocks of Mead’s Drugstore and Alex’s suite. She could easily have been walking south on 7th Avenue to go to her job at the hospital on Queen Street as I was walking north two blocks over on 5th Avenue to my job, or perhaps we’d walked in the same direction at the same time but separated by two city blocks, and had no idea of our proximity. I didn’t venture beyond the office into that area where she lived. I can imagine that I might have strolled over to Mead’s once or twice during my lunch hour on some errand, but when my day was done, I headed as fast as possible in the opposite direction back to the apartment, my new husband, and my new life. Alex’s path and mine never crossed.

  She disappeared on May 18, 1962. While her family and her friends were searching frantically for her on the 19th, the unforgettable Marilyn Monroe was singing her famously seductive “Happy Birthday” to President Kennedy. By August, Marilyn, too, would be dead, the world, while offering certain undeniable benefits to pretty women, being also very hard on them. I was living in that seedy little apartment on the west side on June 1, 1962, when, having already read with only mild interest of Alex’s disappearance, and with a great deal more interest of Monroe’s version of “Happy Birthday,” I opened the newspaper that morning and read that the night before, Alexandra Wiwcharuk’s raped, battered body had been found.