he story of the last half of the Twentieth Century in Alberta begins with Leduc #1, the Imperial Oil well that came in almost on cue on February 13, 1947. When the roaring gusher of oil, gas, mud and drilling chemicals was ignited, a 50-foot column of flame and huge clouds of thick black smoke reached up into the sky. It was like a giant billboard, announcing that Alberta's oil and gas reserves were as big as everyone had hoped and suspected, and it immediately attracted oilmen and their money from all over the world.
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"They ate my puppy dog in a grain shed when I was eight. I been killing them ever since."
--Napoleon Poulin, a renowned exterminator hired to make Alberta rat-free in the early 1950s
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Part of the reason they came was because the province's Social Credit government, under the steady hand of Ernest Manning, had developed one of the most enlightened energy regulatory schemes in the oil-producing world. Manning's 25-year Socred regime would, in fact, give Albertans the longest stretch of honest, competent and stable government they had ever known.
But Volume 9 is more concerned with social development than politics and economics. The 1950s, after all, was the era when the automobile and the television became accessible to all, when the suburbs mushroomed around the cities, when the Cold War haunted hopes for the future, when polio had to be fought and beaten, and when Calgary's rabid football fans rode their horses into Toronto's Royal York Hotel and invented the national Grey Cup party.
