At The Movies

They opened up the place to, it was a Repatriation Depot, and they were bringing people from all over, getting ready to go home and we were in the photography. “Ok, you, you, you and you.” “Yeah?” “You’re volunteered to run movies.” So what they did, they started at 9 o’clock in the morning and we ran movies continuously until 10 o’clock at night. And the first day, we had one projector, which meant, every twenty minutes you got to stop, change, you get cat-called. So we had one fella with us, we called him ‘Feathers’, he’d get you anything you wanted. He just had a knack. So we got talking to him, “We got to get another projector.” So we knew the Education Officer had a brand new one, but he wouldn’t part with it, it was his baby, okay. So that night, Feathers got me and he says, “C’mon, we’re going for a walk.” We went for a walk, we ended up at the Education Officer’s office. He opened the door, how I don’t know, we got the projector, we brought it back to our place and we set it up and you could mark your film so you knew when you shut one projector and start the other. And the next day, we ran continuous movies, it was beautiful the way it went. And there was eleven of us doing it, but two of us would run it for a whole day and the others, it would give us, sign a 48-hour pass and get lost. In fact, that’s the only way I got down to Stratford-on-Avon was on, we did our stint and we were away for a couple of days. But this Education Officer come around looking for his projector. “Where did you guys get that?” “Oh, we found it.” “Where’s the serial number?” “Well, we don’t know. Where is it?” Well, Feathers had eliminated it and that poor guy never ever found out but for three weeks we did movies like that and it was good.

At the end of the war Mr. Abdallah was given a new job. He and ten others were to play movies, at a Repatriation Depot, for the other soldiers that were waiting to go home.

Wilf Abdallah

Mr. Abdallah was born in London, Ontario, in 1923. His father immigrated from Lebanon to the United States at the age of 12 and eventually ended up in London, Ontario, where he was a candy maker and owned a few stores in the area. In 1936 the family moved to Petrolia and then on to Sarnia. Mr Abdallah attended high school in Sarnia before moving back to London in 1939-40. After lying about his age Mr. Abdallah joined the Royal Canadian Air Force when he was seventeen. He went to Toronto for three weeks training at Manning Depot before going to Paulson, Manitoba, to complete his training. In March of 1944 he sailed on the Louis Pasteur to Bournemouth, England, where he was stationed with 129 Airfield. Mr. Abdallah worked with the tactical air force, building airfields and then joined the air force’s return salvage unit. He moved through France, Belgium and Holland recovering aircraft to be repaired or stripped for parts. When Mr. Abdallah returned to Canada after the war he went back to live the rest of his life in London, Ontario.