What made Paul & Evelyn Wortman leave Moncton in 1970 ?

If your memory is not as good as you think it is - like mine - you remember bits of lots of things but you get the decades wrong.

We all remember when old Moncton - the Hub City - Anglo Moncton - Moncton City proper - was hit with three seemingly certain death blows, one right after another.

The obituary for the city was at the printers.

Moncton had only maybe 40,000 residents on a good day in the Fifties and Sixties when Paul and Evelyn Wortman were growing up : tiny.

It was a sort of a government town, but very much a working class government town.

Almost everybody had a family member working at one of three big employers.

Firstly, the CNR shops - employing thousands and why the other big employers were in Moncton.

Hundreds and hundreds worked at Eaton’s warehouse and hundreds and hundreds more at CFB Moncton, again a big central warehouse for the huge Atlantic Canada Cold War defence complex.

Then between about 1976 to 1988 they all closed and even the Feds in  far off Ottawa realized the city was on life-support and needed help.

But Paul & Evelyn left for the USA in 1969-1970 when Moncton was still a job paradise for anglo high school grads from working class families.

And the USA  was in a serious economic downturn due to years of overspending on the Vietnam War.

Not to mention the fact that the free pass that all Canadians used to have to work in the USA like they were Americans had ended with the 1965 Hart-Celler Immigration Act.

You needed skills and experience to settle in the USA as Canadians - neither which recent high school grads tend to have.

So now they are in America the land of no social net, then and now, and they are so skint they successfully convince an adoption agency to put the second child of a married couple up for adoption.

Tough sledding in Massachusetts’ quasi Catholic culture, I’d say - particularly in 1970.

They must have made a heck of a case - I would have thought the agency would have blustered and said if you are that skint, you’ll form a charge on the public purse and be deported back home.

“Haven’t you two got parents back home that would love to help out with your beautiful little grandson ?”

Cause I am betting Paul is the eldest in his family and these are the first grandkids for either family.

Most new grandparents would be gagging to see the kids —- what happened here ?

Come on folks, you don’t have to be police detectives here - just human beings - this story simply begs for answers.....