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fatehbaz · 2 years

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There are three reasons why an international audience should care about the otherwise insignificant Canadian city of Thunder Bay, a community of 120,000 souls 100km North of the American border right in the middle of the world’s second most spacious nation-state.

The first is that, as Canada’s murder and hate-crime capital, with the vast majority of these terrors directed at Indigenous people, roughly 13-20 percent of the population, its example has a lot to teach us about the dire failure of the Canadian model of liberal capitalism, corporate multiculturalism, and half-hearted “reconciliation.”

Second, as a troubled (post-)extractive and logistics-based economy in a “first-world” country — a country that exports and finances extractive industries around the world — its patterns of racist violence reveal something profound about capitalism today.

Finally, Thunder Bay’s problems demand, and are generating, the kind of radical, grassroots solutions that point towards the kind of transformations all communities need to embrace in the years to come to overcome the dangerous intertwined orders of contemporary colonialism and capitalism [...].

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The isolation, the economic marginality, and the history of extraction and racial resentments all contribute to, but cannot completely explain, the staggering degree of racism in the city. [...] Like many police forces in Canada, officers in the Thunder Bay Police Service (TBPS) have been known to drive Indigenous people out to the outskirts of town, take their shoes and coats, and leave them to walk back or freeze to death. Unlike most police forces in Canada, the TBPS has recently been found to be plagued with profound “systemic racism” by two independent and high-profile reports. [...] The real reason for the investigations was the deaths of seven Indigenous youth, most from remote Northern communities, most in the city to access high school education or medical services denied to them in their communities. [...]

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As scholars Damien Lee and Jana-Rae Yerxa note, many precedents stand behind these fears. Indigenous people end up dead in Thunder Bay at staggering rates. [...] Just before the most recent police reports were issued, the mayor (a former Police Association president), the police chief (a fool) and the city’s most successful lawyer (a convicted child molestor) were all implicated in a scandal involving a blend of sexual abuse, extortion, and breach of trust. [...]

Meanwhile, just as I moved to the city in early 2017, an Indigenous woman was fatally injured in the street when one of a gang of white teenagers out joyriding threw a heavy metal trailer hitch at her from their speeding car. It took her several agonizing months to die from her internal injuries. [...]

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The rank, racist and reactionary hypocrisy so common in Canada and in Thunder Bay is, unfortunately, often mistaken for merely a cultural anachronism, which can be solved through better public education, greater cultural sensitivity and more opportunities to celebrate diversity. This has, for instance, been the approach to the problems of racist policing in the city: another “cultural competency” workshop [...].

In spite of a great deal of rhetoric about “nation-to-nation” negotiations by the Trudeau government, it is profoundly clear, as Mi’Kmaq lawyer and professor Pam Palmater warns, that the State does not and cannot accept the idea that Indigenous people would be allowed to say “no” to, for instance, mines, forestry, corporate fishing or pipelines [...].

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To this day Canada is a key player in a global capitalist imperium that specializes in extractive industries and extractive forms of debt.

The Mining Association of Canada reports that “the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX) and TSX Venture Exchange accounted for 57 percent of the global mining equity raised in 2016.” As Alain Deneault and William Sacher have noted, Canada has historically structured its laws and commercial norms to empower the theft of indigenous lands to be violently transformed into “resources” for export, a specialization that is now itself exported around the world as Canadian-owned or -funded corporations are called upon to “develop” mines and extractive projects globally.

Every Canadian with savings is necessarily complicit: almost all pension funds, banks and other investment vehicles here are wrapped up in the TSX and therefore the extractive industry. Meanwhile, as Peter Hudson illustrates, Canada also has a long legacy of renovating national, municipal and personal debt into a tool of neocolonialism, notably in the Caribbean where Canadian banks have enjoyed profound influence, even monopolies. [...]

The ruling class and international capital, working hand in glove, have consistently used divide-and-conquer techniques to sew the seeds of racism that undermine solidarity. Thunder Bay is only a particularly poignant example, a place so small and marginalized that it cannot sustain the veneer of polite, civil, cheerful liberalism that is the country’s brand.

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Text by: Max Haiven. “The colonial secrets of Canada’s most racist city.” ROAR Magazine. 13 February 2019. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks added by me.]

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scotianostra · 1 year

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Marion Patterson nee Chalmers, was born on August 26th 1911 in Aberdeen.

Marions parents emigrated to canade in 1919, where she lived for 20 years, in August 1939, she, her husband Guthrie Patterson, (who hailed from Dundee,) and their son Douglas moved back to Aberdeen.

War broke out shortly after moving back to Aberdeen, Scotland in 1939, and Marion enlisted as an ambulance driver. She really enjoyed her job and attended classes when not on duty to become more proficient in her work. She became a lifetime member of the Order of the Eastern Star and belonged to the White Shrine. Marion was Queen in the order of the White Shrine for two years and was also Prelate in the Order of the Amaranth for a number of years. In the summer of 1942, an emergency bulletin was issued, "All Canadian children and parents wishing to return to Canada, should apply to a steamship office in Glasgow." Marion did not think the War would last very long, but, the thought of taking Douglas to the shelter every night, effects on his schooling and his health, made her decide to send him to her mother in Toronto. She wanted to stay with the ambulance service until the War was over so that she and her husband could return to Toronto together. The next day, two Red Cross ships carrying Canadian children and 200 wounded, were torpedoed in the Glasgow harbour. Her son Douglas was not injured. The damaged ships returned to Glasgow for 10 days for repair and eventually made their way safely to Toronto.

The War raged on, the damage to Aberdeen was indescribable and times were bleak. Marion decided to open her own Hairdressing salon, which had been a dream of hers for many years. She did this with enthusiasm and was very happy to be working at hairdressing again after such a long while. Marion wanted to contribute in some way and in October of 1942, became a Senior Fire Guard for the Civil Defence in Aberdeen, Scotland. One day, while on duty, Marion was using a stirrup pump to extinguish a burning building on South Market Street, when she heard cries for help coming from the building. With stirrup pump in hand, she could see a way to start burrowing under some walls that had collapsed. It took quite some time, but she managed to get to the sailor who was trapped below. Unfortunately, his legs were trapped under some timber beams and Marion could not free him. He was too weak to help. She looked around and found some loose pieces of wood and by pushing on the loose pieces, had enough leverage to partially lift the timber. At that point, the sailor was able to wiggle himself loose. Marion kept calling above for help and finally a rope was lowered through the damaged walls. She was able to tie the rope around the sailor's waist and with help got him out of the burning building. They were both exhausted, but safe. One minute after escaping from the building, it collapsed.

The incident was written up in the London Gazzette on December 4, 1942. Marion was invited to attend at Buckingham Palace on the 12th of February 1943 to receive a presentation of the George Medal by King George VI. During the presentation, it was announced that Marion was the first street Fire Guard to win a medal while engaged in fire duties. As part of the award, Marion was also selected for portraiture in a special section of the National Gallery of England set aside for heroes and heroines of the blitz. She was also invited to be a guest at Balmoral Castle so as to be able to visit at any time she wished, for the remainder of her life. The famous Scots Artist, Mr. Robert Sivell, R.S.A. had been commissioned by King George VI to paint Marion's portrait. Mr. Sivell worked at the Aberdeen College of Art and Marion was scheduled to meet with him for several sittings.

Marion kept the portrait a secret from her family because it came as such a surprise to her; she wanted it to be a big surprise to them too. She was able to dash away from her hairdressing shop to attend special sittings for the portrait. When it was finally completed, Marion again attended Buckingham Place for the presentation. The original painting was hung in the National Gallery, London, England and was shown in a Special Wing for Heroes and Heroines of the 1939-1945 War. Her portrait had the honour of hanging between General Eisenhower and General Montgomery. Two replicas were also created and a sketch in black and white. One replica is in the Ottawa, Ontario War Museum in Canada and was part of the Women at War Display in 1985. The black and white sketch was sent to the Gallery in Aberdeen, Scotland. Just under 40 women in UK were awarded the UK George Medal. Marion was awarded another 5 medals during WWII for her actions as a Civil Defence Senior Fire Guard. Her medals are on display at the Aberdeen Art Gallery having been purchased in 2005 by the Aberdeen City Council and the Friends of Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museums. They form part of the Artists at War display.

Marion moved back to Toronto after the war where she worked as a hairdresser and lived with her family until her death. She enjoyed traveling and was able to make many trips to Scotland and England. She faced many challenges throughout her life during and after the war, including breast cancer in 1975, which she also battled and conquered. She had three grandchildren, five great grandchildren, and four great-great grandchildren. She is shown below in August of 1982 with husband Guthrie and great grandson Darryl James Wannamaker.

#scotland #scottish #history #world war two #heroine #war heroine #scots-canadian

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kapoormovingservices · 2 months

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innercitymovingandstorageco · 2 months

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paulinedorchester · 1 year

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We Followed Our Stars, by Ida Cook. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1950; rev. ed., Toronto: Harlequin, 1976. Reprinted, as Safe Passage: The Remarkable Story of Two Sisters Who Rescued Jews from the Nazis, with a new foreword by Anne Sebba, Toronto: Harlequin, 2008; reprinted again, as The Bravest Voices: A Memoir of Two Sisters’ Heroism During the Nazi Era, Don Mills, Ont.: Park Row Books, 2021.

Overture of Hope: Two Sisters’ Daring Plan That Saved Opera’s Jewish Stars from the Third Reich, by Isabel Vincent. Washington, D.C.: Regnery History, 2022.

As soon as I learned of Isabel Vincent’s book, I knew that it would need to be read with great caution. That feeling was reinforced when I read the “about the author” blurb on the book’s dust jacket. Then I looked at the bibliography, and wondered if I really needed to read it at all. (Here I must stop and thank the collection development, acquisitions, and cataloguing staffs of the Chicago Public Library. This is the second time in less than three years that they’ve purchased a book at my request, and in both cases they’ve managed to put it into my hands in less than a month.)

Why the unease? To begin with, Regnery Publishing’s stable of authors includes Ann Coulter, Ted Cruz, Newt Gingrich, David Horowitz, Sarah Palin, and similar types.

Second, it turns out that Isabel Vincent isn’t a historian: like Lynne Olson, she’s a journalist writing about history. Not only that: Vincent is an investigative reporter for the New York Post! One has to wonder what the phrase “investigative reporter” actually means in the context of that truly filthy tabloid, a jewel in the crown of Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp. On the other hand, I must say that Vincent seems far more comfortable using primary sources than Olson does — her research for Overture of Hope included examining 33 archival collections in seven countries. As well, the book carries an endorsement from the historian Blanche Wiesen Cook, who is not exactly a darling of the right.

Finally, the Cook sisters’ story is far from untold. I’ve known of them for at least the past several years, although I’m no longer sure how I learned: I could swear that there was an article about them in Opera News four or five years ago, but I can’t locate it. In any case, as early as 1950 Ida Cook wrote a memoir of their exploits (revising it in 1976), which is why this is a review of two books, not just one. She was the subject of a 1956 episode of This is Your Life. In 1964 Yad Vashem honored the Cook sisters as Righteous Among the Nations. They were interviewed in McCall’s in 1966 (the article was reprinted the same year in The Australian Women’s Weekly). They also inspired an essay in Granta in 2007, and I found a goodly number of other newspaper and magazine articles about them while searching for image files to use in this post.

Ida (at left; 1904-1986) and Louise (1901-1991) Cook seem to me slightly too young to be classed with the hundreds of thousands of British women for whom marriage became, if nothing else, a simple numerical impossibility in the wake of the First World War and the influenza pandemic that overlapped it. Nevertheless, that’s where Vincent situates them. The daughters of a Customs and Excise officer, they had both entered civil service themselves by the end of 1920, as typists. They were then living with their parents and younger brothers in Wandsworth, London, but the family had moved several times while they were growing up. During a stint in Alnwick, Northumberland, they attended The Duchess’ School, where music was one of their exam subjects: Louise was a pianist and Ida was a violinist.

Their passion for opera seems to have come about more or less by accident. One day in 1923 Louise, who worked for the Board of Education, wandered into a lunchtime lecture on music being given on the premises, returned home in a daze, and announced that she simply had to have a gramophone. She proceeded to buy one on an installment plan, along with ten records. (These would have been 78rpm discs, with a single track, three or four minutes long, on each side.) They were mostly of instrumental works, but also included recordings by two sopranos, Amelita Galli-Curci and Alma Gluck.

These quickly eclipsed everything else for the Cook sisters, who pooled their savings to buy the cheapest available tickets to three performances at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden: they saw Tosca, Rigoletto, and La Traviata, all excellent ways to get started with opera. I was startled to learn that the Covent Garden opera season was only two months long in those days; apparently, the opera house was used as a dance hall during the rest of the year.

When the Cooks learned that Galli-Curci was to give five concerts in London in late 1924 (her first appearances in the U.K.), they bought tickets to all of them. After the first one they wrote her a fan letter, enclosing a handkerchief that Ida had embroidered, and received a letter back by return post, inviting them to come back stage and say hello after the last, which they did.

Having learned in the meantime that Galli-Curci confined her operatic engagements to the Metropolitan Opera, in New York, the Cooks decided that they would travel there to see her perform — and figured out it would take them two years to save up the money that they would need in order to do so. They wrote to Galli-Curci about their plans, and she urged them to contact her when they had an itinerary. She would reserve seats for them, she said. (Galli-Curci's behavior wasn't unusual at the time, at least for singers who could pick and choose their engagements. As late as the 1970s, Dame Janet Baker was appearing in opera only in England, while continuing to tour all over the world as a concert artist.)

And that’s exactly what happened. Their arrival in New York, on January 4th, 1927, attracted the attention of The New York Times; and when they went, as instructed, to Galli-Curci’s agent’s office they found main-floor tickets to several performances waiting for them, along with Galli-Curci’s husband, Homer Samuels (a composer and pianist who was her recital accompanist), who invited them to dinner at their apartment a couple of nights later. They asked the Cook sisters to visit them in Autumn at their home in the Catskills, north of New York City — and that happened as well, though it took another two years of saving to bring it about. Ida’s account of this visit in We Followed Our Stars is not to be missed. She makes it sound like Downton Abbey on a smaller scale. (I feel compelled to add, however, that her description of Catskills social life has absolutely nothing to do with my understanding of what went on there, as recounted by my mother, who spent many summers at Catskills resorts during the 1930s and 40s. See also the films Dirty Dancing and A Walk on the Moon.)

They paid for all of this fun by scrimping and saving, skipping many lunches, and getting up before dawn to join the queue to buy cheap tickets at the Royal Opera House, where they made many like-minded friends and had the opportunity to meet world-class artists arriving for rehearsals. As we’ve seen, they were very outgoing — or at any rate Ida was outgoing and Louise was nearly always willing to follow where her sister led — and by 1934 they had befriended, and been befriended by, Galli-Curci, Ezio Pinza, Rosa Ponselle, Elisabeth Rethberg and — most crucially, in view of what was to come — Viorica Ursuleac and her husband, the conductor Clemens Krauss.

As the years went on, however, a new source of income emerged. Ida Cook was clearly a born storyteller. She had written articles for The Duchess’ School Magazine as a student; in 1928, as an old girl, she sent in an account of her and Louise’s trip to America, which was published, along with an article in the Daily Mail. After the Catskills visit, she sent an article on that experience to Mabs Fashions, a magazine that published sewing patterns, romantic fiction, and non-fiction on whatever topics seemed likely to interest their audience, including travel. This, too, was published, and the editor, a Miss Taft, invited Cook to lunch. (Vincent refers to the Mabs Fashions article, but doesn’t quote from it, as she does from the Duchess’ article, or even supply its title. From this I surmised that Mabs Fashions is poorly documented, and sure enough, WorldCat shows only scattered holdings in fewer than half a dozen libraries in the U.K. I can tell you that it was a monthly, and that it seems to have run from 1924 until some point in the mid-1930s, but much of its contents appear to have been lost to history. That’s a real pity, as it sounds very interesting.) Miss Taft asked Cook to write additional travel articles for the magazine. “Apart from the American journeys, a very short trip to Brussels was the full extent of our foreign travels,” Cook recalled. “But I said, ‘Yes, certainly,’ bought a series of guidebooks and set to work.”

A year or so later Miss Taft offered her a job at Mabs Fashions, as fiction sub-editress. This was a big leap — Cook had a responsible job in the Law Courts, with an assured pension when she turned 60, and in fact had just been promoted — but she decided to take the offer, even though she didn’t know what the position entailed. Her account of this experience is very funny, and I won’t spoil it for you, except to quote her about one part of it: “On press day I was faced with ... adding perhaps five hundred words to a story, without altering its sense, and so that no one could detect the ‘joins’. This was the only part of my work at which I became adept.”

Indeed, she became so adept that after several months the long-suffering Miss Taft asked her to write a story of her own. And then another, and so on. One of them grew into a novel, Wife to Christopher, which appeared in 1936 and was the first of Ida Cook’s more than 120 romantic novels, written over the course of 50 years, all under the name Mary Burchell.

In short order, she was earning as much as £1,000 per year. That money was going to prove very useful. (All of her novels were published by Mills & Boon, which later became an imprint of the romance giant Harlequin, thus explaining We Followed Our Stars’ reprint history.)

“I realize now that, even though we were in our late twenties, we were not entirely grown up,” Cook wrote of the plans she and her sister had been making during the first half of the 1930s. Indeed, when Englebert Dollfuss, the Austrian chancellor, was assassinated on July 25th, 1934, their main concern was that this might disrupt their planned first visit to the Salzburg Festival. (It didn’t.) They were no more politically aware when, during a visit to Amsterdam near the end of that year, Ursuleac asked them to “look after” a friend of hers: Mitia Mayer-Lismann, a German pianist and educator, who was soon to visit London to give a series of lectures. The Cooks assumed that this meant showing her the sights, which they did. When she asked whether St. Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Abbey were Protestant or Catholic, they wondered if she was a Catholic and shouldn’t have been taken to see a Protestant church — so they asked.

What they learned was that Mayer-Lismann was Jewish, and it was she who explained the Nuremberg laws to them. Her other purpose in visiting the U.K. was to see if there was any way of moving there with her family. The Cook sisters offered to do what they could to help. The U.K. wasn’t making things easy for would-be refugees from the Nazis (nor was any other country), and half of the Cooks’ work as the decade went on would consist of cutting through reams of red tape. Word of their willingness to do this spread through the Jewish communities of Germany and, later, Austria, keeping the sisters active until just days before war was declared.

The other half of the task was helping those for whom they were able to secure visas to smuggle out whatever portion of their assets hadn’t been seized by the authorities, which by this time consisted mostly of furs and jewelry. This was a genuine cloak-and-dagger operation, if only because it involved making repeated visits to the countries in question at a time when the authorities there were beginning to view British visitors with suspicion. It was at this point that Clemens Krauss got involved: he kept the Cooks informed about when and where he was conducting what, so that when they were questioned at the border they could say that they were going to hear Krauss conduct this opera in that city on that date.

As a side note, Ida’s new prosperity allowed the Cooks to buy a long lease a one-bedroom apartment in Dolphin Square, which had just been built (and where their neighbors included politicians, spies, and Oswald Mosely). Ostensibly, this was so that they would have a crash pad in central London after late nights at the opera. In reality, it served as a dormitory for newly-arrived refugees. Ida recalled that at one point there were twelve people sleeping there.

While Ida seems to have been the family dynamo, Louise’s contributions shouldn’t be overlooked. One of her hobbies was teaching herself languages; she learned German at top speed in 1937 in order to facilitate the sisters’ work. She also put all of her (apparently quite generous) allowance of vacation time during that period into the rescue effort, and also seems to have been the uncredited co-author of, or at least an essential consultant on, Louise’s novels.

At this point I’m going to stop summarizing the Cooks’ story and tell you that if you’re going to read either or both of these books, you should begin with Ida Cook’s memoir, if only because it’s a primary source. It’s also a very useful insight into how an opera buff’s mind works.

Both authors provide their readers with excellent summaries of political events in Germany and Austria between 1933 and 1939 — and both do so without ever talking down to their readers or implying that they shouldn’t need to provide them with this information, which is quite an accomplishment. Cook can be vague about the dates and chronology of personal events, while Vincent simply is vague on music in general and opera in particular, subjects in which she clearly has no genuine interest. (As Fred Cohn points out in his review of Vincent’s book in Opera News — which is how I learned of it; here’s a link, but I’m not sure that it will work for non-subscribers — her subtitle is a complete howler: there were no “stars” among the Cooks’ refugees; in fact, many of the people they helped weren’t involved with music at all. In spite of this, the Library of Congress has classed Overture of Hope as ML (Literature on Music).) As well, Vincent gives short shrift to the war years. (Louise was evacuated to Wales with her office; Ida was an assistant warden in a Bermondsey air-raid shelter, while continuing to write; the Royal Opera House became a dance hall year-round.) On the other hand, she provides us with a firm chronology of the Cooks sisters’ pre-war lives, and she also reveals the hard facts of how the people whose escapes they facilitated fared, which are not happy stories in all cases.

It is also Vincent who relates that Clemens Krauss fared badly in denazification proceedings. Despite his efforts on behalf of his Jewish associates and their families (as well as many complete strangers), he was widely denounced in 1945, and it’s undeniably true that he displayed a Machiavellian streak that led him to consolidate his artistic influence by securing the directorships of both the Vienna and Munich State Operas under the Third Reich. He ended up being banned from conducting for two years, but Vincent documents that just about all of his denouncers were his professional rivals. (The same thing frequently happened in France during the search for collaborators.)

Finally, Vincent quotes extensively from a film treatment that Ida Cook wrote, based on We Followed Our Stars, that is languishing in Joshua Logan’s papers at the Library of Congress. That document needs to be plucked out of purgatory and produced. Right now!

#world war ii #the holocaust #righteous among the nations #first-hand accounts #retrospective accounts #a long post for sunday #lots of history #lots of links #and even some footnotes #oh and this is also about #opera #also #yom hashoah #begins monday evening

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emjcleaningservice · 1 year

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oldbutnotyetwise · 11 months

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My Friend Mary

When we bought our old property up north you could tell just by looking at it that there would be a lot of history there. A house that was around 100 years old, a barn that was around seventy years old, and bits of old farm equipment abandoned in what was once field but was now forest. The old Barton Farm had a lot of history and sometimes as I wandered about the property or sat in the house or barn I thought of all of those who had come before us and lived, and died in this very special place.

Shortly after moving in I was at the Township Office where I met Charles Barton who was related to the Bartons who had homesteaded our place. I mentioned to him that I was curious about the history of our new home. Charles mentioned my interest to his Aunt Mary, and that is how I ended up meeting Mary.

Robin and I were getting ready to go out one day and upon opening our front door we were met by Mary and Lew Holotuk. Mary was 91 and Lew was 96 at the time. Mary had been born a Barton, and had written out a page and a half about the history of our property. What follows is a bit of a story that I have pieced together about my dear friend Mary. It comes from conversations I have had with her as well as stories about Mary I have picked up along the way.

Mary tells me that she was born in our house on October 27, 1928, that she made her entrance into the world while the doctor was just pulling into her driveway. As was often the case in those days she had several brothers and sisters, together they helped their parents look after their farm. She was ten when she tasted her first beer, taken from where the spring water came out, and where the beer was stored to stay cold. Before video games kids actually played outside, Mary and her brothers would walk along the peak of the metal roof on the family barn and do lots of other things that would make todays safety experts loose their minds.

Mary wanted to continue her schooling but in those days a higher education was something few farm kids got to pursue, and certainly even fewer females.

Now this might surprise the younger folk, but there was a time before cell phones, the internet and dating apps. When the dating pool was rather small compared to what it is today. You were likely to date and marry someone within a twenty mile radius of where you lived, someone you probably went to school with, and someone whose family was known to yours. Mary tells me of how she came home from a date and found Lew waiting for her. Lew had come for a visit and was none too pleased to find out she was out on a date with someone else. Lew had his eyes set on Mary, 5 1/2 years his junior and stubbornly made it clear that he was the one she should be with. Sure enough in time Lew convinced Mary of this and they got married when she was 19 in 1948.

Lew was a mechanic by trade and was in the army serving overseas during WW2. After the war they opened up Holotuk Service Center in Huntsville which they ran for twenty-eight years. Lew did the vehicle repairs and drove the tow trucks. Mary looked after the front of the shop, but she also would drive the tow truck picking vehicles up in Toronto or wherever they were. They had the towing contract with the OPP so were friendly with the local officers. It wouldn’t be unusual to find the officers visiting and playing cards with Mary in the shop.

Over the years Lew and Mary had three children, Ron, Patsy and Ted. Mary knew exactly when Ted was conceived, she said that Lew had snuck up on her while they were at the hunt camp, then she would laugh with a mischievous smile on her face. Eventually Lew developed some heart problems and the Service Center was sold and they moved back to Hotham in 1982. They bought Mary’s sisters out of her parents home after the parents passed away. At one point in 1986 the hospital didn’t want to release Lew they felt he needed more care than she could provide. That is when the hospital learned it wasn’t good to rile Mary up, and after the dust settled Mary brought Lew home where she looked after him. Lew left this world on April 13, 2021 in his 98th year, Lew and Mary had been married almost 73 years by then.

All the time I’ve known Mary she has been the one doing the driving, even when Lew was still alive. Mary was pretty well known as a bit of a speed demon. If the two of us were leaving the legion at the same time I used to wait until she left to avoid slowing her down on her way home. Now over the last few years Mary has slowed down a lot and no longer drives at night, but just recently she had her licence renewed for another year.

Now if I was to try to describe Mary, to help you form a picture your mind I would describe her like this. I would guess that she would be about five foot four, white curly hair, glasses if not on her face hanging down on her chest with the string running behind her neck, I would say she probably looks about twenty years younger than she is, and she has a lovely smile when she’s not trying to outplay you at Cribbage or Euchre. She’s a determined lady who knows what she knows, and although I don’t know how far she went in school, she is wise from a life well lived. Not too much that she hasn’t seen in her days.

Now some of the Legend that circles around Mary, she is a Cribbage and Euchre Shark, and she is very competitive. Now having said that she showed me tremendous patience while I was learning the game of Cribbage. I suspect that Mary has recruited more new members for the Restoule Legion than anyone else. When she brought me an application for the legion, well I didn’t get the impression it was optional. I had quickly sensed that Mary was someone that I definitely wanted on my side. Now there is some talk about some young guy once accusing Mary of cheating at Cards, well lets just say that there was an altercation after that. Mary never said too much about that, and I didn’t ask, but she did make mention of talking to a judge once and I suspected those two things might have been connected. Refer back to the earlier comment about wanting Mary on your side. Now there also is the stories about Lew running over Mary in the driveway once, and another time where Mary ran over Lew. Yes after hearing those stories I would have been a little nervous to stand in their driveway when one of them was behind the wheel in their old silver Saturn SUV. Mary kept her Hunting Licence well into her nineties, not sure when the last time she used it was, but I always considered her armed and dangerous.

Over the time she lived down the road from me I would drop off the occasional Jigsaw Puzzle for Mary, always the 1,000 piece ones that she and friends would work on. I would call around sometimes in the afternoon so Mary and I could share cup of tea and get a few Crib games in. I enjoyed the crib games, although I suspected she went easy on me, but more than that I enjoyed her company and hearing her stories of times gone by. Mary is a living history book of what had gone on in the Hotham area, and she knows just about everyone, and everyone knows her. Although she can be as tough as nails, there is also a softer kinder side of her that I don’t think everyone gets to see.

Sadly an era may be coming to an end. Mary turns 95 shortly and she is coming to the conclusion that perhaps its time for her to move to move from her home to a seniors residence. As I type this up she has temporarily moved out of her home into the Trout Creek Senior’s Residence, to try it out for a month. She likes that they will do her laundry and meals, and I think she is looking forward to having company around her. Even with all her visitors I think Mary found the days long and she was getting lonely. When she spoke to me about it she said that if she decides to stay there she will miss her independence.

It seemed to me that Mary was the Matriarch of the area, and although I am no longer there I am saddened by the thought of this Matriarch moving away. She was a large part of the whole experience of us living where we did, she was also one of the many reasons why we loved living there. Although Mary may not live there anymore her presence will still be felt there for many, many years to come. She will live on in the stories shared by neighbours around the legion tables on the Friday night pizza nights. The legend of Mary lives on, and I am fortunate that I get to call her a trusted and well loved friend.

#hotham #Nipissing #Mary

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"'LONGSHOREMEN HERE JOIN SHIPPING STRIKE," Toronto Star. September 13, 1943. Page 2. ---- Object to Labor Board Hearing Case Until Third Member Named ---- Montreal, Sept. 13 - (CP) National war labor board hearings of disputes involving "several thousand" freight handlers across Canada will await "the time when the board is fully constituted," F. H. Hall, vice-president of the International Brotherhood of Railway Clerks, so announced today.

He said he had sent a telegram to the labor board "declining to proceed with hearings scheduled for tomorrow and Wednesday and had urged Hon. Humphrey Mitchell, minister of labor, "to take immediate steps to fully constitute the board."

The labor board now has only two members, as the service of J. L. Cohen, K.C., labor representative, was terminated by federal cabinet action.

Meanwhile Mr. Hall gave this picture of the situation as far as A.F.L. freight handlers are concerned:

The strike of 1.800 Canadian Steamship Lines freight handlers and sympathizers from the Clarke Steamship Line in various St. Lawrence waterway ports continues, virtually paralyzing the movement of waterborne freight from the lakehead to Quebec.

Representatives of 3.500 C.P.R. hourly-rated employees from coast to coast, demanding vacations with pay and scheduled to appear before the labor board tomorrow, will not appear.

Representatives of 650 stevedores, employed by the Eastern Canada Stevedoring Co. of Halifax and demanding wage increases, will not appear at a scheduled hearing before the labor board.

Representatives of 500 Canadian Pacific and Canadian National freight handlers of Montreal, demanding wage increases, will not appear at a scheduled hearing before the labor board.

Representatives of 250 Canadian Pacific longshoremen at Saint John. N.B., demanding wage increases, will not appear at a scheduled hearing before the labor board.

Strike Spreads Here One hundred and fifty longshoremen, all C.S.L. employees in Toronto today joined the shipping strike which has involved five Great Lakes and St. Lawrence river ports.

Frank H. Hall, president of the board of Railway and Steamship Clerks, Freight Handlers, Express and Station Employees union. an- nounced: "The national war labor board has set Wednesday for the hearing of the case and the union has declined to proceed until the board is fully constituted.

"By an order-in-council made public last week. J. L. Cohen is no longer a member of the board. The union, on my instructions, has declined to be heard until a labor representative is appointed."

Mr. Hall said that freight at the head of the lakes is "completely tied up" there. He said, longshoremen employed by the Canadian Pacific Steamships and the Canada Steamship lines are on strike. The Montreal strike included employees of the Clarke Steamship Lines Ltd.

A C.S.L. official said that freight loading and unloading "is moving as usual in Toronto. We have a permanent staff here," was his only comment. There are no picket lines, he added.

No lake ships were unloaded at Montreal during the week-end. But at Fort William, white collar workers turned out to move part of the cargo of the passenger and package freight carrier Keewatin. All package freight boats at Fort William are idle, a C.S.L. official said.

The Keewatin cleared Fort William several hours later and with part of her cargo unloaded after all available labor, including office workers, trucked freight from the vessel to the shed for hours. At Sarnia, the C.S.L. steamer Huronic remained unloaded after 75 dock handlers there walked out in sympathy.

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