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HomeMy WebLinkAboutClinton News-Record, 1973-02-01, Page 44--CLINTON NEWS-RECORD, THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 1973 . , Editorial corms-en Have a heart — and give It's pretty well decided now. The one exercise yard at the former Huron County Jail is coming down to make way for an addition to the Huron-Perth Regional Assessment Office. It may ap- pear on the surface that the county is still negotiating with the provincial government about the leasing terms for the proposed new addition - it may look like there's still a chance for the walls to go untouched - but a safe wager would be that the die is cast and the deed will be done in good time. About the only thing which will save the historical jail intact will be complete and unrelenting public pressure on the elected officials of This county. Letters, telephone' calls,, petitions, deputations .... yes, 'sit-ins and pilaca'rded pickets. Do the people of this county care that much? It remains to be seem There are still a couple of unanswered questions, however, concerning the county plans for the assessment office addition. At the January meeting of county council, it was merely stated that it was "impractical" to expand the facilities to the west through the purchase of ad- ditional land. There was no explanation as to just how impractical it really is - and if, in fact, there was ever any serious consideration given to the proposal by the county's property committee. It also behooves council to explain to the citizens of this county how it proposes to save the remaining jail walls once the initial blow is cast. How it plans to provide adequate parking and space for future growth without• endangering the remaining wallg. How it purports to keep the entire jail from eventually falling beneath the wrecker's boom once its true historical value has been defaced and dismembered for all time. A Sell-out by any other name THE CLINTON NEW ERA Amalgamated THE HURON NEWS-RECORD Established 1865 1924 Established 1881 Clinton News-Record A member of the Canadian Weekly Newspaper Association, Ontario Weekly Newspaper Association and the Audit Bureau. of Circulation (ABC) second class mail registration number — 0817 SUBSCRIPTION RATES: (in advance) 'Canada, $8.00 per year: U.S.A., $9.50 JAMES E. FITZGERALD—Editor J. HOWARD AITKEN — General Manager Published every Thursday at ifie heart of Huron County' Clinton, Ontario Population 3,475 THE' HOME OF 1ADAR IN CANADA It is important for everyone to realize that the Heart Fund, conducted here and throughout Canada during February is something more than "just another health drive". The Heart Fund is uniquely important. Essentially, it is a combined appeal sup- porting the nationwide fight against a great complex of diseases and disorders - heart attack, stroke, high blood pressure and hardening of the arteries, rheumatic fever and inborn heart defects, to mention only a few. Diseases of the heart and circulation, which your Heart Fund dollars help to fight, are responsible for more than 77,000 deaths in Canada each year. That is more than the combined total, resulting from all other diseases and causes of ,death. In fact these cardiovascular diseases ac- count for over 51.4 percent of all deaths. The heart problem is no distant abstrac- tion. Although national and international in scope, it exists as a painful and costly reality right here in this city. If ,you have doubts, examine the obituaries which appear in our daily newspapers. You will find that our local mortality experience closely parallels national figures; that, on the average, about half our death notice will mention "heart attack", stroke" or "heart disease". All too often these terms are applied to family breadwinners in the prime of life - men in the 30 to 50 year age bracket. There is only one practical way to fight heart disease, namely by suppor- ting your Heart Foundation's balanced programs of research, education and in- formation. You can do this by con- tributing Heart Fund dollars. Truly, the Heart Fund deserves a place at the very top of your "giving for health" list. The objective this year is $1,250,000. Send your contribution to the Canadian Heart Fund, 310 Davenport Road, Toronto, or your local Chapter. Coming home to roost we get . letters Dear Editor: The only solution to thi furor over the leg hold traps i for someone to invent a tra that will work. The Conni-Bear trap will no work in some instances, I mea for some animals. A fund should be set up fo "the person" who could corn up with "the perfect answer,' Perhaps some of these ladie who write in about the s called cruel steel trap coul direct their energies toward setting up such a fund. First person must have som knowledge of the trapping dif ficulties encountered, in orde to be in a position to invent suitable substitute. The leg hold trap is not al bad, some animals can b released from it, and th Conni-Bear does not always kill outright. So instead of endless letters, why not a fund to educate and help some inventor to produce the needed trap. A Concerned Trapper Patrick Hill, Clinton. Recent new stories about fuel shortages in New York city and a number of north-eastern states must have been a real shock, not only to many Americans, but to every thinking Canadian. I know it shook me, when I considered the implications. It was the first strong war- ning of what's to come — a worldwide shortage of fuel and energy. And that's a frightening prospect. Experts have been issuing warnings for years, but these usually consist of an article in the Saturday supplement, easily forgotten or ignored. I'm no expert, but any school child knows that there is only so much oil and gas in the earth, that there is only so much Water-power to be har- nessed, and when that's gone, it's gone. For good. Already parts of the U.S., especially the heavily in- dustrialized and populated east, are on the verge of a crisis in the fields of energy and water. What happens in the States will inevitably happen in Canada, though it may take a little longer, because of our much smaller population and much greater reserves. But unless science can come up with some new, cheap means of producing energy and fresh water, things are going to be pretty shaky by the turn of the century. Perhaps, as always, it's the only way man can learn anything — by having it shoved down his throat. • Perhaps we won't stop wasting energy resources until we're reduced to the point where we're cooking dinner over a fire of buffalo chips, as the pioneers did. Except that there won't be any buffalo to provide the chips. Wouldn't you think that Canada, having witnessed at first hand the ravages the Americans have made on their own resources, would have learned a lesson? Wouldn't you think that we'd be hoarding carefully, with an eye to five hundred years from now, our dwindling resources? Wouldn't you think that our so-called leaders could see more than twenty-five years ahead? Many of them seem to be thinking no farther ahead than the next election, One of these fine years, unless we begin to conserve and preserve, there'll be an Old Mother Hubbard story that will wreak untold misery on millions of humans. But that's an old tale, of course, in this country. Through a combination of human greed, short-sighted leadership and plain stupidity, Canadians have been content -to continue their century-old role as hewers of wood and drawers of water, and to sell- anything they could to foreign investors; British, American and European. There's a great lot of red-hot nationalism in our country these days. But ninety-five per cent of it is words, words, • words. The people who make the real decisions are not the writers, painters, students, but the coldeyed, grey-haired men who sit in the board-rooms, and would sell their grand- mothers into slavery if the in- terest rates were right. They're the babies who have looted our forests and mines and are currently pawning our energy resources. And they're the birds, with some notable exceptions, who take off for the Bahamas or Switzerland when the taxes get rough and they've made their pile, To most of them, the unetn- —GODERICH SIGNAL-STAR ployed are an unfortunate sta- statistic, the poor a necessary nuisance. They know where every nickel of government handouts is. They know every tax dodge. They are the real and only second-class citizens of this country. Holy smokes! I'm beginning to sound like a communist agitator. I'm not. I just get sick at heart when I see what's hap- pening to the country I love. Talk about being sold down the river! We're being sold down all our rivers and all our pipelines as well. Canada might be compared to youth. Youth can, and does, burn up energy without a thought for the morrow. He can dance and drink all night, stand all day in the rain, hitch- hiking, sleep on the floor, ski all day on weekends and sleep all day in school. But imperceptibly, and then suddenly, the youth is mid- dleaged. The luxuriant hair falls out, the belly thickens, the pace slows, and the joints begin to ache. The energy has been burned up, much of it uselessly and the cupboard grows progressively bare. Is that what we're doing today in our comparatively youthful country? Are we going to wake up with no hair, ar- thritis, and a pot belly with nothing to put in it? And while this is taking place before our eyes, the politicians chatter like parrots, jockeying for position, their eyes fixed irremovably on the past. I've no solution. The only thing I might suggest, in view of the energy crisis, is that all the politicians in North America be laid end to end. They'd make an admirable pipe-line, of just the right girth. And they'd produce enough natural gas in one session to stave off the crisis for years, Listening to the radio earlier this week (our television set is on the blink and I've been discovering just how good CBC-Radio can be) I was par- ticularly interested in a panel discussion program on which the topic was "Conversation." There was considerable name-dropping--Plato, G.K. Chesterton, Samuel Johnson, Alexander Woollcott, the recen- tly demised Oscar Levant and other noted gabblers---and my wife turned to me and said, "I wonder what they'd think of Albert?" I suppose almost everyone has come across an Albert at one time or another, but we like to think our Albert is the" world's most fascinating con- versationalist. We have known him, loved him and patiently listened to him for 20 years and, incredible as it may seem, we have never known Albert to say anything that was worth repeating! • It isn't what Albert says that gets you. It's the embroidery. Oh, what a tangled web he weaves in his dogged pursuit of 'the inconsequential! Fact is, Albert can take the most fragmentary topic sentence, set- tle down to worrying it for an 10 YEARS AGO JANUARY 31, 1963 Thanks to Mrs. A.L. Rodges, Clinton received some free ad- vertisement on the "Act Fast" show on CFPL TV, Sunday. Mrs. Rodges submitted the slogan, "Clinton, the Hub of HUron County" for the panel to act out and they failed to come up with the correct answer in their two-minute time limit, resulting in Mrs. Rodges receiving a $5 prize for her ef- forts. Again, apropos of Robbie Burns day, which passed last Friday amid skirling pipes and the consumption of much haggis, we have word from Mrs. Alda T. Gray, Goderich Town- ship, that at one time a nephew of Burns taught school at S.S. No. 5 in that Township. Clinton's council chambers and the public library have taken on a new brightness these days, the result of recent renovations and additions, 15 YEARS AGO JANUARY 30, 1958 Highlight of the annual meeting of the Clinton Hor- ticultural Society was a presen- tation to Rev, D.J. Lane of a special award of merit, a diploma from the Ontario Hor- ticultural Society for outstan- ding service rendered to hor- ticulture. Mr. Lane is now en- tering his sixth year as president of the Society. Members of the Clinton Community Credit Union will be pleased to know that the building has been completed, and arrangements have been made for the office to move in within two weeks. On Monday, February 17, business with the Credit Union will he done at hour or more, talking ,steadily, earnestly and purposefully, and never reach a single conclusion. You come out of his conver- sation the way you went in-- namely, none the wiser--and yet the grip he maintains on your attention is downright hyp- notic. Albert spends most of the time trying to identify the people who creep, unbidden, into his every anecdote. "That reminds me of Bill Johnston." he will say, since any subject will remind him of someone. "Did you ever know Bill--- no, wait a minute, it wasn't Johnston. It was Thom- pson. , Or was it? He was ,with Eaton's, as I recall,,;iWVe credit department. Or was it in accounts? Yes, it was Johnston. Big fellow with sandy hair and a mole on his nose. No, it was on his chin, He moved up north with a wholesale grocery outfit. Kelly Douglas, I think. No, it wasn't that. It was wholesale drugs." At this point you are so in tune with Albert's agonizing struggle to provide positive identification of a man com- pletely unknown to you (and who, it turns out, hardly figures in the story) that somehow it gets to seem the aim of the the new offices on Highway 8, the corner of Ontario Street and William Streets. Mrs. Doucette from Saskat- chewan was a guest visitor at the Women's Institute meeting. She talked about the financing of the institute. Mrs. Charles Elliott talked of historical research and current events mentioning the dedication of the Shakesperian Theatre by ministers of five different faiths, trips to the moon and Clare Wallace's trip to Russia and told of some of the early settlers of Seaforth. 25 YEARS AGO JANUARY 29, 1948 Temperatures dipped to a new low for the season — 25 below zero — just one of these "old fashioned" winters. John Torrance, son of the late Mr. and Mrs. John Torrance, Clinton, recently retired as business manager of , the Lethbridge Herald, after serving the paper for 40 years. Under the auspices of Clin- ton Badminton Club, a group of championship players from Stratford Badminton and Social Club will play exhibition matches on the Town Hall courts on Tuesday evening, February 10, commencing at 8 o'clock. 40 YEARS AGO FEBRUARY 2, 1933 Dr. W.A. Oakes, Toronto, has purchased the property and practice of the late Dr. J.C. Gandier and takes over at once. Clinton welcomes Dr. Oakes and his wife, Trusting that their sojourn here may be happy and successful. The hospital is now free of debt, having repaid to the whole undertaking. "Bill used to live down there in the West End in that apart- ment house that burned clown in '62," Albert goes bravely on. "No it would be before that. Betty and I had that little house on the hill and we moved out in '59. Wait a minute! That wasn't the apartment house that burned down. I was thinking of the old Mead owva le Lodge...." Albert is now hopelessly lost on a trail of his own making. You wonder why he doesn't stop and start all over again. But he persists in trying to hack his way "back, to, original starting Ka new route that takes him deeper, and deeper into the forest. Albert's gift seems to be a completely disorderly mind, a cranium stuffed with uncertain trivia that demands to be sor- ted out. We were talking the other night about poker games, for example, Albert cleared his throat. "I remember a hand that lost George Anderson a hundred dollars," he said, a magnificen- tly direct statement for Albert. "You remember George. He used to go with Marvin Kane's sister. What the heck was her - town, with interest, the whole of a $5,000 debenture which was issued in 1923. Supt. A.E. Rumball was in Toronto last week attending a Hydro Convention. Miss Linnie Nediger left Tuesday for Woodstock, where she has accepted a position on the Public School staff. 55 YEARS AGO JANUARY 31, 1918 This is the 1279th day of the Great War. Capt. Will Fingland, son of Mr. and Mrs. John Fingland, Londesboro, is engaged in Y.M.C.A. work at the Tivoli Y.M.C.A. The Strand, London, England. He expects to go to Bramshott to see his brother Frank. There is still a serious shor- tage of fuel as the second January blizzard ties up train service. In Goderich, the mer- chants have agreed to close their places of business at 6 o'clock each night, 10 o'clock on Saturday nights, in order to conserve fuel. name? Millie? Nellie? Molly? Something like that. Nellie, I think. She was an odd girl. Learned to play the bassoon-- no it was the French horn, I think. We were at a party one night around Christmas—no, it would be after Christmas because I know they were talking about taking down the tree...." Even for Albert this was such a swing away from the subject that I interrupted: "You were saying about George Hender- son?" "Was it Henderson or Ander- son?" Albert mused. "Sure, it was Henderson, because his father was Arnold Henderson. The old man had a Stanley Steamer as late as 1927. That was some car. After that he got a Franklin and ---yes!--- Marvin's sister's name was Molly..." We never found out how George Henderson or Anderson lost the hundred dollars. You never find out anything from Albert. But no other conver- sationalist I know can take you on so many mysterious detours and for sheer mileage I will put him up against any of the greats of the past or present. Jack Bawden's hockey team played against Hugh McGuire's and won 10-3. Nothing seems to arouse so much interest in Clinton as a girl's hockey match. A great crowd turned out to watch. Clinton girls trim the ladies from Mitchell 6-0. 75 YEARS AGO JANUARY 27, 1898 Mr. C. Hoare of Clinton was around through these parts recently (McKillop Twp.) A great many homes here are gladdened by dulcimers of his manufacture and Mr. Hoare is always a welcome visitor. 0. Cooper & Co, have decided upon the use of acetylene gas and are now having their store piped by Harland Bros. who will supply the gas. If the chandeliers arrive in time, the firm expects that on Friday night they will use the electric light for the last time. Headline in this week's paper, "Twenty-five Years is Too Long for Any Government to be in Power." Dear Editor: In reply to C.F. Barny o Clinton: how dare he say tha any scripture was unfortunate to say the least. When God say in second Timothy 3.16 "Al scripture is given by inspiratio of God, and is profitable fo doctrine, for reproof, for correc tion, for instruction i righteousness. Read Mark 10. 17-22 again: "And when he was gone forth into the way, there came one running and kneeled to him, and asked him, Good Master, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life? And Jesus said unto him, Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is God, Thou knowest the command- ments. Do not commit adultery. Do not Kill. Do not steal. Do not bear false witness. Defraud not, Honour thy father and mother. And he answered and said unto him Master all these have I ob- served from my youth. Then Jesus beholding him loved him, and said unto him. One thing thou lackest: go thy way sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, take up the cross, and follow ME. And he was sad at that saying and went away grieved: for he had great possessions. The Question in this•portion is What Shall I DO THAT I may inherit eternal life?" The last we read is and he was sad at that saying and went away grieved; for he had great possessions. Why did he not receive eternal life? V. 19 20 the young man said all these have I observed from my youth v. 21 the Lord Jesus said one thing thou lackest: the one who said unto him. Why callest thou me good? There is none good but one, that is God. Showed him that he was the Omniscient one and pointed out his sin that he could hide from man. The best the young man would call the Lord Jesus was Good Master: which was all Judas Iscariot ever called Him see Mark 14. 44 45: And he that betrayed him had given them a token saying, whosoever I shall kiss, that same is he: take him and lead him away safely. and as soon as he was come he goeth straightway to him, and saith Master, Master and kissed him. Never once in the Gospel record does Judas Iscariot call Jesus Lord. I John 2. 22 Who is a liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ? He is antichrist, that denieth the Father and the Son. v. 23 Whosoever denieth the Son the same hath not the Father, Sincerely W.V. Switzer Bayfield County should explain Some Talker