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HomeMy WebLinkAboutClinton News-Record, 1974-08-01, Page 44—CLINTON NEw$41gcoRn, THURSDAY, AUGUST 1, 11;!'/4 ditorial Comment toss of a good man Tuesday's news that Jabez Rands of Clinton had died, saddened the Whole community, not because he was a great Man or his name was knOwn across the nation, but because he was a community man, one who always thought of Clinton. and' contributed to its betterment in the small ways that few of us seldom count. Jab, as he was affectionately known, served the town for 45 years as an em- ployee at the Public Utilities Com, mission, and after his retirement several — years ago, his real 'contribution to the community in another area was being realized. He was to become the Clinton's. unofficial historian. " In the larger cities and towns, there is always a library that has books and papers on the history of the community, but in a smaller centre such as Clinton, very little of the historical information is collected in one place. Jab was attemp-' Jumping the gun We are the first to admit that the Clin- ton Town council was elected by the taxpayers, and therefore should make the decisions for us. We elected them to do that. But last Thursday night's decision at a closed meeting to hire architects to draw up rough plans for a new Town Hall, without any dialogue with Clin- tonians, represents a major breach of trust. No one other than a few select mem- bers of this town have seen the report that the old Town Hall isn't worth saving. No one in town was asked what they thought of the idea, and no one in town was allowed to give an alternate opinion. Very arbitrary. tin'g to -do that. He was trying to get on paper thousands of tiny, individual facts about our heritage here in town, facts that mean little or nothing by themselves, He was busy collecting old pictures, reading old papers, and wading through decades of old town records and books. every week he wrote a column for this newspaper as well as continuing his research that would later be collected in a special Centennial edition and maybe later into a book. Now, with his death, much of our past also dies. Jab knew many things about bur past, but he didn't have enough time to put them all down on pape', and, many facts will be buried along with him. We here at the News-Record became very familiar with Jab in the last year, and ,we, among others, will sadly miss him. Maybe the old Town Hall isn't worth saving, but at least let's look into the possibilities of saving it and not jump the gun and hire architects without any discussion at all. Politicians don't have monopoly on brains. If the proper procedure is carried out, grants, fufids and other money may be available to us from government sources and, a number of citizens of this town have volunteered their time to look into those possibilities through the Clinton Environmental Enhancement program. Such quick and arbitrary decisions by council is an extremely dangerous thing in an election year. We won't forget that in December. The wag of the snob We are all quite adept at detecting the snobberies of others. We generally see snobbery as the uppitiness of the other person over some bogus excellence he thinks he has. This bogus excellence, and the snobbery that goes with it, corn; pares most, unfavorably with s our own genuine excellences and authentic distinctions and the quite proper pride we take in them. Being aware' of the snobberies of others does give us some comfort: We can be thankful that we are not like them. We tend to be snobbish not over things about which we are firm and strong and secure, but over things about which we feel insecure. Lionel Trilling writes, "The dominant emotions of snob- bery are uneasiness, self-consciousness, self-defensiveness, the sense that one is not quite real but can in some ways acquire reality." Our feelings of gnawing insecurity demand' some kind of erriotional com- pensation. And this often leads to at- titudes and actions which make for someAeg,ree of special 'separation from otherfiergons. This is the heairt:bfsnobz -: bery. John Buchan, the first Lord Tweed- smuir, put it in this way: "Insecurity is the mark of the snob The true definition of a snob is one who craves for what separates men rather than for what unites them." Complete separation from the herd must, of course, be avoided. After all, part of the joy of being a snob is that members of the herd must be able to ob- serve the excellence of what the snob is and what he has and which, they, unfor- tunately cannot share. (from the United Church) Sugar and Spice/By Bill Smiley The Jack Scott Column - OM Et NM "It wcj,, rather naive of me to think that was the cost of the house." i.e get letters Garbage Dear Editor: M•mbfia% Osnedlon community kovellnlINK MoottatIon Amalgamated 1929 THE CLINTON NEW 8/1/1 Established 1865 THE HURON NEWS-RECORD 8s lot/fished 1881 HURON t)UNTY UP Socand Mass Mall raalstrailon nb. 007_ Wieldy Miremosiper Assoclition PthblIshed ovary thuraday dlinfairs, Ontrir10 EdltOr - Jtiniilii E. Fitzgerald 4;7 General Manager, J. Howard Aitken Tht foo4tt Of tADAA IN CO:Ao4" Farewell Europe, Well, I thought this column would have a fairly exotic date- line: Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Rue de Something- or-Other in Paris. That's what I had in mind for the summer. My young brother has an apartment, with lots of sleeping space, in the Black Forest of Germany, or the Schwarzwald, as we jet- setters call it. He offered it to us as a base for bashing around western Europe. It was ideal. About five hours from Paris, the same from Switzerland, Denmark, Belgium, Berlin. A day to Sweden. A mere bagatelle to Holland. I had it all worked out. A one-day trip to Zurich, a two- day spree in Paris, a smash at a Munich biergarten (that's a coffin where you have to keep your socks up), with the oc- casional foray into Frankfurt or Hamburg. Unfortunately, most of our forays this summer will be into hamburg, That's all we can af- ford, and that only once a week. There's an old nursery rhyme, which doesn't even rhyme, "For want of a nail, the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe, the horse was lost; for want of a horse, the battle was lost; for want of a victory, the kingdom was lost." Or something like that. 'I'm quoting from memory. I read it in the Book of Knowledge when i was eight, And along with all those nails end shoes, a good bit of my Memory has been lest, At any rate, you get the mesSage. One thing leads to I'm stuck at home another, Or something. That's why I'm not writing this column from the Eiffel Tower in Paris or God's Bad- burg in Germany. It all started with the Good Samaritans. You may recall that I wrote a column a few weeks ago about some former students who came around and fixed my garage door for nothing. They absolutely refused to accept a cent. It gave me quite a warm glow at the time. That warm glow has, over the intervening weeks, turned into a blazing ulcer. Not their fault, It's my wife's. She's been saying for about two years, "Bill; we've got to get the house painted," I always agree, "Yep. Sweetie, next summer for sure." Now, our house is not something you paint op a holiday weekend, buy a case of beer and getting some of your old buddies to come in and help, It's a two-and-a-half storey edifice of brick, Driving past, you might say, "Hell, I'd paint that for $85.00," There's just the trim that needs painting, you see, But that is some trim, There are thirteen storm windows, thirteen screens, eleventy-four shutters, two French doors, and at least twenty-seven black- birds in a fir tree, That's before you start painting the trim, Well, in a burst of sentimen- tality, my old lady suggested we give "the boys" the job of pain, tang the trim. I would have given them it case of beer arid felt I was all even. The "trim" is costing me $500, Fair enough, in these days. I could have done it myself, but I'm not going to climb a fifty-foot ladder unless there's a mighty fair damsel at the top, And all they found was a hornet's nest. Next. The 'boss, who still calls me "Mr. Smiley" or "Sir", bless him, said, "Sir, you've got troubles, with that roof," My heart sank. I've been through it before. Well, I don't have to go into detail, Any home-owner knows the rest. The roof is shot, everything is rotten, though it hasn't leaked a drop since we came here. The only thing leaking is the downstairs toilet, just after we've spent $16 having it "fixed". Farewell, Amsterdam. Farewell, Copenhagen. Hello, roof, Hello, bank manager. I shouldn't complain, I guess. Suppose those boys hadn't come to fix my garage door, I might have been lolling around in Copenhagen, saying, "Pas de twit, cherie," instead of an- swering the door ten times a day to loan the construction gang a screwdriver. It's going to be a $2,000 sum- mer holiday, At home. it turns out that the garage has to be painted, too, and the back porch, Rather bitterly, I asked one of the "boys" if they • shouldn't paint the woodpile, as well, to go with the decor, And with a nice twist of wit, he said, "Would you like us to Paint the cat, as well?" He sleeps there, Why not? Green. Shutter green. With a high gloss, On noses I am always pleased when a story appears in the papers bearing testimony to the impor- tance of the human nose and, of course, was enormously bucked to learn about the case of Laszlo Veress, of Toronto, Laszlo, as you may have noted, being knocked out, bound and gagged by some unidentified villains, chewed through his gag when he recovered consciousness, picked up a telephone with his teeth and dialed for help with his nose! A triumph, indeed, for that noble organ, as you must agree. My interest in such rare items is more than merely academic since I was born with, and carry to this day, a very big defiant sort of way. My mother, from whom I inherited it, always took pains to use the word "generous" and whenever I would lock myself in my bedroom and cry into my pillow she would be near at hand to reassure me with • soothing semantics. I could not have been more 10 YEARS AGO July 30, 1964 Mr. and Mrs. Stewart Atkin- son and children cruised to Bayfield from St. Clair Shores. Mich., with friends on the "Charmer II" to visit their un- cle, Mr. D.L. Atkinson who resides on Bayfield Terrace. Mr. and Mrs. Art Colson of 261 Townsend Street celebrated their Silver Wedding anniversary last Saturday night with a dinner at Maitland Country Club Goderich, A new policeman started to work this week for the Clinton Police Department. Const. Leroy Oesch came here from Paris, Ontario and before that was on the staff of the St. Catharines Police Department, Custom Trailer Company has broken ground in a bean field just east of Exeter for their new factory. They hope to start production real soon and to have the first trailers off the line in September. About 18 antique automobiles driven by members of the Forest City Chapter of the Veterans Motor Car Club of America were on display in Clinton on Saturday. The club members stopped here on the first leg of a two-day weekend junket. The Clinton Public Activities commission are busy tran- sferring the original hydro lines to new poles which have been moved to make the street wider, 25 YEARS AGO August 4, 1948 County Assessor Alex Alexander, Goderich former warden of Huron County is the Winner of the handsome $1,000 motor boat drawn at a suc- cessful carnival held in !Judith Goodethatri Playground Goderich last week. Threshing is now the order of the day in most sections of Huron County and cob- than 10, indeed, before my mother was quoting Rostand to me to prove, as that splendid man wrote of Cyrano, that "a great nose indicates a great man--genial, courteous, in- tellectual, virile, courageous." This was small comfort in my formative years (before the dial telephone) when my nose seemed responsible for a general boycott by the world's entire feminine population, but as time went by I came to see the truth in it. It may even have been the foundation for a lifetime of rationalizing. In reflecting back over my life, a process that takes all of eight minutes, I have often wondered if my early sen- sitivity about my big nose-may ved, that had the nose of Cleopatra been shorter the whole face of the earth would have been changed, then surely it is not too far-fetched a notion that had ;I a less bulbous beak I might have been something entirely different, maybe even with money. siderabie combining also has been done during the past week. The turnip situation is still hard to estimate, A number of fields have been sown for the fourth time and these are now coming up. Infestation of aphids seems to have subsided in most areas, and a number of farmers who used the Parathion treatment, have fine patches of turnips, After a lay-off of two months, due to the steel strikes in United States, the Dominion Road Machinery Co. started back to work on Tuesday mor- ning, August 2, Some 120 em- ployees were affected. In accordance with the prediction the new owner made when he purchased the business more than a month ago, the former Richmond Hosiery plant re-opened Tuesday morning with a small staff, which will be augmented as conditions warrant. 50 YEARS AGO July 31, 1924 Mrs. Laidlaw .and Mr. Van Egmond motored through from Detroit Saturday and called on Mrs. William Scott in Clinton, Mrs. Laidlaw and Mr, Van Egmond are home to be present for the Old Boys' Reunion week in Seaforth. The Clinton Knitting Com- pany and staff are picnicking at Hayfield today. Mr, Walter Jackson, Brant- ford is .. visiting his brother, Mayor Fred Jackson and sister Mrs. H.W. Steep of Clinton, Norman Counter is . visiting his brother' Morley Counter, Buffalo, Mrs. M. Counter and son, Bill, have just returned to their home, after. visiting in Clinton and Wingham, The CNR work gang are put- ting in water connections at the cattle yards. 11.R. Higgins got 40 large potatoes from one hill and feels this is soinething of a tee0td,. Misses Bisie Cooper and Was my choise of a career, it- self, perhaps predestined in a subconscious way by some for- tuitous remark that I had "a nose for news," an observation that I seized upon instantly to symbolize my nose as an in- dication of my enquiring nature? Who can tell? Was my first interest in the far north aroused by learning that Eskimo kisses were con- ducted by a rubbing together of the noses? I wonder. This intelligence reached me at a time when I'd already had one or two amorous adven- tures, as inflammatory as any 12-year-old Cyrano ever imagined, and had set me to brooding about the towering handicap to non-Eskimo ,kissing,,constituted" Thy,::too prominent a proboscis. The difficulty was compoun- ded by my inevitable choice of partners who, themselves, had large noses, perhaps instinc- tively seeking in each other some shabby reassurance that noses didn't matter. Looking at it this way it now occurs to me that I was, you Viola Livermore were the win- ners of the largest number of prizes at the Clinton Knitting Co. picnic in Bayfield. David Steep was appointed to fill the vacancy on the fire brigade caused by the resignation of Bert Potter. Mr. and Mrs, G.E. Hall, Gor- don and Miss Evelyn are holidaying in Simcoe. 75 YEARS AGO August 3, 1899 Mr. Harry Cantelon, who has managed the Coyne House, Mt. Forest, for the past couple of years, has sold out his lease and gave up possession yester- day. He purposes, however, engaging in the same business elsewhere. Green caterpillars are very numerous on cabbage and cauliflowers, Several people have been using too much Paris Green to get rid of them, The Paris Green stays on the top of the cabbage and makes it dangerous to use. The yield of wheat is better than expected and is turning out very well. The barley will might say, led by the nose from infancy and that I might at least claim some kinship with those more famous men whose deformities inspired them to greater things. It was a point that my wife used to make repeatedly when we were courting. I know now that she was after my money (I had just inherited $200 and a gold watch from my grand- father), but she had only praise for my nose and I, in turn, had been hopelessly attracted to her because her nose Was a thing of absolute perfection as it remains despite years at the grindstone of matrimony. Often, when I would come to her after an hour or so of gazing morbidly at myself in a mirror (full-fact,.•, of course, since retOmirror would encom- pass the profile view) she would laugh away my silly fears. "Don't think of it as a han- dicap," she would murmur,, fingering my gold watch, "think of it as a character-builder," I married her, of course, and the rest is history. be a splendid yield though the berry is a little dark. J.T. Garrow is M.P.P. and Robert. Holmes is an M.P. all because of ballot stuffing. Both are clinging to their offices in spite of public opinion. Mr. McLean should have been the M.P, but because of some fif- teen missing ballots he is not. An investigation of the case by the Privileges and Election Committee began on Tuesday. Holmes is begging for a whitewash to cover the rascality from which he profited, Haws-Record readers air, en- couraged to 'uprose their opinions In letters to the editor, however, such opinions do not necessarily represent the opinions of the News-Record, Pseudonyms may be used by latter writers, but no letter wl$ be published unless It can be verified by phone. Smile A father says his teen-age son took a job-aptitude test; he was found to be suited for retirement. This letter is directed' to all persons using the facilities of the sanitary land fill site near Holmesville on Highway 8, As a resident on this High- way, I have recently noticed a trail of strewn garbage leading from Clinton to the dump site, Carelessness surely must be the cause. This effect is a high- way littered with green garbage I bags, tin cans, papers, etc. The I waste may be found in the ditch, on, the shoulder or even on the road. Before the site was opened, this highway was free of ex- cessive litter. Now At is the haven for careless, thoughtless litter bugs, Please, secure your garbage more carefully and if you hap- pen to lose some On the road, pick it up. Make this highway clean again. Yours truly, (Miss) Heather Price RR 2, Clinton Demolition Dear tditor: I read in the London Free Press last Saturday a report regarding the old Clinton Town Hall. It appears that Town Council is considering demolition of the Hall and building a new one. We are, in Canada, in a period of rediscovery of our heritage and culture and much energy and resources are being put into the preservation and restoration of historic buildings. The Clinton Town Hall is now only a historic building, but a beautiful building esthetically. It is part of a han- dsome "streetscape" of late 19th century, which I believe are going to be restored with the assistance of the Clinton Environmental Enhancement Committee. If this Town Hall is to be ,paved, the residents of Clinton Must demonstrate their interest and concern. The Town Coun- cil is not all-powerful, but is there' to carry out the will of the people. If the people want the Town Hall to be demolished,i it will be demolished. If they want it to remain, it' will remain. It is now up to Clinton, Express your feelings to the council and the press. Sincerely, Architectural Conservancy (Huron Branch) Stolen Dear Editor, Would you please put this in the paper? I wonder what kind of children are being raised in our community. Do parents not pay any attention to the things children brinwin the house that belongs to others? My grandaughter (Tracey Baker), who has been visiting the last three weeks from Lon- don, went to the swimming pool practically every afternoon (no problem). On Friday afternoon (July 19), her last day in town, someone picked up her beach towel and left with it. Her name tag is (or was) on it, She was a very disappointed little girl when she could not locate it on coming out of the water.. I'm writing re: the prin- ciple of it all. It has been reported by us to the attendants at the pool, but we have heard nothing yet. We would appreciate it being retur- ned. Thank you Mrs. L. Schroeter Clinton nose. not haverdetermineCits course. -I use the word "big" in a If it is true, as Pascal obser- From our early files . . . . . . •