HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Exeter Times-Advocate, 1966-07-14, Page 4By Vol Baltkalns
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SERVING CANADA'S BEST FARMLAND
Member: C.W.N.A., O.W,N.A., C,C,N,R, and ABC
Publishers: J. M. Southcott, R. M. Southcott
Editor: Bill Batten
Advertising Manager: Val Baltkalns
Phone 235-1331
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They're tempting fate
Concern
for humanity
i
People of all ages can be excused
for some of their actions during the
heat wave, but there can be little ex-
cuse for one of the dangerous practices
evidenced at Riverview Park Sunday
afternoon.
For there, just about 100 yards
from Exeter's popular swimming pool,
we spotted several youngsters swim-
ming in the weedy confines of the river
just above the dam.
There is no need to reiterate the
dangers that exist in this practice be-
cause they were gone into fully in the
past few years when the citizens of
this area were given the "sales pitch"
as to why a swimming pool was need-
ed.
Admission to the pool is nominal
indeed, and it is doubtful if a lack of
finances was the reason for the young-
sters using the river as a means of
cooling off; although the fact that they
may halve invested then' admission fee
in ice cream or a cooling soft drink
is not unrealistic.
However, parents should be made
aware of the fact that it may have
been their youngsters who were engag-
ing in this hazardous pastime. Certain-
ly, a stern reminder that the river is
now out of bounds is warranted.
All too often news stories contain
accounts of tragedies that occur just a
short distance from supervised areas,
and while they provide us with just an-
other of the ironical circumstances
that leave people with their heads
shaking in disbelief, they are tragedies
that can be avoided with strict parental.
direction.
Many risk one-way trip
quest article by
The Rev, Harold F. Currie
The return of Jesus 'to His
native Nazareth was more than
the nostalgic revisit of a famous
man to the familiar scenes of
boyhood. days. There was, no
doubt, in His mind the thought
He would like to give His own
home town the first opportunity
to hear what decision had come
forth from the souleseerchirig
experience on the desert. He must
have been aware, however, that
His pronouncement would not be
favorably received, There was a
deeper reason for His return.
It was to reaffirm from the
vantage point of His formative
years the mission and message
which was His and His alone.
His were not the idealistic and
visionary presumptions of a un-
informed though devout peasant.
When He spoke with authority
on the great issues of personal
and the inner conflicts of society,
he spoke as one who had par-
ticipated in and had been a party
to those issues and conflicts.
He had been no spectator to
life or to the burning questions
which vexed His day, this extensive check, but unfortunately,
such is not the case. Only a small por-
tion of the cars that daily traverse our
busy highways can be checked.
Therefore, it must be assumed
that those not checked out come up
with a similar average, with only 68
out of every 401 being fit to be on the
road,
What is the solution? That's the
question that has to be answered, and
the sooner the better.
Obviously, while this responsibility
should rest with each automobile own-
er, it is a proven fact that owners have
not lived up to this responsibility and
there is nothing to indicate that they
ever will, even though their lives de-
pend on it.
It would appear that the only sen-
sible solution is for the Department of
Transport to increase their amount of
mobile equipment substantially so
checks can be carried out more fre-
quently throughout the province.
While frequent checks may incon-
venience drivers to an extent, it's still
a better fate than a one-way ticket to
the grave yard.
Opte dewed
If a major league ball player found
his batting average dipping to a .169
figure, he would probably soon find
himself with a one-way ticket to the
minor leagues.
Well, that average was established
in this area recently, and unfortunately
the resulting action indicates that some
one-way tickets may be issued. Unfor-
tunately, those one-way tickets may be
for the grave yard.
That's the stark message contained
in the results of the recent car checks
conducted by the Ontario Department
of Transport. Out of 401 cars given the
38-point check only 68 were classed as
fit for the road with another 74 given
that approval after defects had been
repaired by the drivers.
The fact that 16 percent of the
cars were found to be in sufficiently
bad shape to have their license plates
removed and ordered off the roads en-
tirely is most shocking and provides
us with an answer as to the reason for
the mounting death toll on our high-
ways.
It would be reassuring to an ex-
tent if every car in Ontario received
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No more bare knees?
NOT ISOLATED
Nazareth was not a small iso-
lated village buried away from
the rest of the world. It was a town
or city of about 20,000 inhabit-
ants. It was in touch with the
trade and commerce of the day.
From the hillside up which its
houses clustered could be seen
the far-reaching trade rout e,
"the way of the nations." There
were two great trade routes:One
which linked the wealth of Egypt
with that of the Asiatic prov-
inces and which ran through
Palestine, touched Capernaum
and passed through the busy city
of Damascus.
The other left the former road
by the junction of ancientJesreel
in the plain of Esdraelon and made
its way by Nazareth to the port
of Acre, thus pouring the com-
merce of Egypt and Syria into
the swollen storehouses of the
city of Rome,
In His youth Jesus would be
familiar with the trade and com-
merce of the ancient world. He
would be aware of the continual
exploitation of the provinces bya
rapacious empire,
All this would have been dis-
cussed in the workshops of Naz-
areth with growing indignation
as also would be the rebellions
brought on by this state of affairs.
Soon after starting His mission
Jesus made Capernaum His head-
quarters. Capernaum being the
principle market town on the
shores of the Sea of Galilee.
Trouble is brewing in Britain. The
old guard in the Boy Scouts movement
is up in arms, or perhaps out in legs
is the more correct expression.
For what the senior Scouts are or-
ganizing to fight is a movement to put
the Scouts in modern trousers. Resig-
nations are being received, and the
whole movement is being threatened,
as the attempt of 24 leaders to devise
a new uniform is being bitterly op-
posed. The short pants style, which
dates back to Boer war days, is unpop-
ular with boys. and is held to be partly
classes: He Himself was later
to become a carpenter,
His parables everywhere por-
trayed the life of the workman.
He is at home in those poor
Syrian windowless ho v el ei„ in
which a housewife must light a
candle in the daytime to find
her lost piece of silver. lie was
acquainted with the Secrets of the
bakehouse, the gardener and the
builder. He had seen the rotten
leaking skins of the wine-dealer.
He saw at first hand the brutal
treatment of the upper servants
to the lower and many other in-
justices of the social order. His
parables are replete With illus-
trations which drew attention to
inequalities, discriminations and
hardships of the poor and needy.
Jesus had a profound knowledge
of nature and the pastoral oc-
cupations of His day,
He did not overlook the hopes
and fears and hazards common to
the farmer and the sheep herder,
All these who were weary and
heavy laden were the objects of
H is concern.
An economic system where the
rich became richer and the poor
became poorer fell beneath His
scathing rebuke. The plight of the
unemployed did not escape His
notice. The troubled in body, mind
and spirit were objects of His
living concern.
Jesus had a deep sense of
history. He lived in the very
path where the nations of the
world passed by. More than this
He was a part of a nation whose
education was broad and deep.
From an early age He was
made acquainted with the patrio-
tic literature of His people; its
poets, lawyers and lawgivers and
its prophets. His education would
include other great peoples be-
side the Hebrew nation.
The empires of Egypt, Assyria.
Babylon, Syria and Rome were
not unknown to Him. Jesus along
with other Galilean youth would be
quick to respond to such litera-
ture for they had in them the
blood of a pilgrim nation. They
would couple a sympathetic
understanding of the history of
other nations with a lively patrio-
tism for their own.
Jesus brought to all this a
deeper sense of destiny than that
of His own people. His patriot-
ism was a world patriotism. He
foresaw a world in which its
varied races, its commerce, its
industry, its politics, its econom-
ics, indeed its whole social struc-
ture were caught up in the pur-
poses of the living and eternal
God whom He proclaimed as the
Father of all mankind,
He saw, too, that the brave new
world was to be born much in the
old must die. A new sense of the
dignity and worth of each in-
dividual man was an integral part
of His teaching.
No man, no matter what his
station in life, was beyond the
Father's notice nor should he be
beyond man's own concern.
FRUGAL LIFE
The home life of Jesus was
frugal. The language of His dis-
courses indicated He was born
and raised among the laboring
responsible for a serious decline in
numbers.
But tradition dies hard. And the
defenders of the status quo are nu-
merous and bitter. The display of male
knees and legs which some think child-
ish is held by the old guard to be an
essential part of Scouting, and they
are not having any change.
It all seems like a tempest in a
teapot in a Nvorld with far bigger prob-
lems. It would be a pity if a row over
short or long pants wrecked one of the
finest organizations for boys ever de-
vised. —The Trentonian
woe, that does little to get a
holiday off on an enjoyable start,
However, it was quickly decided
it had not been their fault and
the matter was to be dismissed
so as to not dampen the enthu-
siasm for the enjoyable days
ahead.
This worked fine until we ar-
rived to find that 1966 is known
in the north as the "year of the
mosquito". Why it is only singu-
lar we will never know, because
they were as thick as freckles
on a 10-year-old redhead.
Mr. Webster defines a mos-
quito as an insect, having in the
female (who else?) needlelike
organs in the proboscis with
which they puncture the skin of
animals (always humans) to suck
their blood.
One thing Mr, Webster appar-
ently didn't know about mosqui-
toes is the fact they all appear
to have at least a dozen of those
proboscis things from which hang
those needlelike organs--and the
female species outnumber s
males by slightly under 200 to
one. (That figure was based on
only a short study of the matter.)
The pesky critters took a
strong liking to junior and it
wasn't long before he looked
much similar to a well-used pin
cushion- -with all the accompany-
ing displeasures.
This threw him entirely off
schedule for the first four days,
although by the end of the week
he was quite content to go to
bed at around 10:00 and not be
up and at it until at least 7:00.
To make a long story even
longer (I forget how much I
need to fill this space) yours
truly managed to rip all the
skin off his big toe in the first
dive into the lake, and as al-
ways happens, that toe was the
repeated target for every rock,
stick, clump of dirt and any-
thing else on which a person
can successfully stub a toe.
This finally managed to heal,
just in time to restrict our suf-
fering to a bad case of over-
exposure to the sun's rays, and
had time permitted we would
have conducted a survey on why
it is only the moveable parts
of one's anatomy that attract
sun burn.
That sun burn fortunately
turned to a golden brown a few
days later and we became much
similar in appearance to a Greek
god, But then, that was too much
of a good thing, and it has now
neatly peeled off so that we
can commence the painful pro-
cedure again.
Fishing turned out to be a
very time consuming pastime,
— Please turn to page 7
Taxes on easy payments
Town council should certainly be
giving some thought to the idea of stag-
gering tax bills through the year rather
than waiting until the mill-rate has
been established and sending the bills
when half the year is almost gone.
In line with several other cities,
we note that St. Thomas has decided
to issue an interim bill early in the
year. This will be followed by a defini-
tive bill after the mill rate has been
struck.
This means taxpayers will be able
to pay in four, rather than three, in-
stallments. It will soften the blow by
keeping them in a punch-drunk condi-
tion all year rather than letting them
go soft and relaxed from December to
June. More important, earlier payments
will reduce the city's borrowing re-
quirements with savings on interest.
We believe most people prefer to
pay as they go on such inescapable
items as taxes. Several small install-
ments are easier to face than one or
two big ones. That is why we never
have been able to understand the prac-
tice of most townships in having all
their taxes come due at one time, about
the middle of December.
—The Aylmer Express
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Times Established 1873 Advocate Established 1881 Amalgamated 1929
50 YEARS AGO
Pte. E. Harness, who was
wounded in both legs by shrapnel
at Ypres about a month ago, is
now at Katesgrove Hospital, Rea-
ding, Eng. and expects to be
confined there for at least four
months.
Messrs. Wallace and Harry
Fuke left Tuesday for a trip
up the lakes sailing from Sar-
nia.
Old Sol has been interfering
with production in the factories
and shops and the output has
been a few stages below normal.
A number of the boys were
home from Camp Borden on
weekend passes. They wereSgts.
W.J.Mallet, 114.13faff, Ptes.S.J.V,
Cann, W. Stewart, Rus and Earl
Southcott, Jas. Marshall, Bert
Rivers, Sid West, Eric Hurdon
and W.G. Birney.
15 YEARS AGO
Mr, Fred Cole, who, for the
past seven and a half years,
has conducted a jewelry busi-
ness which he took over from
James Lawson, has disposed of
the business to J.IVI„ Smith of
Burlington who has already ta-
ken possession.
Herman Gill, the man who
was largely responsible for
Grand Bend's incorporation and
its clean-up campaign, deserved-
ly won the distinction of being
the summer resort's first reeve.
Princess Elizabeth will make
her first visit to Canada on a
three-week coast to coast tour
in October, Her husband will
accompany her.
Reformation of the recreation-
al council was tentativelyap-
proved by town council Monday
night to help Exeter Kinsmen
proceed with their playground
project.
Published Each Thursday Morning at Exeter, Ont.
Authorized as Second Class Mail, Post Office Dept, Ottawa,
and for Payment of Postage in Cash
Paid in Advance Circulation, March 31, 1966, 4,180
SUBSCRIPTION RAtES; Canada OA Per Year} USA $7.00
It was with mixed emotions
that we read in this newspaper
two weeks ago that yours truly
was returning as editor. The
fact that bothered us most was
in the statement: "His humor-
ous editorial column, Batt'n
Around, will return with him".
Naturally, we were quite
pleased to learn that the author
of those words noted it was one
of the features during our pre-
vious term in this office, but
what did he mean by humorous
columns?
For one entire year we had
spent countless hours in deep
meditation and thought to come
up with the profound thinking
that weekly fills this spot, We
had imagined ourselves solving
all the world's problems--some-
thing akin to Ann Landers.
Imagine the shock to find that
all along it was regarded as
humor!
That, of course, leaves us
with the difficult decision as to
the future content of this column,
and we've finally decided to let
the chips fall where they will
with no prearranged schedule.
If we decide to be witty, we
will. If the urge to delve into
the realm of seriousness over-
takes us, we will not fight it.
This too offers the same oppor-
tunity for readers. If they want
to laugh, they may. If they want
to read the words affixed in an
air of deep concentration, they
may do that too.
The only favour we ask is
that you don't tell us which avenue
you have taken. It may turn out
to be just the opposite from the
way it was intended and that
would make either one of us look
rather foolish.
* * * *
Having taken an enjoyable
week's vacation prior to return-
ing to Exeter, we are naturally
filled with the vim, vigor and
vitality that always accompanies
such a rest. A couple of things
went wrong but they are hardly
worthy of mention.
However, perhaps we should
mention one or two tidbits, if
for no other purpose than to
fill the space which we have
been alotted-- and for which
we were totally unprepared upori
arriving on the scene Monday
morning.
With another couple from our
apartment in picturesque Thorn
cliffe Park (which contains about
25 apartment buildings and has
a population of some 14,000 peo-
ple) we headed out for a cottage
in the Haliburton region, just
south of Minden.
Due to the fact the other couple
knew the exact location, it had
been prearranged that the gals
would travel together and we
men would enjoy the unusual
pleasures of no back-seat dri-
vers.
Unfortunately, shortly after
getting into the steady stream
of traffic on Highway 401, some
chap managed to smash into the
rear of the gals' car While we
men merrily proceeded on our
way with no thoughts other than
the large bass that were hungrily
waiting for the fine collection of
lures we had in our tackle boxes.
The gals were shaken up and
badly unnerved, bilt did manage
to finally arrive at our meeting
place to unleash their tale of
I was reading the other day
an interview with a Canadian
seaman. He was telling a report-
er why he, and so many other
sailors are not happy with their
lot.
He mentioned a lot of things
that seemed petty at first glance:
coarse sheets on the bunks;
crowded quarters; not enough
showers; cheap soap; scanty re-
creational facilities.
Not much of the spirit of Drake
and Nelson and rounding Cape
Horn there? Not much. But then
the truth came out. These were
only the minor irritants, the lit-
tle, concrete manifestations of a
deeper discontent.
A sailor's pay is good, com-
paratively. Most boats feed their
crews well. What really gets the
sailor down are frustration,
boredom, monotony and loneli-
ness. They suffer from the mod-
ern malaise of the spirit that of-'
Poets many segments of our so-,
clety.
As I read the article, I couldn't
help comparing the sailor's Job
today with that of the 1930's,
when I spent a spell on the Great
Lakes.
Today he works a 40-hour
Week, has a basic pay of nearly
$400 a month, and is protected
by a tough union. In those days,
he worked a 50 to 60-hour week,
picked up a handsome cheque
for $40 at the end of the month,
and could be fired if he even
looked Unhappy.
And perhaps that's why, if
memory serves, the sailor of
those days was a pretty happy
character. He did a lot of grous-
ing, as sailors have done since
ulyses and his crew left Troy,
but he else did a lot of horsing
around, arid took life very un-
seriously.
Not many were Married in
those days. They couldn't afford
it, They'd blow their 40 bucks
on beer arid girls and poker in a
couple of days, and then it was
10 YEARS AGO
Members of Exeter Legion,
who have been working in gangs
nights and holidays for weeks
On the addition to their memorial
hall, hope to have the building
Completed In time for the open-
ing dance in September.
Friday night's Cowboy and In-
dian parade organized by Exeter
Kinsmen Playground supervisors
Was the largest in the history of
the four-year-old playgroOndi
Exeter Boy Scouts presented
a first aid demonstration
on CKNXeTV Tuesday afternoon.
cOU ters Doug Kelton, bon
Thomson and Dori Scott partici-
pated,
25 YEARS AGO
Exeter's victory flag with six
pennants i$ now floating in the
breeze across Main St. The pen-
nants are due to the fact that
Exeter raised 264 per cent of
its quota in the Victory Loan.
Instead of James Street United
Church Sunday School holding a
picnic this year $20 was donated
to the Queen's fund for air raid
Victims.
Miss Mary Borland has accep-
ted a position as teacher at
Hurondale School.
Reg Wtierth, who has been ere-
pleyed at LInderifield's Hard-
ware, MS enlisted in the RCAF
and left Thursday for Manning
pool, Toronto.
and practical jokes
arid "makings" for the rest of
the month.
Today's sailor is a much glum-
mer individual. He's more likely
to be married and have children.
He has a mortgage and insur-
ance and income tax and dental
bills, like all the other Suckers
in society.
Theoretically, he's 10 times
better off than the deck-hand of
the 30's. lie works a whole lot
less and makes a great deal
more. He is better fed and quar-
tered. He can watch television.
He has 10 months away from the
old battleaxe and the kids, two
months holidays in winter, dur-
ing which he is paid unemploy-
ment insurance,
What's wrong then? Why is
he griping, threatening to strike
every so often, wishing he had a
shore Job? It's simple enough.
Sailing is deadly dull. For offic-
ers and engineers, it's lively
enough. They have delicate ma-
chinery, decisions, resporisibili-
tieS, special skills.
But the deck-hand is the Poor
Bloody Infantry of the inland
seas. His work is often dirty,
nearly always monotonous, oc-
casionally dangerous, but hardly
ever heroic,
There's no going aloft to reef
the mainsail in the teeth of a
gale. He's more likely chipping
paint. There's no landing at exo-
tic foreign ports, hiring a rick -
Oa and heading for the high
spots. He's more likely picking
his way across the railway tracks
in a dirty dock area, heading for
a beer parlour.
Ile Spends most Of his waking
hours with a crowd jnst es brown-
ed off as he. And they curse and
play poker and grouse and watch
television crud and brag about
the shore job they Could have had.
Not much for the soul there,
And he's lonely. Lonely for
his family. And'Maybe hO's
--Please turn to page 7 Wini:WMAPSOMatariliti atisaranw-
rob