The Brussels Post, 1979-03-28, Page 2THE GANG FROM SESAME STREET — Clinton Garniss as Oscar the
Grouch won first in the best cartoon character 15 and under category and
Margaret Garniss as Ernie placed second and Frances. Breckenridge as
Bert won first in the best cartoon character 16 and over at Saturday
night's carnival. (Brussels Post Photo)
Behind the scenes
by Keith Roulston
How valuable TV can be
BRUISE LS
ONTARIO
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 28, 1979
Serving Brussels and the surrounding community.
Published each Wednesday afternoon at Brussels, Ontario
By McLean Bros. Publishers Limited
Evelyn Kennedy - Editor Pat Langlois - Advertising
Member Canadian Community Newspaper Association and
Ontario Weekly Newspaper Association
Subscriptions (in advance) Canada $10.00 a Year.
Others $20.00 a Year. Single Copies 25 cents each.
ieNA
Brussels Post
Thanks to the workers
Well, it's over. After many weeks of planning and organization the
Family Skating Carnival is over. It was a night that many people in
Brussels can be proud of.
Some of those people include those who organized the event, those
who decorated the arena, those who collected donations and all those
who helped out in many other ways.
And the efforts of those people include those who orgaized the
event, those who decorated the arena, those who collected donations
And the efforts of those who dressed up in costume should be
commended. It was obvious that mothers had spent a lot of time
makinctheir children's costumes look as authentic as possible and the
adults certainly put a lot of imagination into their costumes as well.
Tne .ntertainrnent provided by the Old Smoothies and Bil Riddell as
well as local skaters Kevin Wheeler and Catherine Cardiff were also
crowd pleasers.
Usually the organizers of such events thank the people who helped
them in preparing such things. But how many people who went to the
events and had the priviledge of seeing a show ever thank the people
who put them on? Naturally there are always a few-who will come and
express their congratulations and thanks for a job well done but more
often than not, organizers are told what they did wrong and what they
should have done instead.
If people are willing to give up a great deal of their time to do
something they think would entertain the village, they deserve a word
of appreciation for what they have done. This goes for the Optimists
who had a terrific hockey tournament, the Lions for Polar Daize, the
Agriculture Society for the fair and many other hard working groups.
The organizers and people who helped out with the Family Skating
Carnival deserve a word of thanks and so do any other people who have
tried to improve on activities for the village.
To the editor:
Council questions cuts a
By Bill Smiley
Like most people in this ct untry with any
intelligence, I welcome the advent of
spring, which in Canada consists mainly of
mud, slush, cold rain and colder winds.
It is the end of that suicidal season in
which we get more and more depressed,
irritable, and bone-weary of living in a land
where the national sound symbols are the
wet sniffle and the barking cough, the
national sight symbols are the filled-hi
driveway and the rusting fender.
It's a trying, time, For years, I've
advocated a mid-February holiday to save
the national psych frorn self-destruction.
I've suggested calling it National Love
Village of Brussels Council as represent-
atives of the residents of the Village of
Brussels wish to express their concerns
about the closing of Hospital beds in
Wingham Hospital.
Some of the questions we would like
answered are:
WHY: Senior Citizens (of which Brussels
has a higher proportion than the
rest of Huron) are worried about transpor-
tation in cases of emergencies in winter as
well as summer. Habits are hard to change
and they have been completely served by
Wingham Hospital all their lives.
WHY: Hard to understand why an efficient
iiirmousolop urn
hospital such as Wingham whose
costs per bed are2/3 lower than larger
surrounding hospitals should have to close
beds to save money.
WHY: A hospital which was built by mills
assessed against all residents in the
surrounding areas should gradually lose
their autonomy and eventually be phased
out of existence.
WHY: With every bed closing there are
local residents out of work. Government
creating jobs on the one side of the fence
and taking jobs away on the other.
The Reeve,
J. Calvin Krauter.
Day, the third Monday in Feb.: a day to
love, your neighbour, your neighbour's
wife, yourself, and life, not necessarily in
that order.
But I've been blocked, year after year,
by politicians, who fear the opponents
might score a victory if it were named Sir
John A. MacDonald Day or Sir Wilfred
Laurier Day; and by the industrialists and
business cornmunity, who blanch with
terror at the th ought of paying their
employees for one more non productive
day in the year. Hell, a third of their
employees' days are non-productive any-
(Continued on Page 6)
Nearly all of us, myself included, have
taken a shot at the kind of programming we
get on television, particularly the American
brand of television that plays to the lowest
common denominator.
Just how valuable television can be is
evident on Sunday nights these days with
the continuing program Roots. It proves
that while television may for the most part
be designed to sell new cars and sanitary
napkins, it can also not only entertain, but
teach us and set us to thinking.
For the last few weeks I've found myself
going to bed and lying there for a few
minutes before going to sleep, thinking
about just how privileged I have been in my
lifetime. I grew up on an Ontario farm that
was far from prosperous and where one
could feel sorry for oneself when he looked
at others around with more money. To be
truthful, probably the young Alex Haley
growing up in Roots had more material
possessions than we had at our place.
But poor as we were, we were far more
blessed than the black family on Roots. We
were privileged because we never went to
bed at night in fear. Imagine what the
blacks in the U.S. south went through in
the first half of this century. One never
knew if he stood up for his rights against a
white man if he might not end up with a
burning cross calling card from the Ku
Klux Klan on the front lawn or worse still,
with his house reduced to ashes. The
alternative was to scrape and bend
whenever some white needed to boost his
own morale by degrading a black. It was so
comforting to the poor whites to be able to
have someone to look down on and they
wanted to keep the blacks down there so
there would always be someone below
them. Even if they couldn't read and write
themselves, White men felt they were'
somehow superior to even college educated
blacks.
Roots shows the value of televisiOn, of
the study of history and of drama. Oh
we've heard about the human indecencies
that were perpetrated on blacks in the 0.S.
We even saw the riots and the beatings
that took place in the late 19S0's and early
1960's as blacks tried to claim the equal
rights they had been promised in the
country's constitution. But all those
stories, even the news film can't tell us
what it was really like to be black and live
in that era. It can't take us inside a black
body to experience the indignities, the
fear, the degradation of simply having a
skin that wasn't white.
The Haley family certainly isn't your
typical black family. Though they came to
America as slaves they became from before
the civil war, a more privileged black
family. One ancestor was an expert
trainer of fighting cocks and so rose a little
higher than ordinary field hands. His son
was a blacksmith, educated and' well
respected in the black community and
about as highly respected as a black man
could be in the white community. His
daughter married a man who owned his
own business and was much better off than
the majority of whites in the community.
His daughter married a professor who went
to the prestigious Cornell University. His
son was Alex Haley, the man who began
the whole thing by going back through his
family history right to the capture of his
ancestor in Africa.
While the Roots families are highly
untypical of the experiences of blacks in
the past century in the U.S., I think the
show may be more valuable for it. For the
blacks who have watched the series with
the same fervour they once gave to reading
their Bible, it showed that some people
were able to rise above the pressures to
keep blacks down. For the whites I think
the show is easier to relate to than if it had
taken the lowliest black and concentrated
on his life. These are people who lived like
our own relatives lived. They Weren't out
picking cotton but doing white and blue
collar jobs, Yet despite their education,
they still had to suffer because of their skin
colour. And their friends; whether black;
poor of white men who tried to help blacks,
suffered with thetti.
(Coritintied on Page 7)
Sugar and spice