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The Brussels Post, 1981-10-28, Page 2Published at BRUSSELS, ONTARIO every Wednesday morning by McLean Bros. Publishers Limited Andrew Y. McLean, Publisher Evelyn Kennet, Editor Member Canadian Community Newspaper Association, Ontario Weekly Newspaper Association and The Audit Bureau of, Circulation. $13 a year 40 cents a single copy Authorized as second class mail by Canada Post Office. Registration Number 0562. Merchants support Santa A canvass of the business of 'Brussels, Receipts will be forwarded. Walton, Cranbrook and Ethel was taken on Thanks to the support of the local merchants, this year's parade will be a success. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated for this year and in the future. Chairman— Dale Newman Treasurer— Cecil Moore Secretary— Gary Elston October 3. On behalf of the Santa Claus Parade Committee, I would like to thank all the merchants who donated in support of the parade. Any merchants we might have missed may send their donation to Cecil Moore, Brussels. • r , EST,. 1872 1 ipprusseis Post BRUSSELS Established 1872 519-887-6641 Serving BruSsels and the surrounding community To the editor: Thanks for the memories Box 50, Brussels, Ontario NOG 1H0 ei. Editor's Note: The following letter was recently received by Mrs. Leona Armstrong of R.R. 3, Brussels who wished to share it with readers of the Brussels Post. Dear Mrs. Armstrong: My Dad, Alex Mann and I enjoyed Grey's 125th celebration very much last Saturday evening. Would you please, convey to all who contributed to the successful event our sincere thanks? It is always a real pleasure for us to return home and meet old friends again to see so many in such a short time was thrilling. We particularly liked the Reminiscing Room with the well organized and inform- ative displays. ' Our Congratulations and Thanks go to you and your works for a memorable evening. Yours Sincerely, Dorothy Hall R.R. 3, Simcoe WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 28, 1981 Thank heavens for volunteers In a day when everyone is supposed to be looking out for number one, where would we be if it wasn't for a lot of people for whom self-interest is set aside for the benefit of the community? Take a look around the community and subtract from it all the things that wouldn't be there if volunteers had only thought of their own personal gain, if they hadn't been willing to donate their time and money for something bigger than themselves. In a lot of our western Ontario communit- ies the best things about community life are due to the hard work of volunteers. Many of our parks wouldn't be there if not for the local Lions, Kinsmen,. Optimists, Rotary or other service group. Our arenas and community halls were usually the result of service clubs and hardworking ;adividual volunteers putting in long, hard hours to build something they feel is more important thanjust the profit motive. Nearly all our hospitals were started by volunteer groups and many still owe their existence to hard working volunteer board members and auxiliary helpers and volun- teer committees who are glad to take on the task of a major fundraising campaign when some major, improvement is needed in the facility. Nearly all cultural activities whether they be amateur or professional theatres, concert series or symphony orchestras, art galleries, or craft shows, are run by Teachers have 20 days of sick leave (paid) due to them every year. That's fair enough. . At present, I have 316 days, plus 20 for the coming years, built up. Figure it out for yourself. I haven't missed many days on the job and some of those were funerals of relatives and such. But how can a man show up for work as a member of the "walking wounded": abra- sions on forehead, black right eye and scraped cheekbone, nose looking as though the rats had been at it, and right leg almost completely crippled, though nothing broken? Well, he can't. And yesterday was the first time in my teaching career when I wasn't ill, but stayed home. I went back today with a few flesh-coloured pieces of tape, and a bad limp, arousing the curiosity of staff and student! alike. Strangely enough, I had been telling bright Grade 11 class just the other day about the gullibility of students. You may remem- ber. I'd had a very minor lesion on my big nose removed. The nurse said "This is a big bandage." I retorted, "This is a big nose." It was all done at the hospital before 9 a.m. and I was on the job. A lad in one of my classes asked, with concern, "What happened to your nose, sir?" I told him with a very straight face that a hyena had escaped from a nearby zoo, poked in one of my cellar windows, and, sneakirig up to the bedroom, had bitten. off My nose And that's why I'd been to hospital, to have an artifical nose implanted. "Oh, that's too bad, Sit," he'd said, in all sincerity. . Well, in all sincerity, I wish the story had been true. For about the eighth time in my dedicated volunteers. A community run only on the profit motive would be a pretty dead place to live. PART OF THE CULTURE That's one of the things I have admired about the people of Saskatchewan: the act of working for the community is part of their culture. Because there are no major cities in Saskatchewan, because agriculture is still the single most important thing in the province, small town virtues still play a major part in the interwoven personality of the province. Like our early Ontario pioneers, the rural people of •Saskatchewan learned early that if they wanted to survive, they couldn't remain individuals each out only for himself. They had to co-operate, to stick together. Unlike our selves who seemed to outgrow the lessons of the pioneers, Saskatchewan still practices that kind of co-operative drive which mixes individua lity with group action in a healthy manner. It has led to the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool, co-operatives in everything from farm supplies to grocery stores, and for better or worse, socialist-populist govern- ments which have brought in social policies like medicare and government auto insur- career, my nose looks like a transplant from a guy who has narrowly escaped his life, after being shot through the nose, instead of the brain. But this Grade 11 class the other day didn't say a word, though their looks were eloquent. They didn't want to be gullible, and have me tell them that my wife did it, or I had a fight with the town cop, or I cashed while glider-flying. I wish I'd been born with the snub nose. These people, even though they are always sticking their snubs into other peoples' business, never seem to get them hurt. I mind my own business, and keep getting my nose broken or badly cut, or a candidate for cancer. Once again, the damage resulted from shopping. One time I came in with two bags of groceries, slipped off my shoes at the door, went into the freshly waxed kitchen, took a kick at that cat, slipped and fell, nose-on, against the kitchen counter. No eggs broken, just the nose. This time, I went off with a reasonable shopping, list, but got into the finpulse-bUying game and arrived home with five of those White plastic shopping bags, loaded to the gunnel§ (the bagS.) Cunningly, I thought, "Well, I can handle three on one trip and go back for the other two and still have one hand free to slam the trunk door of the car." Unfortunately, my cunning neglected the fact that I was wearing my new arch support, ance. In Ontario the land had barely been cleared -and planted when a second generation of dreamers arose: the city builders. Saskatchewan I imagine had its builders of dream cities too but the differ ence is that in Ontario the cities actually came into life. And with them came the feeling that if something was worth having then somebody would find a way of making a buck at it, and, conversely, if you couldn't make a buck at it, it couldn't have been worth having anyway. So in a culture dominated more and more by city-thinking, we simply did without a lot of things that weren't profitable. Later, as times changed, came the thought that if it wasn't profitable but was still desireable, then the government, municipal, provincial or federal, should provide it. Now this way of thinking seems to have been accepted in inverse proportion to the size of the community. The larger the community, the more people accepted that it was natural for either private enterprise or government taxes to pay for something that was desired. The smaller the community, the more people realized that if they wanted total cost $85 and that it was hurting me like a brand new set of false teeth. I was limping heavily on the right. I arrived at the pile of rocks just outside our back door. Sometimes we call it the rock garden, at other times the rock patio. Every year we plan to turn it into one or the other, or something exotic. But it's still just a pile of rocks, each and everyone with sharp edges. Many a chunk I've taken off my shin by veering a little to the right. • To make a long story short, I caught my right, limping foot on 'a heave in the sidewalk, and tumbled straight into the rock pile. Loyal to the end, I clung to the groceries. In my right hand were two bags, obviously loaded with canned goods. The one bag in my left hand contained the toilet tissue and the kleenex. ' I went into the rock pile like a badly ballasted ship hitting a reef. I could have been killed. My nose saved me. It took the initial impact before I skidded onto my cheek-bone and forehead: Bloody but unkowed, I gathered the tt, they were going to have to go out and do it themselves. DO THEY PULL TOGETHER? Today when I look at the health of a community I tend not so much to see how fancy the homes are, how prosperous the businesses, but to see how much people pull together for those things, that come not from profit motive or taxes but from the hard work of volunteers. The profit seekers will move on when times get tough, the government will have to cut back, but through thick and thin the volunteers who make things work will continue to make a community a lively place. They get little reward for their work. Often they will get steady criticism from those people of the community who are happy to take the benefits of the work but don't want anything to do with getting involved, except, of course to comment on how much better they could do things. The only reward the volunteers get is the feeling of having done something important, well. We're lucky here in Huron County because, like Saskatchewan, rural thinking still predominates. People are willing to work together to make our communities better. We are rewarded not just with the extra facilities or services provided, but with a sense of togetherness, a sense of who we are. So here's to all those thousands of hard-working volunteers. The place just wouldn't be the same without you. sir?" groceries (not an egg busted, not a quart of milk spilled) staggered into the kitchen, scattering blood and groceries everywhere. Lots of people would have been rushed to emergency and sewed and cauterized and other wise tortured. I never do that. I use my mother's old remedies. Staunch the 'block with a cloth or something, make sure you . haven't lost an eye, and then sock the ice-water to it. In my mother's day, hot and, cold water were the painkillers' and the blood stoppers. We didn't have ice-cubes then, we had a chunk of ice in the ice-box. And we needed it. I was always coming home with a cut foot that should have had six stitches, or a cut head where a kid had hit me with a stone, or a sprained ankle from football. I must admit that I add a little modern extra. I put the ice-cubes in a towel until the bleeding stops or is merely oozing. Then I take them out, wash off any superfluous blood, put them in a glass, and pour some medicine over them, just in case of shock. If my mother could see me doing this last maneouvre, she'd have gone into shock. She was TT. And that's how I got my banged-up face. But my nose saved though worse. Behind the scenes by Keith Roulston "What happened to your nose sugar ana spice By Bill Smiley Concerned? Write a letter to the editor today!