HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Brussels Post, 1974-12-18, Page 4WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 18, 197
Serving Brussels and the surrounding community,
Published each Wednesday afternoon at Brussels, Ontario
by McLean Bros.Publishers, Limited.
Evelyn Kennedy - Editor Dave Robb - Advertising
Member Canadian Community Newspaper Association and
Ontario Weekly Newspaper Association.
Subscriptions (in advance) Canada $6.00 a year, Others
ccNA $8.00 a year, Single Copies 15 cents each.
VERIFIRO
Second class mail Registration No. 0562.
CIRCULATION Telephone 887-6641.
BRUSSELS
MITA F119
111111414.1011110
1172
Brussels Post Post
.2 Sugar and Spice
By Bill Smiley
,
The first census
Dear Sir:
Every year, my job in Canada becomes a
little bit harder, in spite of 7- or perhaps
because of— our vast technological
achievements.
You see, each year, I receive a •larger
number of heartbreaking letters from
young folk who say they could manage
without Christmas presents if only I could
send Daddy back. My research shows that
Daddy was in a fatal traffic accident, and it
is very hard for a little one to understand
how it is Daddy can go off to work, fishing,
shopping etc. right as rain, but never come
back.
Through the pages of your paper, may I
ask for the help of all the drivers in your
coverage area? We have just come through
Safe Driving Week in Canada, and
everybody has seen a barrage of safety
messages. Please remember them, not
only through the hustle and bustle of this
holiday season, but all through 1975.
Then, I will be better able to concentrate
on finding the kind of gifts that make up
the more routine requests from our
children.Let's have no more sad, desperate
faces at Christmas time.
Wishing you and yours a very merry and
safe Christmas ! HO Ho Ho,
Santa Claus
In the so-called good old days, a great
many who are now middle-aged men were
in the newspaper business. That is, they
had a paper route and made a bit of
spending money, even in the depression
years.
I was closely associated with a paper
route myself, although I didn't exactly
have one. My kid brother did. I was sort of
his business manager or financial adviser.
Every Saturday night, after he'd made
his weekly collections, I would inveigle him
into the bathroom, lock the door so nobody
could hear, and give him some sound
business advice.
I'd remind him that he was too fond of
candy and pop and other tooth-rotting
confections, that he had no willpower, and
that he'd only squander his hard-earned
fifty cents if he didn't invest at least part of
it every week.
He didn't know much about investments
and wanted to put some of his money into a
piggy bank. I'd tell him severely that that
was no way to inake his money grow. He
should give it to me and watch the interest
pile up.
He'd bawl a bit, but then he'd come
around after a bit of arm-twisting, and see
the point. The point was that I was stronger
than he was.
I'd always let him keep part of it , maybe
twenty cents. I'd take the other thirty cents
and invest it. I invested it in the Saturday
night movie, a bottle of pop and. a chocolate
bar. It was a wise investment and. paid
good dividends. The many movies I thus
enjoyed enriched my experience of the
human condition, enlarged my vocabulary,
and added to my personal pleasure in life,.
It took him about two years to catch on,
two of the best years of my life. There was,
of course, a confrontation. He swore I had
conned him out of at least silty dollars. I
scoffed at this and told him it was only
about fourteen. But the little devil had
been keeping his books.
Last time I saw him, in Germany last
spring, he informed me that with
compound interest, I now owed him
$44,000 and if I didn'.t come up with it, he'd
be interested in taking it out of my hide. I
am still an inch taller than he, but he
out-weighs me by forty pounds.
So we compromised. I told him that if he
paid all my expenses on my trip, I'd dig up
the money somehow. He did. And thank
goodness I haven't seen him Since.
All this has been brought to mind by
recent development in the deliVery of daily
newspapers. It is just 'another sign of our
affluent age, when even the kicIS have so
much money they don't have to Work.
For years, I've taken two daily
newspapers, morning and evening. They
take opposite political stands, and both are
so warped that if I take a stand in the
middle of their polarized points of view, I
am right in the temperature zone, which
prefer.
At any rate, it seems that these titans c
the press cannot, simply can not, secur
young carrier girls or boys to peddle thei
papers. .
The morning paper has simply given up
No delivery. The evening paper has hire(
tindependent agents "operating their owl.
vehicles." This means guys who drive
around in their own cars and hurl the pape
out the car window in the general directioi
of your house.
In the good old days of about six week:
ago, I felt a little tingle of warmth when the
door-bell rang. "Ah, the paper boy,"
would remark wittily. And it was. The boy,
or sometimes girl, was faithful and loyal,
even in the foulest weather. I knew the
counrty was going to hell in a hearse, but ]
felt that this was one hummock of decency
and virtue in a m orass of miseries.
Now I feel a very strong tingle, not of
warmth, but of rageat paper-delivery time.
It is my custom when I arrive home after a
hard day on the assembly line at the
pupil-factory, to take off my jacket and my
shoes, and take on a cold beer before
proceeding to peruse my paper.
This entire routine has been spoiled, not
to say desecrated, by the new delivery
method. I still'go through the first parts of
the procedure, but the beer tastes flat as 1
stew around, waiting for the paper. It
arrives any time between four and seven.
That means I have put back on my shoes
and gone out in my shirt-sleeves in the
winter wind to search around in the snow
for my paper as many as four times.
This is not conducive to lowering a man's
blood pressure. At least they put the thing
in a plastic bag. But this is covered in three
minutes when it's snowing, which it always
seems to be when I go out to look for my
paper.
To add insult to injury, I receive a letter
from the circulation department of the big,
fat, rich, lousy newspaper telling me that
the price is going up and that "We feel this
is a reasonable price to pay for dependable
delivery to your driveway six days a
week."
Well, let me just say to the circulation
manager that I don't want the paper
delivered to my driveway, but to my house.
My car can't read.
,i
And let me add that the service is not
depenlabie, in its present condition. And
rrip'{further add that if you can't do
belie than that, I will Shortly tell you What
you can do with your newspaper.
This is' a direct appeal to all parents.
Please Cut off your children's allowances,
to that at least some of them will be
available to peddle papers in the old way,
This is a cry from the heart. Civilization is
sinking, Must this last vestige of normalcy
go down With it?
Once upon a time, there was a writer who liked to
tell stories. Often he would link up the events in a
story with some contemporary happening,.
The writer was a Doctor named Luke. One of his
best known stories was about a pregnant girl at the
time of the first Census.
It was a peculiar kind of Census. There were no
mail-in-questionnaires. No Census-takers knocked
on your door. As a matter of fact, it was the. other
Nay round - you knocked on the door of the Census
.aker. If you insisted upon doing that to-day, you
would likely scare the goVernment out of its Census.
However, the Census takers today - have
sophisticated methods for collecting data and'
feeding it into computers along with pension cheques
and the time tables of high school students. The
government has more reason than ever to be scared
out of its Census.
Canada has a population of over twenty-two
million. According to archaelogists, the whole thing
got started by Asian tribes who migrated across the
Bering Strait. The way we treat the Indians and
Eskimos (the descendants of the Asian Tribes) we
seem to have lost our Bering.
The world population is about three billion. Every
month, we add another six million. We're pretty
good at counting people but we're beginning to get
concerned about how we're going to educate, clothe,
feed and house them, provide medical care, social
security, employment and look after their garbage.
In Bethlehem, right in the midst of that first
Census, a young couple had a baby.
While the whole country thought the important
task was to count people, this child came into the
world to tell us that people count.
Rt.Rev.Wilbur K. Howard
Minister, Emmanuel United Church
Ottawa; Moderator, The United
Church of Canada
To the Editor
Help Santa,
drive carefully
it mRI