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HomeMy WebLinkAboutTimes-Advocate, 1983-06-22, Page 4Page 4 Times -Advocate, June 22, 1983 Times Established 1873 Advocate Established 1881 Amalgamated 1924 dvocate E)11 Serving South Huron, North Middlesex & North Lambton Since 1873 Published by I.W. Eedy Publications Limited LORNE EERY Publisher JiM BECKETT Advertising Manager Bilt BATTEN Editor HARRY DEVRIES Composition Manager ROSS HAUGH 'Assistant Editor DICK JONGKIND Business Manager Published Each Wednesday Morning at Exeter, Ontario Second Class Mail Registration Number 0386. Phone 235-1331 SUBSCRIPTION RATES: Canada $21.00 Per year: U.S.A. $56.00 C;W.N.A., O.C.N.A. CLASS 'A' and 'ABC' Make it clear The chairman of the Huron County Board of Education, Dorothy Wallace, told a Liberal task force in Goderich last week that she is concerned about the Ministry of Education's commitment to special educa- tion beyond 1985. She pointed out to the Liberal Party task force that special education grants to the board `cover only 82 percent of the cost of the program while the remaining 18 percent is to be raised by local taxes. The board of education chairman asked who pays for the program after 1985. The question is a good one and the ministry of education would do well to answer it before school boards across the province implement the special education programs already initiated by the ministry. In her exchange with the fact finding group in Goderich, Mrs. Wallace also expressed concern for the decline in the cost of education being assumed by the province. She noted that the ministry paid 72 percent of the board's budget in 1975 but this has since been reduced to 62 percent. Another point made by Mrs. Wallace was that at the same time new special programs are being in- troduced in the school system, technical equipment in secondary school's installed in the 1960s is becoming either worn outor obsolete. Few people question the value of special education in the province's schools - special education for the han- dicapped is now seen as a necessity in a progressive and fair society. At the other end of the special educa- tion spectrum, however, is instruction for the gifted. Certainly this is also a desirable program for en- suring that especially bright students make use of their full potential. The rub, however, is whether taxpayers will be willing to foot the bill for these programs when they are implemented and when the provincial govern- ment's so-called start-up funds are used up. The province should at least make clear where long-term funding is going to come from. A pity, indeed Two more Crown controlled companies are in financial trouble and once again, Canadian taxpayers are going to come to the rescue. A parliamentary committee 'investigating the Canadair operation has announced that the corpora- tion has debts amounting to 1.4 billion dollars. That's a figure most Canadians can't comprehend, although the federal government deficit figures are starting to make taxpayers aware of such astronomical amounts. More recently, deHavilland Aircraft of Canada Ltd. announced it lost $265.2 million in the last seven months and the Canada Development Investment Corp, deHavilland's holding company, said the firm now has a net worth of minus $2.1 million. That's right, minus! Canadians have come to realized that one of the main requirements for staying in business in this na- tion is to run up huge losses and then ask the govern- ment to come to the rescue. It worked for Massey - Ferguson and Maislin Transport, and- no doubt will work for Canadair and deHavilland. In most instances, the plight of the firm has been blamed on poor management. Yet, executives of those firms remain on staff, and in one case, decided they should have sizeable pay increases, Only in Canada, you say? Pity...the poor taxpayers! One 'boat' missed; another leaving Nostalgia buffs would have been delighted with the decision to stage Tues- day's annual meeting of the South iluron Hospital Association in the town hall auditorium. That was the scene of the board's first annual meeting and it was an appropriate choice in which to conduct the 30th annual event. Appropriate, that is, until mother nature decided to bless the area with the first taste of summer weather. The town hall auditorium, unfortunat e- ly, is not an ideal location in which to put 100 people during a heat wave. Even four huge fans couldn't prevent the hall from taking on the air of a sweat box. both literally and figuratively. Claims of TV commercials notwithstanding, they haven't yet developed a deodorant or soap that could stand up to that test. The situation was certainly not insuf- ferable and preparations may have been difficult to change at the last minute, but the lamentable fact is that within easy ac- cess to the town hall is a beautiful town centre that would have made an ideal location for such a gathering and could have been quickly transformed, into the meeting place with a minimum of delay and work. The parkette between the library and town hall was intended for just such an event, and yet it has never been initiated for any warm weather town meeting. Ironically, the only time it provides -a set- ting for any group is during the frequent- ly cold and blustery ceremony on Remembrance I)ay. Tuesday night, a "(lire -a -Student Week" flag fluttered enticingly outside the steamy window of the auditorium and the soft glow of the lighting in the parkette danced through the shrubbery to welcome the audience as they made their way from the meeting, virtually grasping for a breath of fresh air. Strange isn't it that people so often fail to avail themselves of the pleasures pro- vided for them by man and nature? R t t t * A second question .that arises is to wonder what ever happened to the Exeter • and Area Heritage Committee. While the town hall stands as a.beautiful monument to their efforts, it appears to have been the sole interest of the group and not a stepp- ing stone to further• enhance other aspects of the heritage of the community. it's easy to understand why the group may have stopped to collectively catch a "second wind" after the mammoth under- BATT'N AROUND with the editor taking, but their recuperative powers are somewhat questionable. Had some of their members been pre- sent at the hospital annual, they would have heard the need to fill in some historical gaps in that institution, as several years of records and memorabalia were lost in the flood of 1969 and require efforts to be filled in. it is now 10 years since the community celebrated its centennial and to our knowledge no one in the community has undertaken the necessary task of keeping the historical data updated to augment the invaluable information compiled to that time by author Joe Wooden. .Joe would be among the first to recognize the important contribution that a group such as the Heritage committee could provide the community in having the important events of the town record- ed annually and to be made available when someone undertakes the task of up- dating the history book at some future time. Recollections grow dim with the pass- ing of time, photos which are not proper- ly eared for become faded or lost and records hive a habit of getting misplaced. The experience of South Huron hospital too clearly shows that one unexpected rnjsfortune can wipe out a source of infor- mation and heritage that is extremely dif- ficult to replace, and in many instances, totally impossible. While the community initiative must be to the present and future, its ac- complishments can only be measured by knowing where it has been. Where we have been is a little lax in keeping track of that aspect. * * * Few people take the time to consider the changes that occur in a community in a short span of 10 years, buts you can be quickly shocked into that realization by glancing through the centennial issue pro- duced by this newspaper in 1973. One need look no further than the first advertisement placed on behalf of the town. Of the 11 people responsible for the administration of the community, only one, the current mayor, still is involved. Three of the 11 are deceased. In the first 40 -page section there were advertisements from 45 local retail outlets. Only 12 of those businesses re- main under the same name. Many have disappeared entirely from the local scene or had new owners and names applied. If you moved into town yesterday, you Erobably never heard of Exeter-Lucan lectronics, Maple Leaf Mills, South End Service, Bob Chaffe Fuels, Wilson's .Jewellery, Jack Smith Jeweller, Alf An- drus Tinsmithing, Banghart-Kelly-Doig & Co., Harold Gunn Hardware, Ersman's Bakery, lluntley Drugs, Middleton Drugs, The Chuckwagon, Mr. Pizza, Bev's Plum- bing and Heating, Exeter Frozen Foods, Graham Arthur Motors, Stephan Oren - chuck Upholstery, Lindenfield Hardware, Spicer's Bakery, Don Taylor Motors, MacMillan's, Cudmore Heating, John Burke Ltd., Gould & Jory, F.A. May & Son, Fred J. Lankamp Esso, Exeter Ford Equipment and Larry Snider Motors. That's just in one of the three sections of the special edition, and even as 1 con- clude, the Exeter Bowling Lanes is disappearing. Time does fly! Surely some of its events are worth capturing before they too fly from existence and are gone forever. "1 think our nest egg's been poached!" No deep depression Well, as I totter down the humid corridors of June, I can't say that the end of another school year gives me the prickles. I have no sense of deep depression. There is no lurking melancholy; not even a whiff of nostalgia. Only a lively sense of relief. • Only one more boring, boring, boring Commence- ment to involuntarily at- tended. Oh, I know these are grand, stirring occa- sions for the graduates the prizewinners,' them parents, But for a tuckered -out teacher, they are only a stifling June night in a sneaky -sneaker, jock in- fested cathedral, when he'd rather be doing prac- tically anything else. The very thought of it has given me a solid idea about what I'm going to do when I retire. Of course, I'm not retir- ing, I am merely quitting my job and taking on another one. And at this very moment, I've decid- ed what I'm going to do. I'm going to continue writing this column, naturally. There's no other way I can vent my spleen. And if you haven't seen a spleen-ventor late- ly, I suggest you do. It's better than pounding out your wife/husband. I'm going to write such a dirty book that people will be buying it under the counter, talking about it in hushed whispers, and even claiming it's a work of fiction. But it won't be. I'm going to name names: Gert, Ruby, Pearl. Let the chips whall fare they may, I told my old lady. For once and all, I'm gonnatellit like it is. She looked amused. Trust her! `Yabbut!", I managed, before she broke in with, "Your sex life is enough to naisance. Poetic licence. I don't need to tell them he'd selected me because the day before I'd dropped a bomb on the Canadian Army, purely by chance; and that when we return- ed, he observed, coolly, Sugar and Spice Dispensed By Smiley curl the toes of a sloth." Well, We'll just see about that. I remember this girl in Manchester who...."I don't want a bath; I just want a kiss." I'd licked her ear. And I'm gonna tell my grandboys the straight truth: that I fought the Nazis, toe to tow, and never gave an inch. Well, I did say, "Please stop; you're hurting me." But the kids don't have to know everything. I'm not Darth Vader. Maybe I'll tell them about how I cried in the showers, after Smith Falls beat us, 8-7 in the finals. Might make a nice con- trast to the macho image. But I can hear the little idiots saying, "How come, Grandad, if you got two touchdowns, you were licked?" They know their blasted math. Maybe it would be bet- ter to tell them how our C.O., Killim Gillam, selected me, over all the other pilots, to go up with him on a two-man recon - "You shot a hole in my wing, Smiley." He shouldn't have had a wing sticking out like that. No, this is going to be a no -holes -bared, letting -it - all -hang-out, anything - gees autobiography. Ali I hr. v e to do is come up with a couple of torrid, rather than Turkish -bath, sex scenes, and we're off to Hollywood. Or jail. Well, that's just .for openers: a sizzling, sexy autobiography, and a col- umn that continues to throw anchors to the "lit- tle guy"; as he struggles to hold his nose and float on the nauseous canal of con- temporary life. But what I really have bTanned for my future is to ecome an adult student. I think I can shine there. I'm going to go back to school. In Math, I'm going to argue that a straight line is not the shortest distance between two points, and start a riot when the teacher tries to explain what sexist, racist attitudes he means by "straight." In science, I'm going to complain that the teacher has not satisfactorily pro- vedto me that the earth is not . flat, that Genesis makes more sense than Darwin, that two swallows do a summer make, whereas one doesn't, and that a pistil is no more use to a stamen than a bee is to a frog: In English, I'm going to ask the beleaguered teacher, "Where have you been published lately? In the Sunday School Gazette? The English Teachers' Almanac, in the article that claims Oedipus did not originate Mother's Day by plucking out his eyes and handing them to his mother?" I'll be a heller in history. "But how do you know that Laura Secord hadn't sold the patent before she started putting the switch to that cow? And how do you know it wasn't Laura who was the cow and the real cow was a member of the CIA? Where was Napoleon? When was The Repeal of the Corn Laws? Why was Mackenzie King?" • I'm really looking for- ward to being an adult stu- dent. I'm planning to take pornography, mystery, computer error, im- persnal typing, Gaelic, mujik (with systhesizer), and stamily fuddies, which is all about, like, abortion and how refrigerators are better than brass monkeys for keeping salad crisp. I can hardly wait. Let's hear it for pig One evening we had some friends over for sup• per for the first time. The main meat item was a large ham, The husband of the family was a Jorda- nian gentleman, and although i knew he was a Moslem (Muslim), I had never thought about the rule which forbids Moslems to eat any pork meat. Fortunately there was enough food of other kinds for him to enjoy himself too. Here in Canada, where most people are of Euro- pean extraction, we don't think too much of the eating customs or taboos of other parts of the world. During the course of that particular evening we went on to discuss why pork is not eaten by Muslims and Jews. Ile suggested that one of the reasons probably went back to many centuries when it was not too reasonable to eat pork in a the Moslem troops believ- ed a rumour that pig lard was used to grease their Perspectives hot country with no good way to preserve the meat for any length of time. Ile went on to mention the strong feelings that many of his countrymen have about the issue. One of the ways that non- muslims have insulted the muslims is to throw a piece of pork into one of their mosques (churches). in India back at the end of the last century there were bloody riots because By Syd Fletcher bullets (Which they had to put in their mouths during the loading process.) Personaiiy I enjoy a well -cooked piece of tenderloin pork roast even better than beef and have no objections at all to a good ham sandwich in my lunch bag, but of course, that is without doubt all relative to the way I was brought up. Something i might note though (and never thought to mention to my Jorda- nian friend) was that the pig is not really as dirty an animal as one might think. Unlike a cow which will lie right down in its' own manure, a pig, given enough room in its stall, will use one corner of the stall to relieve itself in and will sleep in another. You see pigs in the field covered with mud and think of them asdirty animals, but a prime reason for that is the pig's need to wallow in the coolness of a mud -hole due to an inability to sweat and cool itself any other way. Come to think of it, you hear about some of these 'ladies' doing this mud - wrestling bit. I think that at least the pig has a reason for its actions. Let's hear it for the.low- ly pig!