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HomeMy WebLinkAboutTimes-Advocate, 1988-08-31, Page 4Page 4 Times -Advocate; August 31, 1988 Times Established I8 Adso(ate Established 1881 Amalgamated 192.1 • Ames dvocate Published Each Wednesday Morning at Exeter, Ontario, NOM 1S0 Second Class Mail Registration lstumber 0386. Phone 519-235.1331 ROSS HALCH Edilor HARR1 DtSRIES ( ompbsit+on Manager CCNA Serving South Huron, North Middlesex & North Lambton Since 1873 Published by 1.W. Eedy Publications limited JIM RE(AEIi Publisher & Adseriising Manager, • DO% SMITH • Business Manager ismacei SUBSCRIPTION RATES: Canada: $25.00 Per year; U.S.A. $65.00 Andy was a friend A friend to all. That is a good way to describe the late Andy McLean of Seaforth. All of,us in the newspaper business, eve- ryone in Seaforth particularly and all of Huron county generally have lost a friend. In addition to his many years as publish- er and editor of the Huron Expositor. in Seaforth, A.Y. as he was affectionately. known was recognized throughout Cana- da as a devout Liberal.and a shrewd and • caring newspaperman. . He represented the Huron riding very capab ' in Ottawa as an MP from 1940 to 1953 and was a member of the Canadian delegation to the United Nations. - In the newspaper field he served terms as president of both the Ontario and Ca- nadian Community Newspapers Associa- tions and in 1960 received a life member- ship in the latter group. Andy was one of those individuals who dedicated his life to helping others and was particularly aware of the need to help residents and businesses make their com- munities better places in which to live. Andy's knowledge not only of Seaforth, but Huron county in general proved valu- able when he was named editor of the Hu- ron County Atlas in 1983 after his retire- ment a year earlier. He produced an atlas which was twice as big as expected and covered every community in the county. He was a Liberal supporter all his life. In fact, we talked to him at the annual Hu- ron Liberal barbecue at the Jack Riddell farm only four days before his death. These are only a few of his many contri- butions to life itself. He will be missed by many people. But, his contributions to the town .of Seaforth, the political arena and the news- paper business will long be remembered. By• Ross Haugh You get what you pay for Ten million dollars is a hard pill to swallow for a village of 1,700 like Lucan. Village taxpayers, when presented with a projected cost . of over $3,000 per household for a combined water pipeline and sewage plant project, were out in force last Tuesday evening to take council to task over what went wrong. The general tone of the first half of the meeting was that some terrible mistake had to have been made. Many questioned the need for the project, some accused council of mismanagement, . and others felt the pipeline should have been built years ago. The truth is few of these citizens have ever attended a council meeting to see first hand the anguish and hard work council have poured into agonizingly slow negotiations with engineers, lawyers and ministries. Eventually, everyone came to the reali- zation these projects are inevitable if Lu - can is to have any kind of future at all. • It's just that no one wants to pay for it. Lucan cannot afford the $10 million it will cost to bring in lake water and to build a sewage treatment plant without , the 80 percent the province will contrib- ute. But it will still cost $830 a year for each household over 10 years. Some suggest the province should gtve more. But let's face it, the province docs not print money- all grants come out of taxpayers pockets anyway. There must be a point when a municipality has to pay for what it gets. Unfortunately, Lucan needs two projects at once. As reeve Norm Steeper has often point- ed out, each project is worthless without the other. New sewage capacity is worth- less without a good water supply; and to put water into new subdivisions without controlling effluent problems.in the Aus- able River would be reprehensible, if not criminal. Life used to be much simpler. •A small pipe and pump was a high-tech replace- ment for a few gallons of hand -pumped water a day. Now wt expect water to backwash pools and pressure to spray across a lawn. A sewer used to be a simple drain into the nearest river, trusting the lakes to take care of themselves. Without sewage treatment, today's populations Of south- ern Ont' ' would devastate the lakes in weeks. conservation is the only hope in curbing demands on our resources. As was concluded at the meeting, Lucan has no choice. Sewage and water cannot continue to cripple the community forev- er. Sixty-nine dollars a month is a lot of money, but the time has come to stop ar- guing about how it happened, pay the money and make it work. Ry Adrian !lane Who remembers labour Labour Day is around the comer again. I remember labour, and I remember being a labourer. How many of my readers do? i mean real labour. Not sitting in an air- conditioned office pondering over paper (i've done my share of that, too). Not working 7 1/2 hours a day. five days a week in an environment -controlled. computerized, unionized factory. 1 am talking about back- breaking labour that strains your muscles until they hurt. Labour that makes your bones ache. , Labour that makes you so tired that you crawl into bed at an early hour and drop off to sleep within seconds. Labour for two dollars a day, and later for seventy cents an hour if you were lucky. i remember cutting wheat with a scythe day after blistering day at harvest time. I remember the pull in the arms, the sweat in my eyes and the fear that the two women binding the sheafs behind me PETER'S POINT • by Peter Hessel would catch up with me. I remember how my lower arms ached when I had to milk 18 cows by hand twice a day. seven days a week. I remember the dust of threshing barley in the barn in the winter. 1 remember shovelling grain and potatoes and sugar beets and fertilizer and coal, load after load. pile after pile. And I remember carrying bags heavier than me up two flights of stairs to the grinding mill. Sometimes I had a ten-minute wait till the next load arrived. How I savoured those breaks, especially when someone brought me a tin of well water! I have never worked in a coal mine. but I think 1 know what it was like. I have never worked in a lumber camp, but lumberjacks knew what labour was. Women sewing in the sweatshops of Toronto's or Montreal's garment centres knew the word. The men helping bricklayers and carpenters 'knew. Iron workers and railway construction crews knew. Labour Please turn to page 5. a`C • 0 S .moi, IkAr,. "ti0L0 IT— WHAT MAKES YOU THiNK YOU'RE EXEMPT FROM SERVICE CHARGES?" Far from peanuts We often hear complaints about the enormous amounts of money paid to some of the higher priced athletes, fellows like Wayne Gretzky and George Bell who are in the two million dollar a year range. That sounds like a lot of mon- ey, but is only peanuts compared to some top notch movie stars and entertainers. We read a recent magazine arti- cle listing the top moneymakers in the entertainment business and the fabulous salaries they pocket- ed for the years 1986 and 1987. Comedian Bill Cosby heads the list with $84 million. Next comes Sly Stallone at $74 mil- lion, Bruce Springsteen at $56 million and the comic creator of Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz checked in at $55 million. Cer- tainly not peanuts. A total of 29 names were listed and at the bottom was Steve Martin at $15 million. Thc only sports person we could find in the list was boxer Marvelous Marvin Hagler at $16 million. Television talk show host Phil Donohue was in at thc same amount as Hagler, Jack Nichol- son and Tom Cruise. * * * * * Do you know how many pco- plc live in Huron county? If -you haven't the foggiest idea, join the group. We didn't either. It took a letter to the editor in the latest issue of the Clinton News Record to bring up the subject. A reader complained of From the r: editor's disk by fa Ross Haugh an error in the number of resi- dents in the county. A quick phone call to Huron's deputy clerk treasurer Bill Al- cock revealed the population in Huron according to this year's assessment rolls is 55,589. The population is only counted every three years now to coin- cide with municipal elections which began in 1982 to be held every three years instead of the previous system of every two years. Alcock reveals that of the close to 56,000 Huron residents, 924 arc over the age of 85. * * * * * Had a surprise visit during our recent holiday from an old-time resident of this area. Dropping in for a few minutes was Joe Gunn who was in the insurance business in Crediton a long time ago and then moved to the Chamber of Commerce in Grand Bend and shortly after that to the Chamber of Com- merce in Comwall. He is now in real estate in Cornwall and is chairman of thc Stormont, Dundas and Glengar- ry county board of education. * * * * * The 1988 International Plow- ing Match scheduled to be held in Perth County near Stratford from September 20 to 24 .prom- ises to be bigger and better than ever. At Saturday's Middlesex match, provincial director Fred Lewis told us that commercial space in the tented city was al- ready sold out and he expected record crowds, if the weather- man co-operates. If the climatical patterns so far this summer continue, there should be no problem. We don't need any repeats of wet weather experienced when the IPM was held in Scaforth and Lucan. l never read those things I thought I came up with a 'great idea this week:.a column about those international foun- tains of fact and then some, the weekly tabloids. You know, the papers nonc of us ever read: The Weekly World News, the almost incognito Sun, Thc National Examiner, The Globe. Who needs the Globe and Mail? It's all in the Inquirer. I went down to Shaw's Dairy Store and bought an armful of thc things. Proprietor Mickey Struyke spilled the beans as I checked out. She told me she sells out of the things cvcry week, so somebody in Exeter must read them. Of coursc, it's entirely possible that people with Inquiring minds don dark sunglasses and drive up from Lucan to buy them. When i got back to the office and started thumbing through them, I realized it was going to be tough to write a humorous piece about them. I mean, how do you top guys who write headlines like: SPACE ALIEN BABY FOUND IN JUNGLE or NINE-YEAR-OLD GIRL RE- VEALS -- LIZARD MAN MADE ME PREGNANT. On another front page claims EIGHT MILLION AMERI- CANS HAVE RETURNED FROM THE DEAD. That would explain the National Examiner's large circulation figures. In fact, it would explain a lot of things about America. Ronald Reagan's presidency, for onc thing. it also gives you hope for the subject of this headline: WOM- AN DIES LAUGHING AT JOKE. And then there's the 12 -year- old boy who got his teacher and six classmates pregnant. He'd probably like to hear that joke right about now. According to Take Two by Mark Bisset the Examiner, school officials are "vowing to have the juvenile Don Juan locked behind bars for life." But the cops can't seem to find him. ;He's thought to be hiding in the countryside. Oh, it doesn't say which coun- tryside exactly, but something in the story might tip us off. See if you can spot it. Wascalja, by the way, refers to "pretty school teacher Wascalja Ilalecki" who was quoted earlier in the story as sobbing: "My career is finished. i • am carrying the baby of arlboy half my age." • Hcrc it is: "Wascalja told a Hungarian freelance joumal4st she was tutoring the schoolboy stud, Henryk Paradowski, at his home when he seduced her." Did you get the clue? I know. I realize it's a subtle one. I'll tell you what: i'll write it again for you, this time using a computer enhancement. "Wascalja told a Hungarian. freelance journalist she was tutor- ing.thc schoolboy stud, Henryk 'Paradowski, at his home when he seduced her." Beautifully written, isn't it? Just the right European nuance. These magazines offer every- thing. One ad promises me, "Now you can cat all you want while extra weight disappears" and an unidentified fat person testifies: "I lost 71 pounds in six weeks". Sounds good. I wonder -- if I lost 30 pounds in three weeks and called it quits, would they give me this DIETOL-7 for half price? As you work your way thmugh the magazines, you eventually come to the personals (unless you're a single Examiner reader who starts at the Personals and works forward). Under thc ban- ner SHEELA WOOD'S HAVE A FRIEND CLUB, onc personal ad reads: "CALIF - CORRECTION- AL INSTITUTE INMATE. Taurus biker, 40, 6', 170 lbs., italian/Irish descent, humorous, romantic, well-mannered. Seeks sincere one-man woman for pos- sible relationship. Docs this sound like you? Write." I didn't make that up.