Loading...
HomeMy WebLinkAboutClinton News-Record, 1980-09-11, Page 4:AO 4 - i 'f"Qilitsws.REcortb?, T SPAY, SEETEMB R Zl;; 1980 Itvo C1Int,pot I w katortl; k ,sviollsiwit N4h thanlday et 's.q;. sox Mt, iintt►lt, c nt.do,. 441, N 1t.E, TO,: 40.344 =4►144'ettoro Rtita Ct n do, • 4r: Ciba ►'100 pow y.ar U.s,A. & fwr+NgNA-'M.H nor yser It ls-restat a+- i $Concl 0004 rnoi14y ttw past offkltandiff thea p.,rmitaurnrr«tr 011.1. Tka N.wMltt�co<d. in4orpon .d ht 1024 tkq, Horan ttowiItocc+nl,.iirruo wN gni IN.. sod: Thy contort Now tr'u'e founi4. 1. k -n'..4 total pros run 0.1M, • A MEMBER JAM,ESE, FiITZGERALD . Editor . SHELLEY M PHEE . News Editor GARY HAIST• Advertising. Manager HEATHER BRANDER - Advertising MARGARET L. G1130.Office . Manager DONNI.E SCSIVER • Circulation • Nor MEMBER Display advertising rates available on request. Ask for Rate Card No. 10 effective Sept. 1, 1979. J Ahepp investment .r0 Clinton council is understandably upset over the news that they will have to shell out an addition $21,000 to complete the work on the footings under the town hall. However they should have thought the situation over clearly before they jumped the gun and threatened the contractor. The truth of the matter is that the contractor, Cobrellt: Construction °of London, cannot be held responsible for actions of past decades of councils who did little to maintain and preserve the town hall. Last year, the town's engineers estimated it would cost up to $80,000 to fix up the 100 -year-old. town hall and when the job was tendered by Cobrell at $46;000, the town thought it was getting a real bargain. But Cobrell's bid did not include fixing the back wall which engineers didn't think needed repairing last year. It has since been discovered that the back wall is in need of repairs as well and council should go ahead and finish the job completely. Then Clinton will have a town hall that will last for many more generations. Contrary to the "rip down and smash up" ethic that seems to exist among a few people around town, tearing down the old town hall and ,putting up a new one won't save us any money whatsoever. By the time a new building could be erected in the style suited to a grandiose bureaucracy, the cost, 'when debentured over. 15 years, would amount to $1 million. • So you can see, spending $60,000 now is indeed inexpensive, con- sidering that when spread out over the past 60 years when nothing was spent on the town hall, $1,000 a year is a pretty good investment. By J.F. Behind closed doors More goes on behind closed doors than sex, it seems. • Take the trustees of the board of education, for instance, who voted dtiring the summer to lower their stipend to $3,000 a year from $3,600. The board patted themselves on the back for this move, claiming they were setting a trend to save tax- payers' money. However quietly last month, behind closed doors, they raised their pay backup again to the original $3,600. To say that brings their integrity into question is the least of the mat ters, to say nothing of the kind of taste it leaves in the taxpayers' mouthes. As people charged °with° the responsibility of educating our young people, the board has set a poor example for youngsters in the system by resorting to such inexcusable methods. . Of course, not all members were in favor of either lowering their pay, or raising it back again, but deciding the issue in a secret session destroys part of our faith in our elected, public system. By J.F. 5 YEARS AGO September 10, 1975 `I Over $8,000 was realized this summe'rby the Clinton Monster bingos that were held each Monday in the Clinton arena. The bingos, which ended Monday night, were initiated to try and, raise funds for the estimated $40,000 repair job' needed to Clinton's aging swimming pool. 10 YEARS AGO September 10, 1970 Huron County farmers seem to be bracing themselves to withhold taxes in dispensed by bill smiley Summer reading Had time to do some reading this summer, though precious little, in between losing my wallet, en- tertaining my grandboys, being almost torn limb from limb by mosquitoes at a lake up north, and being thoroughly whipped at golf by some old guys who should be in nursing homes but can still hit the pill right up the middle. Highly recommended is Farley Mowat's account of his personal World War II. Its title alone would have made me read it. It's called And No Birds Sang, borrowed with a slight change from Keats' ballad, La Belle Dame Sans Merci. First part of the book is typical Mowat, very readable but merely an account of the training and bumbling experienced by the average Canadian soldier, and sprinkled with a few highly improbable incidents. But when Mowat gets his feet into the real war, the invasion of Sicily, the brutal fighting up through "sunny" Italy, where the men were half -frozen most of the time, he hits his stride, and I don't think he's ever written anything better. No one could have written this book who was not there, He conveys with chilling accuracy the exhaustion, the bitterness, "the dogged courage, and yes, the wry humor of the real fighting men in a campaign that had little of the drama and dash of the invasion of France. Just tough, bloody fighting over range after range of mountains, against some of the toughest and best troops in the German army. Mowat seems to have put himself back into the mind and the emotions of the young Canadian lieutenant he was then. He drops his posturing, and eloquently and movingly reveals the anger, the bewilderment, the savagery and the suffering of the Poor Bloody Infantry. Narrowly missing death himself a number of times, he makes. no effort to put himself in the hero's role, and indeed deprecate his own ineptitude in many situation, Rather, he writes with an admiration that is almost love, of his friends and fellow -soldiers and sufferers. He flares with rage at the in- competence and stupidity of senior officers, and in a couple orf parafsraphs strips all the gilt from that pompous little idiot, darling of the newspapers, General Mon- tgomery. It's an honest book, and a good read. It had a little special interest for me, because one of his friends, Major Alex Campbell, was in his unit, and died just as he would have wanted to, in a mad, single-handed, hopeless. charge against a German position. It could only be the same Alex Campbell I knew. We grew up in the same town, Perth, Ontario. Alex's father had been killed in the first World War. From the time he was a nipper, he wanted revenge. He joined the militia as soon as he was old enough, and by the time I was in high school, he had a commission. Alex used to help train our high school cadet corps, ferociously but with an underlying decency. A few yers before, he had been a tiger on the line of the football team, a vast man with great strength and'no fear of anything or anyone. I'll bet he was the happiest man in the country when Canada declared war on Germany. - And he died exactly as he would have wished, hurling his bulk against machine-guns instead .of opposing linesmen. Another author I discovered this summer was Leo Simpson. He lives in the village of Madoc, Ontario, and I knew of him, but hadn't read his novels, probably due to the incredible ineptitude of Canadian publishers when it corn es to promoting good books. 1.40•01, He is an excellent writer, much more literate than the famous Farley Mowat, who knows how to promote his own books and keep his name alive in the papers with various stunts and burning causes. I managed to grab two of Simpson's novels and read them straight through. They were The Peacock Papers and Kowalski's Last Chance. Buy them or borrow them or steal them. They're great. Simpson came to Canada from Ireland, but you'd swear, from his novels, that he'd lived in a small Canadian town or city all his life. He knows the vernacular, he knows the petty little hypocrisies, and he knows the often peculiar. -attitude toward life of Canadians. In The Peacock Papers, he ex- plores, with wit and irony and pity, a decent, middleaged, successful Canadian businessman who starts to come apart at the seams, as so many of us do. In Kowalski'sLast Chance, he peels off layer after layer of the social strata in a small city and dabbles with leprechauns until you are' con inced the next sh'� rt guy you talk to might be one. Roth ' its are very funny, but a great deal more than that. And my book, you ask? Well, it's going swimmingly.. One night, my wife cleaned all the copies of my columns out of various drawers, top of my desk, vegetable bin, and other likely spots, bundled them into a green garbage bag and threw them into the attic. This produced some complications. Sitting around the livingroom are about eight shoe •boxes. They are labeled: Politics, Weather, Celebrations, Family, Sex, and so on. I sit in my easy chair, reach into the green garbage bag, produce a column, scan it, and hurl it toward the appropriate box. The one marked Miscellaneous is overflowing. The one marked Family is full. The one marked Sex is virginal, And the floor looks just as the backyard does in October, when the oaks shed. But we're getting there. By Christmas I reckon I'll be halfway down that big green bag. September- mourn order to win their fight to have educaton taxes removed from their property assessment. The Huron Federation of Agriculture has joined the Ontario Federation in its fight to have education costs met through funds gained elsewhere than property tax. The Federation has called for a tax strike at the end of September if the provincial government does not give in to the demand. Although the Huron County ,-Board of duration heard the varying viewpoints of about 100 McKillop ratepayers at their Meeting in Clinton, members later agreed to move forward with plans to build an addition to Seaforth Public School to ac- commodate McKillop students and to close the one -room schools in McKillop. 25 YEARS AGO September 22, 1955 Mail delivery between London and Wingham will be made by truck instead of train starting on October 17. Ephrain Snell of RR 2, Clinton received a gift from his fellow exhibitors at the Canadian National Exhibition last week. The occasion was to mark half a century of exhibiting at the CNE by Mr. Snell. Mayor and Mrs. Morgan Agnew in- spected the first dial telephone in Clinton as it was installed at their home. This is a move towards conversion of all Clinton telephones to the dial system. 50 YEARS AGO September 11, 1930 It is with keen regret than the news was received Sunday evening that Mrs. John Cluff, an esteemed resident of Clinton, had been struck by a car as she was returning home from church and rather severely injured. In a season as dry as this one, extra care should be taken to prevent fires. What might have been a serious fire was started out on the 16th of Goderich Township yesterday afternoon by, it is presumed, the careless disposal of a lighted match or cigarette. The fire had got quite a start and was creeping into the field of Mr. R.G. Thompson, township clerk, when a neigh- bor, Mrs. H. McCartney noticed it and called her husband, who investigated and with some difficulty extinguished the blaze. Mr. and Mrs. Thompson were ab- sent at the time and owing to the fact that everything is as dry as tinder, had not neighbors noticed in time, serious damage might have been done. 75 YEARS.AGO September 14, 1905 Two small fires have taken place in Clinton this past week, one being purely accidental, but the other is believed to have been of incendiary origin. So strongly do suspicions point that way that Mayor Hoover, on behalf of the town council, on Monday sent out posters offering a reward of $50 for evidence which would lead to the conviction of the party or parties guilty c.;f the offence. After an illness extending over several months, Mr. Thomas Holloway succumbed to the grim reaper on Saturday last. Mr. Holloway was of an upright and kindly disposition and possessed many friends. 105 YEARS AGO September 23, 1875 For the past few days the weather has been cold and showery, with a northerly wind, making great coats much in demand. Oen Tuesday night a fall of snow and hail took place, which did not disap- pear till late on Wednesday morning. We learn that a shocking accident happened to Mr. John Stirling of the 19th con., Goderich Township, on Saturday last. He was helping at the threshing at Mr. W. Stirling's and while walking across a platform in the barn over the threshing machine, he fell down on the table of the same, his head striking it and his left arm falling in between the cylinders, which tore it from the socket and it was actually carried up to the straw stack. The poor __man died instantly. He was an old resident, universally respected and leaves a family of I4 children. Care for .e ldd Deal .Editor; 1 The first week of September signals the return to .school of millions of young Canadians. For. hundreds of thousands of tiny types, this will be' their very first venture into the, unknown, away from theprotection of - parents and the security of home. We must be totally sensitive to the.,needs of these young people as they begin to learn how to become independent of' ; family and productive in their oWn- right. Over two million students will 'be ' riding school buses everyday. In many cases, the buses will be crowded and the trips to school will ' u range from ten minutes to an hour or more. In addition, field trips and other school activities will require ' A most students'to ride a school bus at •----some-ss-tme--or—other--during- -.-th academic year.. School bus drivers continually face problems that demand much knowledge and skill to assure the safe operation of the vehicle. Many drivers say that school buses and their passengers do not get the respect they deserve from other motorists. Accident statistics and violations reports tend to confirm this view. For example, although it is the law in every province, many motorists do not stop when signals are flashing on a stopped school bus. Students, especially the younger ones, expect ' motorists to be stopped when they get off the bus and cross the street. The sense of security this creates could cause disaster if motorists do not co- • operate by obeying the law. The Canada Safety Council will conduct it's second annual School Bus 'Saley Week Campaign on a national basis from September 24 - 30, 1980. Through it we hope to further reduce the possibility of school bus accidents. Whether we be students, parents, motorists, school authorities or school bus operators, the School Bus Safety - Week Campaign is designed to remind us all of our personal obligations toward . the safety of school bus passengers. Please share our concern for the safety and health of these young Canadians. Thank you for caring. W. L. Higgitt, President, Canada Safety Council. A Left, right, march Chances are you watched a parade on the last long weekend of summer. If it wasn't a Labour.Day parade, it was probably part of a fair in a small town or village. Let's be honest. Parades in South- western Ontario don't rival the Parade of Roses in Pasedena, California, nor the Santa Claus parade in Toronto. But what the heck! As long as the people taking part have fun and as long as the spectators don't get rained on or run over, a parade of any size holds a certain amount of magic. What entices spectators to a parade? In rural areas like ours, there's usually someone taking part that we know, and if they don't spot us somewhere along the parade route, we're in big trouble. When we see them, we might be tempted to wave, make faces and try to make them fall out of step or topple • off their float, bike, horse or whatever, but usually we* behave ourselves. There's something about the work involved in preparing for a parade and something about the excitement rrf marching in a parade that causes us to encourage them to keep in step rather than distract them. ' Personally speaking, good behavior results from the fact I wouldn't change places with them for anything. Parades never turned me on. Back in the dark ages when I attended elementary school, each small school marched in a large fall parade. Usually wearing costumes, we proudly fell in behind our banner - left, right; left, right ; right, left... I recall that I was often hopelessly out of step and• falling behind with a teacher rushing back to hustle me along. If I hadn't been so stubborn, she probably would have let me ride on a float. In, retrospect, I realize.I would have had more fun riding on a float; maybe even the one with the outhouse on it. (Every parade had one in those -days.) , The parades I enjoyed were the practice ones, when . we marched around the school grounds or up and down concession roads on sunny September days with Math books abandoned on our desks. Those were • my kind of parades! Watching parades was more my style, though. The televised parade that caused the most enthusiasm was the first Rose .Bowl Parade I watched on Mom and Dad's color TV. The whole family gathered in the living room for a series of oohs' -and hahs. But after a couple of years, the fad wore off. What does the parade in California have that we don't have at home? Just a few million rose petals, carnations and dollars, that's all. This summer I saw a ghriners' parade - the largest I've watched in person. I was impressed by the bands and clowns and vintage cars. My favorite part was the specialty car horns playing familiar tunes, such as Dixie and When The Saints Go Marching In. "Figures, she'd like strange noises," my friends would say. From the big guys on their mini - bikes, I went to see some little guys on their trikes at a typical small town fair parade. Turn kids' imaginations loose and you never know what you'll see - maybe -Count Dracula on a mini -bike or Charlie BRown on a trike pulling Snoopy and his dog house around or even a ten -legged caterpillar. •- (Corners must have been murder!) What local parades lack in size, participants make up for in just plain fun. As I recall the parades I watched this summer, though,, I don't think any of them had a float with an outhouse on it. How quickly 'we forget! Viva the Moleman Dear Editor: Being as how I winned a free subf scription to the Clinton News -Record at the Bayfield Lioness' Penny Sale, I" wants to be the hundredth and one supporter of the Moleman and Lampoonery. That having been said; I shall now substantiate my 48th year (cottage) taxpaying residence in Bayfield. To have shared this residence with the fine folks of the village has been a privilege and a pleasure. To have been able to sit and listen to yarns being spun .by the MacLeods, Sturgeons and McKays and other village residents over the years is a sensitivity which must be ex- perienced to have understanding of the prolific pen of the Moleman. Pity the loser of this feeling. Viva the Moleman and freedom of the press. Sincerely, Marny Walden Wealth of news Dear Editor, Your article about the milkweed plant (first column, September 4) brought back many Memories. During the Second World War, when we were living in Caledonia, Ontario, all retired teachers were called upon to get back into harness. I spent many hours organizing and carrying out pod gathering forays by the pupils. We were expected to do this during school hours and turn in our bags of milkweed pods to a cen- tral location. I believe the silky stuff on the seeds was being used for making some item needed in the war effort. We do not want destroy all our milk- weed plants but should have some around in case warts develop on our hands, or any other part of the body. Frequent applications of the sticky "juice" or "milk" always does awffity with those unpleasant growths, but don't ask me why, it just happens. What a wealth of news is on the Bayfield pages��now. Only a few years' ago Mr. Editor, you were worried about the need of a correspondent. Times do change. You have a good paper and after it is read, the scissors go "snip -snip" in order to hoard all the interesting items. Would anyone care to work for a year or so making scrapbooks for me from the many boxes of clippings on hand? Sincerely, Ethel Poth Bayfield Save space Dear Editor : Wouldn't miss the local news for anything. Good action shots and reports of local happenings. How q,out a smaller less wasteful format and save our trees and money. Sincerely Janet Stryker, RR 2, Clinton