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HomeMy WebLinkAboutClinton News-Record, 1985-10-09, Page 4Page 4 --CL NTUN NEWS-RJECORD. WEDINZS ►AY, OCTA ER 9 o9 The Clldten W.w .Record i4 published each Wednalduy at P.O. IQX 39. Clinton. Ontario. Canada. NOM 1LO, Tel.: et12.3493. sghssrlptlerl Nato; ;anode -41.9.75 Sr. Citizen- p.4.5 per year U.S.A. 4coolie ---433.00 per year 1t. Is registered et second class mell by the pest alikeander the permit number. 01117. The NOwl,Record Incprperaiad in 1924 the Huron Mewartesord. foMnded In: TOOT. and, The Clinton News Era, foended to 1.845, Total press runt 3,700. Incorporating (TIIL BLMTH STANDARD) �- HOWARD AITKEN - Publisher SHELLEY McP$4EE - Editor GARY HAIST - Advertising Manager MARY ANN HOLLENNECK - Office Manager CCNA A MEMBER let EMBER Display advertising rates available on request. Ask for Rate Card No. 15 effective October 1, 1984. •I '1 Fop d ®r thought Nostalgic pictures of hazy meadows and dusty country lanes don't reflect life on the farm in the 19$0's. It's not "The Waltons" or "Little House on the Prairie." Modern farming is big business - an industry among the largest, most complex and most efficient in the country. From October 7 to 14 the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and Food is promoting Agri -Food Week. Agri -Food Week celebrates all that farming and the related food ser- vice industries mean to this province. 1 Farms today are operated by a very small percentage of the popula- tion. Through efficient methods, each farm - some 81,700 across the pro- vince - produces enough food to feed 90 people. • The agri-food industry employs about one in five people, in jobs ranging from harvesting tomatoes to serving restaurant meals. This means $15 -billion a year to the provincial economy. . Ontario residents spend 16.4 per cent of their disposable income on food at home. Along with the U.S. Ontarians enjoy the lowest relative dist of food in the industrialized world. In London; England, for example, a kilogram of coffee costs about $10. A kilogram of cheddar cheese costs at least $12 in Bern, Switzerland; sirloin steak in Tokyo, Japan costs $37 a kilogram. Ontario°is a major food producer for the world. Much of the bacon and other pork products sold ,in Japan comes from Ontario farms —about $30 million worth a year. Wine is ;sold to France, cheddar cheese to England, soybeans to the Orient. Ontario products. have earned a respected name in other countries because of high quality standards and efficient marketing and transportation systems. Ontario agriculture is planting crops and milking cows, building trac- tors and making fertilizer. It's baking bread, filling superrnarket shelves and dining out. • Ontario agriculture' is high-tech industry; from embryo transplants - test tube babies in cattle - i t, the produd codes and conlput erized checkouts in supermarkets. From the planting of a seed of corn, to shipping grain prnduci s 10 needy countries across the globe, Ontario agriculture encompasses a vast cel work of.,people who are involved in one of the mOSI complex, often Misunderstood, but most needed services in I he world. • Information of Sommerville's would be appreciated Dear Editor: Would you be good enough to publish the following in your Letters to the Editor department? Regarding William Sommerville who was in Clinton in 1886 at the time of his father, Adam Sorrimerville's death - would anyone be able to put me in touch with•a.descendant of his? William had a brother J.F. Siimmer.ville of Toronto. ThP "F" may stand for the sur- name Forrest. The Somrnervilles from Scotland are in My family history. I would appreciate hear- ing from some of William's descendants. Yours truly, Isabel St. John RR 3, Uxbridge, Ontario IAC 1K0 Behind The Scenes Canada has the worst record in the in- dustrialized- world for fire -related deaths. While half the fires m Canada occur in the home, those fires account for 90 per cent of fatalities. On' the overage, a fire breaks out in a home somewhere about every 45 seconds and many of the worst fires occur at night. Would you or your family know what to do if a fire occurred in your home? As part of Fire Prevention Week, from Oc- tober 7 to 13, fire department across Canada are placing special emphasis on protection and preparation in the home in the event of fire. Fire departments are urging families to prepare for October 9 when at precisely 6 p.m. participating electronic mediawill sound a fire drill warning. Here is a recommended fire evacuation plan to follow: -At the sound of an alarm or hint of trouble, roll out of bed and keep low to avoid smoke and heat. -Crawl to the door. If it's hot, pick another exit. If not, follow your escape plan. -In the hallway, stay low and meet outside at a predetermined place. -Send one person to call the fire department. -Stay at the meeting place until the fire department arrives so firefighters can be told whether everyone is out and where the fire is. The Insurance Information Institute also recommends that everyone develop and practise a family escape plan. The institute outlines three basic things every family needs to know to ensure its safety: -Eliminate potential fire hazards. -Install and maintain smoke detectors. -Develop and practise a family escape plan. They recommend that families should sketch the layout of each floor in the home. Apartment dwellers should know the loca- tion of exit stairwells and how to get to them as quickly as possible. They suggested working out two escape routes, if possible, for each room and mark them clearly on the sketch.. Matte sure there are no obstructions blocking escape routes. Family members should be assigned to be responsible for the elderly or the very young to help them escape. Design a meeting place outside the home and instruct everyone to go there in case of fire. ' Once outside, count heads, stay together and do not go back into the house for per- sonal belongings. An open house held by the Bayfield Fire Department on October 5 illustrated that fire prevention is a subject that has been well researched. Information available in- cludes a variety of pamphlets, prepared by the Ontario Fire Marshall's office, on fire safety measures. Brochures included those on hotel and motel fires; farm fires, smoke detectors in the home, preventing electrical fire hazards in the home, wood stove safety and precautions to take when fire strikes. The main emphasis of all the material was one of prevention. The message that was repeated time and time again in each of the pamphlets was that by using sensible, safe and correct measures, many fires and injuries could be avoided. They urged peo- ple with any questions about fire safety in their home and place of business to seek pro- fessional advice immediately. While in many cases, people tend to be careless and as a result avoidable fire tragedies occur, one of the greatest preven- tative devices to be introduced in recent years has been the smoke detector. Each home should have at least one work- ing smoke alarm. Smoke alarms have pro- ven to be economical and efficient means of providing detection and early warning of fire in homes. If one smoke alarm is used, it should be located between the bedroom and living areas of your home, normally in a corridor or hallway, so that it is audible to persons sleeping in bedrooms. Sugar and Spice Improved levels of protection can be achieved by installing smoke alarms in each floor. of a home. They should not be installed near cooking areas or fireplaces. Smoke alarms should be installed on the ceiling, not more than 1.5m (5 feet) from the centre of this area. A "dead air space" ex- ists about 150mm (6 in.) from walls; so mount the smoke alarm outside this space. If ceiling mounting is impractical, wall - mounted smoke alarms 'should be located between 150mm, (6 in.) and 300mm (12 in.) from the ceiling. Smoke alarms range in price from $10 to $30 and installation of battery powered smoke alarms generally do not require any special tools to install. Fire safety in the home does not end with smoke alarms. However, smoke alarms are a necessary part of fire safety planning. Be sure that your home is outfitted with - smoke alarms and be sure they are in work- ing order. Every year 8,000 fire incidents in home claim 130 lives and injure 600 persons. Fires may break out at any time, any place but with careful planning and safety measures you may avoid being the next statistic. In bloom Some weather - cold one day, warm the next! It's prime time for colds and flu and also , for blooming wild strawberries, it seems. Mrs. Ray Foster of RR4 Clinton reported seeing a wild strawberry in bloom the other day. Is that a sign of something, to do with winter? Like the fuzzy caterpillar and all? Old tyme dance ' Senior citizens are invited to an old tyme dance, being held at the Clinton Town Hall on October 10. Ladies are asked to bring lun- ch. Gord Harrison and his group from. Goderich will supply the music. Proceeds from the evening will go for community work. Sleeping in 'a box car It's been a long way from there to here. Just 40 years ago; I was lying on the floor of a box -car in north-east Holland, beaten up and tied up. And half -frozen. And half- starved. Today, I'm sitting in a big, brick house, with the furnace pumping away, ' a refrigerator stuffed with food, and my choice of three soft, warm beds. Forty years seems like eternity if you're a teenager, but they've gone by like the wink- ing of an eye, as most old-timers will con- firm. Back then, I was tied up because I'd tried to escape. It wasn't pleasant. They had no rope, so they tied my wrists and ankles with wire. ' I was beaten up because I'd managed to pilfer a sandwich, a pipe and tobacco from the guards' overcoat 'pockets when they weren't looking, and these, along with a foot -long piece of lead pipe, popped out of my battle -dress jacket when the sergeant in charge of the guards gave me a roundhouse clout on the ear just before escorting me back onto the train headed for Germany. Served me right. I should have ignored all that stuff .we were taught in training: "It's an officer's duty to try to escape," and gone quietly off to sit out the war, which I did anyway, in the long run. • But the next few weeks weren't pleasant: I couldn't walk, because my left kneecap was kicked out of kilter. Every bone in my body ached. My face looked like a bowl of borstch, as I discovered when a "friendly" guard let me look in his shaving mirror. Worst of all, there was nothing to read. When I have nothing to read, I start pacing By Bill Smiley the walls. But 1 couldn't pace the walls because I was on the floor,and tied up. Anyway,the light wasn't so good. One little barred window. Perhaps even the worst of all was my dai- ly ablutions. Arrd I don't mean washing . one's face and armpits. h had to, be lugged out of the boxcar by a guard, since only one" leg was working, helped down the steps, and ushered to the railway bank. Ever try to do your dailies ( and I don't mean push-ups), with two hands planted in cinders, one leg stuck straight ahead, the other propping you up, and a guy pointing a revolver at you? It's a wonder I wasn't con- stipated for life. One day the guard almost shot me. I never understood why. He was a rather decent young chap, about 21, blond, spoke a bit of French, so that we could communicate in a rudimentary way. He was a paratrooper who had been wounded in France and seconded to the mundane job of guarding Allied prisoners. He hadn't taken part in the kicking and punching at the railway station, forhis own reasons. Perhaps pride. He was a soldier, not a member of the Feldgendarmerie. But this day he Was out of sorts. Perhaps sick of being a male nurse. His eyes got very blue and very' cold, and he cocked his revolver. All I could do was turn the big baby -blues on him and mutely appeal. It worked. He muttered something,. probably a curse, holstered his gun, and shoved me roughly back into the boxcar. Why did Hans Schmidt (his real mine) not kill me that day? He was .fed up with a job on which rations were minimal, comfort T. almost nv,r-existetlt, and dunes boring and • demeaning. There was another Schmidt in the detail, Alfred. He was a different kettle, though he, too, was a wounded paratrooper. He was as. dark as Hans was fair, as sour as Hans was sunny. He would have shot me, in the same `mood, and written it off as "killed while at- tempting to escape. Luck of the draw. Another hairy incident in that October, 40 years ago, was the night the train was at- tacked by a British fighter-bomber, pro- bably a Mosquito, perhaps even navigated by my old friend Dave McIntosh. I was dozing, on and off ( you didn't sleep much, tied up, on the wooden floor of a box- car) when there was a great screeching of brakes, a wild shouting from the guards as they bailed out of the train, then the roar of an engine and the sound of cannon -fire as the attacker swept up and down the train, strafing. As you can understand, 1 wasn't nit, and the burns in the aircraft didn't even put the train out of commission, but have you ever seen a man curled up into a shape about the size of a little finger? That was ich. Sorry tf I've bored you with these reminiscences. But they are all as clear, or moreso, than what I had for lunch today. Forty years. Time to complete the war. finish university, marriage, children, 11 years as weekly editor, 23 yea, as teacher, a year in The San for non-exiyl. T.B., and 30 years as a columnist. , I couldn't hack all that today. But I can go to bed and say, "This beats the hell out of sleeping in a boxcar. s By Keith Roulston Reader angered by Hydro's "Hogwash" Undermining Canada -U.S. trust The stink over the inedible tuna has done damage far beyond the ruining of a political career of Fisheries Minister John Fraser or the loss of money for the tuna packing com- pany involved. It has damaged the very premise of the current government. Mr. Fraser's decision to overrule his department's inspectors and allow for sale tuna that they had said was unfit for human consumption was just plain dumb. It was almost as dumb as the company's wish to put on the market tuna that was inferior to its usual standards. Supporters of both the government and the company would have us believe that the company was a victim of overzealous bureacrats making an ar- bitrary decision but the tuna was inferior as the cooks of the armed forces proved when they had it sent back. The Brian Mulroney Conservative govern- ment won support not just because of a reac- tion against the 20 -year-old Liberal govern- ment but because people really liked the idea of a smaller, less intrusive goverfi- ment. None of us like being told what to do. We start rebelling against our parents rules when we're two and keep it up until the day we leave home. The rules of schools drive many of us to quit early. We have an in- stinctive shrinking from bankers, policeman, border guards who have power over us. And so the prospect of a government that proposes less government regulations, fewer rules is inviting. The alternative to rules, however, is either a jungle where only the fittest survive, or it is a sense of respon- sibility on the part of all of us. • Feeling particularly irked by government regulation has been the business leaders. The drive to deregulate began even before the Conservative government came to power. The tuna affair, and the bank failures in Alberta, have damaged the ef- forts of politicians who have believed Iusinessmen who said they needed to be reed from government regulations. The government was in the midst of lossening the rules on banks, for instance, when ir- responsible executives and directors in the Canadian Commercial Bank put their bank in a position to go under and cost the govern- ment hundreds of millions of dollars. Honest businessmen, who have tried to improve the image of businessmen in recent years, find their, work undermined by fellows like the leadership of Star Kist who put political pressure on politicians to have their own mistakes put onto the market rather than accept responsibility for their failure. The public sees once again businessmen whose ' interest in profit is greater than its worry about what is good for the public. (Of course the Star Kist management was stupidly short sighted because now it will likely lose far more money than it would have if it had accepted its losses in the first place.) Finally, the tuna affair also undermines the government's efforts to allay Canadian fears about closer ties to the U.S. The government sang the praises of foreign in- vestment, and downplayed the dangers, yet here is a company owned by a foreign giant threatening to close a plant in a depressed province and throw 400 people out of work unless it got its own way to do something that was unethical. Canadians who may have just started to buy the government's line that we could trust the Americans now will have second thoughts. Short-sighted action by businessmen and politicians will do long-term harm to those trying to build bridges of trust. Dear Editor: Of course the attendance was low at On- tario Hydro's Public Information Centres. Landowners on the proposed Southwestern Ontario Transmission Corridor could see lit- tle point in attending a second brainwashing session to hear high pitched salesmen trying to sell them something they On want! The weather was perfect, the bean crop ready for harvest - rarely do these two phenomena occur together. Financially strapped .farmers, already digging into their pockets to oppose Ontario Hydro, were not about to leave their harvesting operations to hear a lot of "hogwash" by highly paid smooth talkers. Basically nothing has changed; the same costly, meaningless literature adorns the table; the routes from the Bruce Nuclear Plant to London are essentially unaltered except that one bears trio label "recom- mended" and the other —acceptable"; the use of well-known hydro P.R. rhetoric is' even predictable - what is changing is the agricultural community. They are • sick of being kicked around by bureaucratic bodies. We vehemently oppose Hydro's recommended system on . the basis of MI- ' proper use of a natural, • irreplaceable resource - prime agricultural land. A concerned landowner at one of the well attended information centres in Nairn, ask- ed a Hydro representative, "What is your overall impression of tie issues raised today at this information session"" His answer was quick and 'well rehearsed. "People art, responsive, concerned aird objective.' When the landowner indicated the inade- quacy of his statement he retorted, "Well, people weren't yelling, screaming. kicking or crying!." Ontario Hydro is positive it will get the transmission cor'r'idor between the Bruce Nuclear Plant and London - when it is turn- ed down at the public hearings. I hope Hydro • doesn't yell, kick, scream and cry, it would; Jelinsli the polish of the smooth talkers! Yours I tidy. , Jane Betio. I Mrs. H.13. 1, \ilsa Prate Get rid of Petro -Canada, reader urges Dear Editor, Canadians are about to be made an offer we should all refuse. Successive Liberal and PC governments have told us repeatedly that Petro -Canada is "ours", but now we're going to he asked to buy shares in it! Just think, we can own it twice! However, while the federal government will ask us to help Petro -Canada get bigger, it will retain decisive control over it. The prospect of having the federal govern- ment as a majority partner is a little daun- ting. Its track record of billion dollar losses isn't terribly inspiring - Canada Post, Canadair, de Havillland, Via Rail, Atomic Energy, etc. etc. Petro -Canada is worth about $9 billion. Think of the potential for more huge losses! Federal Energy Minister Pat Carney says Petro -Canada's going to be run "commer- cially" and the government won't interfere in its operations. Petro -Canada chief Wilbert Hopper reports to her. Yet Pat Carney's "business" is polities. Canadians are being set up again - but this time by a government calling itself con- servative. We're about to get "hosed" on Petro -Canada. Petro -Canada's assets should be sold off progressively, starting with the thousands of gas stations. Think of all the en- treprencurs that could estahlisl110 themselves! Does this federal goverimient stand for socialism or free enterprise? Our advice to Canadians. Don't buy any Petro -Canada shares: Boycott it until the government privatizes it! Sincerely, Colin Brown, President, National Citizens' Coalition. More mid et players. needed ' Dear Editor: Clinton Minor Hockey has been unable to get sufficient enrolment for a Midget team in Clinton. The program is set up, ice time available and game scheduling. However we do not have sufficient players or a coach or manager. A meeting will be held at 7 p.m., Oeteber 17, at the arena to discuss if some arrangements can be made,so thi6 gr,001) of players will be provided with hockey as well as to provide a continuation of hockey players available for our Junior teams of the future. All parents, players and interested persons are invited. Yout;s in Sport, Don Jefferson, President, Clinton Minor Hockey Association.