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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Huron Expositor, 1983-09-07, Page 2Ori • i tirou (fxpositor• ?Slllce f6¢t, Sery►ny the CQmmtinity drat Incorpernting 0ut44011PoSt. founded 1872 ;, 521-0240 fiubllahed at SEAFORTH, ON4ARIQ revery Wednesday morning • S I Susan White, Managing Edl • tot 'Jocelyn A. Shriet Pubtiaher • , s 'Member Canadian CQmmUnity .NeWeeeper Agaeclat(on, Ontario Community. Newspaper Assoc!mtic n and Audit Bureau of Circulation A member of the Criteria Presse oungil ° Subscription rate$: • Canada $17.75 a year (In advance) outside Canada $50. a year. (In advance) Single Copies - 50 cents each SEAFORTH, ONTARIO, WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 1983 ' Second class mall registration number 0696 Lackadaisical drivers Seatbelts save lives, most of us agree. But most of us also getc1 daisical and will have to admit that the current crackdown on p ople In cars who don't use seatbelts Is a good Idea. Solicitor -general Ge rge Taylor said In August that the death of a young Michigan woma driving alone about 7 a.m. on Highway 402 out of Sarnia prompted Onta io to get tough. An Investigating OPP officer said the young woman appa ently fell asleep at the wheel. "I guarantee you, if she had been wears' g seatbelt, she'd be alive today." Mr. Taylor wants the PP to get tougher because although seatbelts have been mandatory in the province for more than five years surveys show only about half of drivers wear them; When compulsory seatbelt legislation was adopted in the 70s it was opposed by some people as an Infringement of civil rights. After statements from countless medical and police people who were utterly convinced that seatbelts save lives, the furor died down somewhat. The public also realized that saying "I have the right to kill myself if I want to by not wearing a seatbelt," is not only silly, it's misleading. That's because all those who do wear seatbelts have te. pay the medical and• social costs when a non -seatbelt wearer is paralyzed for life. It's interesting that although seatbelts aren't mandsitory_anywhere In the US, Americans not being nearly as accepting of "for your own good" laws as Canadians, a change in attitude Is underway. General Motors, the biggest car manufacturer in both our countries, calls mandatory • seatbelt use laws"the quickest, most cost-effective way to reduce deaths on the highways and (which) do not place any additional burden on those who already choose ,to wear their belts." US statistics show half the car occupants who die in crashes would survive if they wore seatbelts. Many Americans want the carnage stopped, and are willing to put up with a law they don't really like if it will help. As for us in Ontario, we've just been getting a little lax about seatbelts. The OPP crackdown is a reminder we've needed. - S.W. Thanks neighbors Photos by Ron Wassink Though we sometimes take them for granted, neighbors in a rural. community are people we couldn't do without. Besides being there when times are good to socialize and exchange tips about farming or cooking, they are invaluable when disaster strikes. A good example is the recent barn fire at the farm of the Richard Downey family, of RR5 Seaforth. Neighbors automatically pitched in to help keep livestock out of the burning barn and to load them on trucks to get them out of the way. Some stayed to help firefighters all night, left early in the morning to tend to their own farms and then returned to help with the clean-up. Others visited through the night with coffee and during the next day with meals since the family would be too busy to worry about food preparation. One farmer added the Downey herd to his, dealing with a cow that calved in all the excitement. Everyone can probably think of his or her own example of a time when neighbors were there to help during a crisis such as an accident, sickness or death. And, as neighbors, we can remember times when we thought nothing of helping out someone in need. As much as he appreciates his neighbors, Richard Downey says that's just the way it works In this community. The neighbors agree. They pitch in without thinking of reward and they know that their neighbors will do the same if needed. "It's such a comfort to think we would get help if anything ever happened to us," says a neighbor of the Downeys. Once in a while, we should all pause to thank our neighbors or give ourselves a pat on the back for being good neighbors. We hope it's a tradition that will continue. - S.H. Not for the fainthearted Fire at Brussels. mill in 1883 On 4b@ y@Qo agone SEPTEMBER 12, 1958 Natural gas will come to Dublin next Tuesday. Union Gas official3 announced this , week. A ceremony nrk1n the advent of gas' ip the Dublin_area:w,jl).be held in Mitchell, Tuesday at noon. it will be followed by a reception in the Legion hall. • Construction of the 22,000 square foot SSiforth Shoes Limited factory commenced on esday and is expected to be completed byte year's end. The building is of steel construction faced with brick. Lloyd Eisler. son of Mr. and Mrs. John Eisler of Seaforth has completed a course in deep sea diving while stationed at Esquimalt in B.C. Even at the finest of cocktail parties, It's hard to miss the city slicker complaining about the rapidly rising cost of food. "The problem is farmers," says the bank executive's wife. "They're able to go south (or to Hawaii) in winter, buy snowmobiles and speedboats, and I hear° they now have air-conditioned tractors. Guesg who pays the bill." The senior bureaucrat concurs, The problem, of course, is that the basic complaint is a myth: the price of food grown and raised by the nation's farmers has not risen dramatically, even though producers have been forced to pay high interest rates to help out the banks, and high taxes to support such items as bureaucratic salaries. So much for the city slicker attitudes. What's really been happening down on the farm lately is not unlike what's been happening for years. In spring, farmers tilled the land and borrowed money to plant cro1Ss. Over the summer they've sprayed, irrigated and tended the delicate plants, at the same time spending sleepless nights worrying about too much sun, too much rain and the myriad list of diseases with complicated names that can completely destroy their efforts. This fall they'll worry about a chilling (and killing) early frost, and, most important, the unknown price they'll get for their product. It's not a game for the fainthearted. Hazards In the farming business are unlike those in virtually any other endeavour. Profits can be huge, but they're more likely to be reasonable, non-existent, or, In bad years, farmers have to contend with massive losses to compensate them for their time and trouble. It's true, all smaller businesses face problems related to high Interest rates, inflation, government red tape and high taxes. But while some firms depend to a greater or Tess degree on the weather, food producers are totally dependent on that great unknown. PLEASE SEE FAINTHEARTED ON PAGE 3 SEPTEMBER 8, 1933 The Seaforth and Goderich Lions Clubs will hold their annual crippled children's clinic at the Scott Memorial hospital in Seaforth on Wednesday September 20. Byng the well known Collie dog belong- ing to Mrs. Frank Cudmore was found dead Sunday in a pit at Christies slaughter house in Egmondville. The dog had evidently fallen in the pit and was unable to get out. Bypg was a general favorite on Main Street and._ will be greatly missed. ,yijMtffee.5pniof, itn'lilliam Little,,, has been notified of his appointment as assistant principal of the Ontario School for the Blind, at Brantford. Mr. Little has been principal of Port Dover public school for the last three years. SEPTEMBER 11,:1908 Mr. Charles' 14• HunteY:1likpecto or th"e" Public' Works. 1)epartinent itt Ottawa ,as ia PLEASE SEE FIRE ON PAGE 3 Sores@illoimg 2O- goy Susan White will be back next week Do controlled media make Soviets cynical? The early official reaction in the Soviet Union to the shooting down of the Korean jetliner gives an inkling of what a different world it must be to live in a totalitarian country. While the rest of the world was up in arms, screaming for explanations, the Soviet news agency Tass was simply telling people back home that an unidentified foreign aircraft had violated Soviet air space and fighter aircraft had tried to "assist' the plane to land at the nearest airport. No word of any shooting. What do you think if you're an ordinary citizen of the Soviet Union and you hear a news item like that? Do you believe it? Do you wait for the other shoe to drop? The whole story to get told? Do you become so cynical you don't believe a word you hear anyway? Probably there are examples of people doing all three of these responses just as we have a variety of responses to any news item here in North America. I can imagine, for instance, the cynical response by remember- ing how 1 fiIcJu..Iigu l about antime l read or hear f3@hnwd tit@ @n@o by KQdltb LI©ilgi©eli news emanating from Ontario Hydro. Hydro seems to be one of the few Canadian authorities which has a measure of control on the news and when something such as the Pickering accident happens it feeds out the news a spoonful ata time so the accumulated dose of bad news won't be large enough to 0 cause a reaction in the public. But in the Soviet Union, that kind of control is everywhere, in every facet of life. Here in Canada, even if we did have a government that got that kind of information cohtrol, we can't shut out the rest of the world. If you've ever tried to get a local Am -band radio station at night and heard it blasted off the air by some U.S, station in Georgia or New York you can see how we can never be isolated, Even in Nazi Germany the BBC brought the outside Id home. But in the Soviet Union the size wor of the country is so vast, is it possible to pull in any station from a non-Communist controlled country unless with short-wave equipment? How do people react when they don't have real information? Do people still talk about world affairs as we do over every coffee corner in the country? Do they discuss politics? If so, what do they say? Do they get cynical about what they are told just as we do in Canada about what our government tells us about unemployment figures or the need for smaller wage settlements? Or do they swallow what their government says hook, line and sinker? The thing is, we don't know, just as they don't know about us. In many ways, we are kept from the truth about the ordinary people of the Soviet Union just as they are kept from the truth about people in the West. We do not have the chance to travel and mix with the ordinary people so we must get our information from the media. On one hand we get what the Soviets' want to tell us about themselves through their state-controlled 'media, on the other we get, for the most part, what the Americans tell us. And how much of that can we believe either? The U.S. media either seems to take the same kind of knee-jerk reaction against the Soviets we saw from some U.S. government leaders after the Korean incident (right down to it being a Communist plot to get rid of the Congress- man who was head of the anti-Communist John Birch Society), Or we get a view from the opposite extreme that either is so left wing -that it romanticizes Communism or is so aware of the faults of the U.S. that it ignores the faults of the Soviets. What we the ordinary people need most in this time of Cold War, is the truth. We need the truth in the West and the Soviet people need the truth. Will we get it before it's too late? in the trailer park • Canada has almost as many square miles of parks as it has of parking lots. 1 am not against this. i love parks and 1 hate *king lots (somebody got me in one the other day to the tune of a busted fender, anonymous, of course,) We have huge national parks, full of mountains and stuff that nobody ever goes near, except a few hardy outdoors weirdos. They're too rough for us ordinary human beans. Then we come down the manageable parks, like Algonquin, where you can canoe and make bonfires, and your chances of death are much less from wolves and bears than they are from stepping on a broken beer bottle. Then we have parkettes, where you can go and bake in the sun and watch your kids trying to break a leg on one of the Star Trek climbing machines or the unbalanced teeter- totters. All of this is, of course, leading some- where. it is leading directly to The Great Camping Trip in the Park. We had our grandboys for two weeks this summer. It was great. They are a little older, a little smarter, and they scarcely break anything any more that is carefully hidden away. They don't even fight any more. Well, only where there is an issue at stake and one of them wants to kill the other with a large stick. But it was very restful, compared with other summers. Last year, the total damage was about S400. This year it was only about 5Q1gc a card 2pk@ by DON $SBU@y 5130 This was somewhat offset fin rally, by the fact that the food billy rihred astronomically. Each of them eats more than my wife and 1 put together. Fortunately, they were r lllein an edhe fees) exc (lent day camp (guess who P and all that was required was to rout them out of bed, make them put on some semblance of decent clothes from the warehouse they immediately turned their room into, get their breakfast, make their lunch, have a good dinner ready when they got home from camp, and try to maneuvre them into bed by midnight. Nothing to it. Except washing all their clothes every two days, finding their blasted shoes. which Could be in the attic, a closet or the basement, and vacuuming the sand out of their sheets every day. e were rather blithely looking forward to taking them back td their mother with after aslight two weeks, when we learned, a shudder of horror, that their mother had manipulated their Uncleghweeintoroakin them on a camping P fora m our place. Hugh came up from the city i the week before to have a n grandboys about the"conference" rwilde wilderness experi- ence. He was going to take them to an island, on an Indian Reserve, and they were going to live off the land. practically. right in the middle of the bush. He spent all Saturday morning making a list of essentials. The kids watched cartoons on TV. Hugh had a dandy list. Raisins. peanuts, sunflower seeds, and about 140 pounds of canned stew, apples, bread, cutlery, pots. pans, plates, the whole business. 11 would have taken an coureur de bois canoe to carry the stuff. We held our mum. Next Saturday he appeared all rcady for the camping trip. There were only one or two things out of joint. It didn't bother the boys, who were all excited about the camping trip. But it bothered me. it seems that 1 was to drive them to the ferry across to the island. about 15 miles. They had one sleeping bag among the three of them. The food hadn't been bought, nor the insect repellent. There were no cooking utensils or cutlery. There was one pup tent, suitable for one. Frantically phoning friends, 1 located another tent that would sleep three, plus more sleeping bags. it was still feasible. 1 haven't mentioned that Hugh had arrived for the camping trip with one arm in a sling. He'd fallen off his bike in the city and had to hit the emergency ward when he arrived here. Wrist broken or badly sprained. But spirits undaunted. He was going going to carry through. I went out in the car to pick up some food or something, and suddenly i had one of those brilliant ideas that hit a guytwice in a arm, lifetime. No Ideolgue, withone wandering around in the bush, looking for a place to sleep, with two tuckered little guys, each carrying 80 pounds, losing the faith rapidly. I went home and laid it on the line, "You're going to camp in Little Lake Park." 1'd checked it out by this time. There were tent sites, running water, toilets, a barbecue, a great view of the lake, and swimming. Hugh, bless him, was going to go through with the original plaits. But he put it to a vote, and the boys, bless them, said, "Little Lake Park" which is almost in the middle of town. So they had a great camping trip. Set up their tents, got a fire going, and had three great days of summer. Gran, who had almost gone catatonic at the first proposal, dragged up some pots and stuff, and we visited them (six blocks away) only three times a day, bringing them only ice, food, charcoal, candles and a few other treats. Fourth day it rained. Wet tents, wet sleeping bags. Wet children. Mud. However, after we brought Gran down from the roof, it sorted out. The sun came mit, the sleeping bags went over the clothesline, the tents were spread out to dry, the kids clothes,, were packed. and undaunted Hugh took them off on the bus to sleep at his place In the city, which is just one jump ahead of a leaking tent. A