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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Huron Expositor, 1983-10-12, Page 2Q? Bt E ABB" AN AAV 1983 1u" iiutoii ., fxposifer Since 1880, Serving the Community first Incorporating -Brussels Post founded 1872 527-0240 12 Main St. Published at SEAFORTH, ONTARIO every Wednesday morning • Susan White, Managing Editor Jocelyn A. Shrler, Publisher Member Canadian Community Newspaper Assoc Ontario Community Newspaper Association and .Audit Bureau of Circulation A member of the Ontario Press Council Subscription rates: Canada $18.75 a year (In advance) Outside Canada $55.00 a year (In advance) Single Copies - 50 cents each • SEAFORTH, ONTARIO, WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 12, 1983 Second class mall -registration Number 0896 CO C n Thanks Wayne All too often, we neglect to thank someone who has done something above and beyond the call of duty, but are quick to criticize. A driving force on the Brussels recreation committee, Wayne Lowe, has resigned as chairman. It was a post he held for 13 years and it's about time he was thanked for time and effort he gave to the community. Brussels and area is fortunate to have many hard working volunteers, but Wayne stood out from the rest. He could be seen putting lines on the ball diamond, levelling the diamond, assisting at the arena and arranging ball and arena schedules. As much as Wayne is seen in the community, he also spent much time behind the scenes. He has done so many things that people don't realize the magnitude of his duties. If something had to be done, Wayne jumped in and did it.., If on the night of a large function the sewage backed up at the arena, Wayne was called to fix the problem. He also tried to give everyone equal ice -time and some people weren't satisfied. But he was working in the best intst for all. Before going to work, Wayne would be at the arena atstx in the morning, just to (Hake sure all the machinery was still operating. He also made sure the-wadin j pool was ready for the summer and closed it up for the winter. Because there are people like Wayne, the Brussels' Morris and Grey community centre has never had a deficit since it was built in 1977. This was achieved because of dedicated people who volunteered their time. Brussels does not have a recreation director, only an arena manager. The rest of the work is done through volunteer help. The arena catering group'have continually pushed money ir3to the facility. Service clubs have also donated. "For years, only a few have been carrying the whole load and we've become accustomed to it," says Jerry Dillow. "Because Wayne was chairman, people leaned on him virtuailytall the time. He's been active all the time — everyone benefitted." "Wayne has done a super job for recreation," says Jim Prior. "Whoever replaces him will probably not be willing to do as much work for a job where you get precious little thanks." When he was first elected chairman in 1974,• Wayne received no remuneration. This year, he was given a $300 honorarium, but he didn't keep the money. He offered his $300 to the new Junior "D" hockey'team so the team could pay their OHA entry fee: "Wayne has really been good," says Karen FCastin�ggC Everything was more or less left for him to do and if it wasn't for many people like him, recreation would go down the tubes. People don't realize what's involved, they just take it for granted that Wayne will be there. I doubt if we can find someone to replace him who will do the same amount of work." People volunteer to serve their community because they enjoy doing things for other people - it gives them satisfaction. "There are doers, watchers and criticizers," says Mr. Prior. "Some people realize what Wayne did, but most don't. Wayne was a doer." Thanks Wayrte. - R.W. U pi ion Ode to Autumn LEAVES ARE TURNING COLOR but the warm weather seems to have fooled nature. A walk around Seaforth last week made residents realize that mushrooms are still growing and spiders are still spinning webs. Unusual high fall weather tempera- tures seem to have fooled nature - or has Indfan summer just been a continuation of the real summer? (Photos by Wassink) Promotion pays Ever notice how an outsider immediately zeroes in on a town's attractions, or lack of them? Meanwhile, familiarity breeds contempt and those of us who live in a place take it totally for granted. Attractions? We don't have any. But then we don't have anything really negative either. A knowledgeable outside visited Clinton recently and told the BIA there about the town's assets. assets even longtime merchants don't recognize. ' "You are a tourist town," said Charles Whipp, part-time promotions manager for the Petrolia BIA. Because it's close to Bluewater lake country, Mr. Whipp estimated 250,000 tourists pass down Clinton's Main St. every year. They're all potential customers and the lack of effort to attract them he called disappointing. Mr. Whipp's message is one for Seaforth too. Clinton at least has a tourist office, opened this past summer on #8 Highway. Seaforth's old police station would make a good information centre suggested in a letter to the editor of the Expositor recently. Good idea, a tourist booth could pay dividends in town. The man from Petrolia suggested Clinton capitalize on its reputation as a friendly town. "You may not appreciate this, but it's a great way to start." The same applies to Seaforth. In Petrolia an active, imaginative BIA, he explained, took a "dirty, mean downtown" and made it into "one of the prettiest in the district". Heritage walks, restored buildings, an old opera house and area oil fields helped make Petrolia a tourist attraction. Seaforth, like Clinton has similar outstanding buildings, and other assets. All that's needed is for us to appreciate them and then for the tight leadership to promote them. - S.W. Clearing the house can clear out your mind $©i ®i lgG1© • 0 2a J it's a big leap from cleaning house to vowing to lead a more richly satisfying life. But give me a chance .to explain, and I'll m e it. ty whole family comes from the clutter school of home decor. "My, she must feel comfortable here." 1 mused as 1 wandered through my daughter's grade one classroom. (Two pet rats and a snake, nooks and crannies for most activities that interest'ftves and sixes, and stuff, stuff all over the place,) "It's a lot like home." We collect and we're not at all selective about what. A nice color, an interesting shape, a bargain price or the fact that grandmother had one just like it is enough reason for us to drag just about any object home. And put it where? Well, it's an old house so there are plenty of window ledges and sashes. We've' added shelves and hooks (that's another thing we collect....old fashioned hooks.) But we're fast running out of space. NOT ONE MORE "You can't bring one more thing into this by 2gasaW WIhi10 house," says the good woman who tries to clean the place twice a month. "Unless you take three things out," We ignore that. And every smooth surface in the house gets covered with at least one layer. Remember those awful photos of Victorian parlors? Dark and plush, with velvet tablecloths covered with lace ones covered with plants, family photos, bricka- brack and a souvenir pitcher from Niagara Falls? When 1 walk into the house fresh from someone else's sleek and orderly modern interior, I'm struck by the resemblance. "1 see you've got some new china,'" says a friend who notices a lot of blue and white stuff introduced into the rest of the prized possessions atop kitchen cupboards. "Nah," I tell her "we bought that stuff years ago in Quebec. it's been in a box somewhere. • There's more where it came 'from," She looked awed. She had no comment. But amazing people with the sheer volume of your stuff gets childish after awhile. And cleaning around it is tough. However, it took two big jolts to turn me, .for the first time in my life, into a thrower -outer instead of a saver. With the example of her parents our five-year-old is worse that the two of us combined and then, some about not wanting to part with one thing, ever. TREASURES As parents do, 1 suddenly saw that this collecting trait of ours in our daughter. And it's not attractive, this selfish, petty preoccupation with material things. How can 1 tell her that with a houseful of my own treasures? The other jolt came, as it so often has, from something I read, in a consumer column by Ellen Roseman in the Globe. She interviewed a man, Don Aslett, who's cleaned thousands of homes and written a book about it. Litter, he says, collections and junk, are the biggest handicaps to quick and easy house cleaning. And listen to this, which hit me at just the right time to strike a resounding chord: "Every piece of junk stashed away or hidden (discretely or indiscretely) • is also stashed away in your mind and is subconsciously taking 'a toll of your emotional, spiritual and physical resources. . DISCARDED "Once discarded, it is discarded from your mind, and you are free from keeping mental tabs on it." Remembering how self-reliant and liberat- ing it felt to live for a year with everything you own in a pack on your back, 1 know he's right. Armed with a garbage bag, I'm making my way slowly, room by room. The house, the family and definitely 1 will never be the same again. Ideas, too, go in and out of fashion, The marvellous thing about this world is that things that are in fashion today will be out tomorrow and back in the day after. (1 always say the only way i'll be fashionable is if moths don't get the old clothes in my closet before they come into fashion again.) And it's like that with ideas too. Hang in there long enough with an old-fashioned idea and you may just be on the leading edge of advanced thought. For instance, 1 recently found that although 1 haven't been to any of those high-priced management seminars herd at expensive hotels, I was already right in there applying the latest in management techniques. You sec when things started to come apart in North American industry and the Germans and the Japanese and the Swedes passed us all by. business leaders here finally got the idea they might be doing something wrong. They went to study the nations who were on the way up and bring back ideas to our countries that were on the way down. ROBOTS One of the things they brought back, cif f3@[ orad t h@ oc@rt@z. bq/ L adii IA©u[Igt40o fru course, was the value of the robot. The Japanese are using robots at an unheard of rate, sometimes havingwhole factories that can be run by one or two people overseeing a lot of computerized machines. For the traditional North American business mana- ger. the idea of filling a factory with intelligent machines which don't have labor unions. don't take maternity leave or bathroom breaks was an attractive one indeed. But some intelligent North American observers n.alized it was the robots the Japanese didn't have that were more important in the long run than the robots they did have. Japanese management had decided that if their machines were intelligent, their people were more intelli- gent: too intelligent to be used as human robots, doing boring repetitive tasks with no chance to use their brains. , SECURITY The Japanese gave workers a chance to really participate in their jobs. They were asked for suggestions on how to make their product better. They were organized into smaller units, teams that were allowed to democratically decide how best to accomp- lish their work. They were given more security, not treated like parts of a machine to be thrown away when they weren't required any more. In short. they were treated like human beings. Sadly, treating people like human beings. living, breathing. thinking people with feelings, was an unheard of new philosophy in North American management. We often get upset with the horrible strike record in Canada, blaming it most of the time on the unreasonableness of union leadership. There is no doubt this is sometimes to blame. Yet the fact that workers feel alienated from their work, like they are disposable dogs in a machine, that the object of management is to make them as uniform as robots has contributed to the frustration that has made Canada have one of the worst strike records in the world. BRAINS TOO Finally Canadian managers seem to be getting smart. They realize when they hire people they are not just renting their muscles for 40 hours a week, but their brains too. They realize that the people doing a job often know more about how to do it well than theroists in a boardroom. They realize that happy people are going to accomplish more and do it better than people who hate their jobs. And that, today, is the latest revolution in management technique people arc paving highly to get. Seems like good old common sense to mc. Countryside calls us in autumn BY W.G. STRONG Some folk like city pavements but others prefer country roads, rural waysides, shady lanes or forest trails. 1n early fall there comes the urging to get out into the country where the backroads twist and turn and seem to stretch to that so-called never - It would be heavenly What would you like to find, most. wen you go to heaven? Let's assume. for one wild. exhilarated moment, that we're all going to get there. Some people would plump for a meeting with the loved ones This I can never understand. It's tike a fellow who has served a life sentence waiting to he greeted by the warden when he hits the pearly gates. Others, sad souls. would he overjoyed if they could "just he happy " Not me Being happy all the time would he a real drag. 1 thoroughly enjoy being miserable on this orb. so that when something good happens. my pleasure is intensified Quite a few. who suffer from physical ailments. would be satisfied with peace and comfort. The insomniac imagines days and nights of solid slumber The arthritic dreams of being able to scratch his opposite ear without feeling as though his arm was being severed at the shoulder by a red-hot iron. Flat -chested girls would settle for a zpOigGi by ©BBB SrEBBQ17 mammoth bosom. They forget that none of the rest of us would be interested. Some chaps 1 know would be perfectly haoov to leave anytime if they could count on a golf course with emerald fairways and velvet greens, 18 holes a day in which they sliced not. nor did they hook, and a good game of poker at the 19th with the bar handy. Many sober citizens 1 know would be happy in heaven for ever afterwards, if they could be guaranteed (and get it in writing) that their wives (or husbands) would be in the other place. permanently. t Alcoholics would not only he in heaven, but the seventh of the same name, if their crock ranneth over. perpetually, and some- body else was looking after things. A few millionaires, once they had admitted they couldn't take it with them, would be serene in a place where there were no taxes, no labor movements, no wages to pay, and nobody asking them to donate to something every 12 minutes. My personal fantasy is a simple one. I'd go like a shot if someone would promise me, unconditionally. 9 dark, swirling trout stream, impregnable to invasion by women, telephones and other nuisances. 1 can see it now. Swift, deep, crooked. ending in a vast. silent. mysterious beaver pond, loaded with Iunkers. I can hear it: the exciting mutter of a small dam just around the bend: the splosh of a startled frog; the sudden, heart -stopping take -off of a disturb - Please see Smiley on page 3 never land of green fields and wooded hills; roads that skirt corn fields, desolate and bare; stubble fields, bleached and dry. where mullein stalks, sun-dried and brittle, stand sentinel. He who will can leave the hard arteries of asphalt and cement and seek a winding country road that meanders through peace- ful valleys and wanders around the shoulders of low hills. It is another world when one travels a dirt road where grasses grow between parallel lines of hard -packed wheel tracks, where ferns glow green and gokrpin the shafts of sunlight that filter throough overhanging branches from which droop wild grape vines and vagrant bittersweet. Trees line the road and shrubs and brush push close to the tracks. "Could this little old road be enticing me now Through the Indian Summer heat Where the meadows are sprawling with flowers and grass And the orchards are mellow sweet?" Burgess A procession of motorists but to see the beauty of nature at the turn of the year, a veritable cavalcade of colour, come back with the usual effusions about the red and gold blaze of the hardwoods, the green of pines and cedars, the accent of an occasional purple oak • a gorgeous panoply of autumn tints. Along this dusty road boys and girls tramped to school, whole families drove to town on Saturday evenings and again to church on Sunday. No more does the sound of the buggy wheels or the clop clop of horse's hooves break the silence. Here and there are small homesteads where cattle graze in pastures. lush and green, or stoop to quench their thirst, knee-deep in a gurgling brook that mirrors the blue inverted sky or where a solitary bovine idly rubs her neck against the gnarled trunk of an aging shade tree. Behind an old frame house, mellowed by the years, where potted plants in tin cans bloom on the window sills, patchwork quilts. sheets and the weekly wash flap gently in every passing breeze. Beside an open barn door stands an empty hayrack. Within one has visions of swallows swooping and darting. pigeons nesting on weathered beams and where, on sunny summer days, children played knee-deep in fragrant clover hay. in a near -by fence corner rests an abandoned wheel which shows one or more broken spokes and creeping rust has stained its circling band of steel. In very truth, out under the blue vault of heaven, there is a freshness. a sense of emancipation from the cares and responsi- bilities of daily living. These are balmy. lazy, hazy days. Dawns are moist and cool; early morns are misty 1 but. when the sun rises, the fog clouds lift. Soon the sunshine, warm and bright, breaks overhead. By mid-afternoon shadows begin to lengthen as the days grow shorter and soon dusk will bivouac in the hollows. The coolness of the evening air is inviting. Soon light fades and darkness settles down as .if night dropped her curtain rather abruptly, One does not need a weather prophet to survey the rime or hoarfrost on the grass and the damage done to garden vines and flowers. Daily gusts of warm air denude the trees of much of their foliage. At this season. nature takes over the entire countryside and paints it ablaze with fall colours. The air is full of foliage flakes gaily fluttering and dancing tranquilly or eddying tumultously in a sudden gale. They are a shower in a breeze, a deluge in a storm and a flood underfoot at day's end, "1 roam the woods that crown The upland, where the mingled splendours glow. Where the gay company of trees look down On the green fields below. My steps are not alone in these bright walks; the sweet south-west at play Flies, rustling, where the painted leaves are strown Along the winding way." Bryant The woods are alive and vibrant. Those who walk their leafy lanes see squirrels, Please see Remembering on page 3 1