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The Brussels Post, 1980-03-12, Page 2Behind the soettos. by Keith:RpulOon. fit this winter? Serving Brussels and the surrounding community. Published each Wednesday afternoon at Bruatels, Ontario By McLean Bros. Publishers Limited Evelyn Kennedy - EditOr Pat, Langlois - Advertising Member Canadian Community Newspapfer Association and Ontario Weekly Newspaper ASsociatiOn Subscriptions (in advance) Canada $10.00 a Yegrr. Others $20.00 a Year. Single. Copies 25 cents each. BLUE RIBBON AWARD 1979 Who wants a ghost town? Another Brussels business has closed its doors and the loss of Smith's Coffee Shop means a disappointment for a number of Brussels area residents. Fortunately there are other good eating places in town, but area youngsters are going to have a hard time finding a hangout, where a number of them can just sit and be themselves without getting yelled at by irate adults. The building is to be taken over by our MP for his constituency office, so it at least Ina ill be getting some use but the increasing sell-outs of old businesses and the lack of the new, is disheartening to see in a village that seemed to be thriving only two years ago. Promotion of the village is the key to getting new businesses in, and it's something area residents should be seriously thinking about if they don't want to see Brussels a ghost town. To the editor: Heart fund says thanks "Heart Month" in Canada is now over and on behalf of the Canadian Heart Fund, Ontario Division, please accept our heartfelt thanks for your promotional support during February. Our objective for the 1980 Heart Fund Campaign was $6.4 million and although all returns are not yet in, we are quite hopeful that our objective will be attained. Without your willing co-operation in communicating our needs to the public, we would not be able to express such an outlook. The Medical Committee of the. Ontario Heart Foundation met at the end of January to review research applications submitted to us for support. You will be pleased to know that after deliberations, $7.4 million was committed to cardiovascular and cerebrovascular research projects in Ontario, 'commencing June 1980. The financial support of many individuals and businesses has made this commitment possible. Thank you again for your support, and for helping us to ensure that research against our nation's number one health enemy will • continue. With best wishes. Yours very truly, Canadian Heart Foundation Ontario Division Esther M. Richards Director of Public Relations This rather tame snowbelt winter has done wonders for municipal snow removal budgets but not much for my waistline removal project. Usually when spring rolls around I don't have any rolls around my middle. I'm probably in better shape when the snow goes than at any other time of the year. Part of the reason is a 900-foot long laneway on our place that gets clogged with snowquicker than'you can say "I need a snowblower". Because we don't have our own snowblower the lane often stay clogged for a few days while we hike in from the road. Making that hike once, twice or three times a day the last few winters has been my equivalent of jogging. It gives me fresh air (and frozen lungs) and strengthened leg and stomach muscles. Recent year our family has also turned winter into a recreational asset through the use of cross country skis. It's one of those few activities that is both fun and healthy at the same time. But this year there hasn't been any snow-clogged lane to walk in. Few have been the days there has been enough snow or wind to block the lane to a car. So the car has heen'right at the door, convenient, but not very good froin an excercise point of view. Skiing too has been virtually non existent because for the major part of the winter to date there hasn't been enough snow in the fields to allow the runners to slide over the clods of dirt. On top of that I haven't had to, push out a single car all winter (now just watch a blizzard come next week and see me pushing cars by the, dozen). I have hardly picked up a snow shovel. In short, I'm a sedentary, softening mass of once-firm muscle. In truth about the only strenuous excercise I have had this winter has come on trips to the big city. Now we in the rural aras like to see ourselves as far superior to the soft city types. We're tough, we tell ourselves. We breath fresh air and get plenty of excercise and we're strong of mind and body. Well I may not have breathed fresh air but I got far more excercise in the city that I ever get around here. In the city I tend to guide my car shaking and quaking and ducking rushing taxicabs to the nearest parking lot and proceed to walk wherever I'm going. Going a longer distance I will likely take a bus, street car or subway but often I think it isn't worth the effort and money of taking public transport just for a few blocks so I walk and the first thing you know you've covered a mile or so on foot. Can you imagine people in our towns walking a mile on foot? People in our small towns get in the car to go two blocks downtown to get a. pack of cigarettea, If they also, need to get the mail, they'll get back in, the car and drive it half a. block to the post office. - How_ about our farmers? A lot of people think of that commercial with Bobby Hull pitching a heavy bale of hay as if it were a • ' 'feather pillow and think farmers must:be in great physical shape. Your average farmer" feeds the livestock by pushing button; cleans out the manure by pushing another button, climbs in , the cab of his pickup truck to drive to the back field where he climbs into the cab of his climate-centrolled combine or tractor and sits on his ever-expanding derriere for the rest of the day. He may not wear a three-piece suit but he has pretty much the same environ- ment, the same stress and the same lack of excercise as and executive in a high-rise office building.. — There's a difference though. City people in recent years have come to realize just what terrible shape they're in. They're tired of being beaten by that .60-year old Swede. Thanks in part I suppo se to those Participaction commercials the cities have,. gone fitness mad. There are health clubs- all over the place. Drivers not only have to watch each other but also joggers and cyclists. „ It may have something to do with the me generation., Everybody wants to look your best. It's not much good to go and by a $100 dress at a fashionable boutique if the roll of fat around your middle pushes it all out of shape. And in these days, of sexual liberation few ladies want„an admiring male hand to feel a girdle. The macho Man at the disco doesn't look too macho if his knees buckle' in the strain of boogying. And the tight-fitting sexy shirts don't look well with a sagging tummy. So the city people have taken to fitness in a serious way.'We out here in the healthful countryside seem happy enough to waddle slowly onwards toward indolent old age. We don't worry about boogying at the disco. Most people don't really worry about , fashions. Health clubs are virtually non- existent and the idea of jogging with people looking out their windows saying "There goes that idiot again" fends to keep a lot of people from joining the jogging generation. Try to get some excercise by going fora long walk and you're likely ' to have some friendly neighbour stop and offer you a, ride in his car. It's part of our rural culture to think of the city kid and the country kid: the city kind trying to show how much smarter he is. than the country kid until finally the country kid gets mad and slugs him. Maybe we'll soon have to get used to the idea that it's the city kid who'll be the one tough enough' to do the slugging. Sugar and spice By Bill Smiley The travel bug attacks Sometimes I am convinced I was born 30 years too soon. When I see the wonderful opportunities for travel young people have today, I turn pea-green with envy. When you and I were young, most of us didn't get much farther than the next town. A minority visited the city occasionally, and it was considered a big deal. And a shal whale of a lot of people never did gef to see a big city in their entire fives. And were no worse off for it, of course. Man, how that has changed. Nowadays, young people go galloping off to the four corners of the earth with no more thought about it than we'd have. given to a weekend in the city. They're so blase about it that it's sickening to an old guy like me, who has always yearned to travel, and never had the time or money or freedom to do it. In my day, during the Depression, the only people who could afford to travel were the hoboes. They could afford it because, they didn't have any money. They rode free on the tops and inside the box-cars of freight trains. And they didn't haye any re- sponsibili ties except the next meal and a place to sleet). Looking back, I was one of the lucky ones. Most of my generation of youth~ was forced by circumstances to stay home, get any job available, and hang on to it like grim death, never venturning forth on the highroads of life. I was the envy of my classmates, when at 17, I nabbed a job on the upper lake boats, and could come home bragging of having I been to such bizarre, exotic places as Duluth, Sault Ste. Marie, Detroit, the Lakehead. Today's youngsters would sneer at such bourgeois travels. They exchange anecdotes about Morocco and Moscow, Athens and Australia, Paris and Port-au-Prince, Delhi and Dubrovnik. Fair nauseates me, it does. By the time he was 22, my own son had lived on both coasts of Canada, been to Mexico, New Orleans; Texas, Israel, Ireland and a hundred other places that are just names in an atlas to me. He's been to Paraguay, South America, and his visited Argentina and Bolivia. He sneaks four languages. I speak one, not too well. My nephews have seen more countries than Chris Columbus or Sir Francis Drake. One's an airline pilot, and knows Europe, North America and the West Indies the way I know my way to school. Another has worked in the Canadian north, Quebec, the Congo, Jamaica, and Costa Rica. My nieces are just as peripatetic. They've been to the West Coast, France, England, Russia. A four-day. trip to New York, tor them, is scarcely worth mentioning. Migawd, I'd have given my left eyeball to see New York when I was their age! I thought it was pretty earth-shaking the first time I saw Toronto. Toronto; yete-c-,ehl Thousands of university students' annually take a year off, borrow some money, stuff a pack sack and head out for a year of bumming around Europe, the Mediterranean, North Afica, India. Rotten kids! In the last decade, the travel bug has spilled over into the high schools. Some of theni are beginning to sound like agencies, with frequent announcements over the P.A. system: "Will the group going to Rome in the winter break please assemble in Room 202 at 3:30 for a lesson in tying your toga." "All those taking the Venezuela trip are requested to see Mr. Vagabond in room 727 at 3:15 today." • "Those who are involved in the spring break trip to the Canary Islands should have their passports by March 1st". ' "An urgent meeting will be held today, for those who plan to take the London-Paris trip during spring break. All seats are now filled: If enough are interested, 'we'll hire another' plane." • It fairly makes your head awirn, .especially when your own ideas of a trip south is 100 miles to the city for a weekend, a trip west means a visit to great-grandad, and a trip east means you're going to a feneral or a wedding among the relatives: Next thing you know, this travel binge will bulge over into the elementary schools, and (Continued On Page 3 )