Village Squire, 1979-02, Page 331
McGILLICUDDY'S DIARY
Village Squire presents the exclusive
feature: the diary of Ezekial McGillicuddy,
police chief of the village of Hamhocks,
Ontario. Well known for his courageous
battle against the forces of evil, Chief
McGillicuddy has agreed to give exclusive
rights to his diary to Village Squire...for a
princely sum of course. Each month we
publish a selection of entries from the
previous month.
JANUARY 1: Ah the first day of the new
year. It's the day most people make
resolutions. I'd like to make a resolution
that I'm going to quit this job the first time
anybody gives me any guff this year.
mean there's got to be a better job
available than this one. The pay is terrible.
The town council's so cheap they sound
like a flock of canaries when they get
together for a council meeting. And with
provincial government cutbacks. they're
getting worse.
Actually we shouldn't even have a police
department. The provincial government
passed a law to take over all the one-man
police forces a few years ago but the local
public wasn't too happy about having just
an O.P.P. patrol coming through a couple
of times a day. So they made me into a
three-man police force. There's me,
Ezekial Herbert McGillicuddy as chief, and
my two constables are H.M. Ezekial and
E.M. Herbert. Every time somebody calls
and wants to talk to Constables Ezekial or
Herbert 1 have to say they're out on patrol
or off duty or something like that.
It wouldn't be so bad if they'd give me
three pay cheques but not this bunch. They
just split my pay three ways. Even that
wouldn't be so bad but from the shifts they
want me to work so 1 can patrol the town
night and day, you'd think I was three
men.
JANUARY 4: Well our usual January
avalanche of snow has begun again and so
has the trouble it brings. Minnie
Whimple has this house over on Orange
Street that's jammed between two big old
garages that come right out to the edge of
the street. She hasn't got room for much
but her driveway between the two bigger
buildings. Well it's not that bad in summer
but in winter problems seem to come up
every year. She gets her driveway cleaned
out and the only place she can find to put
the snow is on the street. Then the town
plow comes along and plows it all back in
again. Then she plows it out onto the street
and the town plows it back and it goes on
this way for weeks, as if they were hoping
the snow would melt from the friction of
moving it back and fourth so much.
Well the friction rose temperatures in
some places at least. Minnie was out
shovelling out het driveway when the snow
plow came along and buried her to the
knees. She was so mad she threw the
shovel and it broke the back window of the
plow. Well the street foreman was so mad
then that he jumped out of the truck and
really had a few choice words with her. It
was against the law to put snow on the
streets, he said. Well where did he expect
her to put it, she asked. Well he could
make a suggestion if she wasn't a lady, he
said. Don't let that stop you, she said. So
he didn't. Well with that she pulled herself
out of the snowbank, grabbed the shovel,
which he had returned after taking it out of
the truck again, and chased him down the
street. I stopped them at the corner of
Main and Miller streets. I didn't know
whether I should charge her with
attempted assault, or him with speeding. I
wish the guy could move so fast when it
came to getting the streets plowed out in
the morning.
JANUARY 17: I see Joe Clark is off on a
trip around the world playing prime
minister. He just wants to get to know what
to do when he becomes P.M. he says. Well
one thing I guess he knows: take your own
plane.
We had our own episode like this back a
couple of months. Councillor Sally Hemple,
you'll recall, decided to run against the
mayor in the last election. She was sure
she'd win. She was running on a campaign
of being a tighter tightwad than he was.
Now in a small town like this, nothing can
win you votes faster than promising not to
do anything that will cost money and they
might even let you raise your own pay as a
councillor if you can cut back on all the
salaries of the town workers.
Anyway, all Sally's polls told her she was
a sure winner, just like Joe thinks he'll be.
She polled everybody at the bridge club
and they agreed. She polled everybody at
the country and curling club and they
agreed.
So to prepare herself for her role as the
new leader of our fair city of Hamhocks,
she began to gather knowledge of all the
things she'd have to deal with. First she
began poking around here in town. She
wanted to get to the very bottom of the
town government system, she said. She
wanted to see all the town employees doing
their duties so she could understand it all.
So she road around with me one
afternoon when there was nothing to do but
hand out the odd parking ticket and she
seemed to think that was pretty soft. She
really got to the bottom of it with the public
works boys though. The day she picked to
go along with them they were cleaning
storm sewers. They were quiet happy to let
her get involved. Put her right at the
bottom of the catchbasin handing up
buckets of the accumulated guck from the
whole summer.
Sally's campaign of getting to the bottom
of domestic affairs quickly slowed down
after that. She decided it was time to get
into the outside world and see how it
works. Well she went over to Baileyville to
see how the government runs over there.
Well things went pretty well for a while.
She went out to dinner with the Mayor over
there who also happens to be a woman.
They were having a great time
comparing notes when they suddenly
started comparing clothes. They didn't see
until then that they both had the same
dress. Well that started things on a
downward trend.
Later Sally made a disparaging remark
about the new Baileyville arena and how
we had a better one in Hamhocks and that
kind of riled the Mayor. So she hit back
about how at least they didn't have drunks
crawling around the streets every night
because they didn't have a hotel like the
Lamplighter. Well Sally's always been
after me to close the Lamplighter down but
she'd never say that when her town was
under attack. She said that there weren't
too many drunks in Baileyville because
Baileyville's drunks were cluttering up the
streets of Hamhocks after they crawled out
of the Lamplighter hotel over here. If it
wasn't for Baileyville's drunkards, she
said, the Lamplighter would have closed
down long ago for lack of business.
Well things just went from bad to worse
and if my friend Billy Timson, the police
chief over in Baileyville hadn't come along,
the two of them would have come to blows
right in the middle of main street.
I guess it's best for our foreign relations
with Baileyville that Sally got beaten by
Mayor Lumpy.
There is no miracle food
which, in itself. contains all
the nutrition the human
body needs. We must
choose a variety of foods
that provide nutrients for
growth and good health.
Consult Canada's Food
Guide.
February 1979, Village Squire Si