It
wasn’t possible to defeat Aunt Jessie
by
Robert LaFrance
Just this morning I was telling Flug
about some occurrence when I was growing up in Tilley in the 1950s and he said:
“Bob, you should write your life story. Or even your autobiography.”
I was flummoxed, flabbergasted, and
gobsmacked.
I suppose it could be argued that
this weekly column is, in a way, an autobiography, but it doesn’t really delve
into all the exciting events of my childhood in Tilley where every day was an
adventure. I resolved to think about my years growing up in that hamlet named
for a temperance leader and Father of Confederation (Sir Leonard Tilley), and
compare notes of that turbulent time when we expected to be vapourized any minute
by a Russian ICBM; we lived fast and expected to die young and have a beautiful
corpse, as the saying went.
I did
exaggerate slightly. It was hardly wall-to-wall excitement, growing up in
Tilley. In later years it was a hotbed of exhilaration, but I had moved to
Ontario by that time. I remember coming home from Ontario for a 10-day vacation
from my job at Canadian Canners in Burlington only to find that Tilley now had
a public dump.
No kidding. A public dump for Tilley! Even though it
was located in Lake Edward, or on the way there, it was OUR dump because it was
my Aunt Jessie LaFrance who had fought the government to a whimpering bowl of
jelly on the issue. Every day of the week she was either phoning the MLA or
going to his office or house. “We want a dump so that people don’t keep putting
their garbage in the woods. In OUR woods,” she emphasized.
One day Premier Richard Hatfield was in
Perth-Andover at the same time Aunt Jessie was. Talk about two worlds
colliding. By the time she got through with him, he would have moved the
legislature to Tilley just so he could have some peace.
I mentioned years ago in this column something that
my grandfather Muff LaFrance had said to me during this very same vacation. We
had been talking about all the goings-on in Tilley – Roland Baker just getting
back from selling a load of potatoes on the north shore, Aunt Jessie’s new
dump, a horse pull scheduled for that weekend, Murray Paris’s accident, Norman
Kinney getting a new pup, and things like that. A person could hardly catch his
breath.
As I said, I was home on vacation from Burlington,
and was talking to Grandpa about fighting the traffic in Toronto. (Naturally I
had chosen to leave for NB about 3:00 pm on a Friday, putting me in Toronto
just exactly at the time of the Daily Smash known as rush hour.) Grandpa looked
thoughtful for a moment, then asked how many people lived in Toronto. I said
about two and a half million or more. “Boy,” he said, scratching his chin.
“That’s funny why so many people want to live so far away from everything.”
Meaning Tilley.
Flug is right; there was a lot going
on in Tilley and its suburbs in those days. There probably still is, but I live
down here in the Colony now, and many folks here seem to spend more time
avoiding all the many activities than otherwise. There was a supper in Burns
Hall in October and only about 500 people came to it over the period of two
hours or so. In Tilley in the 1950s and 1960s there would have been at least
ten thousand.
Back to Tilley, and our fear of Russian
ICBMs. The only television station we could watch was WAGM from Presque Isle,
and all they seemed to dwell on was the certainty of Russian missiles coming in
to take out Loring Air Force base, near Caribou. It was a Strategic Air Command
base. There were about ten TV shows a week explaining how we should all have a
fallout shelter behind our houses. That would have been like putting a
toothpick on the track to stop the Tobique Train. A plutonium bomb would have
flattened everything as far south as Johnville dance hall, so we didn’t figure
digging a cave in our backyard would be the best use of our time.
At night I could stand out in our yard and see the
lights of Loring AFB, and every half hour throughout the night a giant B-52
bomber would fly right over our trembling house and head for the Atlantic. Good
for the flight crew, but not for us. They’d be gone when the missiles arrived.
It didn’t make me feel any better that they carried nuclear missiles that would
flatten Moscow in return.
I have now started on my
autobiography, as per Flug’s suggestion. I told my wife I needed a secretary.
She reached for her winter rolling pin. I have decided to do my own typing with
my remaining unbroken fingers.
-end-
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