POSTING #151

THE ARTHUR DISTRICT HIGH SCHOOL BUGLE BAND---TWO MEMORABLE PARADES

A few weeks ago I attended a Fife and Drum Band Program at Fort George with bands from the US and Canada. The experience brought back memories of July, in (I think) 1954 when our high school band---with its mix of Protestants and Catholics---played in two parades: one for the Catholic picnic on July 1, and a second on July 12th when we led the Arthur contingent in a march of area Loyal Orange Lodges, which took place in a nearby town.

First, a bit of background about the religious complexion of Arthur and the surrounding area when I was growing up.

I don’t have precise figures but my guess is that about 75% of the population was Protestant---split among the Anglican, Presbyterian, United Church and Baptist congregations---with the remaining 25% belonging to the Roman Catholic congregation.

The Roman Catholics had their own primary school, called The Separate School, but after Grade 8 their children attended the Arthur District High School.

Relations between the Protestants and the Catholics were generally peaceful despite the fact that the area had been settled, in part, by immigrants from Ireland, some from the North and some from the South. As in the rest of Canada, the Irish immigrants tended to bring to their new country their age-old religious enmities.

But although relations were generally good between the Catholics and the Protestants, there were occasional religious frictions.

When I was 5 or 6 a group of us were playing shinny with a tennis ball in front of the Separate School. During a break, a friend who was Catholic said he was sorry that I wouldn’t be able to go to heaven. I hadn’t thought much about heaven at the time---whether in fact I wanted to go or not---but I didn’t like the idea of being excluded. When I asked him why I couldn’t go to heaven he said that a nun had told them in class that Protestants wouldn’t be admitted because they didn’t belong to The One True Church.

When I told Mom about the conversation, she laughed and said she didn’t believe that God would exclude us Protestants. She said that I wasn’t to worry about it---and I didn’t.

On another occasion when I was about the same age, I was helping a retired farmer with a few chores around his house. He referred to a Catholic family down the street as ‘those dogans’. I hadn’t heard that expression before and when I asked Mom about it she became upset. I was never to use that term. When I told her who had used it, she shook her head and said that some people just didn’t know any better.

But generally the two communities got along well.

On one occasion, the heavy oak front door of the Catholic Church needed some repairs. The priest, Father Trainor I think, called on a skilled local carpenter, Joe Wilson, to repair it. The fact that Joe was an active member of the Orange Lodge didn’t prevent the priest from picking him for the job. And Joe, for his part, didn’t refuse to work on a Catholic Church.

We got along.

Now on with the stories.

       July 1st Catholic Picnic

Each July first, the Catholic Church had a picnic at the Arthur Fairgrounds. The celebrations began with a parade along George Street (our main street), and up Tucker Street to the Fairgrounds.

On this particular July first, the band assembled in the south end of town along with a few floats. When everything was ready, Dad, in his Ontario Provincial Police car, started out with our band right behind him, and the floats behind us.

We arrived at the Fairgrounds and came to a halt by the ball diamond. I thought we were finished but one of the organizers came up and asked if we could play ‘God Save the Queen’ to open the picnic.

Now, that was a problem. We didn’t have the anthem in our repertoire.

As the leader of the band, I tried to figure out which of the pieces we knew would work. We didn’t know ‘Oh Canada’ and while we knew ‘The Maple Leaf Forever’ it didn’t seem official enough somehow. I finally decided on ‘Rule Britannia’. We gave a rousing performance, everyone cheered and the picnic was officially open.

As an aside, not many of the people at the picnic would have expected that in a decade Canada would have its own flag and that in the years that followed ‘Oh Canada’ would have replaced ‘God Save the Queen’ at most official functions. In the 1950s, Arthur was fiercely loyal to Britain and the Queen.

After we had played ‘Rule Britannia’, our work was done and we were free to visit the various booths operated by Catholic women and eat their hot dogs and apple pie, or play bingo, or just take off for home.

July 12th Loyal Orange Lodge Parade

For the July 12th parade, we piled into a school bus and were driven to the town that was hosting the Orange parade. We located the members of the Arthur Orange Lodge, many of whom I knew, and found out what our position would be in the parade.  A man dressed in uniform with a large sword and riding on what was supposed to be a white, riding horse---but was in fact a gray Percheron work horse---would lead the parade as King Billy.

Perhaps a bit of history will be useful here:

From Wikipedia:

“The Battle of the Boyne …was fought in 1690 between two rival claimants of the English, Scottish, and Irish thrones – the Catholic King James and the Protestant King William (who had deposed James in 1688) – across the River Boyne near Drogheda on the east coast of Ireland. The battle, won by William, was a turning point in James' unsuccessful attempt to regain the crown and ultimately helped ensure the continuation of Protestant ascendancy in Ireland.”

In Canada in the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries, the Orange Lodge was popular and powerful, especially in Ontario. The mayors of Toronto were always Orangemen.

Queen Victoria didn’t want to have anything to do with the Orange-Catholic fights in Canada. When her son, Albert Edward, the Prince of Wales, visited Toronto in 1860 Orangemen tried to force the Prince’s carriage under an Orange arch in an attempt to have the monarchy endorse, indirectly, the Orange Lodge. The Prince’s attendants frustrated the attempt. Click here for the full, fascinating story

By 1954, membership in the Orange Lodges had dwindled in Ontario. Previously each town and village would have had its own Orange Parade but by the 1950s a number of Lodges would have to come together to get a reasonably substantial turnout for the July 12th celebration.

When our turn came, we started out with the Arthur Lodge behind us. Two men carried a banner with the name of the Arthur Lodge and behind that marched perhaps thirty men and women, looking smart in white shirts and blouses, with stern, serious faces. They were showing their support, in this public way, for the goals of the Orange Lodge.

When we arrived at the town’s fairgrounds those of us in the band settled in a shady spot, and waited for the speeches to finish so our school bus could take us back to Arthur.

There were a number of speakers all repeating essentially the same message: the members must remember ‘the Glorious Twelve” and make sure that the Catholic Church wasn’t allowed to use its power to destroy the links between Canada and Britain, and the Queen.

The first speakers were not skilled orators. They read their speeches, sometimes haltingly, and the anti-Catholic message, while it was there, was somehow muted. I looked around at our band members, especially at those who were Catholics. There was an occasional wink, suggesting that they had heard worse and were not upset.

Then a local politician took the stage. I had heard him talk at other events and knew that he was a good speaker. I wondered how this man, who needed both Protestant and Catholic votes to stay in office, would handle his speech.

I didn’t have to wait long. He started immediately with a lambasting attack on the Catholic Church and the Pope. I won’t repeat the charges and attacks but will just say that at one point he told the audience that they would have to be prepared to ‘take up the sword’ to protect Canada and its links to Britain and the Queen.

The crowd loved it. The members stood and cheered.

I remember feeling astonished and embarrassed.  I was astonished because the politician had always struck me as a moderate fellow. And I felt embarrassed that the Catholic members of the band were being subjected to this vitriol---I couldn’t look at them.

It was a quiet trip back to Arthur, without the usual horsing around. The politician’s speech had ruined the day for all of us, Catholics and Protestants.

Looking back, I am encouraged that the fears that generated the Orange-Catholic feuds have almost disappeared. And beyond religious differences, I am impressed with how Canadians have learned to accept differences of ethnic origin, colour and dress. For me, one of the major turning points was when the RCMP decided that Sikhs could wear a turban, instead of the usual hat, with the dress uniform.

About the politician: I have intentionally left out details so that his identity is concealed. I am giving him the benefit of the doubt, and hoping that he didn’t really mean the things he said---that he was just doing what he thought politicians should do.

I hope that was it.

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Note:

The next Letter from Virgil will hopefully appear in a couple of weeks.

On September 3rd, I uploaded Posting #11 in the companion Icewine Guru Blog---"Some Thoughts on the US Presidential Election and on the Republican Convention". See http://theicewineguru.blogspot.ca/

POSTING #150

SOME ODDS AND SODS

This 150th Posting (isn’t it amazing how time flies!) contains a few unrelated stories but first I would like to respond to questions from two readers (I always like to hear from readers!).

One reader said he really liked the story about the Russian paintings we bought in Moscow's Izmailovsky Market in the 1990s. “It’s such a good story, why did you wait so long to tell it?”

Another reader had a similar question about the last Posting, the one with stories about artificial insemination. He wondered why I hadn’t told those stories (which he found hilarious---thank you, kind reader!) earlier.

Well, the short and honest answer is that I don’t know.

But I have a theory.

My theory is that part of my brain---let’s call it the Story Editor--- works in the background reviewing events that have happened to Pat and me and our family, trying to figure out which events contain a story worth telling. Next, the Story Editor works on the tales that seem right for the blog by, for example, focusing on the story line, deleting extraneous details, and finding a suitable conclusion.

At some point, the Story Editor gives me a nudge and says that there is a story ready to tell. All I have to do is perform some fact checking (to make sure my memory disk hasn’t become corrupted), and then key the story into the computer.

I have no idea about the logic, assumptions and logarithms that go into the Story Editor’s decision about when to tell a particular story. What I do know is that things don’t go well when I try to over-ride the Story Editor and tell a story that hasn't been worked over by him or her. The story is invariably wooden and uninteresting.

So, I’m afraid the stories will continue to appear in what may seem to be (and is in fact) a haphazard fashion.

Perhaps Dr. Freud could explain it---I can’t.


A Cream-Coloured White Elephant

Friends who were visiting Vietnam a few years ago fell in love with a carved, cream-coloured marble bench with a matching marble coffee table. It was a good-sized bench, about 8 feet long, with arms and a high back that was heavily carved with bunches of grapes and small animals.  They decided that it would fit beautifully into a corner of their back yard.

The asking price was reasonable but our friends were worried about the logistics of getting it to Canada, and the cost (the bench and table together weigh about three-quarters of a ton). The owner of the business said he had experience in shipping marble items to North America. He quoted them a price to ship it from Vietnam to Mississauga, which they found reasonable, and the deal was consummated.

After some months, the bench and table arrived in Mississauga and were trucked to Niagara-on-the-Lake. They were placed in our friends’ backyard under a spreading tree, where they were a source of pleasure for our friends and their guests.

Then, our friends decided to move to another home in town, a home without a yard large enough for the bench and table. When they found a buyer for their house, they offered to leave the marble items but the buyers didn’t want them. Then our friends offered the bench and table---free---to local parks departments, pointing out how useful and attractive they would be in a lookout over the Niagara River, or over Lake Ontario.

The parks officials were initially very interested but when they viewed the bench they became concerned about how to move it. One of them wondered how they could get a crane into the backyard without damaging the trees or the lawn. In the end, the parks people all said ‘no’.

At that point a neighbour said that perhaps they had been wrong in trying to give the bench and table away. Why not try to sell them to someone, perhaps a local winery?

A few phone calls and the owner of a winery came to see the items. After a brief bit of haggling about the price he agreed to buy them. He said he would be back the next day to pick them up.

Our friends wondered how he would load the bench onto a truck.

The next day, the winery owner showed up with a team of--- piano movers! The men put rolling dollies under the bench and wheeled it to the street and up a ramp into the back of their truck. The whole operation took 15 minutes---and no crane.

There seem to be two morals to the story. First, it is sometimes easier to sell a thing than to give it away. And second, when confronted with a problem one shouldn’t jump too quickly to a complicated solution (such as a crane) and instead one ought to try to think outside the box for a simpler, more elegant solution (such as piano movers).


They Stole What?

One morning during the recent heat wave, the owners of a high-end antique shop in Virgil unlocked the store and found that the air conditioner wasn’t working. The temperature inside the store was much higher than that outside.

The technician they called reported that someone had drained the refrigerant from the air conditioner’s compressor. The owners checked the outside security camera and found a video of a middle-aged man on a scooter driving up to their A/C unit, calmly draining the refrigerant into a steel bottle, and then driving off.

When the story was reported in newspapers and TV---with the news that there was a video of the culprit---a man phoned the antique store and offered to pay for the stolen refrigerant. The owners passed the culprit’s phone number to the police. A man in Niagara Falls who works with an air conditioning service has been arrested.

Apparently, the new, environmentally acceptable refrigerants (one of the recommended ones is called R410) that replace the old Freon R 22 (that was destroying the ozone layer) are much more expensive. Thus there is an incentive for people to steal the new refrigerants.

A week or so after this theft, we came back from a trip to find the house unusually hot. When I checked, I found that the air conditioner had stopped working. I tried to re-start it (by checking for a circuit breaker problem etc.), but it wouldn’t start.

While we waited for the technician to arrive, we thought about the antique store. Had the arrested person been released on bail and was he now toodling around Virgil on his scooter stealing refrigerant to pay for the fine that he was likely to get? Or were there ‘copy-cat’ thieves at work?

The technician, who lives in Port Colborne, hadn’t heard about the refrigerant theft at the antique shop. He had heard about thieves stealing copper tubing from air conditioners and about vandals releasing refrigerant into the air but no thefts of refrigerant.

After checking the system he found that our refrigerant was a little low and he added two pounds (at $100 a pound---that stuff IS expensive!).  He didn’t rule out the possibility of theft but thought it was more likely that a previous technician had not screwed the valve cap on securely.

So we don’t know whether we were the victims of a refrigerant thief.

Meanwhile, we have noticed that Virgil has a surprising number of middle-aged men with electric scooters.

They should know that we are keeping an eye on them.

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As a sidebar to that story, I saw an article that reported that the car most likely to be stolen in the US is not the Cadillac Escalade or something fancy like that but is in fact the 1994 Honda Accord. Apparently thieves love the Accord’s weak anti-theft systems.

We had a Honda Accord in the 1980s when we lived in Ottawa and can vouch for its vulnerability to theft. During dinner one day, we heard a noise in our driveway and went out to investigate. The door lock had been popped and the car was ready to be driven off, under our noses, so to speak. The police said we were lucky.

On another occasion we weren’t so lucky. The Accord was stolen from in front of our house. The police recovered it a few days later---in fine shape except for a banana stuffed in the tape deck!

I think air conditioner manufacturers are going to have to follow the example of the automobile companies and start installing anti-refrigerant-theft measures.

Who would have thought we would come to this!

 Kids Say the Darndest Things

Years ago the Canadian-born Art Linkletter had a popular TV program called “Kids Say the Darndest Things” in which he interviewed children, usually with hilarious results.

The program is long dead (Bill Cosby carried on the program for a time) but we are enjoying the comments of a handsome and charming  two-year old fellow we know (he’ll be three in October). Here are a couple of his ‘darndest things’.

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Recently, he and his parents went for a short hike in the woods in Caledon with the young man on his dad’s shoulders. The young fellow kept bellowing over and over again "EEEEEEEEEEEEEE". When his mother asked him what he was doing, he said with a big smile, “I’m talking to my echo."

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At lunch one day, the young man said he was ready for dessert even though there were a couple of small, raw carrots on his plate.

The father said he could have dessert after he had eaten the carrots.

The young man replied that the carrots hurt his teeth.

The father agreed that the carrots were a bit thicker than normal but added “They will be good for your teeth.”

There was a brief pause (perhaps two beats) and the young man replied, “My teeth don’t care”.


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Note:

I am hoping that I soon will be able to get back to a more regular schedule for the Letter from Virgil Postings. In the meantime, the next Posting should appear in a couple of weeks.

I am also hoping that Posting #11 in the companion Icewine Guru Blog will appear in the next little while. http://theicewineguru.blogspot.ca/