Catching up with the Old Eights over dinner at The Cove

August 27, 2011

Proud graduates of Westport Public School in 1963, the Old Eights claim to be the oldest grade eight class in the entire world which remains intact and in touch.  We got together for dinner at The Cove in Westport last Friday night.

David Roberts and his wife Jane were in town for the memorial service for his sister, Jill Greene.  David told me that they have kept things very quiet for the last year in preparation for next year’s bucket-list expedition to China, Vietnam and Cambodia.

Stephanie Ford-Forrester exhibits her work each year at the art show, so that brought the Forresters to town.  After a catastrophic motorcycle crash in Wyoming last summer, Jim seems to be in decent form, but has a way to go before getting onto a motorcycle again.

Nancy Jane Genge lost her father Drury last fall.  She remains reluctant to give up her role as a nurse in the operating rooms of the Hotel Dieu and Kingston General Hospital, and is enjoying her young granddaughter.

Don Goodfellow is still quietly observing the town, riding his bicycle, and keeping track of news of northern development, particularly in the mining field.

Jackalyn Brady is active on town council, fresh from the latest round of house renovations and planning another.  She’s off on a bus tour of Italy this fall with fellow retired educator Ruth Pedherney.  Apparently Ruth’s husband Bob doesn’t feel up to traipsing around ancient cities.

My former classmates offered their support when I mentioned my new gig as regional correspondent for The Toronto Star during the fall election campaign.  Nobody seemed all that amazed.  They were more impressed, though, with a few pictures on my camera of the new workshop and its wooden siding.

I hadn’t seen Barb (Wing) Graveline since high school, but I recognized her the instant our eyes met inside the door of The Cove.  Barb was a year behind the Old Eights, but she and her husband Gerry came along this year as Jacky’s guests.  They are still reeling from Barb’s second cancer scare and look forward to getting clearance to travel again to Minneapolis where their grandkids live.

The anecdote-of-the-evening award goes to Barb for her account of her second day of work in this very establishment, then called the Tweedsmuir, where Wes Haughton had hired her as a dishwasher.  From what I could hear it seems that her career as a summer food services worker began at the height of the wet-dry conflict in Westport.  Veteran CBC broadcaster Norman Depoe had come to town to report on the lead-up to the referendum and was staying at the Tweedsmuir.  Wes sent Barb out of the kitchen on her second day on the job, entirely without preparation, to wait on the legend.

As she told us the story Barb’s eyes widened and flashed, the years dropped away, and she reverted to the ingénue who had kept us in stitches throughout high school:

“At the time Wes offered quite a sophisticated menu in the dining room.  Mr. Depoe picked chateaubriand for two.  I asked if he had someone else coming to the table.  Mr. Depoe said no.  I told him I didn’t know if we could do that, and would have to ask the chef.  He said that would be fine, and would I bring him a glass of Bristol cream while his meal was cooking?

“I could find plenty of regular cream in the refrigerator, but I couldn’t find any Bristol cream.  I even got down on the floor and looked on the bottom shelf, but there wasn’t any.  I asked Wes at the bar.  He harrumphed, reached back and took the bottle off the shelf, poured a glass of it, and sent me on my way.”

She told us that Wes then explained to her how to deliver the chateaubriand, which had to be sliced and served at the table.  Much to her guest’s amusement, Barb found her way through her first encounter with haute cuisine.

“Mr. Depoe wanted to talk about the wet-dry vote, and asked me if I knew anything about it.  I told him that I heard about it every Sunday in church.

“He wanted details about the arguments I had heard, so I explained that a wet vote might get some of the wives and kids out of the rows of cars and pickup trucks parked outside the Tweedsmuir and the Westport Hotels each evening.  At the time only men were allowed into the beverage rooms.  Family members waited outside.

“His bill came to $12.00.  He took out a hundred-dollar bill and placed it on the table.  I asked if he had anything smaller.  ‘No, the hundred is for you.  This meal was the most fun I have had all day.’”

Posted by rodcros
Filed in Westport
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
Leave a Comment »

Notes from the other side of 60

August 10, 2009

They streamed in from Toronto, Lakefield, and Westport.  The Kingston contingent had just gained a new granddaughter and couldn’t make it this year, but the rest of   my classmates from Westport Public School, The Old Eights, sat down to a Saturday lunch featuring some of Newboro Lake’s finest bass fillets and abundant conversation.  This was the year when we (all but me) turned sixty, so before we broke for an all-aboard tour of the property on the Ranger, we put together a few observations and yarns for the benefit of readers who have yet to reach that august plateau.

On Aging:

Ice cream is its own reward.  Eat it while you can.  Don’t go to a fortieth high school reunion without a large-print nametag or no one will recognize you.  Accept the fact that gravity rules.  What will fall will fall, be it body parts, kidney stones, hair, jowls, eyelids.  So.  We are still well and enjoying each other’s company, despite the failing parts.  After all, in the book of one’s life, what really counts is the story, not the pictures.  Buy your toys while you can still afford the insurance to use them.  Don’t use your motorcycle to hunt with.

On our collective memory:

Date your pictures.  Write down who is in them and what year it was. Newboro Lake writer Charlotte Gray said in a speech recently that we should date and label all of our photographs.  Also print off all of your important emails so that there is a hard copy and our memories won’t just disappear.

No Old Eights lunch would be complete without a yarn about another local writer, Orville Forrester.  His son Jim offered this one:  “The only time I’ve ever been around explosives was when Dad dropped a stick of dynamite into the spring above our cottage to blow it out.  There was a big white explosion — a fountain of quartz crystals and water mixed together.  Then in typical fashion he dug a trench through the North Shore Road, ran a little plastic hose down the hill to the cottage, and we had running water.”

On change:

Somebody at IBM once said, “We’ll only need about two of these things.”  Learn to type if you haven’t already done so.  Don’t resist technology.  It will keep you connected to the world and allow you to communicate in a pervasive way.  Older people do well with Google.  It’s good for the mind to use search engines.  It re-ignites one’s innate sense of curiosity and provides new ways to find interesting things.

The publishing industry is in trouble, not from the recession, but from the spread of digital media.  Universities are cutting costs by eliminating textbooks, offering course materials online.   Newspapers find themselves competing with their own online editions.  Are journalists a dying breed?  One of the biggest worries publishers have with digital media is that if someone censors something, a single copy can be deleted and it’s as if the item had never existed.  Our memory is lost, replaced by whatever the Winston Smith of the day has decided we should remember in its place.

Stuff is one of the worst afflictions:

“You are probably wondering how we survived the Toronto garbage strike.  The pyramids they built were very convenient.  You’d just go with any number of bags and hand them to someone else and they would end up in one of these mountains of garbage.  You could give them everything, as long as it was double bagged, no questions asked. We had put an old washing machine out for pickup just before the strike, though.  It’s still there. They sprayed the pyramids of garbage to reduce the smell and the rodents.  The first day of garbage pickup was a bit ripe.  The trucks smelled horrible.”

“But the Portland dump is a lovely site.  Robert Redford (a red Ford pickup) and I drove to the dump with the stuff left over from my Westport yard sale.  It all had to go.  The staff were very nice to me and even helped unload my junk.”

Then there was the time Jim and Stephanie had to get rid of an old, 1940’s house trailer abandoned on their property after use as a goat shed and chicken coop.  Their neighbour was in charge of the operation in their absence, and he enlisted the help of a backhoe and a crane to lift the thing onto a flatbed trailer for disposal.  The only suitable landing bed among the hills was the township road.  As the crane swung the hulk onto the trailer, the slings pulled up through the rotten floor and out tumbled dozens upon dozens of large, shiny milk snakes.  Bedlam ensued.  Heavy machinery operators and farmers are as jumpy as anyone else when the road is alive with angry snakes.

Posted by rodcros
Filed in Westport
Tags:
Leave a Comment »