James Robinson, 25, of Carleton Place and native of Timmins, died of a heart attack on Sunday while swimming in the Mississippi River opposite the Recreation Centre supervised pool. Deceased is a brother of Mrs. Earl Kemp who resided in Almonte for several years and who now operates the Moderaire Beauty Salon on Bridge Street, Carleton Place. Mr. Robinson came to Carleton Place a short time ago and was employed in Findlays Limited. He weighed 230 pounds. He was halfway across the river when he took the seizure and sank in 15 feet of water. John Drummond, son of Mr. and Mrs. Gordon Drummond, and Ken Williams, son of Mr. and Mrs. Omar Williams, went to his rescue and although they are both’ only 12 years of age, they dragged him to the shore. They answered calls for help from the victim’s brother-in-law, Earl Kemp. Artificial respiration was applied but examination by Dr. J. A. Johnston revealed that the young man died of a heart attack as there was no water in his lungs.
July 30, 1952
On July 1st, a young married woman of this town lost a considerable sum of money. She travelled on the Pembroke local to Ottawa that day and when she arrived found that her money was gone. The only time she opened her purse was at the C.P.R. station here, and it is likely that the money fell out of her purse at her feet when she bought her ticket. An advertisement in this paper failed to bring results. Someone picked that money up and that person must have a very elastic conscience to be able to keep money that belongs to a young mother who can ill afford to lose it. If the finder ever suffers remorse, it can be returned anonymously to the Gazette office and we will see that it gets to the proper party. Now and then when money is lost the finder does return it. When this happens, it recalls the lines written by Longfellow: “Whene’er a noble deed is done “Our hearts in glad surprise “To higher levels rise.’
Actually Doris seemed to settle down once she came home from a few months in the city. She ended up becoming a school principal. Her family was very influential in the city of Boston and she ended up marrying well–Mrs Doris Mason Grosse– yes well, a few times. She was married three times by the age of 45.
Doris Mason
United States Census, 1930
Event Type:
Census
Name:
Doris Mason • Edit
Sex:
Female
Age:
18
Event Date:
1930 • Edit
Event Place:
Boston (Districts 251-500), Suffolk, Massachusetts, United States • Edit
If anyone has not caught on I became obsessed with documenting those that had passed so they could be remembered for future generations a few years ago.
Do we think that serious textual stories are better, more “literary,” whereas something lighter fare is for the under educated? If so, then we have a problem. Today’s generations are not interested in facts, and to get them or a lot of other folks to read about history it has to be interesting. I don’t know about you but reading traditional text really doesn’t inspire me to want to know more, so I decided to take the ‘vanilla’ out of history. I mean what would you rather read–
“A faintness came over him, and together with the evacuations his bowels protruded, followed by a copious hemorrhage, and the descent of the smaller intestines: moreover portions of his spleen and liver were brought off in the effusion of blood, so that he almost immediately died.”
Well, maybe that is a terrible example–but today, one of the younger generation would ‘text’ that sentence something like this:
“Hey! That man just %^&* out his internal organs and I will never eat Pigs In A Blanket again”.
What about the local lad who was so popular that the crowd at one of our local fairs threw so many various items at him out of adoration that he died of asphyxiation? What will you remember? Pie Winners? I don’t think so. But, interesting tidbits helps you remember the rest of the story.
Of course we all remember Brothel Bertie (King Edward the VII) who probably exercised his prowess around the local area. When he visited in 1860 he might have ended dying from bow chicka wow wowwhen he had a drink at Bennie’s Corners if a certain lady from the Metcalfe farm had caught his eye. I don’t know about you, but reading about those “old community spirits” keeps my interests up and makes me want to know more.
Ice Ice Baby, Ice Ice Baby All right stop, Collaborate and listen
On the 18th of 1897 Carleton Place was advertising for someone to introduce military drills and exercise in the public schools. For $600 a year the individual they hired was to instill serious discipline into the local school child. It was mentioned that 15 minutes a day would increase the brain function from all that sitting sideways and slouching forward that a normal child does during the day.
Really? Really?
As Maestro Fresh Wes once said: “Let my backbone slide!”
The Central Canadian newspaper wanted the school system to hire Joseph McKay, son of James McKay, Carleton Place Bell Street baker for the position. He rose in his long militia service here from lieutenant of No. 5 Company in the late 1870’s to lieutenant colonel of his regiment at the turn of the century. The Rifle Ranges at Carleton Place were constructed during Lieut. Colonel McKay’s command and the newspaper said it would be hard to find a more efficient man for the position.
Tiffany Nixon in front of the “50 Shades of Grey’ apparatus at Hamsa Yoga in Carleton Place.
So what did I immediately think of when I read this? All I could see was the yoga trainers at Hamsa Yoga next to the Ginger Cafe . God only knows that I have embarrassed poor Tiffany Nixon enough calling them her ’50 shades of grey’ section on numerous occasions.
So what else did I remember when I read the newspaper article?
I saw Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Mackay who had risen to Major by that point in time looking something like Black Jack Jonathan Randall from the hit TV show Outlander instructing those Carleton Place children with a snap of his crop.
I don’t think there is a “chance in Inverness” that I will ever forget this story now–nor will you.
Ice Ice Baby, Ice Ice Baby All right stop, Collaborate and listen
Black Jack Jonathan Randall- Outlander with a little photoshop
Newspapers seemed to control our local towns and it wasn’t hard to sway the townsfolk into some sort of rabble rousing. Take in point some fine fowl, over 325 to be exact, that resided in Appleton belonging to the Herald’s Mr. Sam Allen. The joke was that Mr. Allen’s chickens were so well esteemed they had taken their fair share of prizes at the Almonte Fair. In fact too much so– as there were a few dozen articles about his chickens!
The “opposite side” joked that maybe a visit to “the Appleton hood” by some could relieve him of some of his fair feathered friends. Was this a warning to Mr. Allen that his poultry should enter the KFC Witness Protection Plan? Or, was it to be soon a Winner Winner Chicken Dinner for all in Lanark County? In everything– the rooster, human or fowl made and still makes the most news. It has been proven many times in the Almonte Gazette and the Carleton Place Herald. Trust me!
Anything less than the best is a felony Love it or leave it, You better gain way You better hit bull’s eye, The kid don’t play..
Many cisterns in Almonte are now dry and there is water famine in many country places. Also the long dry cold winter has been serious for those residents of Almonte who depend upon rain water for their domestic supply as many cisterns have gone dry. Others have burst and the water is being teamed from the river to many of our homes.
How do you convey to today’s generation how important these cisterns were to basic human needs in years gone by? Heck, I didn’t even know what one was until a year ago. How do you get someone to remember what they were?
Van you take do you take the vanilla out hard facts to a generation who says: “I’m cleaning out my car today in case someone needs 27 empty water bottles”.
Easy– Without a cistern and water they would have had no coffee. I guarantee you everyone will remember that now. No cisterns= no double double.
I could be wrong, but history argues that taking the vanilla out of writing will always be in fashion. How many of these local stories have you remembered?
In December 1, 1886 issue of the Almonte Gazette it had an article about people being quite excited about having a train come from the west through our small towns. Was it carrying rare spices or interesting people? No, it was carrying bleached buffalo bones. Why would anyone get excited about bleached buffalo bones? So after I did some research I came up with some pretty interesting tidbits from Bloomberg View.
The completion of the first transcontinental railway in 1869 divided the Great Plains in two. Some of its earliest passengers were buffalo hunters, and as they spread out from the railroad’s embankments, the vast buffalo herds were divided, as well.
It marked the beginning of their end. By the tens, perhaps even the hundreds, of millions, the animals were killed for their skins, which were then easily transported to the coasts for the fashionable classes to buy. One man boasted of taking down 1,500 buffalo in a week — 250 in a single day.
The first hunters got as much as $10 per skin. As more sought to cash in, the price plummeted to $1. Still, very good money for the era.
On the other hand, the buffalo skinners, those who followed the hunters and did the dirty work, were paid only a small percentage, plus all the buffalo meat they cared to eat. They went for the tenderloins and tongues and left the rest to rot. Vultures, like the hunters, enjoyed a few bounty years.
Then the herds were gone. Homesteaders arrived to a landscape white with buffalo skeletons. These would become, in many cases, their first harvest. “The prairies of the Northwest are covered with the bleached bones of the countless dead,” a New York Times correspondent wrote in December 1884, “and here commerce steps in again to ask for something else: the very last remnant there is left of an annihilated race.”
Animal bones were useful things in the 19th century. Dried and charred, they produced a substance called bone black. When coarsely crushed, it could filter impurities out of sugar-cane juice, leaving a clear liquid that evaporated to produce pure white sugar — a lucrative industry. Bone black also made a useful pigment for paints, dyes and cosmetics, and acted as a dry lubricant for iron and steel forgings.
Fresh bones could be boiled to extract gelatin for food, glues and photographic emulsions. Their leached husks, rich in phosphorous, were one of the first industrial fertilizers.
And so the homesteaders gathered the buffalo bones. It was easy work: Children could do it. Carted to town, a ton of bones fetched a few dollars. Sent to rendering plants and furnaces in the big industrial cities, that same ton was worth between $18 and $27. Boiled, charred, crushed or powdered, it was worth as much as $60.
A former bone trader named M.I. McCreight calculated that at least $40 million worth of bones was purchased by the processing plants in all — about $1 billion in today’s dollars. “A rather sizable pay-roll,” he noted dryly in his memoir, “to have escaped the notice of history writers.”
The gathering of bones traced the routes of the railroads. Swaths of land 40 miles to each side of the tracks would be picked bare; newspaper reports from the 1870s, aiming to amuse their citified readers, spun corn-pone tales of farmers bringing in “bumper crops.”
By the 1880s, however, a few reporters were expressing nervous awe at the scale of the cleansing, and even despair for what had been lost. In 1891, not 25 years after the slaughter began, the Chicago Daily Tribune ran a dispatch titled “Relics of the Buffalo.” The relics were the animals’ empty pathways and dust wallows, worn into the surface of the Manitoba plains over countless years. The bones, let alone the living creatures, were long gone.
In reports from the era, the full cost of the buffalo-bone trade is usually revealed by the things not said. No note of lament or irony can be found in a 1907 Washington Post story describing the peculiar nature of Seneca Street in Topeka, Kansas. In the 1880s, it was “paved with buffalo skulls” thrown aside by the bone traders — big but hollow, they weren’t worth the space they took up in boxcars. “In light of subsequent values this was the most expensive pavement on earth,” the writer observed, for by 1907 buffalo remains had become collectors’ items, and “a pair of buffalo horns and the head of an animal of that breed will easily bring $400.”-Bloomberg View
I remember standing at some electronics place on Carling Avenue a few decades ago in Ottawa arguing with my late husband about VCR’s. He looked carefully at the VCR and said it wouldn’t last, and we ended up taking a Betamax home–and we all know how that turned out. They were a staple in every household— even if we couldn’t program them. The last-known company manufacturing VCRs will reportedly halt production this month, ending an era. Funai Electric Corp., based in Osaka, Japan, blamed the decision in a statement on difficulties in acquiring components, according to PC World. Dismal sales also likely contributed. Funai said only 750,000 VCRs (or video cassette recorders, for all you youngins) were sold worldwide in 2015. That’s down from millions in the 1980s and 1990s, when they were a basic in American households. Funai said only 750,000 VCRs were sold worldwide in 2015. Dang, I’m surprised THAT many were still being sold– and surprised they were still in production, when you can buy a used one for like $5. There must be some part of the developing world that doesn’t have flea markets and yard sales. Remember how all of North America spent the 80s committing felonies, building libraries of recorded films dubbed off of television and copied from rentals. I can remembering using tapes that in some cases cost more than DVDs today. Now..all long gone..
Today, retailers like Best Buy and Walmart continue to sell devices that play both DVDs and VHS tapes. For a standalone VCR, however, it appears easier to turn to places like Amazon or eBay (or your local thrift shop). Did you know that film studios reportedly stopped producing VHS tapes back in 2006.?
Everything goes the same way. My late husband’s first hand held calculator, which replaced a slide rule, cost over $1,000.00. Now you can buy something equal for about $5 at the grocery checkout stand. But back in the day that calculator was worth every penny. My first microwave cost over $800.00 and was a monster,taking up most of my counter space..today? $45.00.
This is a sad day for me– seeing the demise of the VCR. My technical know how peaked with the VCR. I could set up and program one in minutes, instruction manual be damned. RIP VCR. So what if I bought an extended warranty from Sears–way back, what now?
lindaseccaspina 