My father remained on the family farm. I remained on the farm until I was 11 years old. I often told the children of today that the conditions that obtained on a farm in the early 1900's was really an existence rather than a living. It was hard, persistent work and everybody lived off the farm. There was very little bought in the way of groceries; there'd be tea and sugar and things like that. Everybody had chickens and hens, and we used to have turkeys and everything that was used for the family -it all came off of the farm.

Clothing was all wool, you know. Everybody had sheep and the wool would have to be cleaned and then taken to a mill and made into rolls and then spun. There was one lady in the district who had a loom, and she could make blankets and clothing too. All the underwear was homemade and had to be wool. As a matter of fact, I think looking back, if it hadn't been for the good clothing we had we would have frozen to death.

Then of course, heat was all provided by wood on the farm. To us, living with today's conditions, it was very hard living, but everyone was quite happy because everyone was the same. As a matter of fact, I remember many years ago asking Father John MacMillan - he was a historian - why it was that the people were so happy and the living was so good on Prince Edward Island. He said, "The reason is, there's no paupers and there's no millionaires"

In 1911, my father was engaged in a lot of different work. He was one of the head starters of the cheese factory and a director. He was one, I guess, perhaps, the head, of the people that set the starch factory up in East Baltic. As a matter of fact, he did too much of that work. He lost time on his farm and it went down quite a bit. My father was into politics, he was a very strong Conservative. I never saw anyone who could stand up to him in an argument. He mowed them down - educated men and college men - when they got into an argument, he'd trim them down to size pretty quick. So I think he was in the wrong niche but he had to stay home and keep the old people.

Then in 1911 he was appointed to take charge of the Light Station at East Point. At that time it paid good money .I think it was somewhere around $1,600 a year, but you had to hire your own help out of it. So that left him $80 or $90 a month, and you could live quite well at that time. They were quite pleased to make the move, but then they found out what they got into.

You wouldn't believe the way the place had been neglected. The house was old and small, and the shape it was in! I've seen better, in pig pens. Rats had eaten the walls full of holes and I'm sure my mother scrubbed that floor twice a day for six months before she found it.

Mrs. Richardson wrote a book on the south side of Nova Scotia called We Keep the Light. She wrote of the conditions there. I found out later, on the grape vine, that the Department was going to fire them 'cause it was downgrading the Department. But the book took the Governor General's award that year for non-fiction, so they decided they'd better not mess around with that one. They went down there with electric lights and bathrooms and God knows what, and it really paid off.

The same conditions existed at East Point. We started in but you'd get no help from Ottawa, none whatever. My father started and everybody worked. We polished brass until we were all worn out, and we cleaned up the steam boiler arms -they were all red with rust - all the gear was in terrible shape. When I was 18 they shifted over to gas driven equipment My father was a great boiler man but he hated gas engines, so I went on as sort of a second. He had an assistant alright and I worked mostly from there until 1926. We kept working and fixing things by degrees.

I have a letter in my files from J. MacPhail - he was head of the department in Ottawa - he was down on an inspection and he wrote a very flattering letter to my father about the condition things were in. In 1926 my father passed away and left me with a ready-made family. My youngest brother was thirteen, so I done an awful lot of jobs at home.

I had pioneered in the radio business, along with everything else. I started out around 1920. There are only two pioneers left on the Island. One is Walter Hyndman and the other, myself. I had been at it commercially, sort of moonlighting, you know. I sold quite a few and I used to repair them. In 1926 one of Holman's managers came. He wanted me to go in their radio department, but I couldn't go because my father was ill and died a couple of months later. I still have a letter in my files advising me that the job was there any time I wanted to come.

I didn't know I had a sort of a complex for studying. I read about all the classics there were in existence because our neighbors, the Camerons, were marvelous readers and we used to swap books all the time. I also got a good working knowledge of gas engines and they weren't very complex.

The radio, well that's a story in itself that should be written up. There was a chap, Charles Ellsworth, whose mother had been a telegraph operator. She taught Charlie the morse code. They got hold of some crystals somewhere and his father hooked up enough batteries to get a transmitter. He used to talk to the operator at Cape Bear, the Marconi man. My father was in Souris one day and had some business with the elder Ellsworth and he took me to the house to see the young fellow working. Well, I'd been reading up on Marconi, of course, and that inspired me right there and then that I was going to be a radio operator. I used to gather all the information I could from magazines and one thing and another. Charlie went on and he was one of the pioneers in Marconi. There was no question that the job was open at Holman's but they only paid $80 a month to start, which was very good pay in 1926 but I couldn't handle the family in Summerside on that pay.

I applied for the job at the lighthouse. I got it completely on the record that we had made, because it was a political appointment at that time. There were a lot of applicants but McPhail in Ottawa, he was the head of the Department, refused to make a change and that's how I got the job there. They tried to rout me out in later years but it didn't work. I wasn't satisfied with the situation even then.

The place had been cleared just on the Point there - it had never been plowed -you could hardly walk at night. To give you an idea how interested Ottawa was: there was a new building built in 1923 and the cellar was still open -eight feet deep and it was a danger. I wrote to the local office to see if they'd do something about it. They wrote to Ottawa and the letter came back saying, "If I didn't want to do it myself, leave it as it was for I seemed to be the only one that was interested." There was an old bush on one side of the property. I cut that down and I put it in the cellar and I got a horse and rig and we hauled clay enough to level it off. That's an idea of what I was up against. It was like banging your head against a brick wall. I carried on, I did a lot of work on the house in 1929 because it was very poorly finished inside. I tried to get something done then but they refused. They said I could do it myself but not to come looking for thanks for it. The Provincial office would do what they could, but. They were hog-tied and, of course, everyone was scared of his job.

In the 1930's the radio beacon went in. I just escaped taking that over because they found out in Ottawa that I had been in the radio business, and they said I'd have to look after the radio beacon in addition to my other jobs. I think they were getting $400 extra a year and that meant 24 hour work. So I squeezed out of that, and I kept quiet about radio for several years. In the early thirties I got my amateur license and I could go on the air if I wanted to. They never let up all during the years. Every once in a while they would bring it up again - that I'd take it over. They had an operator but they didn't want to pay him. It was in 1953, by golly, when they had me over a barrel. I either took it over or I retired. So I made them an offer that they give me an extra man and $100 more so they grabbed it. From then on I was completely in charge of the whole Coast Guard Station and that improved matters considerably.

In the thirties I laid out the lawns that still exist there. Anyway, things went on fairly smoothly after that and it became a terrific tourist attraction - we used to get thousands of people every year. Finally I got a picnic ground going there and the remains of it are still there.

There's a man buried by the road that turns left after the station. He was lost in the August Gale in 1892. He was on a large vessel coming from the Madeleines. When they struck the point, for some crazy reason, they stripped the masts - took all the sail off. My grandfather was watching the vessel foundering through the lighthouse window and said, "By gosh, they'll turn over on 'em" and turn over she did.

When she turned over, the masts broke out. I think all but one of them managed to stay in the rigging. This fellow was an Emery from Wood Islands. They buried him right there as they usually did, you know. They put an Island stone about two feet high at the head of the grave. Thirty to forty years ago the grave was quite visible but now its gone down. Unfortunately, a number of years ago, someone on a picnic took the stone to make a hearth for a fire. It broke up with the heat so now there's nothing there. That's been a project that's bothered me for a long time. There should be some kind of a monument put there.

As I mentioned before, my father was into everything, the cheese factory and starch factory. And he did a good job at the Coast Guard Station. I have letters on file with very fine compliments but with that he was up against a brick wall. So was I when I took over. I went at it myself I must have been crazy, I guess with some of the things I did. My grandfather, of course, was in the coastal trade. He used to trade at Newfoundland, and down the American coast. There was an old merchant at St. Pierre that he got to know as he did business with him. I suppose liquor was brought back.

"I remember going to a fellow's house one day, I suppose I was collecting for something like the Red Cross. He had a large family and he didn't have any money so I said that was alright. It was just around dinner time and they had a couple of fowl on the table and all the trimmings. When I went home, I got a pencil and figured out what it would cost me to go and buy all that and when I was done I had my dinner, but I had nothing for breakfast or supper! It made a difference.

Times were hard. I remember when I was a little fellow on the farm. If a chicken died it was a tragedy because it represented a meal or perhaps 25 or 30 eggs. We had turkeys and they were hard to raise. When they died it was a real tragedy 'cause you could get a dollar for one of those. I don't think the young people today can understand that. Until the cheese factory and the starch factory came, you'd never see a dollar.

The starch factory was wonderful. They only got 30 cents a hundred-weight. The potatoes had to be hauled into the Baltic in carts and truck wagons. You see, from Fairfield and east, you had to go down the north side where the Baltic Rd. starts in, and then go in the Baltic where the dam is. It was a long, long haul. There was a wood road through the woods that goes in back of the farms. My father was one of them that had potato pickers. He got a lot of them together and they started building that road. In the heat of summer they had to cut the woods down and lay logs across the swampy areas.

Old Father James was an elderly man and he was a wonder with charity. I believe when he died, he didn't have one red cent. He'd go in there and he'd bring them tobacco and tea and sit there watching them work in the mosquitoes and everything. It never would have been done if it hadn't been for him. It was really the first real break the farmers got. They call the road "the Father James Road" now and it is a protected road.

The starch was used for everything. The potatoes were ground up and there was water running over them and the water washed the starch out of them. They went down in a big vat. The next day they'd go through a grinder about four feet in diameter and covered with sheet metal which had barbs in it and they would start that turning and get it all mixed. And then it would go up on another floor and it would be separated there. The water would be run out and the starch would be on the bottom. That would dry and they had thousands of feet of pipe to lay it on. They had a steam boiler, of course, and they dried it on that pipe and then bagged and shipped it. It come out in lumps, you know. I don't know whether you've ever seen starch in the old days but it was lumpy. You could starch your collar or use it in baking."

Mr. MacIntyre passed away in 1994. His remains were interred in the St. Columba Cemetery in Fairfield.