I went to grade six and never went to school after that. I started to work when I was twelve and worked with a farmer. He had sixteen cows and him and I milked the cows night and morning. There were six horses and his son looked after the horses. I worked in the woods a lot also.

I took diphtheria when I was eleven years old and we were all quarantined. You'd go to the store, and the storekeeper would set the stuff outside and you went and got it. The doctor was Dr. Morris from Dundas. You generally went after him with horse and buggy. The time the flu was raging, my father brought him down. My grandfather and grandmother had the flu. And when he was done, my father took him to St. Charles and from St. Charles he took him to Annandale. There were folks there waiting from St. Georges and the doctor was away a whole week. He never got his boots off; or never got back to his office.

When you got the doctor you were really seriously sick. There was Dr. Roddie at St. Peters and Dr. Morris at Dundas and Dr. Gus in Souris. We had home remedies like sulfur and molasses. They gave it to you every fall anyhow, and when you got up in the morning you could shake your lender over the stove and the top of the stove would burn; the sulfur would come right through you. I don't know whether it done you a lot of good but you had to take it anyhow. If your lips got chapped or you got a burn you'd put cream on the stove and boil it down to an oil and use that on a burn.

The hens would be out all the time. And my grandmother would take the sulfur and the lard and white hen manure, mix the three together and that was for burns or cuts or anything at all. There were a lot of old remedies. We had a mare that got cut bad on the wire and we got the vet and he had a salve he put on it. Twenty five years ago we would cure that with fresh cow manure. They found out now that there is an awful lot of healing in fresh cow manure because of enzymes and such. Science had to catch up with the past.

We had a couple of vets but they weren't really vets. They got veterinary books and they studied themselves. None of them went to college. My father had a couple of books and he was pretty much as good as the vets. Yes, there were two vets, though you wouldn't call them vets today, but it was wonderful work they done just the same. They could set a horse's broken leg. I know one man who had this mare and she couldn't foal and the vet cut it up inside of her and took the pieces out. So he must have known something about it. That would be quite an operation you know.

My uncle was struck in the face by blasting powder and he couldn't see, you know. Grandmother put him to bed and she took the olive oil and a cloth and every day she put the oil and the cloth over his face and in a month's time the skin came off his face just like a Halloween mask. There was the new skin underneath. His eyes were alright for he could see but there was one, even when he went to sleep, that didn't close right tight. And he had some blue specks on his face. They called him "Powder face Jack".

We lived on Conohan Rd. It used to be Dingwell's Mills but they kept shifting Dingwell's Mills down further. I was born in a house there but it's burnt now. They burnt it one Halloween and a lot of stuff burnt in it too.

Mom was a great one for hooking mats, so about thirty mats burnt. There must have been twenty pure wool blankets. We've got some too, I think there's about twelve there yet. I built a house right handy to the old one. I was married in 1938 so I built the house in 1939 or 1940. We had one stove in the kitchen. We just had one room first, the kitchen and the room upstairs, and then we built on afterwards.

I had a clay pipe but I don't know where it got to. I've been trying to buy one for ten years. Another thing I've tried to buy is a slate pencil. They used slates in the school and there were two kinds of slate pencils. There was the soft kind and the hard kind. We had no toys. At Christmas, we hung up our stockings and we'd get some raisins and one thing and another. As far as toys went, when we got bigger we made our own bows and arrows. We had plum pudding boiled right in the bag. We always had a roast of pork.

Thanksgiving was a day we never celebrated; it was just another day. We never celebrated New Year's. We worked and went to the woods just like any other day.

When I was seventeen, I went to Nova Scotia. We chopped the trees down and chopped the logs out, maybe twelve to sixteen, whatever the tree would make in decent logs. And there was a fellow with a horse and he'd put them on a brow. He built a proper brow with a big log and two skids for them to roll out on. And every evening the boss took a count of the logs at the supper table. Every two men were supposed to have a hundred logs. That was with the four pound axe and the old cross cut saw. And if you didn't have the hundred logs you didn't eat too many meals there because there were lots of men looking for work - men coming and going all the time in the depression.

It was hard work but I was big and strong, and I didn't mind it a bit. We took them to the mill. They cut them into deals -two by fours, two by sixes, two by eights -whatever they would make. We never cut any hardwood, it was all softwood - spruce and fir, some pine but not too much. There used to be lots of hardwood.

The Dixons, they lived up just a piece from McCormack's store, had quite a big mill here. And they had a place they called the Dingwell Hill and it was all hardwood. There were trees in there that would be about two to two and a half feet across the stump and eighty feet without a limb. And they cut four hundred of them every winter. They'd haul them and it was quite a trip.

The last time I was into that Dingwell Hill it was all grown up. It was terrible thick and it wasn't a hell of lot bigger than broom handles. My father, and a cousin of ours, his son, and myself cut the last trees for George Dixon. We cut four hundred that winter. Thirty four dollars for the four hundred trees. We wanted ten cents a tree but they wouldn't give ten cents. We cut and yarded them. We'd cut in the day and yard at night. That's taking them out of the woods with a team of horses to the pile. Pile them up with the horses -you couldn't do it by hand.

They shipped the most of them to the Madeleines after they sawed them. They sawed them into trap bows and boat keels, and different things. It was quite a business.

I worked in Nova Scotia from October to April and then came home to the shore. I did that eight winters. I started fishing first with Johnston. He owned the boats, the traps, and everything. That was Ernest Johnston and we fished from Fortune Harbour. You got two and a half to three cents a pound. And you usually had a bill in the store, too, that you had to square up. I was married about three years when I started with my own traps so that would be about 1941.

I built my own traps so I went to the woods and I cut the bows. I said. "I'm going to build a fleet a year". So I took the axe and went to the woods and cut nine hundred bows for three hundred traps. The bows I cut were little trees about as big as a broom handle. You'd bend them and steam them after hauling them home with a hand sleigh. I fished off Fortune for some years.

I'd go to Naufrage for mackerel and cod but I never fished alone. There was always another fellow with me. It was a bad spot there, the harbour was bad. I fished for a spell right off the beach at East Point. We'd haul up the boats every evening and launch them every morning. The boats were only 23 or 24 feet at the outside - only small boats. Earl Johnson run the factory at East Point to pack the lobster there.

One time we got short of bait at East Point and his brother Ernest had the Herring factory at Fortune and he was getting a lot of herring. So we left East Point one morning before daylight and we came to Fortune, in a little boat with a small engine, and loaded the boat with herring and went back to East Point. The boat had only a five horsepower engine, you know, so it was dark by the time we got back.

I was the last fellow at Fortune with the old five horse power engine. And I was the last fellow at Fortune Harbour to fish with a dory. I trawled in the dory one year about 1941 or 1942. Jackson and I, we trawled together. He'd take me out and he'd take one string and rd take the other. It would be good trawling for about a month.

You went to Souris only if you had business or had to go to the bank. You could buy anything at Matthew and McLean's store from a needle to an anchor. And if they didn't have it they'd say we'll have it for you at the last of the week, and it was there. They were a great store. When we were kids it was great to get a trip to Souris if you could. You see, the cash where they make the change was at the back and the counters were up front. The clerk would put the counter slip and the money in this thing and they'd give it a pull and it went on the wire up to where they made the change. It was great fun to see them travel.

Oh yes, things have changed now a lot. Grandmother made her own yeast with hops. Some grows around home yet. She'd put them in a jar with water and perhaps a little sugar and they fermented. There would be a jar of that all the time, you know, working away. If we were short of biscuits sometimes, Mom would take the sponge, you know where it would raise, and she'd mix it with soda and she'd cook it the same as biscuits. The only things we had to buy at the store were flour, salt and tea, just the staples.

We ate mostly pork for meat. We had beef of our own if we wanted to kill it but we weren't very fond of beef. Every fellow liked the pork and the fish. My father and I did the butchering. Even Mom did the butchering until we got big enough to help.

You see we done everything for ourselves. We built our own wood sleighs, our box sleighs and built our own cartwheels, and made our own double harness with some leather and some heavy belting. We used that for the traces and the leather for the back pads. If you wanted an extra pair of frames you went to the woods and you cut the crooked stick and took it to the blacksmith and he put the irons on it.

We had one of the Francis' sleighs made by Lorne's father and uncle. His grandfather made them first, then Harry and Arthur, his two sons, kept on going. Some of their things were sold as far west as Alberta. My son had two of them. You never thought that some day there wouldn't be any more.

My grandfather was very old when he died. They say he was a hundred. And Grandmother was 97 and had every tooth but one, and never owned a toothbrush in her life. I can tell you about the first flue my grandmother and grandfather had. The first house they built - it would be perhaps as big as this room here, not any bigger - and they built the fireplace. They made four wooden ladders with the rungs in them, then they took the marsh hay and they wove it up the ladder through the rungs and then plastered the thing thick with brick clay, that was their flue, the first flue. Grandfather would go to the woods and he'd get the fir trees, slit it up and dry it and make the barrels for churning. He worked a lot in the shipyards at Fortune, and further up the river at the mills right below our place, building the sailing ships. He did a lot of carpenter work and framed a lot of buildings. My grandfather could do pretty near anything. He could make you a suit as good as a tailor. The suits were hand sewn but he never made no money. Money was a thing he wasn't interested in. He could measure you and make you a dandy pair of boots. When the soles of your shoes wore out, he would mend them. You'd buy a leather half sole and then he would attach them with wooden pegs. If you wanted a stick of lumber for anything he hewed it out with a broad axe. The broad axe was about a foot wide and it had ahead on it something like a bench axe and the handle is offset.

My mother and father worked pretty hard, the two of them. My father was a boss in the lobster factory at Fortune Harbour. You see, years ago, you put the cover on the can. You had what they called a copper and you had to go around with the solder and it was quite an art.

My mother was born in Little Pond and she baked and washed and pitched hay. She washed with the washboard and the old zinc tub. Mom could knit a pair of mitts a night in the wintertime. She'd start and by half past eleven, she'd throw you the mitts and say, "Don't lose them". Those needles would just twinkle. And it's a funny thing, all the old ladies in St. Charles were French women. They'd knit with five needles instead of four.

It was terrible traveling on the muddy roads in the fall. In the winters we'd travel by wagons or buggies across the fields and across the rivers on ice. In the fall and spring it was terrible altogether. Trying to get to Naufrage Harbour and up to North Lake in cars was awful, You'd be hauling cars out of the mud every day. I got my first car about thirty years ago. My wife was a Gillis born at Forest Hill. It was twelve miles up to the wife's home and we'd hitch up the horse and buggy every Sunday to visit.

Copyright
Waldron H. Leard