To the best of my knowledge, the last time someone from Dunvegan entered local politics as a newcomer was 60 years ago. In the 1958 Township of Kenyon elections, Norman MacLeod took a seat on the Council for the first time. It was a big year for “Little Norman,” as he was affectionately known. Just five months earlier, he and his wife Margaret had celebrated the birth of their son, Kenneth N. MacLeod. Whether history repeats itself this autumn is up to the voters of North Glengarry. Dunvegan’s Louise Quenneville has announced that she is running against Jacques Massie and Kevin van den Oetelaar for the position of North Glengarry’s Councillor at large.
Louise has only called Dunvegan home for a little over a year; she purchased the late Leslie Clark’s cottage across from the old brick schoolhouse. However, she has lived in the area for over two decades. And for ten of these years, she has worked at the Glengarry Memorial Hospital in Alexandria.
When Louise told me she had tossed her hat into the ring, I asked her why. She position is that North Glengarry has a great deal of potential. However, to unlock it — to foster development and improve services — she believes the key is planning, long-term planning. “We need to look at where North Glengarry wants to be in ten years,” declared Louise. “As a council and a community, we have to decide what actions need to be taken to attract newcomers, encourage investment, hold on to our hospital beds, and keep our schools open.” According to Louise, this expansion also needs to be sustainable and sensible, while protecting our rural quality of life, including clean water and green space. This is where she says planning comes in; an area of expertise where she firmly believes she has something to offer.
From customer service experience with the airlines, to teaching, to corporate sales, to her current role at our local hospital, Louise has learned the importance of listening and then taking positive action. She’s also confident her project management and creative problem solving skills can be of invaluable assistance. “Regardless of whether they’re large or small, all projects require the same attention to detail: resources, time frames, stakeholder relations, measurable goals and cost control,” says Louise. “It may be safe to say that it’s my diverse experience that sets me apart from the other candidates.” And she may be right.
Tartan Tie Day
Last week, a bag of ties arrived at our door. Tartan ties. Thirty-one of them. Their collector and owner, a loyal reader from Greenfield, had dropped them off in the hope they would live on in the creations of local fibre artists. But I knew the moment I saw the collection of Scottish-themed neckwear that they harboured a delightful story.
The whimsical collection was the property of Len Siwik. Len and his wife Joan fell in love with Kenyon when they were on leave from the Canadian Armed Forces and visited her parents’ retirement property on the 4thof Kenyon. In due course, the couple left the army and bought the farm where they have lived for the nigh on fifty years. As an aside, to celebrate his release from the military, Len let his facial hair grow into the trademark beard he has sported from 1969 until today.
Casting about for his next career, Len settled on teaching (a growth industry back in those days). Given his engineering experience from the Forces and his love of “rithmetic,” Len graduated from Queen’s Duncan McArthur College as a math teacher. The difference between Len’s career trajectory and today’s newly minted teachers is that he and his classmates were virtually guaranteed a job… especially if one taught high school math and sciences. “I could have thrown a dart at a map of Ontario and found a school that would have hired me,” quipped Len.
In Len’s case, the dart landed in Williamstown at Char-Lan High, where he taught mathematics/computer science from 1971 to 1999. The school was perfectly situated; he could enjoy a leisurely commute to and from work and get home in time to run his part-time cow/calf beef operation. Where the ties come in is that Len was an “old school” type of teacher. He wore a jacket and tie every single day he taught. However, it didn’t take long before he added a twist by declaring Friday’s to be Tartan Tie Day, or TTD as he dubbed them. Every Friday, in recognition of the region’s Scottish heritage, Len would don a pure wool tartan tie and head south to Williamstown. Moreover, he would wear a different one every week. As evidence of the poor observational skills of many students, it took almost two years until someone recognized that TTD was a thing.
I asked Len who his tartan tie pusher had been and he said he’d buy them on sale at Danskin’s in Maxville. What’s neat is that, when you lay out the ties side-by-side, you can see the impact of fashion over the years in the widely varying widths of the ties. I also asked Len why he chose to teach mathematics. He told me that he had had a love affair with numbers since he was four years of age. “It was words that always gave me problems,” said Len.
Bait and switch
While researching this week’s first item, I came across an ingenious bait and switch scheme in the August 2, 1946 issue of the Glengarry News. It was aimed at farmers as a way of killing rats, but I suspect it would work equally well with the voracious mice we have in the Dunvegan area… assuming it isn’t antique Fake News, of course.
It’s really a variation on the classic New Brunswick mousetrap. If you’ve never seen one, it consists of bucket containing a few inches of antifreeze, an empty tin can with a rod sticking out the two ends sits on the rim and a wooden board from the ground to the top lip of the pail. To set the trap, you smear peanut butter on the can and walk away. Mice, attracted by the enticing aroma of the groundnut spread, walk the plank and jump on to the can. The weight of the intruder causes the can to rotate and Mickey falls into the bucket. The antifreeze serves double duty. It not only dispatches the rodent, it also preserves it until one can return an empty the bucket.
According to the News, New England farmers would fill up a steel barrel with feed to within 12 inches of the top and put a board up against the side to make it easy for the rats to access the feast. Soon the rats are so used to their dinner-in-a-barrel they scurry up the plank and leap in without a single look. Once they’ve been lulled into a false sense of security, the farmers would empty out the feed, refill the barrel with water — and here’s the key — sprinkle the water with grain. The claim is that rats dive in expecting good eats and end up in Davey Jones’ locker instead. Neat idea, but does grain float? And, if it does, for how long?
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