I must come clean. In last week’s review of the Glengarry Pioneer Museum’s Ice Storm ‘98 fundraising dinner, I neglected to mention one of the contributors to the evening’s success: Steve “Spider” Merritt. And I apologize to him for the oversight.
Spider — for 50 years a colourful thread in the tapestry that is the Dunvegan area — has a proud history as an Ottawa street performer or busker. It was his recently penned ballad about the icy start to 1998 that kicked off the evening’s entertainment. Thank you Steve for your gift of song… and for being you.
Ice Storm Results
While I promised to get back to you on how the Ice Storm fundraiser turned out financially, final figures are still not available. I’m led to believe that the auctions (silent and live) brought in close to $3,000. And, at last count, 140 tickets had been sold. What’s still up in the air is Scotiabank’s contribution. Once I have a final accounting, I’ll pass it along. The good news is that the event appears to be well in the black.
Before moving on, I’d like to praise financial institutions like the Bank of Nova Scotia and Caisse Populaire Desjardins for their continued support of local events. Yes, I know that banks, Scotiabank and the Caisse included, generate mega-profits for their shareholders and members. However, instead of opting for the high profile, national sponsorship route, these two institutions stick close to home and help out their local community. Thank you.
Film in search of a story
To be honest, I was a bit disappointed with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, last Saturday night’s film at the DRA hall. That’s not to say it was a bad film. It just didn’t measure up to my fond memories of it. A classic example of the “buddy” genre, the film capitalized on the snappy banter between Redford and Newman, the same sort of male-to-male bonding that marked the other two buddy classics from 1969: Easy Rider and Midnight Cowboy. And 50 years down the line, the Butch and Sundance chemistry was still there.
What I hadn’t appreciated when the film first hit the theatres was that its storyline was as fluffy as cotton candy. Endless sequences of riding, swimming and walking through, albeit spectacular, scenery to escape the posse hot on their heels makes for a rather thin gruel, plot-wise. No matter how many times the fugitives ask rhetorically, “who are those guys?” it’s still just one long, seemingly endless, horse chase. In fact, the director was saddled with a script so light on content and meaningful dialogue that, to kill time, he had to add “artful” musical sequences like the protracted one with Newman and Katherine Ross horsing around on a bicycle. And the extreme close-ups that were all the rage in the sixties didn’t help matters all that much.
Nevertheless, an evening spent in the company of friends, munching on Jim Tilker’s hot-buttered popcorn and Laurie Maus’s home baked cookies and her version of Flora Chisholm’s Instant Cheesecake recipe, always ends up on the plus side of the ledger in my book.
Not a pick-up convention
Did you, like I, wonder what was afoot at the DRA hall on Tuesday, February 6th? I know it looked a pick-up truck convention had hit town, but the real explanation is that it was a DHI meeting. The acronym stands for Dairy Herd Improvement. It’s an initiative that helps dairy producers capture data about their cows and their individual milk production to assist the farmers with making management decisions.
CanWest DHI hosted the meeting in Dunvegan. The company has nearly 200 staff serving 4,200 herds across five provinces. In addition to field reps, CanWest operates three labs (in Chilliwack, Edmonton and Guelph) and tests about 3,000,000 DHI samples annually.
The focus of the Dunvegan meeting was to help farmers who use DairyCom, DHI’s herd management software. Dr. Ewen Ferguson, a veterinarian from the Campbellford area and Jeromy Ten Hag from CanWest DHI in Guelph were the guest speakers. They spoke about raising heifers, hoof health and the software’s new animal traceability functions.
How did the DRA hall come to be chosen for the meeting? I’m not sure, but it may have something to do with the fact that the parents of Wanda Williams, the CanWest District Manager who organized the seminar, live in the area.
Magic Gas update #1
As regular readers may recall, a number of weeks ago I mused about two classified ads I stumbled across under the “Agents Wanted” section of the June 1926 and the March 1931 issues of Popular Science. The ads promised $500 in monthly sales (according to the Bank of Canada’s Inflation Calculator that’s around $7,000 in today’s dollars) selling a “new discovery” called Magic Gas. The claim was that a $1 box of Magic Gas equaled 33 gallons gasoline. Interested parties were invited to contact P. A. LeFebvre (sic) & Co. of Alexandria, Ontario.
I’m pleased to report that this story generated two replies. The first was a phone call from Lorraine Sabourin, who now lives at the McConnell Manor in Cornwall. She told me that P.A. Lefebvre & Co. operated out of a building located just behind the magnificent old brick Post Office and Customs & Excise building in Alexandria, just north of the Quirky Carrot. Which makes perfect sense if they were in the mail order business.
The second came from Faith Lefebvre of Bainsville. She’s the wife of Aurele Lefebvre, nephew of Palma Adrien Lefebvre. Her contribution to my growing knowledge of this interesting character was that her husband’s uncle was an inventor who “patented many items and later sold the patents to an American firm.” According to Faith, in 1927, P.A. also opened a printing business in Alexandria (another natural extension of the mail order business), which later moved to Cornwall and became Cornwall City Press.
So, it would appear this story has legs. I will do more research, locally and in the Canadian Intellectual Property database, and provide another update if the results warrant one.
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