Early last autumn, I reported that Donat Leduc and his wife Sandy — along with team mates Pierre Leduc, Marie-France Leduc, Jean-Pierre Dicaire and team captain, Fern Quesnel from Moose Creek — had bested teams from Crysler, Embrun, St-Albert, Limoges and Casselman to win a two-day, multi-event Inter-village Challenge at the 2014 St-Albert Curd Festival.
While this was great news, the story was enhanced by the fact their group, the Dunvegan Pirates, promised to split the $3,000 prize between the Glengarry Pioneer Museum, the Dunvegan Recreation Association and the local recreation group in Moose Creek.
DRA President, Ben Williams, e-mailed me a few days ago to report that Donat and Sandy Leduc have just received cheques from St-Albert’s Cheese for the Dunvegan Recreation Association and the Glengarry Pioneer Museum. The plan, at least in the case of the DRA, is to hold a small ceremony at which Donat and Sandy Leduc will present representatives of the Association with the donation.
I also wanted to acknowledge the group’s generosity in this column. This sort of community spirit is all too rare these days and I am thrilled to see the Leduc family and the other members of the Dunvegan Pirates setting such a fine example.
Phone Digit Erratum
In last week’s story about the Dunvegan Soccer program and the fact it is in jeopardy, I expressed hope that a community-minded person would step forward and volunteer to be Dunvegan’s soccer representative on the Glengarry Soccer League committee. The only problem is that I messed up one of the phone numbers. Ben Williams is reachable at 613-525-4006… NOT “527”. On the plus side, I did get Vivian Franklin’s number right: 613-527-3242.
Payphones: end of the line
While we’re on the topic of phones, did you know that there are fewer than 56,000 payphones still in service across Canada? And if you think finding a payphone is hard now, you haven’t seen anything yet. The Canadian Radio Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) just gave the telecom companies the green light to start mothballing the payphone network.
According to a fact-finding study on the role of payphones in the Canadian communications system that the CRTC ordered in 2013, only 32 percent of Canadians surveyed say they’ve used one in the past year. The study also found that 636 of Canada’s payphones aren’t used even once a year, and nearly 11,000 phone booths average less than one call a day.
No doubt this decline in the once ubiquitous payphone comes as a result of the meteoric rise in the use of cell phones. However, not everyone in Canada has a cell phone or even a landline phone, for that matter. This is confirmed by the fact research has shown the majority of payphone users are low-income households and rural Canadians.
With the CRTC’s blessing, telecom companies can now take payphones out of service, providing they give 60 days’ public notice. And this is where I think the train comes off the track.
In addition to the “public notice” proviso (which will probably be a tiny ad buried in the bowels of a newspaper), I believe the telecom companies should be required to erect a sign right beside the pay phone slated for closure informing people of how they can share their concerns about the loss of the phone with local authorities. I’m not convinced that the people most adversely affected by this new policy are regular consumers of print media. And point-of-use notices would have a much greater chance of reaching the actual payphone users.
“Make your will…”
In November of last year, I did a piece on a few of the wartime experiences of Allan V. MacIntosh of Skye Road north of Dunvegan. It was to have been the first in a series of stories honouring the contribution of Dunvegan natives in the defense of this nation’s freedom. I regret that it has taken this long to revisit this important topic, but better late than never.
As you may recall, Betty Bracken, daughter of Roberta “Bertie” MacKinnon, lovingly assembled the information for this series. Betty’s mother, now a resident of the Maxville Manor, grew up in Dunvegan in the early years of the 20th century. And it is one of Bertie MacKinnon’s sisters (and Betty’s namesake) who I wanted to feature next: Elizabeth (Betty) MacKinnon.
Betty MacKinnon died in 2009, so I was unable to speak with her directly about her role in World War II. But her niece provided a number of written accounts of the period. She also loaned me a couple photos of Betty. A strikingly attractive woman, her radiant smile can be seen in photos from the war, as well as one taken 40 years later upon her retirement.
After graduating from Cornwall General Hospital’s nursing program in 1942, and working briefly in Kirkland Lake and Cochrane, Betty joined the Royal Canadian Army. She was sent overseas in 1943.
Asked if she was nervous about working in an operating room, she said “no.” So she was told to make her will and say goodbye to her family. Shortly thereafter, Betty joined the Fifteenth Canadian General Hospital in Italy. It was there she earned the prestigious Oak Leaf for her numerous instances of hospital duty under fire. As the Italian campaign wound down, Betty returned to England to join the Fourth Canadian General Hospital.
There she was promoted to operating room supervisor and worked 12-hour days, from 7 AM to 7 PM, in a “casualty clearance” or triage station. Her role was to prioritize who received what treatment and when. On average, her unit performed over 60 operations a day in four operating rooms.
One of Betty’s most vivid memories was of D-Day when her hospital admitted and discharged nearly 1,000 people in a single day. One story in particular stuck with Betty. A severely wounded patient related how, after being shot in the groin, he lay bleeding to death in a mud hole. As he grew increasingly weaker, he grabbed fistfuls of mud and packed his wound in an attempt to staunch the bleeding. To everyone’s amazement, including his own, the soldier survived.
In 1946, Betty returned to Canada and worked with the Department of Veterans Affairs in Ottawa and Montreal at various veterans’ hospitals. On the 50th anniversary of D-Day, Betty remembered how her time at these post-war institutions back home was probably the hardest of all. “There I saw shattered lives and disabled young men; some we had treated after D-Day,” Betty was quoted as saying. “It was enough to make you weep.”
Two years later, in 1948, she took a postgraduate course in O.R. techniques at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto. However, it wasn’t long after this that Betty’s country roots began to emerge. She found that life in big city life was getting to her. So, in 1951, she joined Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL) and became O.R. supervisor of the Deep River Hospital where she stayed for 32 years.
It was in Deep River that she met her husband, Les Culpepper. Born in British India, Les joined the Royal Air Force and fought in the Pacific theatre. After the war, he returned to India, but immigrated to Canada shortly after India was granted independence and landed a position in electronics at ACEL.
There, the two found the peace they so richly deserved… far from the killing fields of their youth.
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