It’s been a couple weeks since the first part of this letter came out. That included a funny story about Pop saving a dog.
I will never forget the Tides in Nova Scotia either. Have you ever been there? They rise and fall as much as 60 feet, I believe it is. I know we tied up to the dock in Yarmouth one night and could step onto the dock, and the next morning when I woke up I was looking at seaweed hanging from the piles, and we were at least thirty feet below the dock.
One more and then I won’t bore you any longer. This was a bit humorous also. We were fogbound in Arichat, Cape Breton Island for five days. We were the first American Yacht that had ever docked there (or so they said)/ The whole town turned out to greet us, and they opened up the Town Hall and gave us a big dance, records on the victrola of course, but we had a whale of a time and of course like all sailors, each found ourselves a girl.
Mine happened to be the daughter of the Mayor. They are very strict in Arichat and her mother chaperoned her throughout the dance, and made her go home and pull her stockings up as in those days “rolled stockings” were the vogue, and I guess when I “swung her” around on one of the Contra dances that mama saw to her horror that she had her stockings rolled. Straight away she had to go home and roll them right back up, while mama and I waited outside.
Well the fog lifted a bit on the fourth day and we pulled away from the dock and out to sea, but the fog swells were so heavy that the Captain decided to go back to Arichat dock again and wait it out. My little girl friend had come down to kiss me goodbye at four in the morning. When we came back and docked the Captain went uptown for some line or canvas or something and I was scrubbing the top deck, when he came up and said (my nickname was Sinbad) “Well Sinbad it looks like we have to leave you here.” You can see how gullible I was. I said again, “Why, what have I done?”
He said “You know how strict they are with their girls up here Sinbad” and I told him that I did, so he informed me that some of the dory fishermen who were going out to their “lobster traps” early in the morning had seen Christine come off the boat (we called a Yacht a boat) and had gone and told her father that she had stayed aboard the Yacht all night as he had seen her leaving it at four in the morning.
“In other words,” he said, “although you and I know that she just came to kiss you goodbye, in the eyes of her father she has been compromised, and since we are a visitor to this country and want no bad relations, I see no way out of it Sinbad but for you to marry the girl and stay here with her.”
I believed him, and kept sending anxious glances up the dock expecting any minute to see the Mayor, the Justice of Peace or whatever they have in Canada, and a detachment of Royal Mounted Police and what have you coming for me.
After about two hours, I guess I looked so glum that he took pity on me as he came up and told me he was just kidding. Of course I have had many a laugh about it since, but if at the age of 18 you could have looked off at those, stark, cold and barren rocks, you would imagine how I felt.
In all my travels though, I don’t think that I ever met more hospitable people than those of Nova Scotia, and all the more so because they have a struggle to survive. This particular town of Arichat, had lost a great many men some years before when the Columbia fishing fleet, or most of it anyway went down in one of the Atlantic’s worst storms, and besides that they had lost a great many men (for the size of the town that is) in World War 1, and yet they showed “no quarter”, kept their dignity, and were certainly most hospitable to us.
The people were just lovely, and many a night I sit down now and my mind wanders back over the years, and over the fine people it has been my pleasure to meet over the years. They were a far cry from the well lighted, well heated, well paid, “coffee break” people of today, who are screaming for a $5 an hour pay, and a 20 hour week, and all expenses paid not only when they are old, but while they are young also. It looks like we are headed for a country where “everybody just VOTES for a living”.
Well there are a few around who have made private enterprise something to be proud of, and quite a few of those I am sure inhabit the new building of Newton Mfg. Co. Long may they prosper, and I HOPE that I can get my “tail wagging” and contribute a darned sight more to it in the next few weeks than I have in the past few, but as you so often say, in the meantime I will “roll with the punches”.
So, it’s “shipshape and Bristol fashion” to you sir!
Leon.
Oh yes, and ahoy the dory!
Tags: Pop's Letters
