But, um, ah, what else did we do? With skating- skating we didn't have- we couldn't skate because we didn't have no skates. So, ah, we ended up, ah- we had one skate. We'd learn how to skate on the one skate, eh?

And again that was just walking. We didn't have no buses or anything at all. Everybody had to walk. Sometimes- the other, ah, neighbours of ours that lived farther away from us had to walk about three miles in the wintertime, you-know, and summertime. Interviewer 3: Yeah. Speaker 02: You-know. And, ah, ah, there was- oh, it was- it was

Speaker: Everybody got married on a Monday- a Tuesday or- or Wednesday or Thursday. Nobody got married- Interviewer: Oh, why? Speaker: Why? Because we didn't have no electricity and we had no place to keep our food, eh? Interviewer: Mm-hm. Speaker: So it- everything- like, usually every- weddings were on a Tuesday because they would, ah, kill the chicken or turkey or whatever they had. Turkey was very occasional.

And, ah, I had a dress, a beautiful dress. My mother-in-law, his mom, ah, made it over for me. Like, she- she thought it was, ah- it was a- it didn't have no sequins on it and she wanted it flashy so she went ahead and put some sequins on it which made it really pretty, you-know? Ah, really different than- than today.

So they turned them into lecture halls for us. So it wasn 't the fanciest of digs. We took some lectures on U-of-T campus. Our, our anatomy classes were in the medical anatomy building so that we actually worked on cadavers and-so-on-and-so-forth. Oh yeah. Well to learn the anatomy you had to.

No, his half-brother. His half-brother 's there. "Oh, so where 's- where," you-know, type-of-thing, find out he 's gone to the east- east coast to visit his father. Okay. I 'm just here to you-know, to look over the digs because I told- I told him I was gonna be here at this time to re-- review the tenancy type-of-thing and look over the- the digs and see you-know.

They didn 't- I mean they didn 't really leave the neighbourhood type-of-thing. They just moved over here to bigger digs.

It took a while to get used to um the city noise and the din that's always there. You don't notice it until it's not there.

A few chickens see. That helped us out when we were- no work you-know? We worked the land and hewed the garden. Sold our produce in the Belleville-Market at that time. That was back in the dirty thirties as we called it. From thirty-one on. Thirty-four or five.

I can barely remember her actually. I always remember going to her house. They were really poor, you-know, back 'round the dirty thirties and all-that-stuff. They lived in an attic...

Must've had writer's-block occasionally. Interesting. And from there in the dirty-thirties his mother died, and he had ah ah an un-- a brother also working for the-star in the circulation department in Vancouver

And they used to roll their own during the dirty-thirties. There all kids of machines you could roll your own in and ah Ogden.

So in the middle of the dirty-thirties father came back and where he got the love for antiquity I do not know but he roamed the roads in Belleville and environs and collected all the stuff that other people had thrown out as the world became modernized and opened his own antique shop.

Speaker: And I-don't-know if you- I know that you- you may have heard about the dirty-thirties? Interviewer: Yeah. Speaker: Okay where this- all this wind blew all the soil away so they lost their farm and he- and he heard that the only place that you could make a living was working the mines.

And he bought that in the thirties. Ah to help with the pulp-wood, but because being the dirty-thirties and the depression and all he had a hard time paying for it so he actually brought it back to the person he bought it from to the- the dealership he bought it from in Kirkland-Lake here and told him that he couldn't pay for it.

I was born five days before Christmas in a bedroom off the kitchen in the farmhouse owned by my father, my grandfather before him, and also my great-grandfather. Growing up in the dirty-thirties, as they were called back then, I guess you could say we were poor.

Yeah. They must've had a disagreeance or-something.

Interviewer: You had an aptitude for art. Speaker: So I had- they found that- they believed I had an aptitude for art, and I do. Um, so the teacher went through the board and got special dispensation to send- to a school that had- the only school that had at that kin-- a art course, an art class, and that was Burnhamthorpe-Collegiate so they said, "Fine," because no other high-school in the area has this course and your teacher says that you should.

... they said, "Okay fine, you can go to Burnhamthorpe-Collegiate." It meant taking two buses and having to get up earlier to go to school but because it was the only Collegiate that had the courses that were required, fine, you had special dispensation to go, and so I went to Burnhamthorpe, and then from there, Burnhamthorpe sent me to Sheraton-College.

And ah after twenty years of priesthood, he met a- a young woman who worked at the ah church in the office there. And ah they fell in love and he got his dispensation from the church and he's married with two children now. So, he has a daughter, fifteen, and a boy a couple years younger. So, he was ah he was a little ah leery when it came- when he made that decision.