Q: What is your full name?

A: Wilfred Keith Clifford.

Q: And who were your parents Wilfred?

A: Byron Clifford and Maggie. My mother’s name was Maggie. I used to think it was Margaret, but it wasn’t. It was really Maggie.

Q: Her real name was Maggie.

A: Yeah. She was a Mackay before she was married.

Q: A MacKay?

A: Mm hmm.

Q: So your mother’s maiden name was MacKay. Do you….what were her parents’ names, do you remember? Your grandparents.

A: Yeah, James….James and Amanda.

Q: Where were they from originally?

A: Well I guess they came from, from ah, Scot….ones came from the Isle of Skye out in Scotland I think it is. Yeah.

Q: And what about your grandparents on your father’s side.

A: Well they came from….they came from Ireland, from a place called ah, down around Donegal, a place called Dingle.

Q: Dingle?

A: Yeah. And ah, they, they actually was from England, way back two, three hundred years before, because, ah, they was sent out there as a, oh, I don’t know what you would call it….He was a …. kinda to represent England. They actually came from England; they went to… was sent out to Ireland. And…then they moved. They left Ireland there in the…. when they all got out there, the famine there you know….

Q: Yeah. The potato famine?

A: Yeah. And they came over, and grand…great grandfather was given a grant of land down here, halfway down the Island, this side of Flour Cove. And a place….They landed in Flour Cove but the part of the property what is just above it is still called Clifford’s Cove.

Q: Yes?

A: Back then when the immigrants came over, they had to go to…they went to Saint John. That was a big shipping port then. Still is.

Q: Especially for Irish immigrants, or all immigrants?

A: Yeah. All immigrants. They had to go there and they was quarantined for I don’t know, three or four weeks there, and there was a vessel comin’ over to Westport. And they brought them over and landed in Flour Cove, and it was just a little ways below….they just had a little…. few hundred yards from there up to Clifford’s Cove where their grant was. They….it was a grant, I don’t know….it’s sixty or eighty rod the whole way across the Island, right straight across. And ah, they was Pyne ...grandfather’s ….great grandfather’s wife was a Pyne. And there was Pynes in Freeport at that time. And they were Catholic, the Pynes. When the old….great great grandmother died, it was in the winter, and they took her body over to Meteghan in, way back in them old sailboat days, right in the winter, bitter cold. And she was buried in a Catholic cemetery.

Q: So that was necessary because she was Catholic?

A: Oh yeah….

Q: Because normally you wouldn’t move a body that far in those days?

A: No. So, when they got back, grandfather, great grandfather said, “Now when I die,” he said, “You bury me right up there on the hill.” And that’s where his bones are yet. I didn’t know, but I had a friend….he’s dead now, Lawrence Elliott….he knew, he knew where there was graves, three or four graves with a little picket fence around ‘em, somewheres near where Rodney Pyne’s house is now. And ah, when ah, oh back then, there was a lot of, you know, young people died of TB and all kind of things. When they was a big family of them, twelve, I think, and when they, they was nine of ‘em died, well Great Grandmother, er Grandmother said, “It’s time we moved out of here.” So they come up to Tiverton and built a house up the road here a ways and…. And ah, but there was four of ‘em….there was some of ‘em buried in the cemetery down in Flour Cove…. I belong to that church down there in Central Grove there, the Baptist Church. So I had a stone put up there. When my sister Miriam died, why, she was buried there. There was two lots left. The fella that run….that had the doin’s of the cemetery told me about these two grave lots, you know, that was there. So ah, I asked Miriam if she wanted to be buried there. She was in Tideview. She said, yeah, it’d be alright. So I had a stone, a nice stone put up there, and on one side it says, “In Memory of the Children of Mathilda and John McKay….John Clifford.” And then on my…on the other side, “In Memory of Miriam Clifford” and then my name there. Miriam’s got when she was born and when she died and mine’s just got when I was born.

Q: I might have heard about your sister in another interview. Was she in the army at one time?

A: No.

Q: She’s not the army girl. There’s a….

A: No, no.

Q: How long ago did she die?

A: Oh, it’s only been, I don’t know….she….a couple years or so, a year or two. She was in Tideview for ten years.

Q: OK. That definitely wouldn’t be the same person.

A: No.

Q: You have a really interesting family history. Is it written down anywhere? Is there a book on it, or is it in the museum here?

A: No. I don’t know whether anybody had any of it or….I never knew too much about it. I don’t know, seeing as I was the youngest, I was the youngest of the family, they just….the older ones knew a lot, you know, about the history of the family but….

Q: Yeah….

A: ….But I guess they just… [Wifred’s parrot, John says, “ Hello.” Wilfred replies, “Yeah, hello”] ….Just didn’t tell me too much about….

Q: Well you know quite a bit. You can go back further than I can in my family….

A: Yeah.

Q: Yeah, and tell it better. [John: Hello. Cindy: Hello.] So what year were you born?

A: 1913.

Q: And where were you born?

A: Here.

Q: Right here in Tiverton, or right here in this house?

A: Right in this house, right in that room where I sleep.

Q: Yes?

A: Born there and probably die there. [John: Hello. Wifred: Yeah, hello.]

Q: You’re the youngest?

A: Yeah.

Q: Of how many?

A: There’s seven, I think, in the family. Seven. There’s Lillian. She was the oldest. And there was one that died before I was born, I guess, Eva. And then there was Harry, my brother. And Miriam and Lillian….Miriam and Aleda….Miriam, and Laura Belle, yeah….Miriam, Laura Belle and Aleda, and then me.

Q: Yep. That’s seven, on my fingers.

A: Yep.

Q: So how many are still alive? Just you?

A: Yeah. I’m the last….At one time there was three families of Cliffords here. Seventeen Cliffords. Now I’m the only one left on the Island. Yep.

Q: Did you spend your….pretty much your whole life here?

A: Yeah. There was one interview I had. They asked me, “Have you lived here all your life?’ I said, “No, not yet.” And how far….Oh yeah, that was on that questionnaire I got, when they was takin’ the census…..

Q: Yes.

A: And I answered all them questions like that. Yeah. “Have you lived here all your life?” I said, “No, not yet.” And, “How far did you go to school?” The schoolhouse used to be right across the road just up back there a little ways.

Q: Yes.

A: “How far did you go to school?” I said, “Just across the road.”

Q: I’ve heard, “How far was… did you have to go to school,” and I’ve heard people say, “Not far enough. Too close. Mum could see where I was.”

A: Yeah. But ah….

Q: So you were the baby of the family.

A: Yeah. Then, that census there, there was a woman called up. Tom Young used to be an announcer there….

Q: On the radio.

A: On the radio.

Q: Yeah, I remember him.

A: And this woman called up and said…..some of them….there was two questionnaires. One was a…. had a lot of questions. The one that I answered was just a little short one.

Q: Yeah.

A: She said some of them questions on that big questionnaire was too personal, was none of their business. “Well,” he said, “Well, what do you mean?” “Well,” she said, “They wanted to know how much toilet paper I used.” “Ah,” Tom said, “Now come on, they didn’t say that.” “Yes they did.” And this fella, man called up and said, “ That woman’s right.” He said, “That was on my questionnaire.” And Tom said, “Did you answer it?” He said, “Yes.” He said, “What did you say?” He said, “I told ‘em I don’t use toilet paper. I use the T. Eaton Book, and I’m on page a hundred and thirty-eight.”

Q: So as the baby of the family, do you ever remember hearing any stories about the day you were born?

A: No.

Q: No?

A: No. Well, the only one….I must…. I was born in the morning and the doctor was Dr. Bishop. And he had to hurry down to Freeport. There was another woman was gonna have a baby about the same time. Now I don’t….I can’t remember who that was that was born the same day.

Q: Do you remember how much you weighed, and if you were a healthy baby?

A: No. God, well, I was some thin when I was young. Well I still go by the name of Skinny, most people call me. Skinny Ed. And….

Q: That’s your nickname? Skinny?

A: Yeah. And….oh my God….Well I went in the army. I enlisted in the army in 1940, August 1940. And I just weighed a hundred and thirty-nine pounds. Had to weigh a hundred and thirty-five or they wouldn’t take you.

Q: Yeah?

A: Yeah.

Q: I can remember my grandfather was in World War I and World War II, and he had to quit smoking in order to put on the pounds….

A: Yeah.

Q: ….To get that….he was a small guy….

A: Yeah.

Q: And I don’t know what it was in the United States, but he had to put on some weight….

A: Yeah.

Q: ….Probably about…. to get to be about a hundred and forty pounds.

A: Yeah. Well them fellers that turned me down….I don’t imagine there’s either one of ‘em…..certainly either one of them alive now, any of them doctors that didn’t figure I was good enough. I’m still here. Don’t know why but….

Q: So you did….They turned you down, or you did go for….

A: Yeah they turned me….yeah, they give me a….ah, went over there and they…. and another feller went with me. They just put that thing on their ears there, listened to his heart and give him a slip….it was his heart, bad heart.

Q: Yeah.

A: But, they didn’t….it was so early they didn’t have places open, you know, enough to….they was enlistin’ so fast they didn’t have any place….So I had to come home for a couple of weeks and then they called me, and went back, Saint John. And they sent up to Moncton, there, I had a place there, a kind of a hotel or…. it was Atlantic Underwear, woolen wear place, where the women that worked in the factory, it was where they lived. It was a three storey building there. And ah, so, I was there about, oh, a couple of weeks, and they was lookin’ over my record, and I hadn’t been x-rayed. So they sent me down to the hospital to get x-rayed. And it was a funny thing. I went down. And I went in, went in the armory, where I met three fellers comin’ out. And, when I got down to the, down to the hospital, they was just comin’ out. And rainin! You talk about rain. Must have been, you know, one of them hurricanes just goin’ by.

Q: Yeah.

A: And when I come out, I run right across the street and all those buildings right along there had these awnings over…..I run down to the corner. A little grocery store there. I know how much money I had. I had seven dollars and a half, the money I had. And I didn’t know nothin’ about the city. So I went in, excuse, I bought a package of cigarette tobacco. I asked the girl, I said, “Could you call me a taxi?” “Oh yeah.” In just a minute or two she said, “There’s your taxi.” I said, “How much’s that cost?” “Oh, that’s all right. That’s nothing.” Well I said….I got in, and he said, “Where to?” I said, “The armories.” I thought to my self, “Now my God, suppose I’ve got money enough to pay for the taxi?” So he drove me right up to the door. I got out. I said, “How much?” “Twenty-five cents.”

Q: Wow.

A: You could go anywhere in the city then for twenty-five cents in a taxi. Well I just got in there and in come these three fellers. And they’d walked in that rain. And they had you know, heavy rigs on, you know….Everybody was poor and whatever they had to wear they had to wear it whether it was winter clothes or whatever.

Q: Yeah.

A: And the water was runnin’ right out of them, and they looked at me and they looked…. “Well didn’t we see you goin’ in the hospital when we come out?” “Yeah.” “Well how’d you get here dry….not wet?” “Well I called a taxi down there. I got that girl there….” “Oh,” he said, “You must be a woman’s lady.” I said, “No, first woman I ever spoke to in my life.” “Well you must have lots of money.” I said, “Yeah, plenty of it.” And when they said, “Well how much?” you know, and I told ‘em it cost a quarter, well one feller, wasn’t he mad. He was a Scotsman and he’d been back to Scotland twice. And he was some mad ‘cause he didn’t know enough to know how much a taxi cost. And you know what he was, what his profession was? It sounded funny to me then, but it was really true. He was a chicken sexer. Pick out the chickens and roosters and the….

Q: Yeah?

A: But now they have a machine that does it I guess, they don’t have to….

Q: Yeah?

A: Yeah. There used to be a Jap…. My ah, niece married a fella that owned a big chicken farm up there in ah, Maitland, Cox’s Chicken Farm, and they used to…. there was a Jap used to come and do that job….but now they can do it with the egg, you know, before they’re hatched.

Q: Oh, it’s before they’re even hatched….

A: Yeah.

Q: …. And they separate them.

A: Mm hmm.

Q: Where was this chicken farm? In Maitland?

A: Maitland.

Q: Yeah.

A: I don’t know whether….whether they, just before they….anyway they used to throw a lot of them out there in the brook there, and the eagles, flocks of eagles there would come there after they just, you know, hatched out chickens and they threw the old roosters out….

Q: Where’s….where’s Maitland?

A: It’s up in ah, Hants County.

Q: OK. ‘Cause in ahm, Sheffield Mills, up that way….

A: Yeah.

Q: A big, big attraction up there nowadays is the eagles. From December until March….

A: Yeah.

Q: ….they throw something out on the fields.

A: Yeah. It’s these young chickens that….

Q: That’s what they are, young chickens?

A: Yeah.

Q: I thought it was maybe the carcasses or something….

A: Yeah.

Q: …..Whatever. It’s a huge tourist attraction up there now.

A: Yeah. Yeah, they’ve even, I see, they’ve even caught some and trapped ‘em some how or another and sent ‘em to the States.

Q: Relocated them, yeah.

A: They’re a bald headed, Bald Eagle they’re called, and they don’t get that white on their head until they’re what, two or three years old before they…..

Q: Yeah.

A: See one here every once in a while, I see just the other day there’s one flew over, circled around.

Q: Yeah. You can see them in the winter time just driving up the 101 to Halifax.

A: Yeah.

Q: You’re not going to see them as well as if you go in to the Hantsport area and stuff, but you can see them just in Wolfville, New Minas….

A: Mm hmm.

Q: Ahm, I don’t even need to ask questions, because you just talk so well. But I’m trying to get….I’m going to try and get some early…the earliest stuff I can from you. So, what did your father do for a living?

A: He fished.

Q: Out of….Where did he fish from?

A: Here. Tiverton.

Q: Here in Tiverton?

A: And he did fish, before….. They used to fish in vessels, ah, handline, and he fished all over the Bay of Fundy and down, oh I think probably it was on….they trawl fished some on Brown’s Bank and some of them places, and Seal Island grounds.

Q: When you say vessels, do you mean he actually did the kind of fishing where they’d send the dories out from the big ships, which was quite dangerous….?

A: Yeah, yeah he did that. And there was other times when they’d anchor the ship and fish from the deck with big leads, six pound leads for sinkers. What’s he talkin’ about?[referring to the parrot]

Q: “Quiet out there.” [referring to what the parrot said] Can you remember any stories about what it was like to do that kind of fishing? Like I’ve never met anybody that has any memories of that kind of fishing. I’ve just seen paintings of it.

A: Yeah.

Q: And I’ve been to the museum in Lunenburg, and I’m amazed by it.

A: Yeah. Well, when you baited trawl, you had tubs made out of barrels cut off about so much off the top of the barrel and the tub would be that high….

Q: Yeah.

A: And you coiled the trawl down in that and you had, for when you was fishin’ for hake, you had what we call gangions, a smaller line, line about the size of that string hangin’ there, but it was steam tarred cotton line back then. And ah, hooks…..hooks, most of them hooks came from Norway. They had a great finish on ‘em. They wouldn’t rust.

Q: Yeah.

A: And they used to rig that trawl, just thirty inches apart. Oh, it would take you two or three hours to bait a tub of it.

Q: Thirty inches is close compared to nowadays?

A: Well, yeah, the last….I don’t know….there’s not very many of ‘em using trawl now. There’s only…..They took my license away from me, stole it.

Q: Yeah.

A: I went to get my license. I owned that boat up there. [Photograph on wall]

Q: Oh, in the picture. Let me see. Top Notch II.

A: Yeah. She had everything: Radar, Loran, VHF….

Q: It’s kind of got the shape….the same shape of boat as ahm, Clifton Prime’s boat, the Stump Jumper, that long…

A: Yeah.

Q: ….Low….

A: Yeah.

Q: You know Clifton’s, the boat that Clifton had, the Stump Jumper.

A: Yeah.

Q: It looks like the same, similar boat to me.

A: Well somethin’ like it, yeah, pretty well, same model. Cape Island style they called it.

Q: What was the name of that boat?

A: That one there?

Q: Yeah.

A: That’s Top Notch.

Q: Top Notch, yes.

A: Top Notch II.

Q: Did you have a Top Notch I also? Were you the owner of Top Notch I?

A: No, ah, Top Notch I was a different boat, one that was built here years ago. Burl Outhouse built it and she was just called, she was called Top Notch, just….. Then the next one we had built down in Port Maitland was…. Keith Outhouse, he lived over there in that house, my cousin….and we just had the initials K.W. on that boat. And when we got….he died when the boat was, I don’t think she was quite a year old. He had a heart condition and he died suddenly. And, had this boat then named Top Notch second, Top Notch II [Two]. I knowed a Crocker down there to Freeport, Watson Crocker, he had one, and I don’t think he ever changed the oil, he just….he’d dump oil into it once in a while, and he run it right wide open all the time. And I don’t know how old that engine was and he probably still got it.

Q: And that was a Ford also?

A: Yeah.

Q: Yeah. I know what they sound like. I know what a Ford sounds like.

A: Mm hmm.

Q: So your father was one of the great dory men. But then later in life, he must….what kind of fishing was he doing when he finished his fishing career?

A: Well, he went trawl fishing in boats, and you know….

Q: Yeah.

A: ….And they was…. the boats wasn’t like that there one though, they was…. oh, just open boats, but after a while they did have a little house on the stern with a little stove in them, and ah, yeah, they was pretty miserable.

Q: Did he also lobster fish?

A: He only, far as I know….remember, he only went lobsterin’ one season, him and his brother. But ah, back then, well, there was fish to catch in the winter and….

Q: Yeah.

A: ….You could do just as well.

Q: And then did you learn to fish from your father or….

A: Well, yeah…

Q: ….Was he teaching your brothers how to fish?

A: Oh yeah. I used to go out with him and get seasick, Saturdays, still keep goin’ and…..When I first started fishin’, oh, I used to argue with my brother. He said he was never seasick in his life. I said, “Can’t make me believe anybody feels as good in a boat as they do ashore.” And he said he never…..And God, I went fishin’, went with my brother in law up to Whale Cove. Seasick, oh, three or four times a week anyway. And, I was alright after I got started to haul trawl, I’d clear up. But I, I still, even when, right up to the last of it, I had to be careful or I’d get seasick.

Q: Did you find it easier when you were the captain of your own boat and at the wheel so you…..Were you a little less seasick?

A: No.

Q: Nope.

A: No. It didn’t make any difference. I never got seasick goin’ or comin’ in a boat, no matter how rough it was. But when you was layin’ there…..

Q: Yeah.

A: Days when it was foggy and you couldn’t see….They say it’s your inner ear, balance. If you could see the horizon, it was all right, or if I’d get in the fo’c’sle, get in the bunk and lay right down and shut my eyes. But when I got up I had to grab my boots and run and get out. Yeah

Q: It’s not much fun being seasick …..It’s a hard career when you’re not feeling well.

A: Used to even get sick in the fish house. There to Whale Cove, tide’d come right up under, you’d hear the swash from the shore.

Q: You weren’t even moving. I’ve known of diesel mechanics that get sick just when the boat’s tied to the wharf and they’re workin’ on a boat and get seasick.

A: Oh yeah. Yeah, I’ve got seasick out here in the harbour.

Q: But did you have any other careers besides fishing, or you still were a fisherman?

A: Just a fisherman.

Q: Yeah. What can you remember about your mother’s workday when you were growing up?

A: Pretty hard work, what they had to do then. An old pump here that you’d pump the water up, and big washboard I think, and put it on the stove and heated it….. A washboard there they called it, that you scrubbed ‘em up and down on. Did you ever see one?

Q: Yep.

A: I still, there’s still one upstairs, on the….one of the glass, glass ones there, you know. The last ones, they made ‘em out of metal but…,

Q: Yeah.

A: This one upstairs there’s out of…it’s glass.

Q: Yeah, I’ve seen them.

A: Yeah. Did have a….years ago we had a washer machine….there used to be a big long doorstep out there. And had a washer machine and had a crank onto it kinda, and cog gears….

Q: Yeah.

A: And it, the thing inside churned it back and forth, (making sound of washing machine).

Q: Yeah. Did your….did anybody ever make their own soap?

A: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, fat and lye and stuff. Powerful stuff.

Q: We haven’t had anybody mention that in these interviews, but it’s occurred to me that they must have made their own soap a lot of the time.

A: Oh yeah, yeah.

Q: Would they use ah, stove ashes at all? Their own stove ashes?

A: I think, I think so. Seemed to me they leached ah…..

Q: Water through them?

A: Water through them, yeah. And tallow. You could get lots of tallow, you know, from places where they killed cows or somethin’…..beef.

Q: So this was you family’s home right here?

A: Yeah.

Q: This was the kitchen?

A: Yeah.

Q: Just as it is now, but probably looked a bit different.

A: That used to be the dining room in there. It’s John’s [the parrot’s] room now.

Q: John’s own room.

A: I put a bathroom in. I took some off of it to put a bath….

Q: Yeah.

A: And had a new part built on there. Used to be the old porch there was, just up on posts, and my God, cold in the winter time.

Q: Yeah.

A: Everything would freeze in there.

Q: So as the youngest one, some of your siblings had moved away before you grew up, probably. But at one point all seven were here? All seven children were together?

A: Well, yeah, I can remember when they was all here, all but the oldest one.

Q: Yeah.

A: Yeah. When Miriam and Laura Belle, Harry and Lillian, er, Leda, yeah.

Q: Which one….who did you say was the oldest?

A: Ah, Lillian was the oldest.

Q: It was a girl, yeah.

A: Yeah. And there’s Harry. There’s one there, Eva. I don’t remember her. She died before I was born.

Q: So what else can you remember about your Mom’s world when you were growing up? Did she ever work outside the home or make and sell anything?

A: Oh yeah. She cleaned houses and…..[Interrupted by cats knocking things over]

Q: So what else can you remember about your Mom? Was she a fun mother….

A: Well….

Q: ….or a stern mother?

A: Kind of both I guess. Yeah, she was a good mother. Yeah. She did a lot of, I guess they call it a midwife, you know and….. Back then when a woman had a baby, they, why they’d stay in bed two weeks, way back then.

Q: After the baby was born.

A: Yeah.

Q: Yeah.

A: And a lot of them, well….she never got any pay for it, you know then, just….well people were poor, didn’t have the money, that’s all. I don’t know, she brought a lot of children into the world, helped, you know.

Q: But then….it’s not something that all women did….

A: Oh, no.

Q: ….in the neighbourhood…..there was just a few that were, that did that?

A: Yeah.

Q: So what would happen when a midwife had to leave her own family to go tend to the needs of another family…..Who would do the cooking in that house, or take care of those children?

A: Well, whoever was….I suppose the oldest girl had to look after ‘em.

Q: Yeah. How do you suppose your mother came to be a midwife? Just because she had a natural talent for it maybe?

A: Probably. I think probably, yeah.

Q: Midwives are sort of making a comeback. Nowadays there are something called dhoulas who are birth assistants.

A: Yeah.

Q: It’s a new, sort of a new thing again. A new old thing. So you told me the school wasn’t too far away. It was over there….

A: Yeah.

Q: And I think we’ve heard from some other people that the school in Tiverton was a fairly large school compared to some others.

A: Yeah. It was a…. it was quite a big building. It was, oh, see, it must’ve been sixty feet by thirty, I would say. Great high ceilings and, there was four rooms, but the northern room upstairs, the Oddfellows had that rented until they built the hall up there. And, there was quite a big, quite a lot of….I know one time there, one, one of the rooms, seemed to me….well there used to be seventy or eighty going to school anyway.

Q: Wow.

A: And one time they had a thing up there, a blackboard, or ah, up on the blackboard they had this piece of stuff there, it was called the “unclean list.”

Q: Unclean list?

A: Yeah. Oh you know, you’d bait trawl and you only had the one lot of clothes…..you’d go fishin’ off the wharf and you’d get all dirty, and bait trawl and you know, just rinse your hands off in the salt water you know.

Q: Yes.

A: Oh, it must’ve been an awful smell to teachers, you know, away from here that never smelled fish. And….my name and one or two others was always on this, this board….this bulletin board there. Father, he was the janitor. He was supposed to build the fires and look after, see that the place was swept, but he didn’t do that. He’d….he built fires sometimes, but most of the time I had to do it. And anyway, he saw this thing there, and my name on to it, and this other feller’s name, and he thought it was honor list, you know. He was some proud of me. After awhile he got….he had cataracts. He couldn’t see real good. After he got glasses so he could see, he didn’t think so much of me.

Q: So what else do you remember about school? Did teachers ever board at your house?

A: No.

Q: No. Do you remember your teachers at all?

A: I wish I couldn’t.

Q: Another one that didn’t particularly like school?

A: I didn’t like school, no sir!

Q: But your mother always encouraged you to go anyways, like mothers did.

A: Yeah. After, after I went through grade five or six ah, last year or two was just, I just didn’t even try to learn anything. After I got so I could figure, and percentage and stuff like that, I wasn’t interested in any of that other stuff. That….oh what was it there, well, algebra. I couldn’t see any sense in that. Never could do it.

Q: Yeah, it’s kind of abstract.

A: Yeah. But ah, they had one, they had a book there called Mechanical Drawing. I liked that, but they took that….they’ve taken that out of the school now. You’d have to go to college about five years to learn what you’d learn out of that. You could….mechanical drawing, you could, you know, you could draw a blueprint or things…. bring ‘em down to scale and all that you know, how to….It was good but…. And another thing that they done that I’d like to run across is one of them old scribblers with all them tables on the back.

Q: Yeah.

A: But you can’t….you’d have to go to college two or three years to learn that now.

Q: Yeah.

A: Yeah. Different weights and measures and…. I tried to, I’d like to find out, I gotta find out for sure what…..measurin’ on the water, sometimes it’s called cable lengths. And I’ve been wonderin’ how long a cable….

Q: A cable length is?

A: How long a cable length is.

Q: Do you remember that being in the backs of scribblers?

A: Yeah.

Q: Hmm. Do you know…..did you ever hear of a fellow named Alton Barteaux, in Mount Hanley?

A: No.

Q: Well he’s…. ah, there’s a schoolhouse there. He’s ninety-one years old.

A: Yeah..

Q: There’s a schoolhouse that he kind of runs as a museum. But it’s famous because Joshua Slocum went to school there.

A: Oh yeah.

Q: But he has more old school books there than you’d believe. I stop there all the time. I’ll check it out for you.

A: Mm hmm. I got a great book here called Wooden Ships and Iron Men.

Q: I think I’ve heard of that.

A: Well that’s a great book. Then the best book was ah, Two Years…..Two Years Before the Mast. Yeah, Two Years Before the Mast.

Q: Was that about a voyage?

A: Yeah. By God they went through somethin’ them, them old sailin’ ships. It’s a wonder they ever got anywheres.

Q: Yeah.

A: Damned old square riggers, they went sideways as much as they went ahead most of the time.

Q: Sometimes you have to look back and think there, in the olden days….when men were men!

A: Yes. I don’t see, well…I don’t see how they….

Q: Did some of the things they did.

A: Ah, come up the Bay of Fundy here….get up in the Bay of Fundy here and it strike a nor’west gale. Blow the sails off of ‘em and they had to go ashore. Places named I suppose, from old ships that went ashore. There’s, oh, right up to Whale Cove, just below Whale Cove…well there’s two places there. One’s called Wickhamwire…..

Q: Wickham…..?

A: Wickhamwire.

Q: Yeah.

A: And…I forget the name of the other place….and there’s one where the Yuba and the Compact, it’s called, place there, ah, the cliff’s right straight up and down, and this ship run ashore there, ship by the name of Yub…. her name was Yuba.

Q: Yes.

A: Y-U-B-A. And she was on her way to….she hadn’t seen….hadn’t got a sight of the sun in, I think it was three or four weeks, three weeks or more, and she stood off to….figured that she was below Brier Island and they was goin’ to Weymouth to load lumber. And it run ashore up here about two miles above the head on Digby Neck. Well she was only about ten, twelve miles out of the way on….and comin’ across the ocean it wasn’t too bad. And, my God, they must have been some almighty ships. There was one of her yard arms…..that’s what the sails were made fast to….

Q: Yeah.

A: One of them, and they said that was one of the second ones up from deck, and it was sixty feet long, and it would be, well, it’d be I’d say probably ten inches through it in the middle and…. tapered off a little out to the ends, it’d be about six inches. Sixty feet long, and that was the second one up from the deck and there was five of them.

Q: Wow.

A: How….You wouldn’t think they could, you know, float right side up at all. Of course they had to be ballassed (sic) quite heavy. Yep.

Q: If they were ballasted heavily though, did that still….did that make them any safer than boats today or….?

A: Ah, well they, they wouldn’t float. They’d fall right over on their side if they didn’t have a lot of ballast down under the floors, and keep ‘em on their feet like.

Q: You don’t happen to remember the story of the Robert Cann?

A: Oh yeah. Yeah, remember, remember the Robert Cann. She run here. The Keith Cann run here first. Well, first, when the first remember, one called the John L. Cann. Then there was Keith Cann and then, the Robert Cann. And they ah, oh that was almost suicide what they did there. That was foolish. She come in that trip before from….see she’d run from Saint John, here, Freeport, Westport and Yarmouth. And in the summer….

Q: Saint John….

A: Here….

Q: Freeport, Westport, Yarmouth. That was its run?

A: Yeah. Freeport, Tiverton, Free….er….Tiverton, Freeport, Westport, and back to Yarmouth.

Q: Yeah.

A: And they’d make that trip twice a week in the summer. And, this time they come in….Robert Cann come in, water was up in the engine…..She was about half full of water then, it leaked so bad. Up almost where it was going to put the fire out in the boiler. It come here and its pumps had clogged up with coal. And ah, got her cleared out and got her pumped out. And there was another boat runnin’ at the same time. Go on get outta here. [Wilfred shooing cat away].

Q: So, it was not in the best of shape to begin with then.

A: No. Twasn’t safe. I don’t know how they ever got a permit to, you know, to run it. Some kind of crooked work there somewhere.

Q: Hmm.

A: Yeah. And the other boat that was runnin’, huh, can’t remember, isn’t that something, I can’t remember the name of that one. They come out of Saint John together and the other feller, he went, went into North Head because he knew it was going to be a bad storm. And Captain…. of the other boat, they kept on a comin'. How she sank.…and I couldn’t understand how they got out in the lifeboat that night, rough as that was and them old lifeboats. Why I don’t think they’d ever been out, out of the, afloat in years and years. But they got out and they all got in, or they must’ve been….I don’t know how….how they landed anyway up there. They was all in the boat. But they ah…. Captain Ells, he ah, he got out, went out, got out to the Lakeside there somewhere.

Q: Yeah, Lake Midway.

A: Lake Midway, yeah. And they was, they went out over. One other fella had a little life in him, but he died before they got him out. They was all there. Captain Peters, he’d been on the, that run before, and he’d gone over to finish up some business. They owed him some money or somethin’. And he froze. He was frozen, he died.

Q: Which is the captain that had been on that ship for a long time? Was it Peters or Ells?

A: Peters.

Q: Peters.

A: Yeah.

Q: And he’s from Westport or Freeport or something?

A: Westport. Before, on the Keith Cann, it was Captain McKinnon….McKinnon from Yarmouth.

Q: So did the Keith Cann replace the John Cann and the….

A: Yeah….

Q ….Robert Cann replace the Keith Cann? These weren’t all running at the same time?

A: Well they kind of….Keith Cann and the Robert seemed to, well they kind of run together sometime, they, you know….

Q: Overlap somehow?

A: Yeah. Ah John. [To his parrot, John.]

Q: Yeah, I’ve read a few accounts of that story, but it’s always interesting to hear another little bit of information about it. It sounded like a horrendous night.

A: But ah, one time we was scallopin’. We got afoul of somethin’ and hauled up a piece of sheathin’ that had I don’t know how many coats of paint on to it. It broke right off right clean, you know, right new break….

Q: Yeah.

A: ….Drove into the scallop drag….

Q: Yeah.

A: And I still think that was where the Robert Cann sank.

Q: The Keith Cann or the Robert Cann? The Robert Cann.

A: Robert Cann.

Q: Yep. Wow.

A: Cause I couldn’t see…. couldn’t see how that boat could stand it that night, gale of wind like that, you know. All them people into it….it’s quite a….

Q: Did you bring that aboard or did you just….

A: No, I just got this piece of sheathing, just a, you know, ‘bout four inches wide and five or six feet high.

Q: Yeah.

A: Looked to me that it was off of the side of her there somewhere. But at the same time, they said they found the pilot house or part of it. Shirley Tidd saw it er, when he was scallopin’ up off of Gulliver’s somewheres. Oh, I don’t know.

CD2

Q: Yeah, there’s still a…still a cross where that Robert Cann, where those people came ashore….

A: Yeah.

Q: It’s just a wooden cross there now.

A: Yeah.

Q: There used to be a better marker there apparently, some time ago with the names of the people and everything.

A: Yeah. I was to a shipwreck once there below Whale Cove there. There was two….I was up to Whale Cove, and ah, my brother in law sent me up to Little River after…He was repairin’ some lobster traps. I went up to get some nails for him and it come just as dark, just as black as night, and struck a gale of wind northwest. And, when I went back, they said, they almost had a shipwreck here. I said, “Yeah?” Said a tug towin’ a ….tug towin’ another one…they almost struck Half Tide Ledge and thought for sure they hit the Lower Point but didn’t. And the winds struck on nor’west then, blowin’. We didn’t know thing more about it ‘til along in the evening, ah, a man from Little….East Ferry, Ed White come up, said there’s ah two boats ashore, two tugs ashore down in Dunn’s Cove, about halfway from the Head in Whale Cove to the Passage here.

Q: On the Bay of Fundy side?

A: Yeah. So we went down in the night and, we got there, it was quite a few gathered there. So, we built a fire, a big fire there and….this stuff, this housed had washed off of the….One of them that was being towed went in to Little Cove in above there, right in, and the two men that was on her, down over the bow And got on the rocks and never even got their feet wet. But these other fellers….thought they was all gone, and the fire begin to die down that we had there and one fella was gatherin’ this sheathin’ up…. was gonna build a house and he was going to have this sheathin’ on it. And fella from here, Lee Outhouse, he was puttin the sheathin’ in the fire just as fast as this feller was carryin’ it up. He thought he was doin’ alright….he was burn…He wasn’t lookin’ to see how big of a pile he was gettin’. Well we was just going to leave and the fire died down and these fellers hollered, and there was two of them up in the rigging. And, I don’t know why they didn’t holler before. So, just then ah, Wilfred Gidney…..Wilfred and, I think his brother, Roddo [?] they come with a storage battery and a big light and put it on the fellers and got ‘em to get down and get a rope ashore. And they got the rope ashore and got a (rig to rig and…bosun’s share)[?] they called it, and they got the two of them, got them ashore, saved them but…. Captain Baird Powell, his body came ashore there in Whale Cove, and the other feller, the other captain, they was both captains, both drunk, drunk you know, right….Captain Powell looked just the same as a boiled lobster. His face was right….blood was almost comin’ out through. And war time, there was a ship torpedoed just below Brier Island here not very far. Well they saw the blaze and heard the explosion right plain there in Westport. And they was….there was thirteen bodies….there was twenty six men aboard of that ship.. She was an old coal carrier, carrying coal from Sydney to Saint John.

Q: A Canadian ship.

A: Yeah. See they ah, they was all coal burnin’ ships back then, they wasn’t…. And she got torpedoed right there just below Brier Island. It was thirteen of them bodies come ashore, found ‘em. Some Beautiful Cove, some…one down here along the shore, and that one Whale Cove, and…..You goin’ to put all this in the….where people can read it or…,?

Q: No, actually, this….this, instead of being for Passages, this is for something else.

A: Yeah.

Q: Although ah….

A: Well what I was going to tell you, I was going to tell you about what happened to the…. one of the fellers that had the money. See in them days….

Q: You can tell me.

A: ….They carried money to, you know, to buy cargo and….

Q: Yeah.

A: ….And pay the crew and all that and….

Q: Yeah.

A: ….Quite a lot of money.

Q: Yeah.

A: And ah, they found the fellow that was supposed to have the money, but his money belt was gone.

Q: Hmm.

A: So there’s a house over to East Ferry built with that money.

Q: Hmm.

A: That house there next to the ferry.

Q: Yep.

A: Yeah. I don’t believe anybody’ll ever be happy in that house, I don’t think ‘Cause she….she’s a hard character.

Q: Yeah, one of the best expressions is “What goes around comes around” or that type of thing.

A: Yeah, yep.

Q: On the other hand, I think I’ve heard stories of people picking coal up off the beach and stuff.

A: Yeah.

Q: Inevitably things will come ashore….

A: Oh yeah.

Q: …..That are salvaged in a more honest way.

A: They’ve said they have….now I don’t know if there’s any truth in it or not….but I’ve heard it, years ago, that they found some gold, gold coins, or any more than one or not, up to Sandy Cove, one time.

Q: I’ve heard like one coin, or something.

A: Yeah, yeah. So they no doubt, you know….All them ships that was lost, they all had gold….

Q: Yeah.

A: ….Back then. I heard about this old fellow. He had a gold piece about the size of….I forget how much it was worth, but it was about the size of a twenty five cent piece.

Q: Yeah.

A: And ah, he went to church and he got confused, and he put it in the collection plate instead of a quarter. And they knew it was his, so they tried to give it back to him. He said, “No.” Said, “I gived it to God and the hell with it.” Yeah. So, one other joke I heard about church was, this old feller had a dog, and he thought a lot of it. Used to go to church with him and sit in the aisle right alongside. Never run around and never bothered anybody. And they got a new minister and the minister told him, come down and told him, he said, “You can’t have a dog in church. You’ll have to put the dog out.” So he took the dog outside and come back in and listened to the sermon. When it was all through, some of the congregation said, ah, “You should apologize to that old feller. He lives alone and that’s all the company he has and the dog wasn’t botherin’ anybody.” And well he said, “Alright.” So he went down to apologize and said, “I want to apologize for what I said this morning about you couldn’t have the dog in the church here.” “Oh,” he said, “Don’t, don’t apologize, don’t apologize. That’s alright.” He said, “I wouldn’t want my dog to have to sit here and listen to that sermon for anything.”

Q: Alright, speaking of church, but not necessarily church jokes….you’ve got some good ones. Did…was your family very religious when you were growing up? Would that have been normal?

A: Well, the girls all got baptized. My brother didn’t or I didn’t. I joined the church here, mm, just three or four years ago, that’s all.

Q: Yeah, the Baptist church?

A: Yeah, down in Central Grove.

Q: Yeah.

A: But I didn’t get baptized. I didn’t figure, well, the way my health was, that it would be good for, so they done what they called…..

Q: Well they do the total immersion in the Baptist church don’t they? They go for a swim.

A: Yeah, but they could….the way they do it, what they call….ah, somethin’ about your hands there, they, holdin’ hands or somethin’, I don’t know how they call it….

Q: Yeah.

A: Does the same thing. Go right straight to heaven when you die. That’s what I can’t understand. No matter how big a bugger you are, or hellion, when you die, they tell ya you go right straight to heaven, your spirit, soul….mm, yeah. Course that’s only there for a million years, and then next time why, get the final judgement, yeah. One old feller, he was….they told him he couldn’t take his money with him and he said he would and he was going to take it. So he got a big box and he put his….all of his money in the box, put a handle on it, took it upstairs. Now, he said, “When I go to heaven, when I go up, I’m going to grab that box and take it with me.” So after he was buried about a week, his wife went up. The box was still there. She said, “I told the old fool he should have put it down cellar.”

Q: Did ahm, your parents strictly observe Sundays though when you were growing up? Now see you’re making it hard for me to get serious now. What were Sundays like?

A: Well, yeah. Wasn’t, when we was kids, we wasn’t allowed to….couldn’t go out and play on Sunday or couldn’t slide downhill or anything like that.

Q: No?

A: Oh no. And another thing, when there was a funeral, no matter whether it was Sunday or not, an old feller down the road here, he had the hearse, and had a horse. And ah, well he was all rigged up there, you know, black rig on and a high black hat and set up on this hearse. It had big oval windows in the side, you know. A shame, they destroyed that here a few years ago up there.

Q: I think I’ve seen a picture of it.

A: Hmm?

Q: I think I’ve seen a picture of it.

A: Yeah, yeah. And ah, yeah, when that went down by they hauled the window blinds down.

Q: Of the houses?

A: Oh yeah.

Q: Really?

A: Yeah, yeah. Nobody done anything that day, that afternoon. Now they close the store for an hour, that’s all. Yeah.

Q: What else can you remember about when somebody died…..about the undertakers, and what were some of the traditions…..

A: Well there was no….

Q: ….Compared to the racket that it is nowadays?

A: Well, there was one or two people around here that would, what they call layin’ em out, lay a body out, put a….and….

Q: Not necessarily embalming them though.

A: Oh, no

Q: No, it was just laying it out.

A: Feller, a man down in Freeport, ah, what the heck was his name? Anyway, he used to have the coffins.

Q: He kept a stock….

A: Yeah, and….

Q: Kept coffins on hand so you could go pick one out.

A: It cost ah, anywhere from…..I, I had the bill here for…. I think when Mother died a coffin cost, I don’t know, a hundred and seventy five dollars. And when my father died, it was eight hundred and something.

Q: What year did your mother die?

A: Oh, let’s see. It’d be in the early fifties. Yeah.

Q: And your father died….

A: He died, let’s see, he died, ah….ninety six years old, and he was born….sixty, sixty seven, sixty eight, thirty two….oh I dunno.

Q: Did they both outlive all of their children except for Eva? Or did your farther outlive some of your brothers and sisters?

A: Well, no. I guess they was all….no, Eva’s the only one that died before he did, I guess.

Q: Mm Hmm. Did you have to go to Sunday School when you were little?

A: Yeah, I went for, oh, I dunno, a few years, yeah.

Q: Can you remember getting the newspaper or anything when you were growing up? How did your….how did your parents keep up with the outside world? How did news….how did you hear the news?

A: Well, oh well, sometimes get a Courier, Digby Courier. And it mostly word of, word of mouth.

Q: Word of mouth, yeah?

A: Yeah. Somebody’d be somewhere and get some news and…. They was always travelin’ you know, from, go to Saint John or Yarmouth or somewheres on boats or vessels.

Q: Did you spend your entire life in this house, or did you move away at one time and then happen to be….?

A: Well, when I fished with my brother in law in Whale Cove, why, I lived there, you know, most of the time.

Q: Yeah. You’ve mentioned Whale Cove a lot.

A: I come home Saturdays probably, some, not every Saturday, but….

Q: Who’s your brother in law in Whale Cove?

A: Kemp. Kemp Tidd.

Q: Oh, Kemp.

A: Yeah.

Q: Kemp Stanton.

A: Well Kemp Stanton would be his….

Q: Nephew?

A: Grandson, er ah, let’s see. Kemp is, Eva’s son, yeah.

Q: OK, so this Kemp’s last name was….

A: Tidd.

Q: Tidd.

A: Kemp Tidd.

Q: Yep.

A: Now he’d be a grandfather to Kemp Stanton.

Q: Yeah.

A: Mm.

Q: Kemp Tidd’s no longer alive.

A: No.

Q: Wonder if Kemp, would Kemp be a brother to Joe?

A: Ah, no. Joe’s a brother to Eva.

Q: OK.

A: Yep. Joe and Ray.

Q: Ray Tidd, yeah.

A: And there’s a Horace….Horace Tidd. He lived….he lived in Saint John. He was a winchman on the buoy boat there, on the Thomas Carleton….Carleton. Him and I went to Newfoundland one trip. Had a pretty good time. He had a camper, and when you drive along, when you get tired, why, the places where they’d made that new highway, the Trans Canada, places where they’d crushed rock, you could drive in. And next year I went with another feller and they’d put great big rocks in front of them places so you couldn’t go in. You had to go to a motel or somethin’. But it didn’t matter cause that feller. He wasn’t interested in them places anyway. He wanted to get to St. John's? where a girlfriend was there.

Q: And to go to the city.

A: Hmm. We had a good time there goin’ to all them little places, you know.

Q: It’s one of the places I’ve never been that I’d most like to go.

A: Oh yeah, I’ll tell you….

Q: You recommend it?

A: I would. I certainly would. God, if I was a young man, I’d go back there and see if I couldn’t find, well, get in to the fishin’ business somehow or another.

Q: Yeah.

A: God what a….that’s a beautiful country.

Q: Yeah.

A: Well you can’t go….if you’re out of sight of one lot of water, isn’t very long you’ll come to another. What they call ponds, my God, if they don’t have any visible outlet, it’s called a pond, and my God, some of them’s half as big as St. Mary’s Bay.

Q: But they’re still salt water?

A: No, fresh water.

Q: They’re fresh water.

A: Yeah.

Q: OK.

A: They’re ponds.

Q: Yeah.

A: But if they’re….they got an outlet…. an inlet and an outlet, they’re called lakes.

Q: OK.

A: And some of ‘em, course some of ‘em, they’re, places there where, ah, Grand Terra Nova Park, and there’s a lookout there ‘fore you get down in there, down, you can look down into a place called Gambo. That’s where Smallwood was born.

Q: Yeah.

A: And, the….the city there ah, ah where the pulp mill is there, what the hell’s the name of that? Prettiest, cleanest city I ever saw.

Q: Not Borneo?

A: No, it’s…..hmm.

Q: I don’t know Newfoundland at all.

A: Yeah, I’d recommend it. Anybody goin’ on a trip, it’s the place to go.

Q: I’m going to get there some day.

A: Yeah.

Q: Number one on my list.

A: You’ll have a….

Q: That and the Magdelan Islands.

A: ….Have a feed o’ cod tongues and cheeks and seal flippers.

Q: Yeah.

A: I tried the seal flippers but, oh, I didn’t care all that much about ‘em.

Q: No?

A: No, they’re, well they’re kind of, kind of like a wild duck, between that and a fishy taste to ‘em. Well, kinda have to acquire a taste for ‘em I guess.

Q: Yeah, you could, I’m sure.

A: Cod tongues, you could buy them. They was….be fellers out the side of the road sellin’ them. Cod tongues and cheeks.

Q: Probably not a whole lot of things have changed in Newfoundland since you went there, but there might not be so many cod tongues and cheeks readily available.

A: I imagine, yeah. That’s the trouble.

Q: So can you tell me a little more about Whale Cove? Before we started rolling the tape, when I first came in….You went to Whale Cove to do all kinds of fishing, with Kemp?

A: Yeah….went up….I used to go up there in the spring, month of May and, we’d get ready, rig trawl for the summer. And I’d lobster with him, help take up the traps.

Q: Yeah.

A: And we’d be ready for….start out hakin’ probably around the fifth of June. And we fished, trawl fished ‘til October. And ah, I’d come home, get a….I’d get a chance to go with somebody, or I’d bait trawl until February, and Calvin Ossinger would go up to his aunt’s up to Lakeside, Thompson.

Q: Yes.

A: Up there.

Q: That house is gone now….

A: Yeah.

Q: ….But I think I know where it was.

A: Yeah. And he’d go up there to cut wood, the year’s supply of wood and I’d go with his father, finish out the winter.

Q: So in Whale Cove, they….they quit trawl fishing in the fall, but down here they kept trawl fishing?

A: Yeah, yeah.

Q: Why’s that?

A: Well….

Q: What’s the difference?

A: Whale Cove wasn’t….well, it wasn’t much of a harbour. They never had any wharf there then. They’d had a little wharf that you’d get behind until half tide. Then that went down. I seen one time, we come almost goin’ for it by just a misunderstandin’ of what…..We run trawl, and we was layin’ ‘bout off of pretty well off of Centreville, late in the afternoon. And the wind breezed up and oh, it was a hard lookin’ day, great big black clouds and wind breezed up ‘bout west sou’west right up, it was drawin’ on shore some. We got two tubs in and he said, “Do you think we better leave it?” And I said, “Damn sure we should.” And I thought it was funny, he grabbed it and tied that tub of trawl up and threw it back aft, and grabbed another tub and took to haulin’ just as fast….well after a while, the codfish come up, big, nice big cod. I’d yank ‘em off . He never said nothin’. And I done it, next big one come up. He said, “I’d a done that on the first tub if I’d a been there to the roller.” I couldn’t understand what….my God, there was some fish on that trawl. And one dropped off. I never bothered to gaff it after he got half the trawl in. And I don’t know if he got the trawl in, put the coverin’ on, like a tent thing you know, over it….

Q: Over the boat, or over the….?

A: Right from the bow right back….

Q: Yeah?

A: Right down almost to the stern.

Q: Yeah.

A: And, started on. Come to the shore there, about Mink Cove. I can see that surf yet goin’…..tide’s getting way out, pretty well down, almost to low water. See that white froth a goin’ right up to high water mark. We got down to White’s Cove and he said, “There’s a rip right here.” Said ah, “See if you can haul some of them fish back aft.” I wanted to put some aft before we left there but….So I hauled some back aft, and my foot slid down and hit the throttle….it was out through the back of the engine box, shoved her wide open. God! She went in the air and come down. And I thought….water enough on that cover and it hit me on the back, flattened me right down…. And I yanked the throttle off of her and she stopped.

Q: Ooh.

A: And, damned old Plymouth, there, they’re alright after they got goin’ but had a job to get ‘em to go.

Q: So you were dead in the water.

A: So, God, I tried her and she’d go. Took her out of gear. He said, “Give her another little start, not as much as that but,’’ said, “She’s doin’ pretty good long as she’s just joggin’ that way, slow.” So I give her a little stab, got around that place and got around Tommy’s Beach place and got in….Webb Frost was boss there and he was waitin’ for us. He had a thing on a sled there that held three thousand pounds, or thirty two hundred. Shoved that down alongside the boat. Filled that full and hooked the boat on, hauled the boat up, and then hauled the fish up. He had thirty eight hundred, and I know damn well there was five or six thousand pounds on that trawl that night.

Q: Wow.

A: God, used to be some haddock there. Yeah. So, next day, next mornin’ down in the fish house, tellin’ his brother and them, we was there….He said to me, he said, “That was your fault almost come to drownin’ the pair of us.” “Why what do you mean?” He said, “When I asked you if you wanted to cut the trawl off and you said God damned if you would.” I said, “No, no.” I said…I said, “God damned sure we should.” Just that mistake, and almost come to fixin’ the pair of us.

Q: Yeah.

A: Yeah.

Q: Wow.

A: And one other time, close call, fishin’ with Bernard Robbins. He had a boat, just an open boat, no house on it or anything, an old Ten Hartford engine in it. And how he run….the boat wasn’t all that old, only about six years old or so. Bought it from Normie Outhouse, Normie Hant we always called him. And, we’d parted the night before. Parted the trawl, a little piece of trawl out and….and when we put the trawls in there, the old breakwater there, we was fishing to the wharf on the other side there, baitin’ trawl and that….Brought the trawls over, and I brought this four gallon can of gas over, and I don’t know why in hell he done that. “Oh,” he said, “You don’t need that. That’s only in the way. That…” He made me take the can of gas back. Well, so I took it back. Well we went out, and run…. parted that little piece of trawl out and started for it. The thing was coughin’ and skippin’ and I said, “Sounds as though the tank was empty.” He took the (heavin’ ?) stick, stuck it down in and it wouldn’t even wet the end of the stick. Tipped the tank up some so that whatever was in there was runnin’ to the shut-off. And I said, “Put that oil in.” Had the lantern there, we’d just filled with kerosene. Dumped that in, so we dumped that in and shut her right down fine, and we made it. When we come in around the breakwater she made her last blat, and that was it. Well we only had the four gallons to….for the next day, and them damned old Hartfords, they burned a lot of gas. In two hours time, you know, they’d…. they’d take a…..took her a half hour to go off there and back, or an hour to go up and back, or over, an hour and ten minutes. And we’d been to Sandy Cove in the morning, so the tank was just about empty when he put that four gallons in. And, started, and I said, “Speed her up Bernard. She isn’t goin’ fast enough to steer.” Blowin’ then a gale, south east, snow. He said, “She’s goin’ as fast as she’ll go. The water’s up on the fly wheel.” And he bailed a carburetor full and she stopped. And we bailed….got in under the coverin’ and got a quart can and a five gallon can. And he pumped and I dipped….dumped the water out. Got her down below the fly wheel quite well and started again. We done that three or four times. “Boy,” I said to myself, “I don’t know. We ain’t got gas enough to….we ain’t makin’ any headway. We’re goin’ back…..” Before that, Calvin Ossinger had come to us and asked us before we run if….He said, “You goin’ home?” “No,” Bernard said, “We’re goin’ to run.” I said, “I’ll go out and run along side of Uncle Josie.” Right in that thick snow, and we was pumpin’ for our life, damned if he didn’t come to us. Right in that snow, and he’d waited for Josie. And Josie was right close to….the other side of him. We never saw, couldn’t see Josie. And we kept pumpin’ and bailin’ and when we come in around Boar’s head, the (after kid ?) floor started floatin’ up. She was….they thought we had the awful jag of fish. We had nine hundred pound, fish in the bow. God! Yeah, I’ll tell ya, when, when you’re fishin’ a small boat here in the Bay of Fundy, all, for sixty odd years, still here….think you done it all yourself, why, you’re pretty damn well conceited, I’d say.

Q: Yeah.

A: You had somebody else there helpin’ you.

Q: Yeah.

A: Yeah. Yeah.

Q: So Bernard Robbins, he was from around here?

A: Oh yeah.

Q: Did you fish with him after the stint in Whale Cove or before, during….?

A: Ah, see that was….no….when was that? It must’ve been after I fished at Whale Cove I think. Or was it….yeah. I can’t remember now, but….

Q: Where did you start out fishing when you first….When you left school….you must’ve left school after grade seven or so? Did you go much further than that?.

A: Well…

Q: You liked it so much.

A: Yeah. I went awhile in grade nine. Or, I went in grade nine….

Q: Yeah?

A: And you had to write provincial exams. You had to go to Freeport.

Q: Yeah.

A: So I went to Freeport. I never passed but they let me go into grade ten. They wanted to get clear of me I guess. So I went a little while in grade ten.

Q: Yeah?

A: And we had the job of buildin’ fires up in the school house and ah, sweepin’ the place out once a week. The three rooms and the hallway there. So the fire went out one day, in the morning. And the teacher told me I had to build the fire over again. It had gone out. So I come home and I got the kindlins and kerosene can, went up. When she seen me with that kerosene can, she said, “You’re not going to put any kerosene in on them red hot coals. Get out of here. Get that can of kerosene out of here.” I throwed the kindlin’ down. I said, “Build your own god damn fire,” and left. That was my last day of school. I told Mumma what I said and she said, “Yeah, that’s alright.” I wasn’t learnin’ anything anyways after the last couple of years. Yeah.

Q: So then you went right to work?

A: Yeah. I went to do whatever I could get to do.

Q: But it wasn’t fishing right off the bat, or was it fishing?

A: Well, had to do with fishing. Yeah. I was, what, sixteen seventeen….oh, yeah, played around handlinin’ and baitin’ trawl.

Q: Yeah.

A: I started baitin’ trawl when I was about eleven years old I think.

Q: Did your father also do some fishing out of Whale Cove?

A: Oh no, no.

Q: No. Just you. You went up there.

A: Just….yeah.

Q: So Whale Cove was always big for building weirs also. Did you…..

A: Well it was only that one weir that they built there. And….I thought they was….you know, I said that they hadn’t paid for the twine. [In discussion before interview started.] They used it two years, and Bernard sold out. He told me afterward that it, you know, it made money, but they hadn’t paid for the twine. So I signed the thing there that said I would, you know, pay for the twine if, if they didn’t. Christ, then they wouldn’t let us….let us build until they paid for it. And I had some god damned job to scratch up money enough to pay for the twine. I had an investment policy that….guess I got ten, twelve hundred dollars out of that. Then I got….borrowed some more. Well, time you got that done, why, too late to catch…..Come a hurricane. Edna. Hurricane Edna.

Q: Yeah.

A: Took the weir down, and got ah, storm damage insurance on it.

Q: They had that did they?

A: Yeah. Well they….the government give everybody that lost stuff there.

Q: Yeah.

A: So, I got eight hundred dollars back out of my twenty eight hundred. And that’s all I ever did get.

Q: So this weir, is what you were telling me, you were, you put some….you backed it financially, but you didn’t actually fish a share.

A: No.

Q: So who were the ….who were the sharesmen?

A: Well, there was Bernard Robbins and Joe….Joe Tidd….

Q: Yeah.

A: And I don’t know if there was anybody else, no….Bernard, Harry….

Q: And your brother was….Harry?

A: Harry. Harry and Joe.

Q: And what did you say about Percy?

A: Oh yeah. And Percy. Yeah.

Q: Percy Walker.

A: Percy Walker.

Q: He had a share?

A: Yeah. Must have, I think. That’s all.

Q: So you put twenty eight hundred in…..

A: Got eight hundred back.

Q: And got eight hundred back.

A: Done alright in weir fishin’. Yeah. Yep, yep.

Q: What year was Hurricane Edna? We’ve heard a bit about that. Was that in the fifties?

A: Yeah.

Q: Was it worse than the Groundhog Day Storm [of 1976], or a different kind of storm?

A: Ah, well it was a hurricane, a lot of rain and wind, and it done quite a lot of damage. Groundhog Day didn’t….didn’t do any damage here. See, the wind was blowing up through the passage. Only thing, it did take Israel’s Cove over there.

Q: Yes?

A: Took that. Pirate Cove they call it.

Q: What do they call it?

A: Pirate Cove.

Q: Pirate Cove.

A: Hilton Sollows lost his boat. The boat went….dragged its moorin’ and ah, she went up through, and she filled. Well she went ashore somewhere up, way up the shore. I think he got the engine out of her or somethin’.

Q: What about the Saxby Gale? It was before you were born but….

A: Oh yeah.

Q: ….What do you know about that?

A: Oh, I don’t know. That was….I’ve read it. That fellow predicted that I don’t know how many years before. It was goin’ to happen on that day. How he knew it, I don’t know. He struck it right….God, it was all…it wasn’t just here. It was all over the Atlantic….Christ, it was, I don’t know, it covered half the world, that gale did.

Q: That’s pretty amazing.

A: Yeah. I don’t know if that was the…. if that was the same gale that fellow from Westport, Frost….He was fishin’ alone, handlinin’ off of Brier Island there, and his boat upset and he was on the bottom of it, and they found him the next day. He was still on the bottom of it.

Q: Alive?

A: Yeah.

Q: Ahm, what do you remember, Wilfred, about the Depression and war time. How did that affect you or your family or your community?

A: Oh God. Ah, Depression, the thirties, that was pretty hard stuff. Well it…. in the Valley, up the Valley [Annapolis Valley], it wouldn’t be that hard, because they’d have the vegetables and meat and stuff like that. But here, if you didn’t….the only thing about the Depression….we always had vegetables, we always had plenty of potatoes and stuff ‘cause we’d, you could catch fish off the wharf there, pollock you know, nice. Salt and dry them, slack pollock, and take them to the French Shore.

Q: Yeah.

A: Twenty five pound. They wanted a dollar a barrel for potatoes. Well twenty five pound’d get you a barrel of potatoes.

Q: Twenty five pounds of salt fish?

A: Yeah. And if they wanted a dollar and a half, pollock was six cents a pound. Yeah. My God, we’d get a whole boat load of potatoes and stuff, piled right up. Yep.

Q: And bring it back by boat.

A: Oh yeah. Go over to Saulnierville. Some used to go up to Weymouth, and go up…. And some neighbour over here, Atwood Outhouse, he used to go up, go up Annapolis River….go up to Annapolis and go up the river….

Q: Yeah?

A: Way up in Bridgetown, trading.

Q: Yeah? All by boat?

A: Yeah.

Q: Yeah.

A: And he’d bring….back then, I don’t know, well, course now, you can’t keep nothin’ in the cellar. You got a furnace goin’ down there, hot water heater. ‘Tis’t the same as it used to be but….

Q: No.

A: Years ago we used to go over to his house there, down in the cellar and play down there with all them barrels of apples. Didn’t they smell some good!

Q: Yeah.

A: Could eat all the apples you could hold, you know.

Q: Did you get a belly ache?

A: Yeah.

Q: What about ahm, World War II? How did that affect your family? You were….

A: Well I enlisted in it and then they kicked me out.

Q: Yeah.

A: That’s all.

Q: You were telling me about that.

A: Yeah.

Q: What about any brothers?

A: No.

Q: Just….you were the only one that enlisted.

A: Yep. There was some that wouldn’t enlist and, called ‘em zombies.

Q: Called them zombies?

A: Yeah.

Q: Yeah? Were they….

A: They, they was in the army, but they wouldn’t go overseas.

Q: OK, so they…they were able to do that? They were able to choose whether they went overseas or not?

A: Well, yeah, seemed to be. They hadn’t got conscription. The old MacKenzie King there, he wouldn’t agree to it, to have a conscription.

Q: So it was all by enlistment.

A: Yeah. Geez…

Q: So how could you….

A: You wouldn’t think they’d let a damned fool like that run the country…. be Prime Minister. Damned old fool. He used to have these things, what they call ‘em, seances, talk with his mother, his dead mother.

Q: Yeah?

A: Yeah. Christ. That’s what we had for a Prime Minister in the wartime.

Q: That’s how he did his decision making.

A: Yeah.

Q: Consulted his mother. His dead mother.

A: Yeah.

Q: So I still don’t understand how people could enlist but then not have to go overseas. They could just….

A: Well they didn’t enlist exactly.

Q: It wasn’t exactly enlisting. OK.

A: No. But, I don’t know. I believe….I don’t know whether they could get a pension or not.

Q: We’re going to just stop for a minute Wilfred, and do a tape change. Or, this would be a good time to take a break.

CD3

Q: Well, with an election coming up Wilfred, what can you remember about elections, and some of your favourite politicians?

A: Not too much. They used to….Oh they ruined it. They don’t pass out any liqour nor nothin’ now. They used to….what a racket that was. You know ones used to tell me about it, he’d get a bottle of rum from both sides. Yeah.

Q: How’d he do that?

A: Oh he’d talk Liberal. He was a Liberal. They’d give him one. Then he’d go around and vote, gonna vote Tory, you know and talk Tory, and get one. Yeah.

Q: And he didn’t ah…..

(John the parrot says, “Hello.” Interviewer says, “Hello.”

A: Yeah, John. Hello, yeah. Hello again to John.

Q: Now why doesn’t John like women?

A: I don’t know. Don’t know why that is. My sister Miriam, he flew into her one time. She batted him the side of the head and said, “Get out of here you bastard.” And he said, “Bastard, bastard.” Never said it afterwards. But Billy Howard’s wife, Joanne, she comes once a week and cleans the place up for me.

Q: Oh that’s nice.

A: And he’d kill her. He’d….he gets right in a rage just as soon as he sees her. I have to put him in the cage.

Q: Put him in the cage and close the door?

A: Yeah. And ah, the other day there she came, and he was up on his cage there. I said, “Alright John, come on. Get in your cage.” By God, he crawled down, right down head first, and went right in and that was all. Yeah.

Q: Where does Billy Howard live? Right next door?

A: No, he lives Freeport.

Q: Oh, OK.

A: Yep, way down around, far as you can go almost. Bought a big new….he used to live down in Central Grove here, down about four miles down but, he sold that place and bought this oh, great big house down there. He’s had it all refinished inside and now, Christ, he’s got a beautiful home there. Him and I are pretty good friends. Years ago, he was just startin’ out lobsterin’. He had to pay….he had a boat….well he had to pay a hundred and eighty thousand dollars for a boat, and ah, license, I guess.

Q: When he was just getting into lobster fishing?

A: Yeah.

Q: Yep.

A: And I let him have….I let him have some….not that much….I pretty near had to let him have I think, sixteen thousand dollars.

Q: Yeah.

A: And ah, he had a lot of trouble in the first of it. The engine, diesel engine, Perkins, they never was any good.

Q: Yeah.

A: And ah….

Q: Was it brand new?

A: Yeah, and the base would, was split on it. Put another base on and that split, for some reason, I don’t know why. So, bought a, bought a rebuilt engine, ah, I forget what the hell, that other kind they make so much fuss over. Anyway, there was somethin’ wrong with the reduction gear. And, it’d be like filings come out when they changed the oil in it.

Q: That’s a bad sign.

A: Something was grinding up in it. And down to Liverpool there, Steel and Engines there, and three or four different times with it. And last….went down once, and they said, ah, told him, they said it’ll cost eleven hundred dollars to overhaul that machine. He said but we can sell you one, sell you one wholesale where you’ve had so much trouble. Sell you one wholesale. They’re thirty eight or thirty nine hundred dollars. Sell it to you for half price. Sixteen, sixteen hundred.

Q: For a brand new diesel engine, or a ….?

A: Ah, reduction, reduction gear.

Q: Oh, just the reduction gear, yep.

A: So I said, “Would you take a cheque?” They said, “You got money in the Bank of Nova Scotia?” I said, “Yeah.” I said, “The bank right across the street here, Bank of Nova Scotia.” So then I went….and Billy….Billy had a full looking beard, dark brown you know. And he sat by the door. Come in and sat by the door. And I went over, and I said….the woman said, “What can I do for you?” I said, “I’d like to have this amount here, sixteen hundred and ninety five dollars transferred from Freeport branch up to this one. And on our way up Billy said they’ll think it’s Frank and James….Frank and what’s his name there, the….Jessie James, Frank and Jessie come to rob them. And, well, she called I suppose to see, you know. She said, “You got any identification?” I said, “Well, I got a drivers license here for a motorcycle.” Well, so she called Freeport, and she went just as far away as that thing would reach. And she come out, kinda grinnin’ and she said, “I got a foolish question to ask you. What’s the name of your dog and what’s the name of your parrot?” And ah, the dog’s name…..cripes you know that’s something, I can’t remember that dog’s name. His picture’s up there. That’s his picture there with his dark glasses on.

Q: Yeah?

A: What the hell was his name. Well anyway. And the parrot’s name was John. So, I told ‘em the names. “Yep,” they said, “You’re the fellow,” so they counted out the money.

Q: That’s one nice thing about Nova Scotia. You can do business that way.

A: Yeah.

Q: You couldn’t do that in a bigger place.

A: No.

Q: So did you always figure you would be a fisherman, or did you ever dream of being anything else?

A: No.

Q: Besides a mechanical drawing person.

A: No. Used to think years ago when the teacher there was so god damned ugly with me and always givin’ me a….got a least two strappin’s a week. I used to think, by the Jesus, when I grow up, I’m going to be a school teacher, and when her kids comes to school, I’m going to beat hell out of ‘em. But the god damned thing went and moved to the States and got married.

Q: Now what would you be doing to get a strapping?

A: Didn’t take much.

Q: Didn’t take much.

A: No. If they asked you a question and you didn’t know the answer, you got the strappin’.

Q: Oh, that’s not fair.

A: That helped. Oh they’d keep you in, you know, for no reason hardly at all, keep you in ‘til almost dark. Only got out once on time. One time, they used to have these songs written down in the scribblers, you know, and you’re supposed to sing. I never had none wrote down. I’d pick up any scribbler and make believe. So they asked the girls, you know, they said, “Did….can Milton sing?” “Oh yeah, Milton sings.” “Louis Elliott?” “Oh yeah.” “Aubrey?” “Yeah” Everybody. “Ever hear Wilfred sing?” “No, no, never….” They all had to stay in and sing and I got out. That’s the only time I ever got out on time.

Q: So the minute you got home from school, what would you do? Head for what?

A: Well, according to the time of the year it was…. if there was still pollock around the wharf, you’d go up, catch a pollock off the wharf. Or if it’s later, why you’d go have a rabbit snare set in the winter time, November.

Q: What chores were you expected to do at home?

A: Oh all you had to do was carry some coal up from down the cellar and get some kindlings and stuff.

Q: So the stove at home was a coal stove….

A: Yeah.

Q: Not a wood stove.

A: Yeah, just coal…..burnt just coal then.

Q: Where’d the coal come from?

A: Oh, it come from up Parrsboro. Vessels would bring it here.

Q: Yeah? Into Tiverton?

A: Yeah. It’d land up to the old breakwater up there.

Q: And how would it be delivered?

A: Ox teams.

Q: Yeah.

A: Yeah. They hauled a ton at a time. Used to dump it right out there by that cellar window there. Put most of it down cellar in the coal bin down there, but always left some out.

Q: Outside?

A: Oh yeah. Mother….Mother would, you know, growl. She said, “Now boy, you know that they’re….they’ll steal that….they’re going to steal some of that coal.” And we knew who’d steal it. Man lived way over on that house, way to the first one over. Ah, who is that feller that owns it now? Anyway, poor fellow that lived there. Sam Foote owned the house, but Ralph Young lived there. And he was poor. He never had nothin’. And we knew he’d take some of the coal. And Papa would say to Mama, “Now you wouldn’t want them kids to get up in the morning, not have anything hot for their breakfast, no hot oatmeal or anything,” and she’d knock off growling. At the same time, right across the road here, there was a big family, and they was poor. And I don’t know how it was, but the man there didn’t have the push that…. He could’ve went and done the same as we did, and caught pollock and dried ‘em and went to the French Shore. But he was afraid to….the boat belonged to Small Brothers and he was afraid they’d say something. Well, they said something, all they could do was take the boat away from him and nobody else would have it anyway. Well, there wasn’t too much….Anyway, Mother would growl about Papa lettin’ that coal out there so Ralph Young could steal some of it. And you’d watch her, she’d be goin’ across the road with a big bread pan full of potatoes. Yeah. And, one time my sister Miriam was over there and Irvin had brought a fish home, haddock, and his wife Lily said, “Well he brought a fish home but,” he said, she said, “There’s no way of cookin it.” She said, “I haven’t even got salt to put in the water to boil it with.” So Miriam gave her some money to buy some stuff. No matter how….it seems no matter how poor you are or how bad off you are, there’s always somebody worse.

Q: Yeah.

A: Yeah, always. I read there, a piece one time, about this feller said he felt sorry because he had no shoes until he saw a man that had no feet.

Q: Yeah.

A: Yeah.

Q: Yeah, lots of times I need to readjust my thinking and not complain.

A: Yeah.

Q: I’ve been complaining about wood a lot this week….

A: Yeah.

Q: But I’ve certainly got nothing to complain about compared to some other people.

A: Yeah, that’s right, yeah. Boy we don’t….a lot of people don’t realize how lucky we are to live in this place, around these places. God, go to bed and never think about lockin’ a door.

Q: Nope.

A: No. There’s a cash box in there and, well, you just flip the thing open……sometimes two or three thousand dollars in it.

Q: Yeah.

A: Yeah. Don’t think a thing about it.

Q: Well I’m a relative newcomer to this area. I’ve lived here for twenty two years, but I’ve never locked the door, not even if I go away.

A: No?

Q: So clearly, if there was people in the community that was not as well off as others, one way or the other, the community did take care of them.

A: Well, God, I’ll tell you, they was so damn proud, the most of them that they’d just about starve to death before they’d ask….

Q: Before they would accept something. Yeah.

A: Yeah.

Q: Were people more likely to help a neighbour if, say the….say the husband was a heavy drinker, and that’s where all the money was going and that’s why they didn’t have anything to eat….would they be more or less willing to help that family?

A: Oh, I don’t know. They….it didn’t seem to make much difference. They didn’t….they just, you know, they was good people and they’d help you no matter what you was.

Q: Yep.

A: Yeah.

Q: Did the….was the Poor Farm in Marshalltown….Did anybody from the Island ever go there in later years?

A: Oh, my God, what….that’s what killed a lot of old people, the thought of goin’ to that place. That, that was an awful place.

Q: Just the thought of it.

A: Just the thought of it. Cripes almighty, they was lousy and they was dirty and, Christ. An old bugger there….and have babies with some of those idiots, you know. Yeah.

Q: So it was almost a threat hanging over some people’s heads.

A: Yeah.

Q: But before, it didn’t always….it wasn’t always there. I don’t know when it was built, the Poor Farm.

A: Yeah. No, it was there all….

Q: I remember when it burned down.

A: It was there all the time I can remember. Billy Howard’s kids there, we’d go to….go to Digby, and the two girls, well they was, one would be about eight years, the other six or so…. “Go across the cross road. We want to se the whore house.” Poor house. They got it mixed up. They’d heard….somebody’d mentioned something about a whore house. Wanted to see the whore house.

Q: I remember seeing something in a little book about the Islands, about there being Overseers of the Poor at one time….

A: Oh yeah.

Q: In the town, among the town officers, the village officers.

A: Yeah, yeah. Overseers of the Poor. Why, one was Lev Sollows, down below here, a mile down the road. The other one was Norman Outhouse, Normie Hant we always called him. He lives up….

Q: You mentioned him before. What did you call him? Normie Hant?

A: Yeah, his father’s name was Hant….Hantford.

Q: Hantford, yeah.

A: We called him Normie Hant. And ah, Atwood had the job of Overseer. And Alden Buckman, he lived down the road here, a couple of miles down. Had quite a big family, boys. And ah, he come up to….ah Lev Sollows was his uncle. He come up to Lev to get….get a bag of flour.

Q: Is that what the Overseer would do? He would have stuff that you could get from him?

A: Yeah, well, he’d give you a thing, a slip, and you’d go to the store and get it.

Q: Yep.

A: So, he gave him a slip to go get a bag of flour, but he didn’t give him money to buy yeast cakes. He said you can get the eight cents somewhere to buy a pack. Now my God, back then you never had eight cents.

Q: Yeah.

A: Well, Alden come up. Atwood was Overseer, lived over in this house over here. He went in, he told Atwood what Lev had said. Atwood said, “Sit down, Alden. Have your supper.” “No,” he said, “I won’t sit down and eat to somebody else’s table and the kids home cryin’.”

Q: Yeah. Couldn’t do it.

A: “Alright,” Atwood said, but they had a car, Atwood did. Got in the car and went down. I guess what he told Lev wouldn’t be printed hardly. Wouldn’t dare to print it.

Q: Yeah.

A: By God, and he come up, and he had all kinds of stuff, roasts and beef, and all kind of canned goods, sugar, molasses, pork, salt pork, everything, fitted him right out. Yeah, it was one of them fellers was, he never knew what it was, you know, like to be hard up. Lev had a, you know, good farm and raised cattle, had a big woodlot.

Q: When you were the Overseer of the Poor, it wasn’t a job you got paid for.

A: No.

Q: It was just a position you would have.

A: Yeah.

Q: What were some of the other….I saw on the same list, a whole bunch of other….you talk about people, the guy having the occupation as a chicken sexer….well I saw a list of all kinds of interesting, similar offices. I mean, Overseer of the Poor, that was kind of self explanatory. But there was also jobs like Hog Reeve and Salt Measurer and….

A: Yeah.

Q: Do you know what all of those were, all those different village offices were?

A: Yeah they….I don’t know, they was all kind of things. I probably heard tell of ‘em and never thought much of it. There used to be….there used to be a public scale up the road here, well it’s this side of the ferry wharf quite well.

Q: Yeah.

A: Right over on the side of the road there was a big wooden platform and they could ah….see when the coal vessel came in with a load of coal, why they’d….the ox would haul the cart right over on to the scale, and they’d weigh the cart and then when it come back with the coal, why, they weighed it….

Q: Yeah.

A: ….and deducted it out of the weight of the cart.

Q: Yeah, I forgot, that’s how you got most of your stuff. It would come in by a boat, and it would all probably be measured, measured out.

A: Oh yeah.

Q: So most people, their fuel was something they had to pay for. It wasn’t something they could….

A: Well a lot of them had woodland, but the ones that had….didn’t have it, why….

Q: They would be the people that burned coal.

A: Yeah. They used to kind of make fun of, down the Island there, what they called a Central….ah, down island cord, half cord, in a cart. And, there’s no way you can measure up a half a cord. You get about, well you get about a little over a quarter of a cord for a half a cord. About a third of a cord.

Q: Did your father keep an ox or a pair of oxen?

A: No.

Q: No, not everybody had to have one in order for things to…..?

A: No, there was only….only three or four that had oxen. A lot of ‘em had cows but….

Q: Did your family have any big animals?

A: No.

Q: No.

A: No. Jim Cosman…..Jim Cosman had a great big ox, a dagen they used to call a single ox.

Q: yeah?

A: Oh, it was a great big thing. And he had a piece of woodland way down, that’s what we call the South Way, down there a mile down. He come up with this load of wood on this goddamn thing as big as an elephant. And stakes, oh he’d have ‘em….well the stakes would be about maybe three feet high. He wouldn’t have….oh it wouldn’t be halfway up the stakes…..nowhere, no….but they’d be out by the end of the sled. Sled about eight feet, I suppose they’d be ten feet, or it’d be two or three feet out over. Cripes, he could have piled that up, all he could have stuck on to it, and it wouldn’t have bothered that ox any. That’s a funny thing what they could do with an ox then, ox team. They used to put up ice.

Q: Yeah?

A: And they had…. see Irvin Ruggles had one, and there was one to Small Brothers, one to…..three or four ice houses.

Q: They had ice houses?

A: And they’d cut the ice down the Island, down in them lakes down in Central Grove.

Q: Yeah?

A: And haul it up here with them ox teams. And my God, they couldn’t make over two or three trips in twenty four hours, you know, twelve hours or….

Q: Yeah.

A: And they could only haul…..they’d haul about a ton of ice at a time.

Q: What size….what size were the blocks of ice?

A: Oh, they’d be about, oh, I don’t know, they’d be about as big as that chair there, that seat on that chair. They’d be anywheres from….sometimes they’d have to cut it when it was only four inches thick.

Q: Yeah.

A: But then sometimes it would get to be a foot thick. One winter it didn’t freeze at all here, and ah…..This is something you wouldn’t believe. I can remember when the glacier was here with ice.

Q: Yeah? Where?

A: Come here. Didn’t have….the ice didn’t freeze here at all. And over to St. Andrews, it froze three feet thick. And it was a foot square about, and three feet down the other way. The vessel that brought it here was called the Glacier. (Laughter) I had a job….I had the…..I don’t know how I come to get the job to, to tend the guy line, to haul it ashore, you know, hoist it up on this derrick on the vessel and the boom there. And I hauled it ashore and they’d land it in the cart. Yeah.

Q: So that was almost a disaster if the lakes didn’t freeze.

A: Yeah. Oh yeah.

Q: They’d have to find it elsewhere and pay for it.

A: Up to Whale Cove, they built an ice pond there after a while. It’s still there, a pond. Nice pond they dug out there and put a dam across it that….you could ah, drive a truck right across the dam there. It was all built ah, with clay, clay core pounded down with wooden mallets, pounded right down solid, and it had ah, (John squawking), it had a place there where you could regulate the flow, the depth….

Q: Yeah.

A: Put a board down and take one out or whatever. And ah, they put the sluice….built the ice house right close to the pond….and they put the sluice right down in the pond. And they’d cut the….they’d mark the thing off with this rig ah, cut down about that deep, mark it off lengthways and crossways and…. Haddock fishin’ with my brother in law, and he said, “If we go out haddockin’ and out fishin’ today, they’ll say we just done that to get clear of helpin’ put up the ice.” Well if you helped put up the ice, why they’d give you….you could have all the ice you needed for the summer, free. So we went up. He said, “We’ll wait ‘til they get all started….” He said, “And we’ll get a pick pole and just guide it into the sluice.” Well, good enough. And he got a pick pole and I got one. Ah, Boliver, Everett Boliver, he was the boss, a great big man. His son lives there yet in Little River there just before you get to the church up on the hill there.

Q: Would that be Forest?

A: Huh?

Q: Would that be Forest?

A: Yeah.

Q: Yeah.

A: Yeah, his father. He was a big man. He saw me. He said, “You look like as though you’d be a good man on a crosscut.” He had a crosscut with just one handle, and I had to keep up with him. He was sawin’ one….I weighed a hundred and forty pounds, like a string bean, and that great big giant, had to keep up with him. And knocked off long enough, at noon, to go home and get your dinner. Went back and worked by God, ‘til about ten o’ clock that night. Filled that up, right up to the peak, that…. Well next day, he was down to….down to East Ferry. He had an ice house down there, Harris’s Lake they call it there now.

Q: Yeah.

A: So I said, I’ll be goddamned, this time I’ll get a pick pole. Well, not a bit of it. Boliver said, “You’re a pretty good man with a crosscut. C’mon!” Jesus. So that winter, come down, comin’ home Saturday night, oh it come an awful blizzard. Snow, an lot of….there was an awful lot of snow that winter. And, come down and called across to the ferry to come and get me. And they wouldn’t come over. There was no ice. They said there’s ice was goin’ to come down out of St. Mary’s, you know.

Q: Through the passage?

A: Yeah. It does that every once in a while, but there wasn’t any ice. They just wouldn’t come. Well I went up to….went up to Herman Theriault’s and got my supper. And Elton, he’d went off and boarded his boat and couldn’t get the engine to go, so he’d went into Willie’s…..McClafferty’s and got his supper. After dark, I went to get….get Elton to go home, to go back to Whale Cove. Willie got his wallet out and started countin’ out these five dollar bills. Give me twenty….give me four five dollar bills. I said, “What’s this, to pay the crowd?” “No,” he said. “That’s yours.” He said, “The other fellers are going to get ice for their work.” He gave me twenty dollars and that Elton was some damn mad over that. He brought that up for years, about how, you know, I got twenty dollars and he never got nothin’. And that night, goin’ up, Charlie Height had a store in his…. there in Tiddville….and Elton got a whole bag full of groceries. And God knows what they was. Must’ve been lead in some of it. And I….in that blizzard….we walked up, come to a bare place there somewhere in Tiddville. And Elton said, “I’ve got a good mind to walk all night right around and around in a circle.” And we got up, up Whale Cove hill….well you couldn’t follow the road, had to get over in the field there. When he got down abreast of home and, oh God, it was between eleven and twelve o’clock that night, I hollered to him, “Good night Elton” and Elton said, “Goodnight.” And Kemp said to Laura Belle, he said, “There’s Elton. He’s drunk again tonight.” Yeah. But then there was some snow, used to be some snow. That ah…we was goin’ out, Ray and I, Ray Tidd and I, Kemp’s boy, Joe’s brother….

Q: Yeah.

A: And we was goin’ out, walkin’ out there, and they’d plowed the snow out….at first there you had to Jesus, you had to shovel it by hand, but this time they’d got the snow plow over there. And the banks was….this was the first day of April….the banks was that high, and I was walkin’ ahead of Ray, and Ray hollered, said, “Look at here what I found.” I said, “Yeah, April fool.” It was a five dollar bill. He said, “No, no, it’s right here. Come here and look.” And there was the print of it right in the snow.

Q: Wow.

A: And ah, it was that fella. And ah, he said, what’s happened, Elton’d been comin’ home drunk, and hands in his pockets with the money in his hand….his hand flew out and the money had flew, God knows he said, how much is over in the field somewhere. Yeah.

Q: Well I’m surprised that there were some years that there wasn’t ah, it wasn’t cold enough to freeze cold enough for ice, but definitely you remember lots more snow?

A: Yeah. There was a vessel run ashore down what they call the Caves, ‘bout oh, three or four miles this side of Freeport. And we heard tell of this vessel being ashore, this three master.

Q: On this side?

A: Yeah. So me and Bernard and Herbert Cossaboom went down, we thought it was in Lake Cove. Well it wasn’t in Lake Cove, and from there on you couldn’t follow the road, well you just….thought it must be Flour Cove. We went to Flour Cove. T’wan’t there, well we kept on a goin’ and it was the Caves, in the Caves, a place called the Caves. Well we….she was there. We started down over the bank, we knew, even had thought why they called it the Caves….’cause the reason they called it the Caves ‘cause at the lower end of the beach, the bank had caved down in so you could walk up and down it. So we started down over the upper part….I’ve looked at it since, my God….I was goin’ down ahead one….and there was rocks comin’ down goin’ by me….if they’d a hit me, why they’d brain me. And we got down there and come to a right straight up and down….well the only thing to do was lower yourself down as far as you could and hang on by your fingers and drop about six or eight feet down on the beach. Well we got there and these fellas started bringing stuff ashore that…. And there was one brand new little block, ‘bout big as that, right brand new, never been used, oh, varnished. It was pretty, pretty.

Q: What was it?

A: A block, you know, same as tackle like.

Q: Yep.

A: And ah, Jesus, I grabbed that….they were bringin’ that stuff ashore and puttin’ it on this old piece of sail they had there. Herbert grabbed a great big pie plate. My God, the pie plate’d be the bottom of that chair pretty near. A pie plate, the biggest pie plate I ever saw. My God, when they begin to look around and they seen that block a gone, you talk about a rage they got into. Geez, when they wasn’t lookin’ I threw it back. Oh they was just the same as crazy men. First thing they done was chop the spars out of the vessel. Yeah.

Q: What had happened to the vessel in the first place?

A: Hmm?

Q: What had happened to the vessel in the first place? Had it completely foundered?

A: Well, it run ashore there. It…what it really was doin’….it had a part of a load of salt….

Q: Yeah.

A: ….But it, the rest of it, it had, what it was doing, it had a load of rum. It had been down to the West Indies and got some salt one place, and then filled her up with rum.

Q: Yeah.

A: She was up in the bay and ah, peddlin’ it out you know, there was boats comin’ and loading up and….And I guess they kind of lost reckonin’ to where they were. Thought they was in the Bay of Fundy and they was in St. Mary’s.

Q: Yeah.

A: They hauled her off to the nor’west and got smashed right in the bank.

Q: But everybody survived?

A: Oh yeah.

Q: OK.

A: Yeah, they all got out of her alright, yeah. And, the last of the rum runnin’….Oh yeah, there was a vessel went down through here one time, headin’ for Meteghan. She was leaking. And ah, it had a load of alcohol, cases, wooden cases with two….two cans of alcohol, two and a half gallons in each can.

Q: Cans?

A: Yeah. And God knows how many cases she dumped over. And ah, my uncle, Wes Leeman and Watson Outhouse was down there handlining. God, on the last of the ebb this stuff kept comin’ in these cases. Christ, they seen it was alcohol and they…. a feller owned a fish house there to Lake Cove, he was over there to the cove. And we started….they started takin’ it ashore. They filled that fish house right full, right up to the peak, cases of alcohol.

Q: What kind of alcohol was this?

A: It was a pure alcohol. Hand Brand alcohol, you know.

Q: Was it for drinking or….obviously it was for drinking.

A: Oh yeah.

Q: It was called Hand brand?

A: Hand Brand, yeah. Yeah, and it went up some, and it went through and they saw it there and, so they come down. Oh God, it was kind of fun. So they got it out of the fish house and hid it through the woods everywheres. And, I heard, ah, Syd Guier had a can and Curtis Outhouse had hid in this old spruce that had growed its limbs right down to the ground, and he heard Syd comin’. You could hear anybody carryin’ it, it’d bong, bong, bong, you know, that thin can. He come….Syd come stumblin’ along….. this can, and he shoved it in through these branches. Curtis had his hand right out there, just took a hold of it. Syd thought he had it hid. Curtis did. Oh God, and they was….I went back to my rabbit snares. I was about fourteen or fifteen. And my brother and….Oh Jesus Christ, there goes my finger again. [Scratched by his cat]

Q: That little rascal.

A: My brother and Emerson Outhouse, they had four cans of….five cans of alcohol and a gallon jug of alcohol, and they was debating, goin’ to punch it and set it afire, burn it up. It was some that Sydney Smith had hid and they’d found it. And ah….

Q: Were they against alcohol?

A: Yeah, they….my brother used to drink before he was married but he wasn’t drinking then.

Q: Yeah.

A: And….but they gave me the spare can, the five…..there was five cans, they gave me that, and the jug. And I brought it out, and up here on the hill it was all, it wasn’t much wood on the face of the hill. It was kind of just like pasture land like. So I stayed ‘til dark and brought that home, a can of alcohol and the jug. And, people knew I had it, but they didn’t know what I’d done with it. And they claimed, you know, somebody got the yarn a goin’ that I’d painted it green and had it hid up there in the trees somewhere. Anyway, along in the winter, Art (Screamer?) was buyin’ , buyin’ up the alcohol for a feller on, up the Neck, some Sypher, I think it was.

Q: Probably in Sandy Cove.

A: Yeah. And ah….

[Missing a small bit of audio tape here. Wilfred sold the alcohol to Art for eight dollars.]

Q: So you sold it for eight dollars?

A: Yeah, and my mother, she said, “You gotta buy a suit of clothes.” So I….so I sent and got this suit of clothes. My God, I wouldn’t put them on, no way. It was what they used to call salt and pepper, you know, black….

Q: (inaudible)

A: Yeah, yeah, and had these ah, golf…..

Q: Knickers?

A: Knickers.

Q: Did you help choose, or did your mother do the choosing?

A: She did the choosin’.

Q: Yep.

A: I didn’t do the wearin’ though.

Q: Never?

A: No.

Q: Not even once?

A: No. It hung there in my bedroom, and in the spring when they done spring cleaning they’d take it down and clean behind it, put it back up. In the fall they done the same thing. It was there about five years. Finally they….my sister Laura Belle, she took it up, gave it to Johnny Gosson in Tiddville. So that’s all the….didn’t do much bootleggin’.

Q: Was that the first time you ever had any amount of money to spend?

A: Well, no, I don’t know. I’d made money, oh I….When I was eleven years old, I baited trawl, and I’ll tell you how much clothes cost then. I bought a whole damned outfit for clothes….two suits of underwear, two pair of overhaul pants they called ‘em, in nine ounce ah, denim.

Q: Yeah.

A: Christ, they was stand up alone, pretty near. And, two pair of them. Get three pair of socks for a dollar, two outside shirts. And the whole thing only come to less than ten…. it wasn’t quite ten dollars, the whole thing.

Q: Did you get all that from a store or did you have to send from the catalogue?

A: Send to Eatons.

Q: To Eatons, yeah.

A: Yeah.

Q: So, this alcohol, it was actually in a can?

A: Yeah.

Q: A metal can.

A: Yeah.

Q: I didn’t know they put alcohol up that way. And this was a big Temperance movement going on at the time or Prohibition?

A: Oh yeah, yeah. Yeah, some of it would, oh some of it would be adrift so long that it, it would be little pinholes get in it and there’d be salt water into it. And ah, my father, he picked up quite a lot of it. Seemed to be in the bay, what we call rockweed streaks. There’d be one come up from down Brier Island off the ledges there, where all this rockweed and stuff and drift stuff would gather in a streak, like, and it would come up here about two miles and a half off the head.

Q: Almost like a raft of it or something?

A: Yeah, it would be a lot of it, all, just all kind of drift stuff. And there’d be a lot of that….there’s be alcohol sometimes in that. My father, he brought in a case of it, a can of it….And ah, had a fellow fishin’ with him, Syd Guier. It didn’t take much to make Syd drunk for some reason or another. And he come up one night….he lived down in the house there, the other side of the church….

Q: Yeah.

A: The other side of the upper church there.

Q: Yeah.

A: And he come up with this ah, five gallon demijohn with wire, ah, wicker stuff around it you know, like a basket.

Q: Around a ah, like a clay….

A: Yeah, it was a big….

Q: Jug?

A: A big glass jug.

Q: Yeah.

A: Demijohn, they called ‘em.

Q: Yeah.

A: And, well Blair Leeman and Otis Outhouse and somebody else, I think it was my cousin Alvern Clifford….they knew Syd was comin’ up to get this alcohol so they laid in wait for him. And before it had any….no street lights you know, dark….And Syd got the….got his half of the alcohol. Went out, went up in the schoolyard and he got by them some how or another and got…. “God,” Blair said, “Where the hell did he go?” Syd said, “I’m way above you.” Christ, they took after him, took the alcohol away from him. “Way above you,” he said. He thought he was pretty smart, my God. Syd….Syd’d get drunk and tell about, “I got five thousand dollars home. Nobody knows where t’is under my pillow. They’ll never find it.” And him and his brother Orlin, my God it was fun….they’d get in the damnedest fights. Oh, (inaudible word). I come down from Whale Cove one…. had to wait…(Boyd Blackford ?)got in the garage. He needed a fan belt for the engine, Kemp did. So I’d come down, and Syd and Orlin was in the fish house baitin’ trawl, and Charlie Howard and….I forget who was with Charlie. He was in the other part of the fish house. I was standin’ there listenin’. Orlin got done, got his tub of trawl done first. Syd said, “You oughta get done first. You don’t do nothin’ around the house.” Well Orlin said, “Well what the hell do you do?” Syd said, “Had to get a bucket of water and put the cat out.” Puttin’ that cat out sounded as if it was pretty important. And then they kept arguin’….they got in a fight. And ah, Syd, ah, Orlin got Syd down, right under the baitin’ bench, poundin’ him. “My God,” I said, “That, that’s awful.” And they heard this hollerin’ and screachin’. Harry and the fellow that fished with him, Duke we called him….they come out and they hauled him out from under there and got ‘em apart. Five minutes later they was just as good as pie, brothers again. And that Orlin, my God he had the awful temper. He was comin’ in from fishin’ one day and the engine was skippin’ and skippin’ and after awhile it stopped. Car engine. And he went to put a new set of points in and he lost that little screw that held ‘em in.

Q: Yeah.

A: He was right in a rage. He took a screwdriver and was gonna drive it down in the floor boards….drove it right down through his foot.

Q: Ooh!

A: Nailed himself right to the floor. Ah….God. And Syd….trawl was fast one day, got caught on bottom, and they got….they got afoul, hook ‘n hook with somebody…..the trawl was fouled up. And Syd hollered, “Cut!” He hollered so hard he blew his teeth overboard.

Q: That was probably costly. What would it cost to get a new set of teeth?

A: Oh, back then teeth cost about, I think around thirty, thirty five dollars. That’s all.

Q: Not too much. Not relatively so much.

A: Yeah, about thirty five, I think about thirty five dollar I paid for the first set of teeth I had.

Q: Yeah.

A: The set I got now only cost a hundred.

Q: Yeah?

A: Now, God, I guess they cost seven or eight hundred dollars.

Q: That’s what I thought.

A: Yeah.

Q: So pretty well everybody ends up not owning their own teeth anymore, ‘cause the dental care when you were young….Nobody was really taking care of their teeth the way kids do now.

A: No, no. I think, far as I can….seemed to me my teeth came in when they….rotten when they come in.

Q: Yeah?

A: I don’t remember, remember havin’ good teeth.

Q: Never, no?

A: But my father, he only had….he had all of his teeth, all but one when he died, ninety six years old. And that one, he’d hauled that out himself.

Q: He was just missing one.

A: He just….there was one gone.

Q: He had all his own teeth. Wow.

A: Just one…hauled that out himself.

Q: Yeah. So where was your father when he died? Did you two….were you ever married?

A: No.

Q: So did you always live in this house?

A: Yeah.

Q: And your father did too?

A: Yeah.

Q: He lived here until he was ninety six?

A: Yeah.

Q: Wow.

A: Well he lived some up to Whale Cove on the last of it I think, up to his daughter’s.

Q: One of your sisters.

A: Yeah.

Q: Which….that would be….?

A: He was up there to Laura Belle’s I guess.

Q: Laura Belle’s, yeah.

A: Yeah.

Q: So how did you escape marriage?

A: Oh I dunno. I always think about what Mortimer Snerd said.

Q: Which was….

A: Mortimer…..ask Mortimer if he had a girlfriend. He said “No,” he said, “I wouldn’t be seen with any girl that would go out with a thing like me.” That’s the way I felt.

Q: Ahh.

A: Oh, I’ll tell you, it was….well, let’s see, I’d be seventeen, eighteen when the Depression come. And it was there for five or six years. Well by the time….like I should a been thinkin’ about getting married, times was so goddamned hard….

Q: Yeah.

A: And I couldn’t see myself puttin’ a woman to that kind of torture, you know. Didn’t look to me as though….well you, cripes, you couldn’t even dream about how good it is now. God. No, if you’d a told….told me that you know, you’d have, you know, plenty of money and could have a car if you wanted it and….well they’d put you in the asylum. You’d a been crazy.

Q: Wow.

A: Yeah. And I’ll give you another anecdote about how bad they wanted you to have anything. The government gave out a bonus, fifteen cents a hundred weight on fish. So….

Q: Was this during the Depression?

A: Yeah.

Q: Yeah, and the bonus was for, just, just to supplement….?

A: Yeah. So, I got the….this cheque, along late in the fall, eighty, or eighty two dollars, or eighty some dollars. I was on a quarter….quarter of the….quarter of the stock. I had eighty two dollars. Yeah, eighty, yeah, for sure, eighty. Anyway, first I got the….I got…I got an account of the fish that we had sold to Eldon Eliott when I was down on Saturday. And I took it back and showed it to Kemp, Sunday. I’d signed my name to it. Kemp said, “You signed your name to a lie.” I said, “What do you mean?” Well he said, “We caught more than thirty thousand pound of fish.” Oh yeah, I asked about it. “Well that’s all….” Eldon said, “That’s all I salted out of ‘em, put the….I canned the rest.” So we went to our lawyer, Gip Horner. He was a funny feller, that Gip.

Q: Gip?

A: Gip Horner.

Q: Gip Horner.

A: Yeah. Gilpin. Called him Gip.

Q: Yeah.

A: Gip Horner. By God, he would have made some lawyer. Well he said, “You didn’t sell salt fish….you didn’t sell canned fish.” So he said, “You go back and get the right amount.” So I went back and got the right amount and it was somethin’ over two hundred thousand. So he….a feller that lives in that house right down there, that second one over….Elmer (Rimes?), he was a magistrate and notary public or something like that. So my sister Laura Belle come down and we went down…. this account, and you know, got him to fix it up. Well, of course, he put the address, Tiverton. Geez, I got this cheque for eighty dollars or somethin’. Well there wasn’t much traffic goin’ then. You had to walk if you were goin’ to Whale Cove. So in the spring, along in March, I went up. I said to Kemp, we were down to the fish house there workin’ on traps….I said, “You got your bonus, did you?” “Bonus,” he said, “No, I never saw no bonus.” I said, “What, my God,” I said, “Did I get it and spend it all?” He said, “How much did you get?” I said, “I got eighty dollars.” “No,” he said, “I never got none.” So, went and saw Gip again. Well Gip inquired around and he found….the letter was in the dead letter office. (Elbridge’s, Outhouse ?), handwritin’ right on to it, “address unknown.” Son of a bitch, he knew what was in it.

Q: Yeah.

A: And that’s how bad they hated for you to have anything.

Q: Yeah.

A: They wanted to keep you right, nose right to the grindstone.

Q: Yeah.

A: Dirty bastard. So we got it. God, that was a lot of money back then, two hundred and forty dollars.

Q: Yeah.

A: Geez, put him right on easy street.

Q: Yeah.

A: Yeah.

Q: Where was ahm, the lawyer’s, Gip’s office? Did he work right out of Tiverton, or his house or….?

A: He never had no office. He just….

Q: Was he a real lawyer?

A: No, no.

Q: No?

A: No. He just….I don’t know how he come to be so damn well educated, by God. And he could write, and he was a good writer too.

Q: Yeah?

A: That’s the only thing that would turn him against bein’ a lawyer or a doctor. You could understand what he wrote.

Q: Yeah.

A: Yeah.

Q: Well, let’s see….

A: Gip….Gip and Johnny Gosson come over to Kemp’s one time, and ah, Joe and them, on Halloween night, they’d shoved Johnny’s outhouse, outside toilet, shoved it over, right close to the road. And Johnny and Gip come over….oh Johnny was riled right up. He was some mad. And Gip said, “Now, look Johnny. After all,” he said, “You was a menace to navigation, you know.” Menace to navigation, yeah. Well Kemp said, “Well I’ll see that it’s put up, back up.” So he went out and shoved it, stood it up again.

Q: Well, I’ve come to about the end of my questions, but I know that you have no end of anecdotes to tell. I know I could get lots more out of you, but I should turn the tapes off and let you get some dinner.

A: Oh I ain’t in no hurry, unless you want something to eat.

Q: No, I’m good.

A: Yeah. I don’t know what I’m gonna have. I don’t know….can’t think of anything I want anyway.

Q: What do you usually have?

A: Well, I had a hamburg last night for supper. Don’t want that again. I got some there, but….hamburg and sweet potatoes last night. Oh, I dunno, there’s a can of kippered snacks there….probably I’ll cook a potatoe and….after a while. If I had fish, fresh, good fresh haddock, frozen….They put it up in five pound boxes there, pound packages. When it’s good, why….. Used to get it over here to Israel Cove, Pirate Cove there, and they’d mark the good kind…..

Q: Yeah.

A: Mark it so, you know, for special customers…. But they moved that and don’t do any of that there now. That’s closed.

Q: That was just open a few years ago, wasn’t it?

A: Well, yeah, it’s been there quite a while.

Q: Is that part of D.B. Kenney’s? Or was that something else?

A: Well it’d be, it used to be Small Brothers.

Q: Oh, OK.

A: Then D.B. Kenney took it over.

Q: And that’s not even operating now?

A: No.

Q: I remember when it was, just a little while ago.

Q: So what do you think the future of the fisheries is today?

A: It’s gone.

Q: Yeah.

A: Gone, and’ll never come back. Christ, it’d make you grit your teeth to think….there’s a dozen women, six women at a time, up there in the fishery office, tellin’ you when you can go out, when you can come back, how many fish you can bring in. Christ, if it wasn’t hooked on to the post office I’d get somebody to blow it up.

Q: What do you think the future holds for the lobster fishery, which is about all that’s left?

A: Well, that’s all that’s left. In a way, the draggers have helped that, that’s for sure, ‘cause it killed all the fish that was eatin’ the small lobster up. That’s the reason the lobster fishery’s come back so good. But you can’t tell. Nature has funny ways of doin’ things, you know, sometime. And it could be such a thing sometime. You’re liable to find some kind of a disease in them lobsters, they get thick enough. Nature has of way of lookin’ after herself in some cases. And it could happen.

Q: Do you think the lobsters themselves could just be overfished?

A: Well, yeah, in a way, yes. But ah, as long as they…..there’s no fish to eat the small ones, why they could probably stand it for quite a while.

Q: Yeah.

A: Well my God, the Bay of Fundy….the Bay of Fundy was a Klondike. You wouldn’t never believe that they could drag so long and so much. You could go out here and count twenty five and thirty draggers. There wouldn’t be any of ‘em off any more than three and a half miles….anywhere from a quarter of a mile. Count twenty five and thirty of ‘em that you could see, and God knows…. They dragged from Brier Island and off of Nor’west Buoy, right up to Sandy Cove, back and forth, back and forth. For years they done that. Ruined all the bottom, so it’s no good to run trawl there. Had a….when you run trawl, you had to put floats on it and weights and….

Q: And you didn’t have to do that before?

A: Oh no.

Q: No.

A: No. There used to be places that was good bottom, broken bottom, and then there was places that was right hard. Every bait would come back just the same as when you put it over. But there ain’t none of that there now.

Q: What do you think it all looks like on the bottom now?

A: Just a swamp.

Q: Yeah?

A: Mm mm. Used to be all kind of vegetable things grow, things looked the same as ripe tomatoes, apples, and all kinds of stuff on the….

Q: Yeah, I remember going out with a fisherman, pulling up sea cucumbers and everything, and saying that there was almost an equivalent, underwater, for everything that we grew in our garden.

A: Pretty well, yeah. Well them cucumbers you call them….garnets, I guess their real name. We had a different name than that, but I won’t tell you what it was.

Q: Oh, I can guess.

A: And ah, before the war, I read where they was getting twenty dollars a ton for them….

Q: Yeah.

A: Dried, I suppose. I suppose they were dried, and shipped to Japan.

Q: Japan, maybe?

A: Yeah. I don’t know whatever happened since that, ah, whether it….market is still there or what, but ah, St Mary’s Bay, my God, was a place where, nothin’ but garnets. And up to….out here on the Bay of Fundy shore there isn’t any until you get….you get down close to Freeport, you get some. But up this shore here, oh my God, traps fill right full.

Q: Well, let’s see…. I think I’ve covered….you’ve covered most of my questions. I haven’t had to ask them. You just happened to answer them. Can you remember people being….any superstitious people when you were growing up….any special superstitions?

A: Well, I dunno. Well, probably some, but the same things….you know, walkin’ under a ladder, you couldn’t do that….

Q: Yeah.

A: And stuff like that, but….And, oh, some claim that they’d seen people that was dead, and drowned, and one thing and another. There was a school teacher here….I don’t know if I told you about the school teacher that saw her father….

Q: No.

A: School teacher here, Stella (Havey ?)her name was. And her father was a seaman on a ship….on a sailin’ vessel. And the old school house used to be right across here, the old one. Well that other one was the newer one. But ah, the old school house was…..the same, same shape as that old hall over there.

Q: Yeah.

A: And ah, she was teachin’ school one day and all of a sudden her father appeared. Oil clothes on and water runnin’ right off of him. She just saw him just for a flash, and she said, “Father!” She hollered right out, “What are you doin’ here?” He disappeared. There was no water on the floor, just…. She got word about a week later that his father….her father fell overboard and drowned about the same time.

Q: Wow.

A: Yeah.

Q: Well, before I completely run out of tape, Wilfred….In the very beginning of the interview, ahm, this one little mike wasn’t on for about two minutes, so just for the….just to have it on the tape somewhere, can you just tell me like, the first few questions I asked you, your full name, and your mother….your mother and father’s names, just in case I didn’t get it on the first tape. It might be there and it might not. So just for the tape recorder, can you just state your full name again?

A: Wilfred….Wilfred Keith Clifford.

Q: And your mother’s name was?

A: Maggie Clifford.

Q: Yep. And her maiden name was?

A: MacKay.

Q: MacKay.

A: Yeah.

Q: OK. And let’s see, we should maybe go back just another minute on it. Ahm, your Dad’s name was?

A: Byron.

Q: Byron….

A: Clifford.

Q: Do you remember his middle name?

A: He never had any.

A: He never had one. Just like my Dad.

A: No.

Q: And your grandparents….on your mother’s side?

A: James MacKay ….

Q: Yeah.

A: And Amanda.

Q: James and Amanda MacKay.

A: Yeah.

Q: And on your father’s side….?

A: They was John….John and Matilda.

Q: Right.

A: yeah.