In Springhill,Nova Scotia my father knew a man named Art.He worked at a school for deaf students in nearby Amherst,and,as far as I can tell,Art and my father were rather close.so when we took our summer vacation in 1966,it was to the beach,right next to where Art kept a summer cottage.
My fathers's history with Art would have gone back into the late 1940's,after Art returned from the war.For as long as I can remember,and perhaps for many years before that.art lived down in the flats of Springhill,near the old mines in the foul air.I have know idea if he was ever a miner,but in the lists of miners I have seen,I've never noticed his name among the men listed.what I do know is that at some point he owned and operated a hot dog stand at a beach,and that my father worked for him during the summer.He was also involved in boxing,either as a coach or promoter,or perhaps both,and he looked the part.Art was a lean man of about average height,with a bullet like head.he'd sustained some sort of a scar during the war,which was no prominent all the time,but could flare up and give him a menacing look.To see him,he did not strike you as a man you might like to meet inside a boxing ring.he looked very capable of taking care of that sort of business.In fact though I could see no evidence of any real meanness in him.He seemed calm and even tempered, I rarely herd him swear,and he seemed,on the occasions when my father and he held court and reminisced about past days of working the hot dog stand,and boxing,to drink rather less than my father,who himself did not seem a heavy drinker.I sensed about him an ability and a desire to motivate.,for in my childhood,Art would teach me and encourage me not in boxing,but in the game of golf.one thing about art that I noticed though,is that he never seemed to talk about mines or mining.when it came to talking about the war,he was reluctant to talk about that as well.He would mention that he still had shrapnel in one side of his face,on the occasions it flared up and bothered him.But mining is something I never recalled him talking about.
Arts cottage was at a place called Fox Harbour,along the north coast of Nova Scotia,forty some miles maybe from his home in Springhill. On the road trips we'd made since moving to Moncton,I'd been to Art's cottage before,and it was a rather remote place in those days.It's located between the towns of Pugwash and Wallace,neither of which were really large places.though both were busy during the summer season.But Fox Harbour,you could say was centrally located,in the middle of nowhere.It was a dozen or so miles out of Pugwash,and not all of the roads along the way were what you would call really inviting,though there was a main road up to the point where you turned off to drive out to the beach.that road was really remote,a long way from anything,and it was in awful shape.At the time,there were a few small farms along the road,and about four of five miles in,people were starting to take an interest in building cottages,where shore front property was still available.The farmer that lived at the end of the road was down scaling his operations and had begun to sub-divide and sell individual lots.
Getting into the end of that road was like traveling back in time,maybe forty of fifty years.For one thing,I'm not certain that people back there even had phone service.At least not all of them.As we would drive along,I noticed that the utility poles all leaned over,some of them so far as too be little higher than the fence posts along the road.I could have,even at five years old, walked right up to the pole and grabbed the wires in many places.The phone repair,or the hydro servicemen would not even have needed ladders,never mind climbing the poles like they did in the city. When we first went out there,there were places where the trees were so close to the road that they would close right in on the car,and,if you rolled down the windows,you could grab the passing branches.Just beyond the last farmhouse the road took an almost ninety degree bend and narrowed down into a lane that would not allow two cars to pass going in opposite directions.The surface was dirt,and deeply rutted.at that time there were a few cottages on the right hand side as you were passing.On the left hand side there was nothing but brambles and bush.If you had ventured in that far without knowing any of the people who lived there,you would have been well and truly lost,about as far away from civilization as you could get.And it really wasn't a car friendly road.You could get stuck,even in summer,and,at other times,the road could be an impossible quagmire.More than once I recall coming to a puddle wide and deep enough that my father would not venture through it and would have to back up a substantial distance before he could turn around.Most of the cottage people back there lived in the larger towns and so were friendly and civilized enough,but there were a lot of places on the way in that I would likely have been hesitant to approach in any situation other than a dire emergency.Most of those people were people I never came to know,and the ones that I did,I never felt that I knew well. But that is where my father decided to take us for vacation in July of 1966.
My fathers's history with Art would have gone back into the late 1940's,after Art returned from the war.For as long as I can remember,and perhaps for many years before that.art lived down in the flats of Springhill,near the old mines in the foul air.I have know idea if he was ever a miner,but in the lists of miners I have seen,I've never noticed his name among the men listed.what I do know is that at some point he owned and operated a hot dog stand at a beach,and that my father worked for him during the summer.He was also involved in boxing,either as a coach or promoter,or perhaps both,and he looked the part.Art was a lean man of about average height,with a bullet like head.he'd sustained some sort of a scar during the war,which was no prominent all the time,but could flare up and give him a menacing look.To see him,he did not strike you as a man you might like to meet inside a boxing ring.he looked very capable of taking care of that sort of business.In fact though I could see no evidence of any real meanness in him.He seemed calm and even tempered, I rarely herd him swear,and he seemed,on the occasions when my father and he held court and reminisced about past days of working the hot dog stand,and boxing,to drink rather less than my father,who himself did not seem a heavy drinker.I sensed about him an ability and a desire to motivate.,for in my childhood,Art would teach me and encourage me not in boxing,but in the game of golf.one thing about art that I noticed though,is that he never seemed to talk about mines or mining.when it came to talking about the war,he was reluctant to talk about that as well.He would mention that he still had shrapnel in one side of his face,on the occasions it flared up and bothered him.But mining is something I never recalled him talking about.
Arts cottage was at a place called Fox Harbour,along the north coast of Nova Scotia,forty some miles maybe from his home in Springhill. On the road trips we'd made since moving to Moncton,I'd been to Art's cottage before,and it was a rather remote place in those days.It's located between the towns of Pugwash and Wallace,neither of which were really large places.though both were busy during the summer season.But Fox Harbour,you could say was centrally located,in the middle of nowhere.It was a dozen or so miles out of Pugwash,and not all of the roads along the way were what you would call really inviting,though there was a main road up to the point where you turned off to drive out to the beach.that road was really remote,a long way from anything,and it was in awful shape.At the time,there were a few small farms along the road,and about four of five miles in,people were starting to take an interest in building cottages,where shore front property was still available.The farmer that lived at the end of the road was down scaling his operations and had begun to sub-divide and sell individual lots.
Getting into the end of that road was like traveling back in time,maybe forty of fifty years.For one thing,I'm not certain that people back there even had phone service.At least not all of them.As we would drive along,I noticed that the utility poles all leaned over,some of them so far as too be little higher than the fence posts along the road.I could have,even at five years old, walked right up to the pole and grabbed the wires in many places.The phone repair,or the hydro servicemen would not even have needed ladders,never mind climbing the poles like they did in the city. When we first went out there,there were places where the trees were so close to the road that they would close right in on the car,and,if you rolled down the windows,you could grab the passing branches.Just beyond the last farmhouse the road took an almost ninety degree bend and narrowed down into a lane that would not allow two cars to pass going in opposite directions.The surface was dirt,and deeply rutted.at that time there were a few cottages on the right hand side as you were passing.On the left hand side there was nothing but brambles and bush.If you had ventured in that far without knowing any of the people who lived there,you would have been well and truly lost,about as far away from civilization as you could get.And it really wasn't a car friendly road.You could get stuck,even in summer,and,at other times,the road could be an impossible quagmire.More than once I recall coming to a puddle wide and deep enough that my father would not venture through it and would have to back up a substantial distance before he could turn around.Most of the cottage people back there lived in the larger towns and so were friendly and civilized enough,but there were a lot of places on the way in that I would likely have been hesitant to approach in any situation other than a dire emergency.Most of those people were people I never came to know,and the ones that I did,I never felt that I knew well. But that is where my father decided to take us for vacation in July of 1966.
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