One winter, Bob Sturgeon decided he’d try working at a bush camp.
He headed up to Camp 12 of the Great Lakes Paper Co., at Black Sturgeon Lake. While there, he suffered a serious injury.
“I don’t like to talk about it,” Sturgeon said, but he shared an experience from the 35 days he spent in hospital in Fort William.
There was a student nurse who made the rounds at 6 a.m., waking the patients to take their temperature.
“One day I put the thermometer on the radiator that was by the head of the bed. When she came back, I quickly put it in my mouth,” Sturgeon said.
The student nurse took one look at the thermometer, and ran out of the room. She came back accompanied by senior staff.
Sturgeon was asked how he felt. “Fine,” he answered. They took his temperature again; not surprisingly, it was normal. As they left, he asked the student what the fuss was about.
“Well,” she said, “I don’t know, but when I first took your temperature it was 105.”
Yarns and Tales with Bradford Old Boys was an evening of storytelling, history and reminiscences with three of West Gwillimbury’s lifelong residents: Bob Sturgeon, John Fennell and Sam Lee.
Fennell reminisced about past elections, which used to be held annually at either the Coulson’s Hill Orange Lodge, or the Bond Head Orange Hall.
“Everybody smoked a cigar or pipe,” said Fennell.
He said he remembers sitting on the balcony of the Coulson’s Hill Lodge with his father. “We couldn’t see the speakers because of the smoke.”
Then there was the story of the nomination meeting, advertised in the Bradford Witness as taking place at “one o’clock in the Bond Head Hall on Oct. 10.” Interested voters turned up at 1 p.m., only to learn that the council had already been chosen — at 1 a.m.
There was even a little modern political commentary regarding the online voting glitch that shut down polling in 51 Ontario municipalities on Oct. 22.
“For years and years in West Gwillimbury, the election was operated by the clerk, and one or two people,” said Fennell. “I’ve voted in 75 elections… and I don’t ever recall having a screw-up like we did.”
One-room schools, church garden parties, Friday night dances, bootleggers and the Bradford Fair were all topics of discussion — and the stuff of legend.
“Bradford’s Fall Fair was held down where the community centre is now (on Simcoe Road) and there was a racetrack down there,” said Fennell. “The fair existed until 1935, and it closed because, for some unknown reason, they didn’t have enough money to pay the prize money.”
He said he remembers taking home a trophy from his first school fair, where he showed a shorthorn heifer and a Leicester ewe lamb.
On the night before the fair opened, there would be a dance held upstairs in the Old Town Hall, which is the current Treasury Building.
“If you took a girl to a dance, you were supposed to have the last dance with her,” said Fennell. “If you brought a real fancy girl, you had a hard time hanging on to her.”
There was plenty of laughter as stories were shared — of a well-known British comedian brought in to entertain at a garden party in Fennell’s Corners, whose off-colour jokes “ended the garden party,” and some of the colourful characters who peopled the township back in its early days.
When Freddie Woods married Eunice Scanlon and brought her home to his 9th Line farm in the 1930s, the newlyweds were “shivareed” by their neighbours, who noisily serenaded the marriage, said Fennell.
A short time later, a severe earthquake shook the area. Freddie reportedly grabbed his shotgun and ran to the window, threatening to shoot them all if they didn’t stop shaking the house.
“He thought they were shivareeing him again,” said Fennell.
Every seat at the Bradford West Gwillimbury Local History Association event was full, upstairs in the Bradford West Gwillimbury Public Library boardroom for the lively meeting, which included questions from the audience, and a final suggestion from Sturgeon: “Put your life stories on paper, if only for your own enjoyment!”
