Correspondents, then and now

BY WENDY ELLIOTT

The Advertiser

NovaNewsNow.com



Thirty years ago, Chatelaine Magazine was running a series on Canadian cities called ‘Could you live in…?’ During the summer of 1977, when I was a cub reporter at The Hants Journal, I decided to copy the idea on a smaller scale.

Thus it was that I was given guided tours of nine communities by the paper’s correspondents of the day. Those were magical visits where I got to see and learn and appreciate rural Hants County. I also got into trouble from time to time.

Take Mount Denson, for example. I noted that the community centre had broken windows and a front door latched with a coat hanger. The store was closed and I was told there were fewer farms and more housing. So I suggested perhaps Mount Denson was turning into a bedroom community and things hit the fan.

Yet the Mount Denson correspondent, Mrs. Annie Walker, had assured me that “every time the phone book comes out all the names are changed.” She believed that the community had been left behind by the ‘new highway’ to fend for itself.

Then I went to visit a dear woman named Kaye Siler in her Avondale kitchen. She and her husband Bill even took me for a delightful ride in their little boat off Newport Landing.

I got chewed out by a Toronto lawyer for mentioning 1930s rum-running in connection with a prominent Avondale family. It was then that I began to fathom the difference between storytelling and putting a tale in print. Print takes on a very different life sometimes.



Great storytellers

Too naïve to be deterred, I visited Kempt Shore and saw the unmistakable spirit of cooperation well off the beaten path. Driving way down on the Noel Shore, I toured Selmah and viewed 47 occupied homes, four mobile homes and three lamentably vacant houses.

There I met a great storyteller, Harry Salter, who was keeping a vast oral history alive. He and wife Carrie lived in the homestead that had been in the same family for 150 years.

In Upper Vaughan I had the privilege of chatting with Mr. and Mrs. Wallace Smeltzer. On that day she had baked eight apple pies “because I had the apples.” In her eighties at the time, Mrs. Smeltzer had been schooled when she cooked for 40 men in the lumber camps while her husband earned $1 a day.

They told me impossible tales about forest fires and hiding from flames while standing in a lake. They knew all about hard work and thought nothing in their younger days of walking to Windsor should the need arise.

Over in Admiral Rock, I heard ghost stories about the never fully departed from this world Nicholas Moore. He was thought to haunt the old Brimicombe house and was described as the “little man in a swallow-tailed coat who passes by without speaking.” People were nonchalant. “Oh. Nick again.”



Time to talk

In Noel I learned about a village that once hummed with the shipping industry, a community rich with history. Seniors in Noel had time to talk. They said, “even on the hottest day in the summer there’s always a cool breeze off the bay” and I learned the virtue of taking time to sniff the air.

Noel was where the first printer’s imp got me. The typo involved an older woman who had taught a church group of girls to “fart in bloomers.”

Back in 1978 it was Hants County writer Maud Newcomb, in her Nova Scotia in Grandfather’s Day, who mourned the loss of many elements of community, the fields overgrown with alders and a new lack of self-sufficiency. But there was one community correspondent who began a unique Hants chronicle even earlier.

Her name was Mary Elizabeth Clark. Known as M.E.C., she wrote the news from Clarksville from about 1912-48. A beloved local correspondent, she was also honoured by the Canadian Authors’ Association.

Mrs. Clark had a wonderful way with words, a love of nature, children and animals. Her tribute in this newspaper in 1952 indicated, “M.E.C. was the envy and the admiration of newspapers all over Canada.”

I am currently transcribing MEC’s ‘news budgets’ and seeking her poems or any reminiscences. Any reader who might be able help in this research is asked to write me c/o P.O. Box 430 Kentville, N.S. B4N 3X4 or leave a message at The Hants Journal office (info@hantsjournal.ca).