Summer chuckles from the Bygone Days
From painted cars to broken eggs, there was no shortage of funny stories from the past
Reginald "Dutch" Thompson's column The Bygone Days brings you the voices of Island seniors, many of whom are now long-departed. These tales of the way things used to be offer a fascinating glimpse into the past. Every second weekend CBC P.E.I. will bring you one of Dutch's columns.
Islanders are well-known for their sense of humour, and that was also the case in decades past.
Dutch Thompson has heard plenty during his travels across P.E.I. and shared some of them with CBC.
'A good paint job'
The first comes from Gladys Bryan, who was born in Elmsdale in western P.E.I. in 1918.
She often helped her husband Heber with his rural mail route. In the 1930s they bought a second-hand Model A Ford to make deliveries.
"That old car, my gosh, it went on for years and it was great," Bryan told Thompson.
"There was no pavement and the all-out model A was up high and it could go over the dirt road so easy. It didn't cost hardly anything to keep it in repair."
That was a good thing, because mail carriers made less than $90 a month back then, she said, and they had to buy their own fuel.
If you didn't have enough chaff you'd be down onto them hard slats.— Robbie Robertson
But they were proud of that car, Bryan said, and took it to church every Sunday.
"I painted her all black and I got some leatherette and I covered it all inside," she said.
"I know this gentleman, the warden of the church, he says, 'Gladys, you did a good paint job' and he was looking right at me and I thought he meant the way I put on my lipstick. And he was he was referring to the car! I said thank you anyway."
Of mice and mattresses
The next story comes from the other end of the Island, northeastern Kings County past Souris, where Robbie Robertson was born in 1904.
Robertson fished all his life, back in the days of 50, 60, 70, even 80-pound codfish.
Robertson came from a family of 14 children and told Thompson there weren't enough bedrooms to go around even in the big Robertson house.
He said there were often three children to a bed. They slept on homemade mattresses called ticks — cotton flour bags sewed up and filled with oat chaff or husks.
"If you didn't have enough chaff you'd be down onto them hard slats," Robertson said. "If you put a lot of chaff in it'd be great for one but to get two or three, everybody would go towards the centre. You'd have to make kind of a hollow of a centre and roll out."
By the time fall came around the beds would be pretty flat and everybody would look forward to filling their beds with fresh chaff from the fall harves, he said.
But it wasn't just chaff that made it into the bed.
"Mice was awful plentiful, too, then," Robertson said.
"I know it happened more than once, discovered a mouse working in the tick. You'd have to take it apart and build again."
The Seven Mile Road, give or take
Just how long is the the Seven Mile Road, anyway?
The late Louis Cantelo, who was born in 1904 and lived to be 102 years old, lived on the Seven Mile Road and was a regular at the annual Dundas Fair and Plowing Match.
I don't know how they figured it out.— Louis Cantelo
Before it was the Seven Mile Road, it was called the Grand River Road. But there were two Grand Rivers, and people used to get them mixed up, Cantelo told Thompson.
So they renamed it Seven Mile Road, because it went "seven miles without a turn." But it got confusing again, Cantelo said, when the Seven Mile Road was extended to Dingwells Mills.
"One fella broke down one day and he went to the phone and he called up and he says, 'I'm 10 miles out the Seven Mile Road,'" Cantelo said with a laugh.
"I don't know how they figured it out. They figured it out some way anyhow."
Egg delivery doesn't go over easy
General stores in the bygone days carried everything from a needle to an anchor and they bought lots of farm products such as eggs.
Some general stores, like Clow's in Hampshire, would truck their eggs to grading stations in Charlottetown and have them sorted there.
When Bobby Clow was a teenager, one of his first responsibilities was running the eggs into town, he told Thompson. But he ended up paying a price for showing off.
"I remember one time Dad sent me to town. I was 16, we had a tonne truck and I had a crate of eggs in the back to take in. And of course I called in to see my buddy. He was still going to school down there in Warren Grove. They're all out at recess playing. Of course, I pulled in with this great big truck, you know, showing off, I was only 100 pounds at the time."
Clow said when he sped off in the old truck, he put the pedal to the floor for extra effect.
"I got to town and the poor old eggs are all over the place. I remember coming home and telling dad the bottom fell out of the crate. I know he didn't believe me, but he let on he did."