Recollections of St Luke's Club

 

Recollections of St Luke’s Club

Part One

Mabel Haines, my mother, and Margaret Haines, Metro Sass's wife, were sisters. They, along with a third sister, Janet, shared the responsibility of caring for their mother, Margaret Jane Haines nee Harvey.

Mabel met Eugene (Hickey) Hueglin in Stratford, Ontario. They married in Kitchener, Ontario, in 1929. Hickey was driving taxi for his uncle, George Diehl, while Mabel was working for Avon Hosiery Limited. A diary entry my mother made indicates that they met while ice skating, and she remembered him as Eugene Higland. I have no idea how my father came to be known by the nickname Hickey.

Margaret met Metro Sass while they were both employed at the Bradley Farm, in Dover Township. They married in Stratford in 1936. By 1939, Metro was caretaker of St Luke's Club at the end of the Eighth Concession in Dover Township.

In 1947, my father was working for Direct Winters Transport in Guelph, Ontario, however, through some arrangement between the families, my father went to work for Metro at St Luke's Club.

When my family, including my mother, father and older brother moved from Guelph to the area of St Luke's Club, in Dover Township, the first house we lived in, that I will call “the house on stilts”, was situated on a triangular piece of marshland that was bounded by the Town Line on the South, the Heron Line on the East and a dredge cut to the North.  The marshland was later drained and turned in to farmland. My grandmother didn’t live with us at that time. She may have gone to live with Janet in Stratford, Ontario.

As evidenced by the image of my mother sitting on the front porch, the area around the house periodically flooded.

Non-the-less, it was a great place to grow up, and holds many memories of a bygone era.

It was a small house with four rooms and an outhouse. We had electricity, but no running water and I can`t remember any telephone. We all moved into one room in the Winter and, as they were the most available and cheapest source of fuel, burned corn cobs to keep warm.

My older brother Joe and I often wore handmade clothes, and went barefoot. My first store bought shoes were a pair of black Penny Loafers.

We had a few chickens, a couple of cats and a tame Mallard duck.

The chickens were mostly, if not all, Barred Rocks, and it seems to me that, when the time came to have one for dinner, mine would be the first to be dispatched. Watching a chicken lose its head on a chopping block was not pleasant, but it gave you a greater appreciation for how meals wound up on your dinner table. It also taught you where the expression ¨like a chicken with its head cut off`` originated.

 

One of the cats was extremely lucky in that one Winter day, after a thin film of ice had formed on the marsh beside the house we lived in, it ventured out on the ice only to have it break under its weight. Amazing as it may seem, the cat immediately started swimming under the ice back towards shore. Fortunately, I was standing on the shoreline, saw the cat swimming, and was able to break a hole in the ice through which it was able to resurface and get to live another day. A different cat, however, wasn`t so lucky. It became caught in a muskrat trap and had to be put down.

I`m not sure what happened to the duck.

The marsh beside the house was also the place where I learned to swim. To assist me, my father tied a rope to me, told me to paddle out into deeper water and. if I ran into trouble pull myself back to shore with the rope. Bathing suits were optional since there were no close neighbours, and little traffic on the Town Line.

Part Two

Taylor Disher, Connie Blanchard and George Garbutt were amongst the several individuals who I had the pleasure of knowing in my youth. and who bring back memories of hunting, trapping, fishing, dredging, seine nets, snapping turtles, and cigarette packages.

 

Taylor Disher, George Garbutt and a friend

Our closest neighbour to the “house on stilts” was a fisherman named Taylor Disher who mostly lived alone, but sometimes had a lady friend stay with him. One memory of him was that he had dinner plates with a rim on the bottom. This enabled him to have lunch on the top of the plate and then flip the plate over to have dinner on the bottom. One day he died a natural death sitting at his dinner table. When I heard he had died, I , and others, walked the short distance to his house and, upon looking in his front door, saw him peacefully slumped in his chair.

Connie Blanchard was a boatbuilder who docked his houseboat in the dredge cut just South of the Rivard Line, and alongside of the Town Line, in Dover Township. Where he came from, and why he chose to dock where he did is a mystery to me. I believe he was a bachelor as in the few years I had his acquaintance there was no mention of a wife, or family, in his life. His life was centered around building boats and, at one time, he may have had a connection to the Chris Craft trade mark. His open concept houseboat was his workshop, living area and hangout for many locals, including myself. The rear end of the boathouse could be completely opened up so that once he had completed a boat it could easily be taken out of the work area and launched. He had a dog, a Labrador Retriever I believe, and from time to time he would open a can of the dog’s food and eat it as he felt it was as healthy as anything else you could get, and probably cheaper. I don’t remember how many boats he built but it was a pleasure to watch him work and to be part of the ambiance of his workshop and the folks who gathered to hear his yarns. For some unknown reason he would refer to me as “Evil Eye Fleagle”; perhaps because of a hat I wore.

George Garbutt’s Lakeside Cabin

George Garbuttt was a fisherman who also operated a dredge. I seem to remember he was a bachelor who came from the Jeanette’s Creek area where members of his extended family sold fruit and vegetables. He had a cabin along the shore of Lake St Clair, beside the dyke that separated the lake from the St Luke’s Club marsh. The dyke was necessary in order to keep the water level in the marsh higher than that of the lake. The cabin was accessible by boat, or by walking the dyke from where it started across the dredge cut from the clubhouse. At some point in time there had to be some major reconstruction work undertaken on the dyke, and George was called upon to operate the dredge that was utilized. From time to time my father and I would visit him at his cabin. Two things that always remind me of George are corned beef hash and cigarette packages. The former he would serve to visitors and the latter he would cut up to use as note paper.

George Garbutt and his Dredge

Around about 1949 my family moved from “the house on stilts” to the “old club house”. The move was occasioned by my uncle Metro relinquishing employment as the caretaker of St Luke’s Club, and moving his family and business, the Sass Manufacturing Company, from the countryside to the outskirts of Chatham. As part of this transition, Metro moved the “house on stilts, from where it stood when we lived in it, to a site on his father’s farm. This move was truly an engineering feat as it involved considerable route and powerline clearance along a roughly sixteen-mile trip, on some lowbed arrangement, over gravel and asphalt roads.

Compared to “the house on stilts”, the “old club house” was a palace.

Though old, it was two story, had a kitchen, living room, dining room, multiple bedrooms, indoor plumbing, central heating, a screened in porch, a dry yard i.e. not flooded, and a white picket fence.

The potable water, that smelled and tasted of sulfur, was provided by a remote well and pumping system. It definitely was an acquired taste, and had to be supplemented with bottled water.

The bathroom, that was upstairs, was quite large, with a toilet and tub, but no shower. 

I shared an upstairs bedroom with my brother.

For a time, one of my older cousins, Jean Hunter, stayed with us. For some reason, during that stay, she came to the startling realization that her mother Janet, and father Jack, had been married less that nine months before her oldest sister Florence was born. A not uncommon happening “back-in-the-day”.

In the Fall, my father would buy potatoes in large, burlap bags, and store them in the spacious room outside my bedroom door. Potatoes were a staple in our house and, since money was scarce, some of the Summer wages I made working in the fields at Bradley Farms helped pay for the potatoes.

During the Summer, Bradley’s would send a stack truck in the morning to pick up those who wanted to work in their fields, and deliver them back in the evening. Everyone would stand, or sit, in the back of the truck for the bumpy ride to their farm over dusty gravel roads. Most work consisted of group work hoeing weeds or de-tasseling corn, the expectation being that everyone would keep pace with each other. On occasion, once you demonstrated that you were reliable, you would be tasked with working on your own and, in so doing, be entitled to receive a bit more in the way of an hourly wage. At the end of the day, before you were trucked home, the foreman would gather you together and pay you for your day’s work, with twenty-five cents an hour being a premium wage. De-tasseling corn was, perhaps, the hardest work, however with a bit of luck you might be able to enjoy an intimate moment with a co-worker.

Around about 1951, whilst we were living in the Old Club House, Ontario Hydro decided to convert the source of electricity provided to South Western Ontario from 25 to 60 cycles per second. Believe it or not, this initiative finally brought the area into line with the rest of North America. Prior to the change one could actually sit in a room and watch the filament in an incandescent bulb pulse and, if one moved in from outside the region, they had to either purchase new electrical appliances, or have the motors on their existing ones converted.  Unfortunately, converting the motors didn’t always prove to be successful. https://archive.macleans.ca/article/1951/8/15/ontario-scraps-its-horse-and-buggy-lights

Around the same time, my parents bought a black and white TV; the only type available at the time. There was no cable reception so an antenna was essential, preferably that one you could rotate. Fortunately, as our house was located 26 miles across the open water of Lake St Clair from Michigan, we could receive a number of TV stations. You could buy a plastic screen overlay that simulated blue sky and green grass. Broadcasting was not 24 hours a day and a test pattern, to aid in making various technical adjustments, would appear on the screen before and after daily broadcasting. Most afternoons a favorite show was the Mickey Mouse Club and the Kate Smith Show which she would end with the song “When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain”, Since our TV was the first in our neighborhood, it tended to draw a crowd to watch it. Saturday mornings usually found quite a number of the local children, mostly members of the Hamilton family, assembled in front of the TV watching the Sealtest Big Top, Lash Larue or Tom Mix. On weekend evenings, in order to watch Hockey, Roller Derby or the Ed Sullivan Show, people would fill our living room to the point that some members of our family would have to watch through a small “pass through opening” between the kitchen and living room. At some point my grandmother came to live with us again and many evenings she, and my mother, would spend an enjoyable time watching the Arthur Godfrey Show together.

 

My grandmother, Maggie, and mother, Mabel beside the Old Club House

Entertainment and information were also provided by radio, with hockey being my father’s favourite programming. Indeed, he was want to keep statistics on various teams (the Maple Leafs versus the Red Wings) and players, and listen to one game on the radio while watching another on TV. For others, shows such as The Happy Gang and The Shadow Knows were preferred. Part of The Happy Gang theme song was “… if you are happy, and healthy, to heck with being wealthy”, a song that captured the essence of the times. Meanwhile many waited for the Dominion Observatory time signal signifying one o’clock each day.

Although my father was the caretaker at St Luke’s Club, he never actually hunted ducks. or trapped muskrats. Rather, his year around responsibility was to ensure that the club house, surrounding grounds, marsh, and associated infrastructure, were operated and maintained to the satisfaction of the Michigan based Ford and Buhl families who owned the Club. Since the water in the marsh had to be kept at a higher level than the adjacent lake, making sure that an appropriate amount of water was pumped into the marsh was essential. Similarly, inspecting the dyke that separated the marsh from the lakeshore, either on foot or by punt boat, was a continuous job since it was not uncommon for a break in the dyke to occur as a result of muskrat activity. Maintenance of the thatching on the several duck blinds scattered about the marsh had to be done, as did clearing channels to facilitate movement by punt boat from area to area. As well, though never openly mentioned, grain had to be purchased for subsequent use as bait when scattered in the vicinity of the duck blinds. 

More to follow