WE WANTED OUR BOYS TO FEEL A PART OF GRAVENHURST’S HERITAGE

AND THAT’S A TRADITION THEY KEEP UP TODAY IN THEIR MUSIC SHOP - THE GLORY DAYS OF THE MUSKOKA THEATRE -

BUT HERE’S HOW IT ALL BEGAN-

When I worked for Muskoka Publications, in Bracebridge, I took every opportunity to dive into the old newspaper files kept in the basement. Not a good place to keep papers, and we did have floods down there over the years. I loved to spend an hour or so, when I had my work caught up, and for every hour I spent in this newspaper archives, I’d find two our three good ideas for future feature articles. Most of these multi-issue feature articles would run in our summer publication, The Muskoka Sun. At that time we might hit 100 pages for the Civic Holiday weekend, so it would devour lots of editorial copy. In those musty piles of old newspapers, I found just the kind of ideas that would keep Bob Boyer happy.....as the Muskoka Sun was his jewel and I was his ace in the hole. Of course in those days I burnt the midnight oil because I didn’t have children. A flask of whisky kept my coffee crisp for the midnight revels. I’m a prolific writer, you see (as if you didn’t know) and I’m always looking for story ideas. While today I get a lot sent in by readers, back then, it was a little more difficult finding enough story ideas to meet Bob’s demands. You’d be surprised how much copy can be swallowed by a 100 page publication, running just over 60 percent ad copy. A lot of publications today are closer to 75 percent ad copy.

When Bob came up to my office on press day, by Jesus I’d better have some copy in reserve. I hated to disappoint Bob. So I just got in the habit, early in my writing career, of preparing material well in advance. My writing colleague Brant Scott, would see Bob coming up the stairs and yell over, “You better have something in the bag for Bob.” “The bag,” in this case meant having ready-to-typeset copy. It got so bad sometimes.....that Bob would run two or three of my feature series installments in one edition. I won’t kid you. I loved the bylines and Bob was never stingy about affording me the best blocks of space in the paper. But on an hourly wage basis, I actually began losing money because I wrote too much.

When we moved from Bracebridge to Gravenhurst in the fall of 1989, we began a never ending adventure. As I used to pour over those old newspaper files, as if the holy grail of obscure but important history, Suzanne and I started to gather every bit of written history we could obtain.....so that we could better relate to our new home town. I hate being considered a newbie. I hate being considered ill-informed or not informed at all. Suzanne’s family dates back to the earliest pioneers in Muskoka, being of the Shea and Veitch families, of the Three Mile Lake area, and the hamlet of Ufford. Her ancestor’s dug-out canoe is in the collection of the Muskoka Lakes Museum. As well, her father’s family settled in Windermere in the early 1900's, and Sam Stripp and his son Norman (Suzanne’s father) used to paint the steam yacht Wanda for the Eaton family. While I’m a transplant from Burlington in the 1960's, I have worked ever since to learn everything I could about regional history, to be able to write about Muskoka and her communities with responsible reporting and accurate representation. But to shed the newbie status I married into a local family. It worked best and fastest.

I began this fact-finding obsession, in earnest, back in 1979, working at a newspaper office in the Village of MacTier I knew it was critical to get a good working knowledge of my host community.....and let them tutor me about what made their hometown tick.......and we got along pretty well. I was a research fanatic because I knew, from several run-ins with the local citizenry, that reporters before me, hadn’t been as persnickety about reporting town events. I hated getting yelled at because of a slip-up in research. It doesn’t mean I’m mistake-proof but I always triple check my work to at the very least, bring it down to a fraction of “error potential” over many miles of feature articles.

We read about Gravenhurst, we travelled to the historic sites, learned about them by asking questions of those who did know, and took an interest in being a part of this town’s vibrant heritage. Our boys, Andrew and Robert spent much of their childhood wandering around the Calydor property, on Muskoka Bay, the former site of the Calydor Sanatorium for tubercular patients, a German Prisoner of War Camp, during the years of the Second World War, and onward to its service as the Gateway Hotel in more recent history. While it was just ruins by the time we arrived, it was a fascinating place to wander about. At the beachfront, we all enjoyed picking up broken pieces of pottery and glass buried in the muck, that had some provenance attached from those the late 1800's years as a hospital onward. The boys had broken off big chunks of barb wire from the old camp, and we had boxes full of finds made, from glass and pottery, to square nails and hand forged spikes. We used to stare longingly at the ruins of the camp building, wondering how they could be preserved for posterity. The boys at a young age, knew a lot about the Second World War, and we all benefitted, in one way or another, from being in the neighborhood of this incredible international history...... only a street over from where we were living. Suzanne used to take them berry picking in the summer, on the former tennis courts on Lorne Street, and they knew all the inter-connecting trails throughout the large vacant property. I wrote a lot of feature articles based on those many visits, all of them published in the late 1980's in the Muskoka Sun or the Muskoka Advance. They played, Suzanne searched for artifacts around the shore and I made notes. What a family? It was at the very least, a cost efficient form of recreation, at a time when were broke. There would be very few folks who could say, in this country, that their children’s playground was a former Prisoner of War Camp. Feel free to ask our boys about the experience.

I was turned onto the Calydor Prisoner of War Camp by a writer colleague of mine, Scott McClellan, formerly of Gravenhurst, now Australia, who had written a lengthy series of articles about the site for Mr. Boyer in the early 1980's. It had been based on research, years before that, done by the committee responsible for the publication of “Light of Other Days,” a wonderful local history with a meaty section on the camp. Long before we moved to the Calydor Subdivision, on Segwun Blvd., I had fantasized about the incredible opportunity to be in the same neighborhood as this war relic. I even got to conduct a tour once for a group of ladies on a local history tour, and have led many impromtu expeditions with my historian friends since.....always with an eagerness to share the history of my hometown. When Cecil Porter invited me to the launch of his new book, on the Camp, a number of years ago, I was absolutely delighted. It’s one of the most important books in my Muskoka collection......and believe me.....Suzanne and I have a big selection of rare and out-of-print histories.

Over the years I’ve been a curator / manager for Woodchester Villa and Museum, (Bracebridge), curator for the Bracebridge Sports Hall of Fame, (Bracebridge arena), a director of the Bracebridge Historical Society, the Muskoka Lakes Museum, and historian of South Muskoka Memorial Hospital, but I’ve never been as contented anywhere else......as I am here in this history-laden town I used to read about......in those halcyon days in the bunker of The Herald-Gazette, hustling for feature material to keep Bob in a goodly supply of editorial copy. From what I’d read, over that decade with Muskoka Publications, Gravenhurst was going to be a good place to land.....with a young family, a teacher partner, and a desire to immerse in this town’s enthusiasm for its heritage. While at times I’m disappointed by the general indifference of elected officials, the loyalists to historical preservation here, are second to none for getting the job done. I’d love to one day, feel I’ve accomplished as much as the Archives Committee, and all the other working historians here, who I so admire. It gives a middle age historian something to work toward, I suppose.

To me, and most certainly our entire family, it’s all evidence of a “living history”..... to be recognized and celebrated.