Do you remember the days of play when you were a child? Raymond Gilbert does. In his autobiography, When Time Was a Little Slower, Wiarton-raised Gilbert recalls that “The winter and summer were taken up with hockey, baseball and swimming, but the kids had to find other entertainment in the spring and fall.”
“One of the lovely qualities of a small town during this era,” he remembers,” was the fact that your mother could let you out the door at any time and not worry about where you were going. Most mothers didn’t even ask, they knew you were safe.”
For Raymond, “Spring centered around the first day we could dive into some water for a swim. Some children chose the Wiarton Long Dock for their first dive of May, but the water was deep and cold, and I mean cold as in really cold. Of course, you had to play hooky that day. It was usually a warm day in May that we dove in for about seven seconds.”
“Fishing off the Wiarton Long Dock or in the Colpoy’s or Oxenden rivers was another way to spend a nice day. Trout or perch were the common catches at the dock. Once a year in the early spring, Georgian Bay smelt migrated up the local rivers, and everyone had a smelt feed. Autumn had more activities. The fall fair was an anticipated time. Often the whole public school would march up to the grounds. The town offered almost endless prizes for pies, cakes, beets, pumpkins, oldest person, oldest couple, and even best step-dancer. But, if you wanted to win the prize for the most freckles, you had to go to the Eastnor Fair in Lion’s Head.”
Fall, Gilbert recalls, brought piles of leaves onto the roadside. “Townspeople were, at that time, allowed to burn them on the street. The autumn smell of Wiarton with its smoky streets is still one of my most pleasant memories.”
Originally aired November 18th 2016
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