Hi to all.... just read Sharon's recollection of arriving in Wingham... I remembers "setting pins" at the alley.. I think it may have been "5 cents a line"  The most feared thing was setting pins for the men's league.. I think it was Ken Saxton was the king of all throwers.. You had to look out for flying pins when he threw... I believe he was also a pitcher for the mens softball team..Sometime we set two lanes at a time.. there was a small opening between each lane.. there was a removable board about the the size of a kitchen "cutting board" that slid into the opening... the problem with removing it was sometimes a pin from the adjoining alley flew through.. got good at dodging same..  In league play, each player played 3 games..   I think about 4 guys per lane... on a good night, if you were lucky enough to get 2 lanes you would get paid for 24 "lines"..  felt rich on those nights.. Sharon was a classmate but I hung out with Wayne (Butch) in high school.. that also lead to hanging out with Lorna too!!!  Butch, and another school buddy, John Merkley, left after high school to attend Ryerson Polytech Inst... ( now Ryerson University) in Toronto... I ended up rooming in with John and Butch in Toronto while attending Toronto Police College. It was a 3 bedroom apartment on Ontario St. in downtown Toronto.. two other guys, also Ryerson students, (Jim Bard and Farouk Mohammed) lived there too... Butch and John shared a big bedroom, the other two got a bedroom each and I got the living room couch... I graduated in 1963 and worked in downtown Toronto.  I got transferred to north Toronto and then moved out and boarded with an elderly couple who had retired from farming (Len Guardhouse) in the "rural" area north of Toronto.. rural  in Weston area.. today it is part of Mississauga at the Hwy 427 area just north of the Woodbine racetrack and Casino... Lots of good memories of the Browns bowling alley and the Ontario St. apartment years.. !!!!!!!!!!!! 

 Bill Crawford 

                Memories of Grades 5 and 6 1952 - 54

            We arrived in Canada in August 1952- my parents and 9 children, ranging from aged 2 to 15. About the middle of September, we moved to a house north east of Wingham, near the cemetery-about as far as you can get from the Wingham Public School! Being the oldest of the elementary school children, it was my job to indicate to the principal, Mr. Beattie, in which grade each of the students should be placed. My father, who knew some English, told me the numbers. That was about the extent of my English at that time. I landed in Mrs. Webster’s grade 5 class. I was befriended by Bob McIntyre, who lived on the way home from school, and he is the only one of the class whom I still meet occasionally.
             There are a few memories of that first year in Grade 5. Mr. Kinkaid, the inspector, taught me the word “fox”. Since we lived so far away from school, we were the only ones to stay for lunch. Miss McLaughlin looked after us during the lunch hour-taking the opportunity to teach us some English at the same time. I met her again years later in Huronview, an old age home. Miss Edyth Beacom, who taught grade 3 then, is still living. She must be over 90. One of the writers talked about the radiators. There was no thermostat, so Mrs Webster would control the climate by turning the knobs and adding water to the trays on top of the rads. During that fall the class was taken to the park downtown to meet Louis St Laurent on the campaign trail. I shook his hand, but didn’t know who he was at that time. I soon picked up the language and fit into the class quite well. One of the reasons for my improved performance in school compared to the school I left in Holland, was that there was more audio and visual stuff used here. There was also more freedom in artistic expression. When I was going to school in Holland I apparently was not very attentive. Nowadays they call it “attention deficit disorder’ or ADD. There they called it DNPA (Dick never pays attention). Those were the exact words used on my Grade 4 report card. In going over in my mind about that year, I vaguely recall having to wear dutch pants. Its probably a repressed memory of a traumatic event in my life. Maybe some of you will verify this. At least my home knit underwear was not publicly visible!! If the monthly attendance was satisfactory, the school got the last Friday afternoon off. We didn’t know until the end of the morning if we did get out of school.
            In grade 6, we had Mr. Shynkar. He was a teacher who was somewhat ahead of his time. He used lots of audio-visual stuff, and made his subjects quite interesting. One of the things I remember about that year was that when and if the teacher was late due to snow storms, I was appointed “teacher” . That did happen once! Mr. Beattie kept an eye on the class once in a while from the hall. ( I really did become a teacher eventually, and had the experience of practice teaching in the grade 5 room where I was in 1952! ) Another thing I remember is the day we went on a field trip to “the Alps?” somewhere NW of Wingham. We walked there, with Mr. Shynkar ferrying us in groups that would fit in his car. I think that he lived in that area. How times have changed! My sister aged 5, who attended half-day Kindergarten, walked by herself from school to home! This involved crossing town, the river, and railway tracks! Can you imagine kids doing that today? In late September 1954 we moved to a farm house near Kippen, a major disappointment to me at the time. There we went to a country school, No14 Stanley. I was the only one in grade 7 & 8, and the teacher seeing that I was older, and apparently over my DNPA, arranged for me to take grade 7 and 8 in one year. By the way, I failed grade 4! So the So the next year I entered highschool. I hope to write about our life in Wingham outside of school in a future article.

Dick Roorda

Clinton