ROUGH, BURLY, MAGNIFICENT
Now, a
Maritimer may eat a lot of herring bones and codfish and so on…but, they also
feed on pride… and I was ready to defend
my “homeland” when the papermaker softened the blow and sparked my curiosity. “ Some pretty smart fellows come out
of the Maritimes,” he said…” we’ve got
some PRETTY CATTY guys up here.” By this time I was about ready to rouse the
Sleeping Giant and go to war… imagine anyone calling a Maritimer “Catty”. Why that’s a female term… and women hate it…
if you say to a woman that’s she’s “catty” … that’s an invitation to get
out the back door and stay out… but fast. There are few words in the English Language that
arouseth a woman’s scorn as the the label “catty”. Imagine calling a man
“catty” ! I soon learned that in this
rough, burly magnificent land of the
lakes where men are men… I learned that
to call a man “catty” was to pay him
the highest compliment in the
roughest toughest of all games. It is a lumberjack’s word of respect and I would
only call a lumberjack a “sissy” if I were in the other end of a
transcontinental telephone line.
You see,
that newspaper you read every day is born out of two parts. It was processed in a great roaring mill
where the machines rumbling at
breathless speed take the wood … make it into a porridgy mush … turn it into
running liquid and then into dry shiny paper.
They call that the Mill side of operations. At Thunder Bay Paper Mill in Port Arthur city
limits they have one of the most modern streamlined operations in the
world. In fact their grinder room is the
very newest thing in paper making.
No comments:
Post a Comment