Dr. J. Harvey 2006 Interview

 

NIPIGON HISTORICAL MUSEUM                      May 31, 2006

Interview

 

Dr.  Harvey

Now Resides in Thunder Bay

 

We arrived in Nipigon in 1961 actually I was working at the Port Arthur clinic at the time and the public health nurse came into the office and wondered if I knew someone who was interested in coming to Nipigon because the local doctor Dr.  Jefferey had just died.  He wasn=t that old only in his forties he was an alcoholic I remember some people telling me that they=d go into his office and he=d asked them if they=d like a drink.  If you said no he would say Awell I do@ and he=d pull the drawer open and pour himself a drink.  Sibby Natchuk was his office nurse for a long time and her job first thing in the morning was to try and get him sobered up.  Anyway, he was a good doctor and a lot of the patients told me that they=d rather have Dr.  Jefferey drunk than any other doctor sober.  So I went down to Nipigon and looked over the books because Mrs.  Jefferey was selling the practice and figured out what I=d make and I came back to the Port Arthur clinic and told them that if they=d pay me what I could make in Nipigon then I=d stay and they said Ago to Nipigon@.  So I can remember the day I arrived it was November and it had just snowed and was sort of miserable and wet and slushy and so on.  Outside there was apartment building on the corner of Bell and First street which was where the practice office was.  Originally it had been a home and then it became the RCMP office and then I=d bought it from Dr.  Jefferey who had used it as an office and then I had bought it and did a few renovations.  Now I think John Fould=s owns it as an apartment building.  So that was where I practiced and then there was Dr.  Somerleigh and Dr.  Sittlinger and Dr.  Somerleigh had just a year before I had gotten there a woman who was angry at him because her baby had died which had absolutely nothing to do with him but she threw acid in his face.  You have to give the guy credit because in spite of being so badly disfigured he came back and practiced in Nipigon it was something for the community too because he had a lot of patients.  Then there was Dr.  Sittlinger over in Red Rock and Dr.  Sittlinger comes out in the summer time to Stewart Lake and so basically there was the three of us at that time.  At that time too it was the old Red Cross Hospital, it was a beautiful stone front building which was where the hospital was and that was the original building which would have made a wonderful place for the Nipigon Museum but of course, it got torn down.  Then they added on to the hospital and the Red Cross Hall was where Harbinson=s live and the Red Cross in those days was kind of like a club which was a social club that everybody kind of belonged to help in the community. 

So there are lots of interesting stories from those days because there was no ambulance in those days so I had a station wagon and so if they needed an ambulance I=d use my station wagon.  I can remember one time actually this person still lives in Nipigon but his name shall go unmentioned, but he was a really bad alcoholic and he knew that he shouldn=t drink and drive so he was driving down towards Terrace Bay and when he came to a side road he crossed over the railroad tracks down to the lake and have a drink and he became progressively more drunk as he went along until he was totally smashed.  So he was driving back up and it was getting dark by this time and he came to this side road and he turned left and the highway was just really rough and then all of a sudden this idiot came along right down the middle of the highway with only one light and what had happened was he turned on to the CPR tracks instead of the highway!  This was the Canadian in those days you know the passenger train that was coming down so I guess he=d pulled over as much as he could but he still scraped the Canadian right from one end to another he did hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of damage to the whole train which was made out of that really shiny aluminum.  Anyways, we got the call that somebody had been in a car accident with a CPR train and he was stuck his foot and he was passed out or unconscious or drunk or whatever but his foot was stuck under the brake pedal so we had to get a crow bar and pry the pedal up.  It was actually near Gravel River where it happened so we unfortunately I couldn=t get the back door of my station wagon open to get the stretcher out but I could get it out through the passenger door but I couldn=t get a person on it.  So we decided the only thing to do was to carry this guy and he was about 6'3" and weighed about 250 pounds and he was totally unconscious so two OPP officers carried this guy about maybe a quarter of a mile up to the highway.  Just as we got to Harry Timcoe=s place in Gravel River, this guy sat up on the stretcher and started running down the highway.  Well you could see two very disgruntled policemen who had just carried this guy all that way and then all of a sudden he get=s up and starts running down the highway and I must admit they weren=t very careful when they put him in the police cruiser.  The only injuries he had was a dislocated shoulder and a sprained ankle but other than that the next morning he couldn=t remember a thing that had happened!.  The moral of that story is that he is now an active member of AA and he=s sober now and a good member of the community. 

I remember another time when I was using the car as an ambulance I got a call down to the Plaza Theater because this little old lady was sick she had passed out.  So I came down with my station wagon to pick her up and I put her in the back and I had just only had the station wagon for two weeks and the lady threw up blood all over the back seat because she had a bleeding ulcer.  So I took her to the hospital and spent the next three quarters of an hour hosing out the back of my car.

There was a funeral director in Nipigon in those days by the name of Frank Lawrence which was before the Elliot=s took over which was in the same building.  Frank and I had gotten to know each other and we were good friends and Frank was quite a character. One time he had this old Hearst which was about a twenty year old Cadillac and one day he called me and told me he had to go away to this convention in Toronto and his wife Nancy was there.  If somebody died when he was away then what they would do is take the body up to Thunder Bay and the funeral director there would look after it.  But he said that the only thing was that the guy next door to his place who ran the grocery store was one of his helpers and anyway the other guy who was his helper was off sick so he wanted me to give him a hand if somebody died which was not too likely that somebody died in Nipigon every week.  So I said Ano problem@ and he left and in the middle of the night I got a call and what had happened was there was a woman in our town who delivered parcels for the post office she had a little wagon that she pulled around she was a single woman and that=s how she made a living for herself was to deliver the parcels for the Post Office.  Anyway, her mother and sister had come up from the States to visit her and unfortunately her mother had passed away during the night so I got this call at 4 o=clock at night saying her mother wasn=t breathing and they figured she passed away.  So I went to the house and the mother was dead so I pronounced her dead and I was the coroner for Nipigon so I said well in order to take her back to the States they needed to have a special certificate in order to transfer her across the border.  So I told them that I was the coroner and I could fill the certificate out for them and then I said you=ll probably want to use the local funeral home and I said Aoh that=s right Frank=s away@!  So they said Aoh, that=d be nice if your local funeral home could make the arrangements@ so I went down and what Frank hadn=t told me before he left was that the muffler had fallen off his funeral coach so I started this thing up with the guy next door in the middle of the night just roaring and this woman lived on eighth street up the hill and her house was up above the road so you had to go up this driveway.  So we turned the funeral coach around and I was trying to back it up this driveway and it was making all this noise and it kept stalling and I was trying to get it up the driveway.  So anyways, I step out of the funeral coach and well you should have seen the look on the relatives faces!  The doctor, the coroner, and now the funeral director!! They must have figured I had the town completely tied up and I=m sure they must have had some storied about Nipigon when they got back home where this guy does everything!  When Frank came back I said AFrank that=s the last time I=m ever going to help you in your funeral business!@. 

One time my wife Maureen and I were having supper at Frank=s place and we got a call from the Hospital emergency room because there had been a very serious accident.  The one person was dead on arrival and there was a couple of other injured people so I said AFrank I=m going to have to go up to the hospital because there=s been a serious accident and there=s somebody dead@.  So I get up to the emergency room and the other two people hadn=t been badly hurt at all but there was the person who had passed away and the body was in the emergency room so I said Awell there=s a local funeral director here in town if you=d like I could give him a call and he could come and help with the arrangements@.  They said Ayeah, that would be nice if you could do that for us@ so I opened the door out of the emergency room and there was Frank standing there he decided that he knew he was going to get called anyways so he followed me up to the hospital!  I said AFrank, get back in your funeral coach and drive around the block a few times! We don=t want them to know that you=re following me around that doesn=t say too much for my practice when the funeral director is three feet behind me!!!. 

One time I was walking along the Cliffside Cemetery in Nipigon and I could see this head bouncing up and down in a grave!, so I stopped and here it was Frank and you could just see his head come up and then back down and I said AFrank what in the world are you doing?@ and all his equipment had been old that he used and you know they have the straps that lower the casket down into grave, well one of the straps had broken and the casket had fallen into the bottom of the grave and it twisted and the top snap came loose and the top of the casket popped open.  So he was trying to get this thing jumping on the lid to try and get it to stick and I guess he finally had gotten Mr.  Schwartz who had dug the holes and so on and he was just shaking his head at Frank. 

I remember one time I got this call up to MacDiarmid which is now Rock Bay as a coroner and I was told there was a woman there who had gotten run over by a train.  So I drove up and it was a sort of a dull day and there was all the Hardy=s were up on one side and all of the McGuire=s were on the other side of this kind of a grassy cut just outside of MacDiarmid and sure enough there was this poor soul in two pieces.  And so there was all the relatives right there and I just covered her up and they took her away and then I phoned the pathologist at the Port Arthur General who would do her autopsy and had said Ayou know this woman=s been obviously run over by a train and could you do the post modem@ he said Afine@.  About three hours later I get a call back from him and he said Ayes, she had been run over by a train but you also forgot to mention the 42 stab wounds she had in her body@.  Well I didn=t want to examine her right there and apparently she had been stabbed on the way home from a party late that night or early in the morning and then the guy threw her on the tracks thinking that he would cover up his crime by doing that.  So they took the guy into the police station and they took his clothes for forensic evidence you know for blood stains and so on and then he had signed a confession saying that he had stabbed her and that on the way home he had met her and they had an altercation and then he got angry and stabbed her and threw his knife off into the doc in MacDiarmid.  He got off because they never could find the knife it was so dark and murky the water that we couldn=t find it so the only evidence they had was his confession and his lawyer was able to show that he had been intimidated into making a confession because they had stripped him of all his close and that=s what forced him to give a confession so he got off.  It was about six weeks later when the guy who committed the murder was stabbed to death outside of a bar here in Thunder Bay. 

We did a lot of interesting things Nipigon was a very progressive hospital at that time one of the things that Nipigon instituted was rooming in like a lot of this stuff we just take for granted now like a mother being able to have a baby in her room.  In those days doing obstetrics they didn=t do that in Thunder Bay then and we got a leading authority in internal and baby care from Montreal come up and gave some talks at the Nipigon Hospital and the Hospital eventually approved it and it was quite the battle actually because people were worried about things like infection and so on.  It seems hard to believe that they would take the baby after and put it in the nursery and the mother wouldn=t even hardly get to hold the baby.  So rooming in was instituted quite early and then the next step was having fathers in the delivery room and that was again a really big fight with the board until a couple of board members wives got pregnant and were having babies and they wanted to be in the delivery room!  Gladys (Gladdy) Gordon was pretty progressive too and she could have just dug in and said no but she agreed with a lot of things.  The other thing we did was I don=t know if you=ve ever heard of the Nipigon Coronary Care Research Project but in 1972 we got a grant from the PSI Foundation which was before OHIP and the doctor=s had their own insurance plan for patients.  Companies like the Red Rock Mill could purchase it and it was a kind of like health insurance and mostly it was through employers that they had it.  So anyway, when OHIP came in they had all this money in the kiddie like millions and millions of dollars and you couldn=t give it back to the people in a sense.  So they used it for research so I applied for a research grant and the project was to see whether it was possible to do coronary care in a small community because in those days coronary care was started in 1970 and this was only like two or three years later.  The thing was that because I was the coroner I had access to all the statistics on people who had died of heart attacks such as their death rates and so on.  So we tied it in with Mc Masters University because we were tied in with them training medical students.  The other thing was that at that time the CPR was a new thing and in fact a lot of the ambulance drivers in Ontario weren=t allowed to do CPR because of the risk of being sued.  So what we decided with this project was that we were going to train everybody in Nipigon and Red Rock how to do CPR so if somebody dropped from a heart attack there would be somebody right there to do CPR on them.  We trained about a thousand people in the community which included all the plywood mill employees and all the Red Rock mill employees and all the High School students.  We had a resuscitation manakin that they could practice on and at the Fall Fishing festival we set up a booth where people could come in and learn how to do CPR.  So we trained and trained and that was one aspect of it and the other aspect of it was in the hospital where we actually had a room designated for Coronary Care which at that time was at the new hospital that was being built but of course there=s only one nurse on at night so how could she keep an eye on the patients so we got closed circuit television which again was something really new.  So we had this project that we were going to do with closed circuit television and we also had a self learning whole educational multi-media module for the nurses so that at night when they had nothing to do they could train themselves all about how to diagnose cardiac eurhythmia=s and what drugs to give and all that kind of stuff.  Then we would with the resusciany manakin if the nurses weren=t busy I would walk in and call a code 99 which in those days was what we called it and the nurses would have to go through all the procedures and they just hated it when I walked in.  The interesting thing was that we had to get approval from the board and the hospital board said Awe can=t do this in Nipigon because it=s too small and there are too many risks, this is very sophisticated equipment@ I=m not quite sure what all of their problems were with it.  So they just said no and in today=s dollars it would be equivalent to a million dollars worth of research and the plan was to hire a couple medical students from Mc Masters University to come up and do all the data collection and statistics and so on.  So the board said no and about a month later it was time for the annual meeting and George Sittlinger over in Red Rock told one of his patients that Ait=s terrible you know the board won=t let Harvey go on with this research project@ so this woman got on the phone and you could buy a membership in the Thunder Bay District Hospital organization for a buck.  So about a hundred and fifty people all took out their dollar membership and attended the annual meeting which usually at that meeting you=d be lucky to have a dozen people attending so these people all showed up and they wanted to know why the board turned down this research project and so on and what all their excuses were.  The board explained that it was very difficult equipment to use and so Lillian Wolters was a kindergarten teacher at that time and she said Awe have a video camera in our kindergarten class and the kids don=t seem to have any trouble using it!@. It was really bad but another woman got up with tears in her eyes and said Amy husband Joe just passed away a few months ago and if there=d been this program in the hospital he=d probably still be with us@.  So the board resigned, the whole board quit and then there was no hospital board and they had to call the Ontario Hospital Association because this Dr.  Harvey character was causing all this conflict and trouble and so on!  Then they kind of poured oil on the waters and everybody decided to get along again and so we put that program into effect and I think even until this day they have Cardiac Care in Nipigon.  It=s funny though we=d forgotten a part of the project to put any money in for installing the cable for the closed circuit television so this medical student that was working along side me one night we drilled a hole in the floor by the nurses station and there was like a crawl space under the old hospital.  So there we were in the middle of the night with flashlights pulling this cable underneath the hospital and then we drilled a hole in the floor in a room that was going to be the intensive care unit!

Mr. Chaboyer was on the ambulance and he really was the back bone of that training program and it=s funny how in a situation like that there=s somebody in the community who will catch the vision and if it wasn=t for people like him.  He was a very quite un assuming sort of person but he was very faithful and he worked very hard at it.  We did surgery in those days and actually all of us did surgeries in particular Dr.  Sittlinger and myself we did appendectomies and hernia=s and tubal ligations and I notice in the papers I kept from the hospital here there used to be consent forms for sterilization in those days and you had to sign that you realized they were irreversible and in those days the wife had to sign it too or if the wife was the one getting it done the husband had to sign for her.  I remember one woman who was Catholic and she was said she was so tired of going to the confessional every month and having to confess she was taking birth control pills so the husband agreed to have a vasectomy so then he just had to confess it once and it was over!  So I did the vasectomy on him but unfortunately about a year later she came to me pregnant and so I said AI=m not going to take the blame for this your husband=s vasectomy worked you=ll have to face the music yourself!@.  She wanted me to say that it didn=t work!.  You see a lot of life and a lot of sadness in the medical field especially as a coroner I think the saddest things were the suicides for me.  One young couple had been in their early 30's and they didn=t have any children and the husband was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis and he just didn=t want to burden his wife with it so he went and rented a room in Terrace Bay and killed himself by overdosing on pills.  His wife was so heartbroken over what had happened.  Another man who had been sort of depressed off and on and he went to the Nipigon Hospital and an old friend of his had been there and he had just messed the bed and this guy stood there and looked at his friend and said to the attending nurse Aif that=s the way life ends then I=m going to do something about it!@.  So he got in his car and his daughter was called by the nurse so she got in her car and tried to follow him because at that time they lived in Thunder Bay.  Just as she pulled in the driveway she heard the gun go off and he had shot himself.  She said Ait was so awful my father=s brains were all over the walls and ceiling@ and she said AI just couldn=t let strangers clean the room I had to clean it up myself@.  So you can imagine the trauma involved what most people don=t realize with suicide is that it=s such a terrible thing to do to your relatives. Talking about brains, my wife and I had been coming back from Thunder Bay late at night because we had been up to the community auditorium and we were driving home at around 11:30 at night just by Hurkett and the police lights were going and here was this car that had been in a head on collision.  So we stopped since I was the coroner and the guy who had been driving the car was going so fast that when they hit the other vehicle which was a truck or whatever and the people in that vehicle weren=t injured.  Anyway, they were going so fast that when his head had hit the steering wheel it sheered the top of his head off and his brains were actually sitting on the top of the dashboard!.  If you can imagine how you would do that without you know just how they were sitting there. So I told the police that I think we can be pretty certain that this person is dead.  He had a chum with him and he was dead too. 

One time I got called up Black Sturgeon and an older man had been cutting wood and had a heart attack and died.  So there was this stack of wood that he had piled up it was all nicely cut and I think it was on crown land so I went up and pronounced him dead and made sure it wasn=t a murder being covered up or anything.  So I asked the police officer I said Awho does this wood belong to?@.  The police officer said AI don=t know@ because we had a wood fireplace at home, so the old station wagon I had I ended up loading it right up with all of the nicely cut wood and it was just about dragging on the road!.  When the winter time came I told the kids Alets burn some dead wood!@.  The crazy things that you do!

I remember this particular station wagon we had was a 1962 pontiac and it had what you called positraction and it was just a new thing then and in those days you could have a studded tires.  I got a call about a plane crash on Black Bay actually what had happened the guy it was late at night and they got a knock on the door at Nuttal=s they had a cabin there and it was the guy from the crash and he had crawled about 2 miles across the lake in the snow.  It wasn=t terribly cold it was maybe minus 10 degrees outside then and he said Amy buddy is still trapped in the plane and I couldn=t get him out!@.  So we went out and sure enough we couldn=t get the guy out because the dash board was stuck and they were afraid to move him and so on but he was conscious.  He called me and so like an idiot I thought that with this new positraction I could drive out on Black Bay and actually a guy went ahead of me on a snow machine which was good because there was spots that were slushy and there were some holes in the ice.  So I followed him out and we had crowbars and stuff and the guy was saying Ano don=t pry on anything@ because there was like one hundred thousand dollars worth of navigational equipment and he didn=t want it broken and here we were hacking away at it with axes.  He had two broken ankles but other than that he was okay, what had happened was that they were flying around in this snow storm and there was a whiteout and he couldn=t even tell which way was up so they ended up crashing.  So they thought it was pretty good that the ambulance came right out onto the lake.

I remember another time it had been hunting season and there were some pretty tragic events of hunting accidents in Nipigon but this one had happened during the first day of hunting season and there was a moose walking up the road.  So this guy had pulled his truck over and was waiting for the moose to walk off the road before he shot it actually it was an American Tourist had pulled off the road and this guy from Nipigon pulled off to the side because he spotted the moose in the middle of the road.  So the American hunter was standing on the road watching the moose and this guy from Nipigon jumps out of his truck and fires and shoots the American tourist right through the chest!.  So they bring him into the Nipigon hospital and he=s bleeding like crazy and we started to give him a blood transfusion and packed the wound and so on and shipped him off to Thunder Bay.  The guy was conscious while I was working on him and he was from Florida anyway, we got up to Nipigon with him and he went unconscious and he was unconscious for about two days due to a lack of blood and the shock and everything.  Dr.  John Gooding was the surgeon up in Thunder Bay and he spent six hours operating on this guy putting him together.  The guy woke up and recovered and all he could remember was this doctor from Nipigon that had saved his life.  So every year for about ten years I got this box of oranges from Florida you know, and John Gooding got diddly squat! So I used to tell John Aoh, I got my box of oranges for saving that guys life!@ and he would say Aoh, yeah right@. 

So we did surgery in Nipigon we did hernia=s and those sorts of things and then we had surgeons come down from Thunder Bay.  A surgeon by the name of Randy McComb would come down with an anaesthetist and they would do the more major surgeries like gull bladders and then we would do the post operative care in Nipigon.  So that was kind of nice because the patients could have the surgery done right in Nipigon without having to leave town.  We had quite an active operating room and then Dr.  McComb moved away and then as time went on it was felt that you had to be a properly trained surgeon.  We were what you called in those days Physicians/Surgeons.  In my training I had done surgery in the Detroit receiving hospital which is sort of like ER and it was the second busiest emergency room in the United States.  So I got a lot of experience from there but as time went on of course you felt it wasn=t safe to do surgery in Nipigon which was probably true to some extent.  With the highway improvements and the air ambulance and so on the whole dynamic changed but those were sort of the old glory days of Nipigon.  There were people like Sylvia Naetchuk and Gladdy Gordon and Verla Smart who was the RNA, Phyllis Spirka was the head nurse after Sibbey Naetchuk left.  When I look back now they were pretty good sports to put up with me!  Dr.  Sittlinger I remember just to be funny would take a few wiffs of the end of the anaesthetic agent and get high! He would have to sit down and lean up against the wall because he was so dizzy!  There was an x-ray machine there when I arrived and there was a woman who ran it and she was an RNA and she=d learned how to run the x-ray machine she used to live across from the hospital and I believe she was of Finnish descent and she=d come over after the second world war.  Then as time went on we got a more sophisticated machine and in those days we did what we call forescopic procedures like we would take barium enemas which was for examining the intestinal track by putting the barium up from below or they could swallow it and we could do x-ray=s of the stomach.  We did a lot of things in the x-ray department and then again we felt that to really do a good job we had a radiologist come down once a month and we=d line up everybody that needed an examination of their stomach or intestines and he=d spend the whole day doing all the x-ray=s.  Again that meant that people didn=t have to travel and they could have it done right there. 

I became interested in acupuncture back in the 70's when a bunch of doctor=s from Canada went over to China and saw it and were totally amazed.  So I had taken a course in acupuncture and I have lots of stories about that.  In my office I because with acupuncture you had to let the person sit there with the electro stimulating machine hooked up to the needles for about twenty minutes and I didn=t want to tie up an office up in my regular office so I fixed up a room in the basement.  Actually I built the entrance way to my office with the stairs going up to where my office was and stairs going down to the basement so that some time in the future I could have an apartment there.  So I fixed up the one room just as you were going to the bottom of the stairs there was a room there and that was where I did the acupuncture and there was a lady who had been suffering from migraine headaches and with that you would put the needles in the forehead and a couple of other places.  Anyways, there were these wires hooked up to the needles I placed on her forehead so she was downstairs having her acupuncture treatment when a patient that had never been to the office before had just moved into town and came to the office and she wasn=t quite sure where to go and so unfortunately I forgot to lock the door to the basement so she walked downstairs and opened the door and saw the patient sitting there with these needles coming out of her head hooked up to this machine!  So the woman comes upstairs and says to the receptionist Ais this a doctor=s office?@ and the woman was pale white.  Another time there was an old Finnish guy who lived across from the office and he originally was in the hospital hooked up to an ECG machine and when I treated him with acupuncture the next day I saw him he said Aoh, that treatment you gave me really helped! Could I have another one today?@.  So I tried to explain to him that it was just diagnosis you know but he wouldn=t have it so I thought well okay we=ll do the acupuncture on him since it makes him feel so good.  So he would come over about once a week for his acupuncture treatment downstairs in the basement room and one day I was sitting in my office upstairs with a patient sitting across from me and she said Ado I hear something?@.  And I listened and you could hear this sound coming up from the cold air register Ahelp!@ and I thought Aoh, shoot!@ because I had forgot my patient who had gone downstairs for his acupuncture treatment about two hours earlier!.  So I could hear this noise Ahelp!@ and I went down and saw the poor guy and I said Athat treatment you got today was a really good treatment and I=m not going to charge you extra for the extra time!@.  Surprisingly that was his last treatment with me!.  I remember another time because we did urinalysis and blood work from the office which was actually not allowed when I first came to Nipigon.  So we did the lab work in our office and this guy had come in for a life insurance physical he was a young muscular strapping guy and so Gladys said to him that for that physical we needed a sample.  She gave him a jar and said Acan you give us a sample?@  So he goes into the washroom and he was in there for quite a while and about fifteen minutes later he comes out and all that was in there was this white stuff.  So Gladys looks at the jar and says Aoh no no no that=s not right you have to do it again!@.  So the guy says Ano, not again!@.  So I said Ahey Gladys, make sure he knows it=s a urine test before you send him back in there!@.  That guy must have thought we were a bunch of perverts!.  There=s some interesting characters in Nipigon there was this old bachelor named Alec McMund and he used to live in a little shack down the road where the Matchett=s lived by the Sunnyside cabins and Alec had this one room little shack up there.  Everybody knew him and he was blind in one day and his vision was failing him in the other eye and he was very old and he had worked in the bush all of his life.  People said he should be in the old folks= home up in Thunder Bay because there wasn=t one in Nipigon in those days.  The town every fall would bring him a pile of chopped wood the guys from the maintenance department and he would cook a little bit for himself and so every once in a while we=d bring him a good meal.  About once every three months he=d take the taxi into the hospital to be checked over and people thought it was just awful that this old man was all alone but he wanted his independence.  Sure enough we got a call from one of his neighbors didn=t see any smoke coming out of his chimney so he had died and was frozen solid but he died happy and with his independence which I think is more humane than watching somebody like that being in an old folks= home.  We had another guy who was mentally challenged who must have been about 40 and he had an 80 year old father and he was sort of like Haus Cartwright from Bonanza he was a great big guy like kind of a gentle giant.  His father passed away and his mother had passed away before that but he could do some things to look after himself and I think it was Clarence Saunders who would take him out grocery shopping but he never bathed.  So whenever he came in to the office which I had that used to be a house at one time equipped with a three piece bathroom and so this guy when he came into the office to see me Gladys took him into the bathroom and put him in the bathtub and took all of his clothes and ran down to the Laundromat and washed his clothes for him and then brought them back for him!  Talk about you want to see a bath tub ring after all of the poplar smoke being in his house it was really something but Gladys was a really good sport about it to run down to the Laundromat.  This guy came into the hospital one time I think he had pneumonia and the nurses couldn=t get him out of the bathtub because he just wanted to sit in the bathtub!.  Eventually I think he had to go to a home here in Thunder Bay but where he lived I noticed the house stood for a long time on the highway but I see now it must have burnt down. 

There=s lots of stories talking about bodies freezing we one time got a call along with the OPP up to Black Sturgeon Road and there was a couple of guys who had been out hunting.  So I guess their car had run out of gas and or else they had sat in the car to keep warm with hopes that somebody would come along and they got carbon monoxide poisoning and had died.  So anyways, when the police came along the two of them sitting in the car were totally frozen solid and the OPP didn=t know what to do with them because of course they were frozen in the sitting position.  So the OPP thought well there=s no point in calling for an ambulance or anything so we just put the one guy in the one corner of the backseat of the cruiser and we put the other guy in the other corner.  They were driving along with these two frozen guys in the backseat and as they were coming down the Black Sturgeon Road there was a guy hitchhiking because his car had broken down I guess it was really cold, so they picked him up.  Well the only place for him to sit was between the two guys in the back seat and so the guy says Aboy, these guys sure don=t talk much do they!@.  And then because the heater was on in the cruiser, the one guy thawed out and slumped over this guys lap and then the other guy slumped on him.  Apparently the guy just said Astop! I=m getting out of here!@ and jumped out of the cruiser because he was totally freaked out of his mind. 

This story I was told to by an RCMP officer from the Nipigon detachment that way up north an old bushmen living by himself had died and was absolutely frozen solid.  So he called it in on his radio and asked Awhat should I do with him?@ and they said Awell, bury him get a big axe and make just a shallow grave@.  The officer had the brains to think well, I=m going to have to dig a hole six feet long here because the guy was tall.  So the RCMP officer put him on a saw horse and he figured, I=ll saw him in half and then I only have to make a three foot hole.  So that was what he did, he started sawing this guy in half and just then one of the old bushmen=s fellow trappers came around the corner and saw this OPP officer sawing his buddy in half! He came tearing into town talking about this crazy Mountie who had murdered his friend!. 

Another call I got up the Black Sturgeon was during hunting season and a guy had come out to the highway and flagged down a car and said Athere were four of us out hunting and my brother-in-law just shot two of the men in this cabin and poured gas from the Coleman stove on the place and burnt it down!@.  So the police had thought this story is pretty wild, anyways, they went out and had to go by boat up this river which I think was probably Wolf River so up went the coroner and the police and finally here=s this cabin which was burnt to the ground and you could see the shapes of what had been two bodies there.  Well, the brother-in-law turned up in town in Thunder Bay and the police went to him and he said Ayeah, I just wanted to get out of there because my brother-in-law shot those two guys and I didn=t want to get blamed for it!@.  So there were these two guys both accusing the other of having shot them and what the police should have done was to charge them both with together with the murder but instead they charged the guy with the bad criminal records.  The jury said Awell, we=ve got two guys who are both liars how do we know who it was@ so they didn=t convict them and there was no point charging the other guy because it would have been the same story so they both got off.  I remember in that inquest the defense lawyer tried to convince the jury that the lead in their brains was from the roof melting and dripping on to their heads.  Unfortunately the roof was made out of galvanized steel and not lead!. 

We had three kids when we came to Nipigon and then we adopted five more after that.  So we had a family of eight which was multi racial, we had one Colored child and one part Chinese, two Native children.  One of our daughters we adopted had congenital amputations of her fingers and toes so they were all special needs kids that we adopted.  Our son Jerry had been born with diabetes which was very unusual and he=s 43 years old now and has no complications at all.  When he was a teenager he lived on Coke and Chocolate Bars so it=s amazing because sometimes you think there=s no justice and he=s doing fine other than the fact that he had rotten teeth.  We lived up on McKirdy street and I believe it=s the Greek restaurant owners who bought it off of us the Stavropolous=s.  I built all of the rock walls at the place and it took me several years to do them all it was just a sort of a hobby for me.  The one summer I was there in my shorts covered in mortar and had the cement mixer running.  My wife had said that the hospital had phoned and that there was a couple of people in the emergency room with insect bites or something and so my wife said Amy husband=s busy working outside right now@.  So the hospital said Awell we=ll send them up for him to have a look at them@.  They came up to the house and stopped and asked me Ais this where the doctor lives@ and I said Ayeah@ so they walked up all the way up to the house and Maureen yells out Adear, there=s somebody here to see you!@.  So the look on their faces was priceless because here=s the doctor building a stone wall. 

Talking about stone walls, the town council one time got the bright idea to hire a dog catcher from Beardmore because they couldn=t get anybody from Nipigon to do the job because they=d be lynched!  I was building the rock wall and our dog which was a Golden Lab was sitting there watching me and all of a sudden I looked up and he was gone and the kids said Aoh, some men took the dog@.  What they did was they had a bitch in heat in the back seat of their car and they opened the door so of course the male dogs would just run to the car and they had a whole back seat full of dogs!  I was really ticked off so I jumped in the car and they kept them on the other side of the railway tracks down by the Plywood Mill was where the dog pound was.  Anyway, I was really moving in my car and I hit the railway tracks and tore the muffler right off my car.  Just as they were opening the door to get the dog out there was a scuffle in suit in which the dog catcher got his fingers slammed in the car door!  So I got my dog and put him in my car and took him back home and about half an hour later Constable Jones of the OPP arrives at the door and said Awe got an incident report here@ and I said AI thought the guy had stolen my dog how would I have know he was the dog catcher he never had any identification, I was just retrieving my stolen property!@.  The officer said Adid you have to slam the door on him though?@.  So by the time I got the muffler fixed I might as well have just paid the fine and been done with it. 

Nipigon=s probably the same way everybody knows everybody else and so people can be reasonable and understand things but it also means that people gossip a lot more but you gotta take the good with the bad.  We enjoyed the sixteen years we spent there and it was a wonderful place to bring your kids up partly because the parents all squealed on each others kids.  Our daughter Liz, because we lived up on a hill we=d get a pair of binoculars and could watch her.  She used to catch the bus down on Front Street and we=d see her by the bus and then the bus would leave and she was still standing there because she was playing hooky so we=d ask her when she=d come home how school was and we=d get this big long story.  So we=d say well that=s interesting you know because we saw you standing by the bus this morning and then the bus left and you were still standing there!@.  Another time somebody phoned and said Awe saw Liz across from Saunders Foodland and she was standing there having a cigarette@.  The poor kid never had a chance at all but in a sense that was good that parents watched each others kids and took responsibility for them.  Then there was the day there was a woman by the name of Mrs.  Martin who was a widow and she lived in this old house on around fifth street but Mrs.  Martin was a pack rat and she kept everything.  Her house was full of everything like newspapers and a lot of preserves because she made preserves but she never ate them her whole basement was full of them.  She had two children and she was a highly intelligent and well educated woman she was a school teacher and I think she brought her children up very well one of them went into the military and her daughter became a lieutenant colonel or something like that.  Anyway, Mrs. Martin had this old house and it caught fire so unfortunately the Nipigon fire department put the fire out when the house was about half burnt so now she had these ruins just sitting on the foundation.  Just at that time the community of Cameron Falls was becoming automated so it was being controlled from Pine Portage now it=s controlled by I think Thunder Bay but the whole community out there was just amazing of houses and they were all being sold for I think like a thousand dollars and you could get a nice three bedroom bungalow.  All you had to do was to pay to have it moved into town.  So Mrs.  Martin came to me and she said AI=ve managed to save up a thousand dollars to buy it and I=ve made arrangements with the movers and they=ll move it for me but the problem is what am I going to do with the old house?@.  There was still four walls standing even though the roof was gone and this was back in around 1965 so I had the bright idea that what we=d do was we=d get the school kids from the George O=neill school.  So we put up a poster and said that any kids that were interested in destroying a house to come to Mrs.  Martin=s on Saturday morning and to bring sledgehammers.  I had a big maxi van and so the kids we put them upstairs and they=d pound away and smash the house and then with the maxi van I tied a rope around and blew a whistle and then the kids were all to clean out of the house when the whistle blew.  Then with the rope I would go down the hill and we=d pull a section of the house down that way.  Ava Larson had a son who had died of a brain tumor and he had an old truck and so he out of the goodness of his heart said that he would haul stuff to the dump for us.  So on Saturday we knocked Mrs.  Martin=s house down and hauled it all away to the dump and the kids had a wonderful time!  You think about it now though with all the liabilities and lawsuits and danger and everybody worried but nobody got hurt.  I remember I had a chainsaw and I would cut a section and then the kids would knock it out with the sledgehammer and then we=d pull it out where the truck was. Then they brought the new house in and Mrs.  Martin came back to see me because they put the house on the foundation the wrong way.  Well it would only fit one way but the problem was the foundation was long and narrow and the house was long and narrow too but the front of the house was in the middle of the long part so these guys put the house on the foundation and when she went out her front door she was looking at the wall of the next door neighbors house!  She was quite ticked off that they put the house on the foundation the wrong way.  I guess that house is still there I know there are several houses that came from Cameron Falls but that was the most famous. 

There were nurses in Cameron Falls who would just travel back and forth to the hospital I think they may have had a nurses station there but the medical treatment was done in Nipigon.  Sometimes in those days we would make house calls too.  I remember the one time the Legion had a dance and unfortunately I think it was the salad that got salmonella and there was about 600 people at this dance and all of them were just sick as dogs.  So we were all running around giving people shots of gravol to all these people on Sunday morning who were vomiting and it wasn=t because they were hung over they were really sick.  I remember I got a query from OHIP because I had made something like 60 house calls within a 24 hour period and they wanted an explanation of this abnormality in my billing schedule.  George Sittlinger was busy over in Red Rock doing the same thing talk about being popular!.  It was a good place to bring kids up.