A Chairdean Ionmhuinn Mo Chinnidh
|
Vol.19, No.1 Winter, 2005 |
I often feel that too many of my articles are slanted toward the western side of the continent and that kin in Nova Scotia see a lot that may not be familiar to them. I plan to correct that in the next few issues by providing material from a column by Pat Mac Adam, seen below, in the Cape Bretoner magazine. Pat is one of us. He began life in Eskasoni (on the north side of East Bay). Cape Bretoners will be familar with many of the place names in this and also, perhaps, some of the people.
Fr Ed House my friend, cousin and fellow genealogist sent me this.
Paul Morrison never won fame or riches, but in his own corner of the world he held a powerful sway. Once, Reader's Digest carried a monthly feature: "My Most Unforgettable Character." I have met presidents, prime ministers, prelates and pro athletes. They are all unforgettable but Paul Morrison, a bachelor Cape Breton Scot, stands out. Paul didn't hold the Order of Canada. There were no honorary initials after his name. He enriched the life of every person he touched. He was comfortable in his own skin. He was a success as a human being. Paul was, as Scots would say, "full of the devil." He was the "dominie" (the leading Scot elder). Neighbours and friends sought his counsel. Lawyers and surveyors consulted him because he knew every corner of his ancestral acres and where property lines began and ended. One day, a know-it-all, wet-behind-the-ears bureaucrat looked down his nose and asked haughtily: "You have lived your entire life in Island View, Mr. Morrison?" Paul's mischievous answer was: "No, not yet!" One had to get up early to get ahead of Paul. Although he had only Grade 6 schooling, he had the native intelligence, wit and cunning only earned in a school of hard knocks. Paul graduated with high honours.
He was an institution. He lived his entire life along the highway, only feet from a Bras d'Or Lake. He was born in 1899 on the mountain side of the highway. When he broke an ankle he couldn't negotiate the steep driveway so he moved down to a small cottage. On a clear day he could look across the lake at Ben Eoin and Big Pond -- Rita MacNeil country. The cottage had no indoor plumbing or running water. A two-holer outhouse and septic tank were located out back. His well yielded hard water that was sulphurous to smell and taste. A wood burning stove took up a quarter of his kitchen. The heat it threw off could melt an iceberg.
Paul's Boston nieces, Tootsie Gillis and Terry McAdam, spent six weeks every summer next door to Paul's. They pestered him so much that he installed an indoor toilet. One evening, sitting down to a barbecue, Paul remarked: "Jaysus, when I was little, we used to cook in the house and go to the bathroom outside. Now, we are eating outside and going to the toilet in the house." His kitchen was THE local social centre. Friends congregated to play cards -- 45s -- and to smack their lips over one ( or two or more) of Paul's "hot ones" -- hot toddies concocted with moonshine. Paul was a student of 'shine. He maintained that the best stills were in French Vale. He eked out a marginal living as a road foreman. He had a market garden and sold fresh produce and dairy products door-to-door in Sydney. As a foreman in 1953, he was paid 80c an hour; his crew of 10 labourers each earned 70c an hour. A timesheet found after his death revealed that he worked nine hours a day for 10 days in March, 1953. His take home pay was $57.60. As he morphed into old age, Paul's slight frame began to shrink and he took on the appearance of a puckish garden gnome.
He befriended some American hunters -- PhDs from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They always stopped by for a "hot one." When Paul went to Boston to visit his sister, Flo, (my aunt by marriage) and her family, the professors couldn't do enough for him. Paul enjoyed playing the rube. When the engineers took him to see the 60-storey John Hancock skyscraper, he pretended to be unimpressed. His only comment was: "Jaysus, you could put a lot of hay in there." His hosts took him to an up-market restaurant, Igoe's in Cambridge, for dinner. Paul was in his element. The show he put on was funnier than Abbott and Costello's "Who's On First." On the way in, he had a tug of war with the hatcheck lady. "A handsome woman tried to take my coat. It was my coat. I paid for it." They were escorted into a lounge for pre-dinner drinks. Five of them were squeezed around a small round cocktail table. "Jaysus, are they going to feed the five of us around this small table. I've got bigger milking stools." Shelling peanuts There was sawdust on the floor. Patrons were shelling peanuts and discarding shells on the floor. "Jaysus, if you threw shells on the floor at Jasper's Restaurant in Sydney, they'd throw you out on George St. on your ear." Paul allowed that the food tasted "wonderful, marvellous, whatever it is. If the restaurant paid their electricity bill maybe we'd be able to see what we are eating." He kept diners in stitches -- all with a straight face. On the way out, he had another tussle with the checkroom lady. "She wanted 50c before she'd give me back my coat. I had to buy it back from her." Paul's stories stood tall. He told one of a retired couple who spent their summers nearby.
The wife had her lady friends up for a week to play marathon bridge. Her husband was relegated to the front porch. The highlight of his week was waving to the Micmac Indians driving to and from Eskasoni. Then, his bored, frustrated mind landed on a devilish plan. All week, he saw well-padded, blue-rinse matrons sashay across the lawn en route to the privy. Without being observed, he snaked a garden hose through the grass and into the back of the outhouse. He jammed a funnel into each end of the hose. Then, he waited and prepared to strike. Finally, HMS Marlborough entered harbour. He waited 30-seconds for her to ensconce herself on the throne. Then, he yelled into the funnel at his end: "Can you hold it a second, lady? We're trying to paint down here." Paul claimed the poor lady flew out like "she was shot from a cannon. "Her step-ins were at half mast."
Paul took me "picking" (antiquing) one cold winter day. We were looking for Nova Scotia glass, Mac-Askill photographs and a spinning wheel. A ferry linked Grand Narrows with Iona. The Barra Strait across was jammed with drift ice. Paul saw the worried look on my face and said: "The ferry is on call. It's over on the other side. There is a telephone in that shack. Crank it and the ferry will come and get us." I went into the shack. The only appointments were the phone and a huge photo of the captain and 31 dead crew members of the ferry, Caribou, that was torpedoed off Newfoundland in World War II. At least there wasn't a Muzak band recording of Nearer My God To Thee or Autumn. Paul had only the slightest trace of a grin on his face when his white-faced travelling companion got back in the pickup.
Paul lived and died by the sword. While Liberals governed Nova Scotia for 23 consecutive years, he was assured of steady work. Bob Stanfield's Conservatives ended Liberal rule Oct. 2, 1956. On Oct. 3, Paul was fired. Battered straw hat He was 85 when he died. His battered straw hat hangs from a nail in Donnie and Terry McAdam's cottage. Any self respecting horse would be embarrassed to wear it but it is the most prized item in the room. Looking at the hat, one can almost conjure up a phantasm of Paul saying, with a glint in his eye: "No, I never married. I never had to because I discovered sliced bread and the electric blanket early. I like my shine clear and strong, stirred or shaken, and I like telling stories. Yes, I'm a well balanced Scot; I have a chip on both shoulders."
“===============================================================================
For the past 20 years I have shared with you the exploits of several of our herioc ancestors, there was John J Mac Donald who was killed fighting for the north in the Civil War, Angus Mc Donald who died in a Candian avalance at Rogers Psss high in the Canadian rockies. Colonel Ronald Mac Donald who died in battle fighting Bonaparte in the Battle of Corona and John Mac Isaac who was killed falling from a baloon.
Now I bring you a different character, a Gillis who became famous in the US in the 20s. Although I can't definatly prove we are related, he came fron Margaree where some of our Gillises began or he could have been related back in the Highlands. I think you'll agree that he received world-wide attention., at least among law enforcement.
"Chicago's southwest side was a filmy, icy gray – the grayness of a cesspool that morning. Slush of a recent snowfall-turned-sloppy had been shoved by plowmen onto the curbs and over the sidewalks, against the low brick storefronts and over the stoops of the three-flats along California Avenue. Milk and tinkers' wagons, streetcars and a few automobiles dared to skate the lanes of frozen cobble and hardened mud. They found themselves on a hazardous journey. A freezing skinned the pavements early morning, giving the unclean grayness a petrified look, glistening but definitely not crystalline. Ugly, rather. December 6, 1908, had dawned, a physical nightmare. And the nightmare had a spokesperson, born that morning. Its squeals battered the darkness of the Gillis flat at 944 North California.
Lester Joseph Gillis came into this world a chronic child who, it was said, never lost the bleating ill-temper of a spoiled brat. He bore the pout of a devil-child and the cruelty of one of Milton's Inferno torturers. A social commentator would later describe Lester Gillis as "something out of a bad dream". He was to emerge from the kick 'em-hard Chicago Stockyards district as Baby Face Nelson, one of the toughest, and definitely the most heartless, of the Depression-era gangsters. Cold and brutal, he enjoyed killing. Even his criminal peers were wary of his path.
"Where outlaws such as Pretty Boy Floyd and the Barkers would kill to protect themselves when cornered, Nelson went out of his way to murder – he loved it," apprises Jay Robert Nash in Bloodletters and Badmen. "His angelic, pear-smooth face never betrayed his instant ability to kill."
Richard Lindberg, author of Return to the Scene of the Crime, adds, "Standing only five feet four inches, Gillis compensated for his physical limitations with a murderous temper and a willingness to employ a switchblade or a gun without hesitation or remorse for the intended victim."
Little Lester was born to poor Highland Scot immigrant parents Josef and Mary Gillis, from Margaree, Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, who could not comprehend nor adapt to American ways of life; they were pathetically naïve in the realities of the urban pavement. The neighborhood brooded in the lower depths of Chicago's sanitation canal district, tilting between a milieux of freight yards, water towers, viaducts and a series of constantly flooding city sloughs, fed by factories that fenced in the entire area. Wherever one walked he walked in the shadows of their smokestacks".
Court TV Crime Library
www.crimelibrary.com
==============================================================================
" The Mc Donalds from the Bras d' Or to the Estrella" is a book on CD which chronicles our famliy's experiences from Scotland to California and can be viewed on a computer CD drive. It contains 274 pages of narrative and over 50 pictures. This is a compilation of most that I have learned about our ancestors during the past twenty seven years of research.
"Glengarry DVD" plays on most DVD players and computer CD drives. It consists of pictures of Michael Murdock Mc Donald's Ranch from 1900 to 1940 as narrated by him.
Several of you have bought some of these disks, often multiple copies for your offspring.
Email me if you want either or both of these CDs.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++