Was digging through our archives (a grand word for the loosely-organized piles of boxes in our basement!) and found this article about my great-uncle Everett Hardy. He was a lovely fellow who was able to rhyme off stories, facts and figures nearly to the end of his 94 years. He was from another age, steeped in stories of the sea, both tales of his own escapades and from the books and National Geographic magazines that he read.
My mother says the local doctor of her youth, John Stewart, said that if Everett had been able to have a good education, he could have been a lawyer (high praise in a time when lawyers were still mostly universally respected). As his parents aged, Everett gradually took over much of the business side of their cannery. He had a head for numbers, and remembered lobster prices and catch sizes decades after the fact.
The reporter who captured Uncle Everett’s tales was Debbie Horne of the West Prince Graphic weekly newspaper. She left the paper quite a few years ago, but was a fixture in West Prince for a long time. If something was happening in our area in the 1980s and 90s, you could be sure Debbie would be there, along with the West Prince reporter for the (then) daily Journal Pioneer, Eric McCarthy. How lucky we were to have that amount of coverage of our small communities. They had to cover everything, from fishing and farming to crime and human interest, and they both did it well.
I have a poor recording of Uncle Everett from about a decade after this interview, which I transcribed a few years ago. He used phrases and pronunciations that have died out of common usage today, as does my mother. He mentions a type of ship called a schooner in this article, but he never pronounced to rhyme with “tuner”, more like “gunner”…it’s difficult to describe. Ask me sometime and I’ll say it fer ye!
His deep interest in the natural world filled him up to the brim, so much so that in his later years, his love of the world and all that was in it would choke him up as he spoke. No gentler, kinder man has ever lived, and I’m glad someone took the time in 1983 to record his tales.
A technical note for anyone who transcribes newspaper clippings: I’ve been using TextSniper for the past few weeks to capture text from PDFs and photos, and it is a helpful little app that sits patiently in my menu bar waiting to be triggered. I recently found the toggle to prevent it from adding line breaks, which has saved me a lot of editing when copying text from newspaper columns, and now I love it even more! It’s part of Setapp, a subscription plan I ignored for years but decided to try when RapidWeaver came up for renewal and I realised it was part of Setapp. There are 240+ fun and useful tools that all seem to work really well. I’m just sharing my Setapp experience – I don’t monetize anything on my website, so you won’t make or break me if you do-or-don’t click!
