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ESQUESING HISTORICAL SOCIETY NEWSLETTER January-February 1991 Bill McDonald's Recollections of Georgetown by Janet Duval If you're interested in life as it used to be here in Georgetown, before there were plazas, video stores and high rises, you could try a visit to the library, pore over old newspapers or join the Historical Society. Or you can talk to Bill McDonald. The Sargent Road resident has lived here all his life and he entertains the casual visitor with lively stories of his past. Often it's local children who come calling these days. He tells them of his years delivering groceries by horse and cart for Farnell's store on Main Street and twenty more years in Thompson's Hardware. Then, with an understanding twinkle, he sends his young friends downstairs for a game of pool. For a person who left high school after only a year or so, he speaks with wit and eloquence. Times were hard then. It was the depression, and he was the last of four sons born to a mother whose husband died of anaemia five months before Bill came along. With the $500 insurance money, she bought a little house on Market Street. "If you walked upstairs, the whole house would rattle," Bill says. "It was a tumbledown shack when I knew it last, but my mother was mighty glad to get it back then." In later years a brother replaced it with a neat Cape Cod style home, where Bill's niece, Jessica Wilcox, lives today. An able dressmaker, Mrs McDonald cut down old clothes for her boys and passed them on from one brother to another. "It was a pretty hand-to-mouth life. If we didn't toe the mark, we might go without supper. You paid your doctor's bills in full those days. I don't think we dared get sick." Georgetown had just two schools then: Chapel Street School, replaced now by new houses behind Saint John's United Church, and the old nigh school. The town might have been ahead of its time in having Annie Ryan-a woman and a Catholic!-serve as principal of the public school for many years.