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The Beardmore water tower stood like a sentinel over the huge complex until it was taken down in 1999. The Beardmore boat house which was located at the end of what is now Cameron St. was also a club house for boaters on Fairy Lake. Teenage boys cut their working teeth at Beardmore Like a lot of other teenage Acton boys, I earned my keep by working a part-time job at Beardmore & Co. while attending high school. I was introduced to the job one bright Monday morning at 7a.m. when an office em- ployee took me over to the beamhouse and introduced me to the foreman, the late Dutchie Veldhuis. Cu r ious beamhouse employees watched as I was escorted past piles of hides in various states of the process. They no doubt wondered how long Id last. Some boys never lasted a day, some took it for a few days and then high-tailed it to jobs which were drier and didnt reek of smells which only a tannery can produce. The beamhouse, for those unfamiliar with the tanning process, is where the hides were washed, dehaired, de- fatted, and cut into butts, shoulders and bellies; then softened in vats before going to the tan yard. Nothing was wasted. The hair was saved, washed, dried and baled, then sent to hat factories. The flesh- ings, those jiggly pieces of hide unfit for tanning were shipped out to glue factories, to make glue of course. My introduction to the job included donning a long plastic apron, rubber gloves and a pair of rubber boots. Then I was given a scraper and instructed by a fellow schoolmate to take all the white hair off the hides before they were picked up and put through the hairing machine. From there they were sent to the fleshing machine which trimmed the hides of fat and loose flesh. The f l e sh ings were dropped into a huge bucket. It was my job to empty them into a large bin crawling with huge maggots getting fat off them. I retched the first time I emptied that bucket and several times after. However, within a week or two I could have eaten my lunch standing on the pile. There were strong men running those machines, guys like Gord Cunningham and Bill Brennan, their mus- cles glistening as they lifted those heavy hides into the machines before they were sent to the trimming tables. After the hides were divided up, they were selected for sole leather, belting, and other leather products. It was wartime and the beamhouse production workers earned a flat 42 cents an hour plus a pro- duction bonus which could amount to another 10 to 15 cents an hour. Everyone in the beamhouse received that bonus which in those post- depression days kept many toiling in that wet, smelly department instead of in a drier, cleaner job, myself in- cluded, although my stipend was a boys wage, 29 cents an hour plus the bonus. I gained a lot of respect for the men who toiled there. When they had met the production quota of so many packs they could go home which often meant at 3 or 4p.m. unlike those who worked from 7 till 12 noon and then from 1 to 6p.m. a 10 hour day and five hours Saturday morning. As time elapsed and confi- dence in my work increased, I was dispatched on Satur- day mornings to wake up those employees who failed to report for work. It was wartime, Beardmore was classed as a war industry. Failure to show up for the job except for sickness was a blow to the war effort. It could be enforced by the town constable, the inimita- ble Chief E.E. Harrop, who could show up at your door and arrest you. Of course, Friday was pay day, and the tendency to head straight for the hotel after work was real. Some- times, believe it or not, one or two of the beamhouse stalwarts got inebriated. Efforts to wake them up for work on Saturdays was futile. I can still hear them yelling their defiance as I knocked on the door in a per- functory manner knowing there was as much chance as getting them to the job that morning as the filter beds to freeze over in July. One morning, dispatched to wake up Alex Currie who operated the wash- ing, drying and baling of hair dept., I hammered on the door of a home in the Beardmore Crescent and got no reply. It was about 7:30a. m. Finally, after repeated knocks a voice said, wad- dya want? I replied, They want you in the beamhouse. Youre late. I work at The Acton Free Press. You got the wrong address, came the reply. I had woken up Cam Currie at his home instead of Alex, wherever he lived. Later in the war when I apprenticed at The Free Press, Cam Cur- rie was gone and I never did get any repercussions. From that point on however, I was very careful about whose door I was pounding on in the A.M. Teenage boys cut teeth... Continued from page 4 I could go on and on about some of my experiences at Bearmores before and after classes at the school, and through the summer holidays. How I was the interpreter in high school French for the French Ca- nadian lumberjacks the company brought down from Kapuskasing and points north. They spoke a kind of joual, I spoke a halting kind of French taken literally out of text books. Somehow with lots of expressive arm waving we managed to get some of what we said un- derstood. I never regretted my time at Beardmores. It was a learning experience and an introduction to how hard people had to work to get by, especially in wartime. Later after finishing school and reluctant to go to uni- versity, I apprenticed at The Free Press and was taught the printing trade. To leave Beardmores employ even though I was just part-time was no easy task. Selective Service de- cided where you could work in those war days. Leaving was next to impossible. Fortunately, the publisher and owner of The Free Press, the late G.A. Dills, knew the political ropes and Beard- mores reluctance to let me go was tempered by the need for a printers devil at the newspaper. That was decades ago but the memories linger. Coles Slaw with Hartley Coles Continued on page 5 To the Beardmore family & all of its employees, Thanks for the memories. Lorne Minute Walters First employee of Tyler Transport Ted Tyler Senior Founder of Tyler Transport c.1929 Tyler Transport Limited. 519-853-1550 Transporting your children safely since 1948