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Ere Gu eR a yd yee NLR Tr SIE AAA iL PhO Si ROP 52 STEHT TEE AAR SCH DA My ARI RN SEO A Decision, Please The hearing into the proposed site for a new Scugog Public Library is over. The Ontario Municipal Board ground its way last week through nearly three full days of testimony and evidence from those who support the site and those who oppose it. The hearing was an exhaustive one, and both sides had more than ample opportunity to make their points'with the two-member OMB panel hearing the matter. We suggest that by the same token, both sides should accept the OMB's decision when it is handed down in the near future. And hopefully, this time around, the OMB will be conclusive in its decision, rather than the last time when the ""non-decision decision" left a strange taste for all parties concerned. If the OMB decides in favour of the proposed site, then obviously, we must conclude from this that the Board believes the site is a good one for a library building, and good for the community. We would strongly urge the objectors to accept this decision. If the OMB says no to the site, then our local library Board will really have no other choice but to go back to the drawing table and start afresh with the search for a new site - if that is possible and feasible. But whatever, the issue has been dragged in front of the public for long enough. The time is long over-due to put it to rest and accept the Board's decision this time around, no matter which way it goes. ~~ Good Grief, ~~ What's Next There is something amiss in society when a public school board sets up a nursery in one of its schools so that teenage unmarried mothers can attend classes and have somebody look after their infants at the same time. That's what the Toronto Board of Education has done at one of its "Inner City" schools; an infant day care as a three-year pilot project at a cost of $302,000. Three unwed moms are already taking advantage of the program this fall. The facility will be expanded for six by Christmas and 18 by September next year. One of the mothers is 14 years old. While we can't help but applaud the desire of these young women to continue their education, and a the same time we recognize that the Toronto "Inner City" has social problems and needs not found elsewhere in Ontario, just how far is society pre- pared to go in its all-encompassing blanket of womb to tomb welfare. Surely, if these unwed mothers want to keep their children rather than give them up for adoption and at the same time continue their studies, some kind of far less expensive tutoring or night school arrangements could be made. The arguments in favour of this program are that these mothers come mostly from difficult and deprived family backgrounds themselves, and with- out an education they will likely end up on long-term welfare from the state. And one of the criticisms, which we think is valid is that on the surface, anyway, this program appears to condone sexual promiscuity among young teen- agers, and the recently fashionable practise among unwed teen-age mothers of keeping their babies, rather than placing them with adoption agencies. Some studies have indicated that a teen-age mother who decides to "go it alone" and keep her child is going to face an extremely tough road, high # school education or not. . One would think that the state and social agencies would be trying at all costs to persuade these girls to give up their babies, rather than the other way around. Aside from the financial and moral implications of this school nursery, the need for this program is a rather vivid example of why our public school systems need more sex education, not less. bill @ SUMMER READING Had time to do some reading this summer, though precious little, in between losing my wallet, entertaining my grand- boys, being almost torn limb from limb by mosquitoes at a lake up north, and being thoroughly whipped at golf by some old guys who should be in nursing homes but can still hit the pill right up the middle. Highly recommended is Farley Mowat's - account of personal World War II. Its title alone would have made me read it. It's called And No Bird Sang, borrowed with a slight change from Keats' ballad, La Belle Dame Sans Merci. First part of the book is typical Mowat, very readable but merely an account of the _ training and bumbling experienced by the average Canadian soldier, and sprinkled with a few highly improbably incidents. But when Mowat gets his feet into the real war, the invasion of Sicily, the brutal fighting up through 'sunny' Italy, where the men were half-frozen most of the time, he hits his stride, and I don't think he's ever written anything better. No one could have written this book who was not there. He conveys with chilling accuracy the exhaustion, the bitterness, the ley dogged courage, and yes, the wry humour of the real fighting men in a campaign that had little of the drama and dash of the invasion of France. Just tough, bloody fighting over range after range of mountains, against some of the toughest and best troops in the German army. Mowat seems to have put himself back into the mind and the emotions of the young Canadian lieutenant he was then. He drops his posturing, and eloquently and movingly reveals the anger, the bewilderment, the savagery, and the suffering of the Poor Bloody Infantry. Narrowly missing death himself a number of times, he makes rio effort to put himself in the hero's role, and indeed deprecates his own ineptitude in many situations. Rather, he writes with an admiration that is almost love, of his friends and fellow-soldiers and sufferers. He flares with rage at the incompetence and stupidity of senior officers, and in a couple of paragraphs strips all the gilt from that pompous little idiot, darling of the newspapers, General Montgomery. It's an honest book, and a good read. It had a little special interest for me, because one of his friends, Major Alex Campbell, was in his unit, and died just as he would have wanted to, in a mad, single- handed, hopeless charge against a German position. It could only be the same Alex Campbell I knew. We grew up in the same town, Perth Ontario. Alex's father had been killed in the first World War. From the time he was a nipper, he wanted revenge. He joined the militia as soon as he was old enough, and by the time I was in high school, he had a commission. Alex used to help train our high school cadet corps, ferociously but with an under- lying decency. A few years before, he had been a tiger on the line of the football team, a vast man with great strength and no fear of anything or anyone. I'll bet he was the happiest man in the country when Canada declared war on Germany. And he died exactly as he would have wished, hurling his bulk against machine-guns instead of oppo- sing linesmen. Another author I discovered this summer was Leo Simpson. He lives in, the village of Madoc, Ontario, and I knew of him, but hadn't read his novels, probably due to the incredible ineptitude of Canadian publishers when it comes to promoting good books. He is an excellent writer, much more literate than the famous Farley Mowat, who knows how to promote his own books and keep his name alive in the papers with various stunts and burning causes. I managed to grab two of Simpson's novels and read them straight through. They were The Peacock Papers and Kowal- ski's Last Chance. Buy them or borrow them or steal them. They're great. Simpson came to Canada from Ireland, but you'd swear, from his novels, that he'd lived in a small Canadian town or city all his life. He knows the vernacular, he knows the petty little hypocrisies, and he knows the often peculiar attitude toward life of Cana- dians. In The Peacock Papers, he explores, with wit and irony and pity, a decent, middle- aged, successful Canadian businessman who starts to come apart at the seams, as so many of us do. In Kowalski's Last Chance, he peels off layer after layer of the social strata in a small-city-and dabbles with leprechauns until you are convinced the next short guy you talk to might be one. Both books are. very funny, but a great deal more than that. And my book, you ask? Well, it's going swimmingly. One night, in a rage about nothing, my wife cleaned all the copies of my columns out of various drawers, top of my desk, vegetable bin, and other likely spots, bundled them into a green garbage bag and threw them into the attic. This produced some complications. Sitting around the living room are about eight shoe boxes. They are labelled: Politics, Weather, Celebrations, Family, Sex and so on. Isit in my easy chair, reach into the green garbage bag, produce a column, scan it, and hurl it toward the appropriate box. The one marked Miscella- neous is overflowing. The one marked Family is full. The one marked Sex is virginal. And the floor looks just as the bik yard does in October, when the oaks shed. But we're getting there. By Christmas I Jeckn I'll be halfway down that big green ag.