The following text may have been generated by Optical Character Recognition, with varying degrees of accuracy. Reader beware!

th ae Pg ee OD. mnuron iC life aed at work While the adults around him lolled about on the sand, soaking up the sun in last weekend's blistering heat, this youngster was hard at work doing a bit of landscape repair work at one of the area beaches. He didn't quite succeed in filling in the creek, but the spirit, as they say, was definitely willing. Staff photo Huronia happenings Last week's blistering heat saw the beaches in the Georgian Bay area literally packed with city folk, as they escaped the concrete for the fresh- water breezes to the north. But late Sunday, they were scrambling for their cars as a brief but drenching rainstorm lashed the area. Highways were jammed early as people fled the deluge and headed back for another week of work. x * May 1975 turned out to be one of the finest spring seasons in years for tourist operators and businessmen in the bay area, as sunny skies and high temperatures more than made up for the drizzly, cool springs of recent years. xk The Mariposa Arts Theatre presents its latest production, Man of La Mancha, at the Orillia Opera House this week. Tickets, available at the Opera House box office, are $2.75 and $3.25, and are available for the performances tonight through Saturday, with show times 8:40 p.m. The musical score is by the Orillia Arts Orchestra. x Wilfred Laurier University is offering a series of six-week university extension courses this summer in Orillia from early July to the second week of August. Subject offerings will be in "'all normal fields,"' including business administration, geography and English, and can lead to full university bachelor of arts degrees. Classes will be taught this summer at the Twin Lakes Secondary School, with the tuition fee $65 per course. For further details, call 326-4682. x Throughout the Collingwood-Blue Mountain area, it's apple blossom time again, as the or- chards are filled with beautiful and sweet- smelling reminders that summer is back. It's worth a drive for the sights and smells in apple country. ie ok Penetanguishene is gearing up in earnest for June's centennial celebrations, as the town marks the 100th anniversary of its incorporation as a municipality in Ontario. June 28 to July 6 will be Old Home Week, with thousands of former residents due back to share in the party. One of the most prominent will be Father Athol Murray, the parish priest who organized the tricentennial bash in 1921, marking 300 years of white settlement in the area. Quote of the week "Tell you what, Pilot, love and skill laugh at locks, for them that can't be opened can be picked. The mechanism of the human heart, when you throughly understand it, is, like all the other works of nature, very beautiful, very: wonderful, but very simple. When it does work well, the fault is not in the machinery, in the management." not but Thomas Chandler Haliburton from Colombo's Canadian Quotations (Hurtig Publishers) TERRY PENN wy son aeaulieu -- AS SOON AS | GET THIS OUT OF THE BOX, AND SET UP... & -.. [LL HAVE THE "COOLEST" DOG HOUSE IN ANY COMIC STRIP ! eaten The Depot by Gary Wrathall Kenn Knapman of Collingwood doesn't fancy himself an historian. In fact, he's prone to making that disclaimer at least once in every five minutes of conversation. What he is though, besides being the successful proprietor of one of the Georgian Bay area's finest restaurants at Craigleith, six miles east of Collingwood, is a pack rat - a Georgian Bay Pack Rat. "| rushed down there to find he was burning original copies of council minutes from the late 1800s..." A Pack Rat collects things, and usually never lets them go. That's precisely what Kenn Knapmen does, he collects thing. It may be a book, a picture, a map, an engraving, a piece of pottery, even a faded magazine. What makes his collection unique however, is that all of the material dates back at least to the turn of the century, and the majority of it further than that. In fact, his collection of early Georgian Bay history, particularly the era around the coming of the railroad, may be the most complete collection in private hands anywhere in Ontario. Meal connoisseurs who have partaken of the Depot restaurant menu since it opened in 1968 in what was once a railroad depot built in 1879 know the passion Mr. Knap- man has for that era in Canadian history. It lines the walls, tables and chair of the tiny restaurant. Pictures of Sir Sanford Flemming, one of Canada's railroad pioneers, line the walls. Photos of the Depot building when the first train ap- peared for settlers west of Collingwood in 1872 compete for the remaining space. Land grant deeds, survey maps and a host of other documents remain unseen, jammed into bureaus, desks, even in drawers in the kitchen. A resident of Collingwood for the past 17 years, Mr. Knapman purchased the Depot building, then in a long state of disrepair and almost falling apart, in 1967. At the time, he was simply concerned that it was going to be torn down by the owners, and he thought it might make a temporary museum during the Collingwood cen- tennial celebrations. eae But he and his wife, who had operated another restaurant in Collingwood for a number of years, decided to turn the Depot into a similar establishment, but this one rooted in the history of Georgian Bay. Now, when he's not greeting dinner customers in a small foyer which used to be the separate men's waiting room of the railroad station, he's entertaining them with stories of what used to be, showing them the history he has gathered. Other times, it's off to get supplies for the restaurant - food and history both. A history buff... A history buff, you see, can't sit still. There's a lot of history to be gathered. He knows it's out there somewhere, and he's determined to get a hold of it. Often, it means reaching into his own pocket. Every month he receives bulletins from historical auction firms which list dozens of notes, letter, pictures and other documents up for grabs to the highest bidder. You send in your bid by mail, often only on the strength of the briefest catalogue description, and hope your bid goes through. The system, while somewhat of a blind, "here goes nothing" sort of thing, does pay off. A few years back he noticed in one such auction list that a firm in Vancouver was offering a collection of letters written by a Captain Stayner for sale. The only thing the list mentioned was that Captain Stayner was the Deputy 'Postmaster General of Upper Canada in 1836. But there was also the suspicion, call it the hope if you will, the man was con- nected in some way to the Town of Stayner. So in went the bid, and luckily enough, it was accepted. c Turns out that the Captain was indeed a one-time major landholder in the Stayner area. So he had a local connection as well as a Canada-wide one. Copies of the letter were provided by Mr. Knapman to the Stayner newspaper and the town's public library. "A lot of things you buy you never know if it's going to be of interest to you or not," Mr. Knapman says. "But if you don't get it, you'll never know." "You know, people are funny. If they have no use for stuff, they'll just throw it away" His yearning will also take him to various auctions, in person, where he'll find himself up against government ar- chives representatives or persons representing institutions like CN and CP. Even then, the little man, people like Kenn _ Knapman, sometimes win. As a history buff, he's naturally con- cerned about what people may have, and not realize it. Like all history buffs, he instinctively cringes when he thinks of what is being thrown away. eae "You know, people are funny. If they have no use for stuff, they'll just throw it away." "One evening I got a phone call from someone I know in Thornbury who said their neighbor was out in his back yard burning all these old books and newspapers. One of the historical pieces on display at Craigleith's Depot Restaurant is this piece shown by proprietor Kenn Knapman from the Mary Ward, the Great Lakes passenger ship which ran aground and sank off the shores of Craigleith in the 19th Remains of the Mary Ward =" The Pack Rat of Craigleith preserves " early history of the Georgian Bay area Century. The official opening ceremonies for the recently completed railroad tracks and Depot station were nullified when a special train was used to bring rescue workers to Craigleith when the Mary Ward sank. "T rushed down there to find he was burning original copies of council minutes from the late 1800's, some old newspapers from around 1880 and things like that. I just couldn't believe it!" Sometimes though, collecting is much more deliberate. He will either look for a known collection up for sale, or dinner customers will pass on a lead. "You go to auction places to find the stuff, or people will be in here, looking at what we have and say "Gee, my grand- father had stuff like this and I think we some of it in our attic." "T've got stacks and stacks of material"' he adds. "'I'd bet three quarters of it I don't know what it is and I've never read it," 'Besides the passion for collecting, Mr. Knapman has another one. He wants, he repeats quite often, people to know what he has. He wants people to feel free to drop into the restaurant to browse through the collection. "TI don't care if they don't spend a dime," he says emphatically. "They can just pull up a chair in the corner and read all night. If they want to know anything, I'll be glad to help them if I can. "Tf they do happen to come in here to eat, my staff has orders that if someone asks more than two questions about the place, they're to send for me." "T don't get any personal gain from this. But there's just no point in collecting anything that's not used." He's already proud of the fact his collection has been the source of numerous research projects by students or in- structors from universities, including some from as far away as Calgary. The nagging question always asked, is why he collects like he does? How does a man who has had numerous vocations in the past, many completely unrelated to history, get turned on in his late forties? ..not a historian "I don't know," he says thoughtfully. "I'm not an historian...But there's something exciting about all this. I could sit up to 4 a.m. each day reading it." Then too, there's something mystical perhaps, about the area he's called home for the past 17 years. A native of Hamilton, he has no passion for the history of that area and hardly ever goes back for visits. "This is God's country up here," he tells a young Toronto couple as they leave the Depot after a Friday evening's meal. Perhaps, in a sense, that explains it all. column by Shirley Whittington A couple of our local milk stores display their nudie magazines at child's eye level, just inside the front door. There are some who feel that nude female breasts project an entirely appropriate ambience for a milk store, but there are others who ob- ject, saying that they haven't seen that much skin since the last time they were in the bathtub. Young mothers who pop in for a jug of two per cent are unsettled when their pre- Schoolers want to know what that man is doing to that lady. Those glossy skin mags ought to be available for people who want them but it's too bad that they're given prime space right up there beside the jelly beans and diet pop. Why aren't they lined up on the newsstands along with True Confessions and House Beautiful and Vogue? Ah - Vogue. Now there's a classy magazine. Vogue is to True Confessions as cognac is to rum-and-coke. Vogue is directed to people who don't have to ask how much anything costs, and who believe that the only way to get rid of temptation is to give in to it, no matter what is it costs. TI buy a copy of Vogue oncea year. Why? Once a year, I need to know that somewhere there are women who don't have to wait until the baby bonus comes in before they can buy a new pot of eye shadow; women in whose lives the hair- dresser looms larger than the or- thodontist; women who keep cologne in their refrigerators instead of Freshie; women who can afford a yearly shape-up at a beauty farm when they outgrow their Pwwwuewwwey |e ee gg ewe eee ete Tee = bikinis; women who have more than one diamond and who really believe that a dress that hasn't been worn more than once a season should be thrown out or given to the cleaning lady. Vogue is the National Geographic of Fifth Avenue and the Popular Mechanics of haute couture. The Vogue I bought last year was peopled with impossibly beautiful women - bony clothes horses who stared from the pages with glacial indifference to the fact that what they were wearing cost a month's grocery money, or more. If there were any men in the fashion layouts, they just stood around holding car doors open and things like that. Mrs. Exeter used to be featured in the back pages of Vogue. She was very thin and very rich, and the classiest senior citizen this side of the Duchess of Windsor. Clad in chiffons and pearls, her face ex- pertly lifted, she epitomized inherited wealth and position. She did not wear cotton housedresses like my mother, nor did she sweat over a hot stove or ironing board. Mrs. Exeter, in fact, did not sweat at all. When gently exercised, (as after a hard day clipping coupons), she gently perspired Chanel. I haven't seen Mrs. Exeter for a long time. She has gone, along with the hollow- cheeked fashion goddesses. The girls of Vogue are no longer haughty and cold. They are naughty and bold. The May issue features a fashion spread that is underlined with a breathless "Oh -- Mmm -- ohh -- ah-hah"' which dribbles off to four mysterious dashes and an ex- clamation mark. A girl is leaning over a guy who's lying down. Her dress is unbuttoned at the front. A guy greets a girl by the swimming pool, and squeezes her unbound bosom. A couple of pages later the same man is with a different girl in an ambivalent tableau. He is taking off her brassiere. Or maybe he's putting it on. Somebody's being put on here. 'This bra," gushes the copy writer, "has the kind of easy front closing anyone oe £ £AB SD FS PHBVCVVCOP eC + Coe Zeew Cee 4 The girls of Vogue go naughty and bold as the beautiful people become, simply, ordinary can manage." So here I am with the latest copy of Vogue in my chapped and trembling hands. Now I know what the beautiful people are doing. They are doing what ordinary mortals have been doing for centuries. The porno mags in the front of the milk stores are demeaning to women and puzzling to five-year-olds whose mothers have taught them to respect their bodies and those of others, But at least the girlie mags are honest about what they're selling. Vogue pretends to sell class and good taste and high style. In their May issue they've proven what a lot of smart and unpretentious women have known for a long time. Even Mrs. Exeter knew that women dress for other women, but they undress for men. Shirley Whittington is a staff writer with Markle Community Newspapers.