But it was a beautiful place. So I- I- I- Vira and I went together for about six years, I guess that she came. And oh we had a ball. Oh, cripes some of the stor--

Speaker: There weren't all that many games because it was Depression time. Ah, I think Crokinole was one of the- and Monopoly, I can remember those two. Interviewer: Mm-hm. Speaker: Of course hide-and-go-seek when you're real small, eh?

In the circle there's a hole. And you have the little round wooden disks. That ah you would set at the edge of this here perimeter which is about ah thirty inches across the- the board- about thirty inches across. You'd set it on that mark and you had to hit it- hit the ah little Crokinole hoping you wouldn't hit one of those little pegs. And ah- and hoping that you could get in- in the hole, eh? Interviewer: Wow. Speaker: So anyway that's as far as that one went. And the next person would try the same thing but the next person always tried to knock yours away from that hole.

Ah I shudder every time I say, "I quit my job" because it's a really- I won't- I won't go so far to say it was a cushy job, but it was decent paying, full benefits, lots of holidays.

Speaker: I- I came across- I don't know where I put it. I came across my dance card when I wrote about it in here at the school dances. Interviewer: What's a dance card. Tell us abut that. What- what is that? Speaker: Oh you had a dance card. These dances that- in the high-school- Interviewer: Yeah yeah. Speaker: And ah- and there w-- I don't know where I put that thing. There were twelve dances. Yeah, I think there was twelve or sixteen different ones. They were numbered and- and if you wanted to dance with me, then you put your name-

Yeah, yeah. Oh he- he- he felt debonair, eh? That got him into trouble, he was too good-looking sometimes.

You go to Virginia-Town you have housing available there from the former Kerr-Addison-Gold-Mine which has been closed for quite a few years. So they've got a few didly-pidly mines working there right now. You know what I mean?

... we used to just like do experiments like when we-- at our new house here we like tried to re-wire the whole cable ourselves and we actually did. We actually got the whole thing re-wired ourselves because I didn't have no cable in the one room. So we re-wired it from the laundry room up.

Um- and you-know, you look at things like the Macassa ah, mine. They didn't have no idea how g-- deep the gold- the deeper they go, the better it gets. I-mean they got ground problems there but if they can solve that through engineering or-whatever, they might have a twenty-five, thirty year life on that line.

Speaker: And I-don't-know if you- I know that you- you may have heard about the dirty-thirties? Interviewer: Yeah. Speaker: Okay where this- all this wind blew all the soil away so they lost their farm and he- and he heard that the only place that you could make a living was working the mines.

And he bought that in the thirties. Ah to help with the pulp-wood, but because being the dirty-thirties and the depression and all he had a hard time paying for it so he actually brought it back to the person he bought it from to the- the dealership he bought it from in Kirkland-Lake here and told him that he couldn't pay for it.

Those are homemade- not mine. My niece from Muskoka was up to v-- for the big do, for the party on Saturday.

And ah- so he became a doctor and ah- doctored here for a long time and then he moved up to Timmins and ah, he passed away not ah that long ago. But ah ah then war came along and a lot of the- the fellows that I knew, that's including couple of my- my good boyfriends.

But the- that was what the story used to be. Ah just- just like Dog Patch. And you know what? It was kind-of like Dog Patch. Everybody had a dog and a dog was running loose.

You wouldn't believe and they dressed to nines. They had big dances and they dressed to the nines. They all did.

Speaker: There was one time there that we- I was working in what they called a drift. Interviewer: Mm-hm. Speaker: And we were at the end of drift and we ah did our- our drilling- drilling of the holes. Interviewer: Mm-hm. Speaker: Then we loaded the ah- the holes up with powder. Then you had to light the fuses, eh?

Speaker: ... when you go in the museum upstairs and you see the underground setting with the- with the a grey settings it looks as though you're looking in the mine-shaft. That was ah conceived by ah- it was a drift- ah (Speaker 2 speaks). Interviewer: Yeah, that's good.

Speaker: I'm not sure how they do it now but when I was doing it, they had ah- y-- you were drill-- it's like a f-- they call it a face, eh? Your- your face. Y-- it's like in the drift. Interviewer: Okay. Speaker: And then you start your drift. So you had ah one, two- you start with five holes in the middle of the- the face I would say. And two holes are big like this. Like they're about three inches in diameter. Interviewer: Okay. Speaker: They're called bull-bits.

Yeah yeah. And- and so um- we um ah- then we had this friend. He used to be a druggist here before the war. And then he was in the navy and then- his name was Bicker-Logan and then he had a pharmacy over- he was a pharmacist here and then after the war, he got married and he had a pharmacy over in a- in a Valdore.

Interviewer: What- what big things are happening because of the gold? What's it making better? Speaker: We're building a D-V-A. That's just because the government doesn't want to pay rent to the other building, it's not because of gold.