Interviewer: Did you ever celebrate Christmas in Belleville? Speaker: Yes, the Christmas of nineteen-twenty-nine, there was such a snow storm before that the drifts were so high that you could hardly see over them to get 'round the corner of Bridge and Dufferin. I remember the house.

Interviewer: What did you- what did- kind of road was it? What was it? Speaker: Oh, old road in the wintertime with maybe snow this high. Interviewer: Uh-huh. Speaker: Full of pitch-holes between drifts. Mm, boys, they got what they called a ah- a frame sleigh with long runners. They were desperate.

Speaker: Because it- if you ever plough it up it'll just drift away. Out around Munster here, there's an awful lot of it. It'll drift out in big drifts along the fences of (inc). Snow in the winter. Interviewer: Um, do you have any ah, low lying grassland anywhere? Speaker: No, that's not- not much of it here. There is some swampy stuff.

And of course, the road wasn't open so when we hit a snow drift if we just happened to tumble out, that was quite the ordinary thing of the day and we just pulled up the big blankets and jumped in.

Speaker: Oh well it was a means of getting from here to there (laughs) Interviewer: (inc.) exciting? Speaker: Not really, because, ah, it was- it was uh a lot of work having to clear all that snow away. Oh yeah the snow was huge- huge drifts. Interviewer: W-- Well what about the summertime? What was the summertime like? Speaker: The summer was lovely, just very much like we have now- I don 't think- I don 't recall it being as hot as it is today- now. No.

Oh when I was ah very young, we played ah on outdoor rinks in the winter, sliding- ah we used to slide down the sides of the tailings-dams. And try to make our own little avalanches on the drifts and jumping in drifts, jumping off garages and into the snowbanks and getting stuck up to waist-high snow and trying to dig yourself out. Ah we had kick-the-can, we had ah hide-and-seek, ah you-know ...

Oh yeah, when- but even now like before we'd have I-don't-know, about s-- it was I remember it going- we have a sliding window and it'll go three-quarters up our window with the drift kind-of pushing it up and- and it was basically three-quarters of the window and this year I think it was like maybe a third of the window, it wasn't even close.

It just- oh gee, and the snow drift sometimes, you hardly get through them. Dad would be in the camp some place working eh?

Speaker: And ah- at that time, there was lots of days in the wintertime that they couldn't get through up there because of the snow drifts and- was funny because if you thought "Well, might get stuck, we'll go on the bus." (Laughs) Interviewer: (Laughs) Be a snow day.

Oh no, there was snow storms and-that but, I remember on time we had a snow storm and ah, the guys went ahead of the snow plough and dug out the big drifts so that they could get through it because they couldn't begin to get through it on their own. Yeah.

Interviewer: D-- do you- that was a big storm, do you remember any other big storms (inc)? Speaker: Oh no, there was snow storms and-that but, I remember on time we had a snow storm and ah, the guys went ahead of the snow plough and dug out the big drifts so that they could get through it because they couldn't begin to get through it on their own. Yeah.

Speaker: Another exciting thing was when Larry was born eh? Speaker 2: Yes. Speaker: Ah, we were still living up on the farm at his parents' place when I went into labour for our second baby. And then snow drifts were deep, deep eh? And not too many had phones back then either.