So in grade-one I remember my dad dropping me off at school, and I had a Roy-Ra-- Rogers school bag, (laughs) it had Roy-Rogers and this horse on the- on the front of the school bag, and my mother said to me, she says, "I'm giving you a Jersey-Milk bar, and you can have it at recess. Don't eat it during school, though, because the teachers won't like that." (laughs) So I remember taking that school bag with the- with this Jersey-Milk chocolate bar, and um, of course I didn't eat in- in school, because I was a very shy person, so I didn't-

Speaker: I can speak a little but very little now but my dad was Polish, my mom was Scotch. Interviewer: Scotch? S-- Scotch? Speaker: Yup, Scottish.

... ah you raked all the grain up with a hay-rake that the horses pulled, and then ah got the binder, and ah went along and it picked- it picked the grain up and straw, and fed it through the unit, and it would tie what's referred to as a sheaf of grain.

My father was a farmer and a carpenter, which took me into that sphere of activity with horses, everything was done with horses. ... And ah you started out, with the horses, ... maybe when you're ten, you would drive the horses with the load of hay, or an empty wagon. And that's how you would learn to handle the horses. And ah, so then you would graduate from there to being in the bush, and skidding logs when you're maybe twelve. ... And you would skid logs out of the bush ...

I was only sixteen. He was twenty years older than me. I had sixteen children. We had a hard time. ... When I was a young girl, I worked for my father in the bush, cooking for him, too. Baked the bread, I was twelve years old and I skidded the logs and took care of the horses. Had two horses.

But then- in summertime it was okay, but in winter time when it was snowing. Slippy, eh?

Oh yes. No saddle, it was slippy. The back gets slippy.

Yeah. One time I wiped out hard and smoked my face off the water, and- yeah.

Speaker: Ah, I wanted to do something a little more adventurous, a little more exciting, more dangerous. I wanted actually to be a smoke jumper. Interviewer: What's a smoke jumper? Speaker: The guys that go into a forest fire and they'll- they get dropped, they jump out of a helicopter or a plane inside the ah- the other side of the fire and then try to fight the fire from the inside out.

Like, ah, if we happened to snitch some, ah, ah, cucumbers or- or carrots, eh?

The time is so long. ... There's nothing really to do when you go to someplace like, eh? Even when I go to my daughter's there, eh? Now- and you're so glad to get home, you hate to leave, but you're so glad to leave. Because you're used to your own bed-

Interviewer: So did you learn how to drive? Speaker: No. ... Interviewer: Yeah. Do you wish you did? Speaker: Ah in a way yeah, in a way no. Because now if I want to get someplace, well there's the home support you can get, eh? ... Yes so you can always just get somebody like, you-know?

So even when- excuse me, even when my, um, children were born, I would take my grandmother for a ride, and we would go out from here to Combermere and then take the old Barry's-Bay road back, stop some place for an icecream-cone or some treat, you-know. So she loved to just get out and see the countryside, see the changes. I mean, those were roads that she would have travelled, by horse and buggy. Those were roads that she would have walked.

So we may- we may have an outage. Um, we have a generator now that if we're going to be out for longer than, say, eight hours, or if we need to be someplace that we need to be showering, or if we're concerned about our food then, not being able to keep it from spoiling, then we'll run the generator.

Interviewer: Do you ever fly? Speaker: Oh yeah. Mm-hm. Couple of years ago, the first year I retired I went with Herman. We went for two weeks, he was planning, he likes to go ever summer someplace, and my dad liked to do that too um, and that was back in the day when people didn't go up to Povungnituk and you-know Kugluktuk or-wherever.

But people stayed here. If you went away it was you went away because you were working in Kitchener or you were working someplace else and- but most people stayed here. When- when my- when I was growing up in Barry's-Bay, yeah you stayed here.

Interviewer: Did- were- did the- were there a lot of school trips? Speaker: No. ... One time they had some kind of a- what they called a king or queen jubilee.... And it was up in Boulter or some place, I remember.

Interviewer: ... it must have been tough here, eh? Speaker: It was. They first came to- down there around Eganville some place. ... They even- some of them had to live in- in sod shanties.

Interviewer: So what do you do at the park? Speaker: Oh, sometimes we went there some place for- just for a picnic or- ... Or just to the place there, the museum or-whatever they have there to look at that.

So I stayed with my cousin 'til I got a job. ... And then once I got a job I stayed there and came home for two, three weeks. Home for the summer. The first summer I came for a few months because they went away some place. My l-- my, ah- people that I worked for. ... But then after that I only came home for holidays.