"Of course in them days when you turned fourteen you were supposed to be a man."

Mr. Allan Blimke

 The Laurentian View Dairy is known all over the Ottawa Valley for its ice cream and its 'good old fashioned home cookin''. As we walked to Mr. Blimke '5 house, we wondered what the man who had founded this well-known establishment would be like. We would soon find out. When we reached the red brick house beside the Laurentian View Dairy, we met his daughter; Vera, outside. She took a break from shoveling snow and guided us into the house. Vera took our jackets and we went to the living room to set up. Mr. Blimke was reading the morning newspaper. Once we got started, Mr. Blimke was excited and had no problem telling us stories of his past. We soon found out that his life had been filled with many more adventures than we had ever expected.

by Dwayne Donnelly and Elizabeth Payer

 

"Times when I was a child aren't like they are today. I was nine years old when we moved up to Perch Lake from Pembroke. We lived on a farm and had a big family with eleven at home. The only schooling I got was from age six to nine. When we moved up here, the school was a little log house on the old Pembroke and Mattawa road, down at what they call the Nadeau place. We lived about three miles from there. In the summer time there was schoo~ and in the winter time the roads were closed. There was no snowplows then and you had to make your own path. The only snowshoes we had then were boards with a strap across the  middle and we'd try to walk on them. During the summer I didn't get too much schooling because I was next on the list for working around the farm. I was eleven or twelve and of course nobody pushed me to go to school and I didn't fight to go. We used to go swimming a lot in the summer time we'd run bare feet. Of course when we went to school we had a pair of boots on. In those days there was plenty of work but the money was scarce, so we all had to wear the give downs. My father was a sawyer at the Pembroke Lumber Company mill and he worked there for eighteen years. My mother, she was the housekeeper and that's about it. She was a good cook and a good baker. We always had lots to eat but we didn't have too many cakes or pies and things like that. I used to remember on Sundays she'd have a layer cake with a little thin icing on top baked for us, and we always looked forward to that. It used to taste pretty good.
In those days there was plenty of work but the money was scarce.
time, in the Indian River and that was a big deal. An odd time we'd club together five or six boys and go together and fish along the river. We didn't always have shoes to wear and in the summer