“You don’t want to have spent all your life climbing to the top of the corporate ladder only to discover it is leaning against the wrong wall.”

   As we walked down the stairs of the Deep River Public Library, we began to see some of the woodworking exhibit hosted there. At the centre of the room sat Carl’s polished cedar strip canoe and there stood Carl, several feet away, speaking with someone else. We introduced ourselves and proceeded to one of the back rooms to commence our interview. As we sat down at a table and turned on the tape recorder, Carl began to open the book that was his life.

By Kevin Williams and Laura Watts

“I was born in Pembroke in 1935, and that’s where I grew up. We lived in a house next to an empty lot that we used as a garden. That garden was a very important source of food. My father was a millwright and planerman in a lumber mill. He was a working-class man, and his days were long. When he came home, he would spend some time in the garden each evening. Some of the vegetables grown would last throughout the winter. I remember there being mountains and mountains of cabbages and potatoes.
   I walked to school until I got my first bike when I was twelve. School is a lot different now than it was. Back then, we just sort of shut up and listened. There wasn’t a lot of free exchange of ideas. There was

  little or no personal exchange between teachers and students. When I was going to school, I thought that teachers finished the day, went home, got hung up on a hook and stayed there until someone took them down the next morning so they could go back to school.
   My first paying job was just wonderful. I was in grade eleven and I worked for the Department of Lands and Forests, which is now called the Ministry of Natural Resources. I was paid four dollars a day. I spent that whole summer in Algonquin Park. Half the time was spent marking trees to be cut the next winter and the other half was spent timber cruising new stands that would be marked for cutting the following year. I remember having an excellent cook along with us. He


Carl Hoelke

would make us fresh bread, roast beef, pies and cakes, all on a fold-up tin stove. The only drawback was that we had to cut the wood for the stove.

   I was looking forward to returning to the park again the following summer. However, the word came from the Ministry saying that in the future they could only hire forestry students. So the next summer I had a terrible job working at a drugstore. My boss was a little old man who would watch as I cleaned the windows, pointing out any spots I had missed.

 

Carl stapling the strips of wood onto the mold frames

TAMARACK Magazine: Exploration of Valley History - Issue IX                                 3