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Showing posts with the label Renfrew Mercury

Tribute to Renfrew's Late Guitarist Eric Kauffeldt

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  Remembering Eric Kauffeldt (Stephen Weir Facebook article, 1/03/2022) Back in the day when I lived in Renfrew, the town's first newspaper, the Mercury, was still printing with lead type. It was a weekly labour of love paper, and was read by everyone in town. In 1967 Obituaries couldn't wait a week in the Mercury. Editor Norm Wilson scotch taped, as soon as he wrote them, death notices on the front window of the paper on Raglan Street. The Young Lads (male senior citizens) would hang out in front of the Mercury to check out who had passed. When you asked a "Young Lad" how he was doing, he'd say " not in the Merc's front window, so I must be okay". Now, some 55 years later, the Mercury has been taken over by the Toronto Star, and the obits are posted on the web and not the window. I left town in 1969, but I still remember the people who treated me with friendship and fun. And now, as a senior I have entered that stage in life when your friends

Time Is A Bouncing Ball - more Renfrew stories

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The article printed below is a work of fiction, and it is not new ( I have updated it twice. The latest was submitted to the CBC two years ago - this is that version).   I think I wrote Version One in the Eighties. It was used in a long-gone magazine called Valley . It was published by General Store Publishing House in Burnstown, Ontario.  The faded clipping has been pinned to my corked lined office wall for over 20 years. I wanted to post it on my website before the clipping (my only copy) fell apart and the story returned to being just a fading memory.  I figured out the Optical Character Reader on my printer this weekend and so Presto Chango ... another story in my ongoing mostly fiction series about Renfrew in the Sixties and is now on stephenweir.com. Title : TIME IS A BOUNCING BALL by Stephen Weir  It's too long ago now to remember how we got onto the roof of the Howard Haramis restaurant. I can't imagine climbing up the fire escape, but 50 years ago there was o