So very many changes in 50 years - From the Cluttered Desk with Keith Roulston

As Blyth prepares to celebrate the 150th anniversary of its incorporation in 2027, I’m part of a team of about two dozen people researching an updated history of the village. It’s given me an opportunity to see how much has changed over the years.
Individually, most of us live better, more comfortable lives today than we did in 1977. But as things like the online world improve our personal lives, our communities often suffer, by comparison. Back then we had a full main street with grocery stores, hardware stores and clothing stores for both men and women.

 

Not only towns and villages were healthier, but the hamlets around the county still had businesses on their main streets. Huron County native writer Harry J. Boyle, who was vice-chairman of the Canadian Radio-Television Commission, but was better known in these parts as author of a number of humorous books about his hometown, wrote about his uncle’s general store in St. Augustine. I remember the last days of the general store there.

 

Boyle said the village of Clover in his books, including Mostly In Clover, was a combination of Auburn, Dungannon and Blyth. Back in 1977, Auburn was no longer the prosperous village it was in his description of the 1920s, but it still had two grocery stores, a furniture store and a hardware. Nothing is left today except a gas station and general store on the edge of town for people passing through.

 

We, Jill and I, still published The Blyth Standard in 1977, as well as The Rural Voice, which North Huron Publishing Company publishes again now, after several different owners, and the general interest magazine, The Village Squire, which is long gone now. Back in the 1970s, The Village Squire printed a story on Eedy’s Bakery in Dungannon, then selling bread in several towns, but later closed.

 

There were two stores in Blyth back then that sold televisions and radios, but also repaired them. Remember when people used to repair TVs, not just replace them if they didn’t work properly?

 

In 1977, the Blyth Festival, which would come to dominate Blyth in the half-century since, was still new, in just its third season after beginning in 1975 with, ironically, an adaptation of Boyle’s Mostly in Clover which kicked off the theatre with a roaring hit that later was revived and toured to Petrolia.

 

It’s not just that local lives have changed. Monday of this week was also the celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the U.S. It’s hard for a younger person to imagine the changes that King and hundreds of other young activists brought to our neighbour to the south. In 1956, King supported a boycott of segregated buses in Montgomery, Alabama where Black people had been forced to sit at the back of the bus with front seats reserved for white folks. 

 

As the boycott lasted for months, King received as many as 40 death threats a day on his telephone and his will weakened. Eventually, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favour of the protesters. (Imagine that from today’s Supreme court!)

 

As well as many other protests against stubborn southern state governors who wanted to maintain Black segregation, King led the 1963 March on Washington, where he delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, 
Older readers will remember King was assassinated in the horrible year of 1968 when Robert F. Kennedy was also murdered. (If you want to compare past and present you can also compare RFK Sr. with his son RFK Jr., who seeks to end vaccinations as a cabinet minister in the government of Donald Trump.)

 

In Canada, the same period saw the birth of a new nation, even as Canada celebrated the 100th anniversary of Confederation in 1967. Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson made amazing changes, given that he never had a majority government, giving us both a new flag and a new national anthem, leading up to the Centennial. 

 

Soon after the Centennial, Canada got a new Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau (father of the current, soon-departing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau) who would bring in a new, made-in-Canada, constitution. Throughout the period of the mid-1960s to 1990, Canada would live through periods of stress as Quebec threatened to secede from Canada.

 

In both Canada and the U.S., in our own small towns and larger communities, the changes have been many in the last 50 years or so. In general, our lives are better, though we still have to survive small crises. Compare, however, our lives with many countries in Africa, or Eastern Europe where the Soviet Union disintegrated but a new imperialist in Vladimir Putin is trying to reinvent Russia.

 

There are still tensions, but we’ve come a long way from our past.