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Joel van der Veen/Independent reporter
Taylor Roth, Camile Risler, Autumn Wyness and Jessica Schmucki, students of Rhonda McCulloch’s Danceology, perform at the Stettler Public Library on Saturday, Sept. 27, as part of Alberta Culture Days activities.
Stories from the past highlight Prairie culture
Opinion
Library, museum host writers to mark Alberta Culture Days
THE CHOICES FOR NEW AB PREMIER Editorial on P6
Joel van der Veen INDEPENDENT REPORTER Lorraine Lohr Cathro enjoys telling stories about her family, her life and the province she calls home, making her an ideal speaker for Alberta Culture Days. The former local resident and author of Roots and Adventures: A Prairie Childhood was invited to speak at the Stettler Town and Country Museum on Saturday, Sept. 27. Cathro spoke for roughly an hour about the culture of the Prairies and her ancestors, and the formative effects it had and continues to have in her life. In 1900, her great-grandparents, the
Lohrs, arrived in what was then the Northwest Territories, before the land had even been surveyed. “They were very, very tough people to come out and survive on the Prairies,” Cathro said. “They were very resilient.” In her view, the people of the Prairie provinces have a different understanding of life, compared to those living on the coasts or in central Canada. Cathro discussed three major cultural influences from her childhood: literature, music and a love of animals, especially horses. She read stories from her book, which was one of the projects she’d planned for her retirement years. She took writing class-
es and had plans to share her work with her family, but others encouraged her to publish the book for a wider audience. The book details her family history and her upbringing on a farm south of Erskine in the 1950s and 1960s. Cathro said she worked on the book “seriously” for about a year and a half and published it through FriesenPress in May. She and her husband Doug now live on an acreage southwest of Calgary. She said Saturday that she has a second book in the works, which picks up where the first one left off, around 1970. continued on page 4
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