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honoring all who served and who are serving now. 100th year anniversery from the end of world war one. Vol. 5
No. 11
YOUR INDEPENDENT LOCAL NEWSPAPER - LANARK, NORTH LEEDS & GRENVILLE
NOVEMBER 2018
10 feet tall to most people who knew her Smiths Falls - Sally Smith editorial@pd gmedia.ca Smarty Marty, who always liked the last word in everything, died this year on October 8. Born Margaret Ann Murray in Kinloss Township, located between Kincardine and Walkerton, the sixth oldest of 11 children, she learned early that if she wanted anything she would have to insist. And to her last day, that’s what she did, says daughter Wendy Alford. Part of it was being a middle child, trying to stand out in a crowd, and part of it was not letting anyone else define who she was. Marty was born into a farming family from a long line of farming families; her grandfather was a farmer and at one time the Warden of Bruce County. That’s perhaps where Marty first got a taste for arguing, talking, debating and making herself heard. According to Wendy, she spent the rest of her life — sometimes tactfully, sometimes in downright hilarity, and sometimes just plainly outspoken — making herself heard. There were giggles at the most inappropriate times, “people would think we were not right in the head, anything could set us off, inside jokes, terrible, uncontrolled giggling,” Wendy recalls. “Mom was like that.” This was a way of life for her. “…she sought out having fun,” Wendy says, remembering her cousin Jim’s wedding. On that night the family serenaded the newly wed couple in a shivaree. Traditionally a shivaree is a riotous celebration of a marriage; on that night, according to Wendy, friends showed up in the middle of the night, ate all their food, drank all their booze, and then, with Marty urging everyone on, put a ladder up to the bedroom window and “started a chainsaw to scare them.” With Hallowe’en just just days away, Wendy remembers
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the story of her mom and a friend heading out in the pitch black of a very late night / early morning and stealing all the pumpkins still sitting in the fields of the Rideau Regional Centre. They brought them home and it was only the next morning when they saw the stamp of RRC on each and every pumpkin. “They were busted. They couldn’t even give them away.” Or, one St. Paddy’s day, Marty and a friend at 3 o’clock in the morning “painted all the yellow lines down the middle of the street green.” Marty married Bob and moved with him from town to town as he followed his work at the Royal Bank; they landed in Smiths Falls in 1967, having moved “15 times in 14 years,” Wendy says. One child was born in Hamilton, one in Toronto, one in Iroquois Falls, one in Rodney, one in St. Thomas, and Todd was born in Smiths Falls. The thought was, says Wendy, that “we had one everywhere else, we might as well have one here.” They initially lived at 15 Gladstone but did most of their growing up in a red brick house at the corner of Main and McGill “with no backyard,” Wendy grins. The family used to joke about that — eight kids and no backyard. A small woman, only five foot two, “but ten feet tall inside her head,” Wendy remembers her mother as not being a “joiner.” It was much more like “I’ll make it up and you all follow me.” And people did, not just because they’d have fun but for fear of missing out on something momentous. Two particular occasions in which Marty was integrally involved, brought attention to Smiths Falls in the larger media — one was the annual Sportsman’s Dinner and the other the 150 mile trek during Old Home Week in 1976. If something wasn’t right — if it was wrong — Marty latched onto that. She was “…always a
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champion for the underdog,” Wendy remembers. “She would bully, harass, shame you into doing the right thing.” Wendy tells the story: the Sportsman’s Dinner in Smiths Falls was a man-only event. But in 1978 or 79 all the top athletes in town were female. Being a male-only evening, however, only boys were nominated. “Mom was determined she was going to go but no one would sell her a ticket. “That was the first mistake. “Mother called Mildred MacDonald at the CBC, and made a real issue of it. She finally found someone to sell her tickets, we were nervous as hell, we didn’t know what to expect, but when we went in, the men were quite nice to us. “That was the end of that. “Now it’s called the Sportspersons’ Dinner. That’s the kind of stuff my Mother did.” Was she a feminist? “Yes, in one way…” Wendy says, “but in another way, for her, right was right and wrong was wrong. If it wasn’t fair or just, there was no holding her back.” And the small, feisty woman loved a good challenge, especially if there was money on it. A lawyer in Town said there was no way she could walk 150 miles to celebrate Smiths Falls’ Old Home Week in 1976; that was like waving a red f lag, Wendy says. “As soon as you told Mom she couldn’t do something, it became a challenge.” The lawyer went further and bet $150 she couldn’t do it. It took a week, they had a team of teenagers with them, a horse and wagon. They walked the whole way — from here to Crosby, along the back roads, to Kingston and all the way back — Newboro, Chaffeys Locks, Jones Falls… “We would drive out to see where they were. They walked 25 miles a day and were beyond exhaustion, done.” All of Smiths Falls came to the edge of Town to see them at the finish. She got her $150
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cheque, no more, just $150. Then came Settlers’ Days and the stagecoach (which now sits at Settlers’ Ridge mall). Marty had the coach built from scratch to make a mail run each year, Ottawa to Toronto being the longest. She cajoled the Mint into making coins to commemorate the event, and “Settlers’ Day money” was good in stores during Settlers’ Days. “Mother was a brilliant tactician. She could talk anybody into anything — if you just let her talk long enough…she was like the Pied Piper.” In April 2008, Marty accepted the Governor General’s Caring Canadian award during National Volunteers Week. Wendy
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remembers the day as standing on Parliament Hill with 10,000 other people watching her Mom receive a medal. “It was pretty impressive.” At her funeral, son Bill used three descriptive words. His mother was “not a wimp, nor a whiner, nor a wuss.” Wendy agreed that this was the crux — “you suck it up, you put your big girl/boy pants on, and you march on, no looking back, no regrets…. “She didn’t have any regrets,” Wendy adds. “She was her own woman, she bowed to no one, she was a little lady doing her best — but her best was better than most.”
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