Saturday, October 19, 2024
Sorry I'm so late at this message but I thought the family might enjoy these memories of my time with Lorne. My family had a 3 quarter section farm one mile west of Haynes and a mile south. Dad bought the land after the war for $500 and we struggled to make a go of it. He eventually started working for an oil company (Great Plains Western) at Joffre. We subsequently moved to Leduc but kept the farm as that was our home. As a teenager from the age of 14 I worked all summers with various farmers in the area, Frank Dobinson, Donald Boe, and George Bennett. At the age of 15, in !963 I became a close friend of Lorne and would visit at their place often. Lorne, Bea Dobinson, and myself were at the Red Deer fair and as the evening wore on I was the only one with a method of getting back to Joffre. I owned a Honda 50 motorcycle which had seen better days. All three of us piled on that machine and headed east.around midnight. We were a bit cramped but it worked until we got to the River Hill east of the old bridge. At this point the Honda could not pull any of us up that hill so we got off and walked. At the top we turned left onto the north bound road and I dropped off Beatrice (Gauld) and then took Lorne home before I returned to where I lived at Boes place. On another visit I learned that Cameron's hired man had a 1953 Oldsmobile 98 2 door hardtop for sale for $275 so we took a drive in it and I tried without success to get my father to lend me the money which I could pay back at the end of the summer. Lorne, Judy, and I had a lot of fun that summer. My condolences to the family on the loss of the kid I knew.
