Business Plans
Grant Proposals
Fundraising

Home • Index

Search • Printer Friendly Version

What one citizen can do

by Terry Carroll, August 31 2011 Weekly News

Arguably, if Paul Corriveau had never taken an interest in St. Thomas, there would be no Iron Horse Festival, no CASO Station restoration and no Railway City Brewing Company.
Paul didn’t start with any of these as the executive director of some well-established organization or an elected official. He began as a citizen and went from there, often wearing that characteristic smile of his and staying with something long after a less committed person would have frowned and walked away.
The Iron Horse Festival, just completed, is an example of the fulfillment of one of Paul’s almost impossible dream. The idea came to fruition in 1994 and arose out of the On Track effort to bring competing railway groups together. In the first couple of years, the Festival ran too long, had too many disparate activities located throughout the city, and threatened to implode in a Hatfields and McCoys feud over downtown parking and loss of business.
Instead of being defeated over these issues, Paul and his group of volunteers soldiered on, refining and simplifying the concept to make it into the street festival it is today, essentially a fall fair – without the livestock and exhibits but with a whole lot more music.
The Festival is now a not-for-profit organization with its own Board of Directors, and Paul Corriveau is a past president. The torch is passing as it should. While he was always the visionary and had the tenacity these projects require, he never worked alone, and it took lots of other people to make his visions come true.
I strolled Iron Horse Festival last weekend with family members from Chatham and Vancouver. “Why is it called Iron Horse?” they asked. I told them about its origins and the railway heritage of the city.
But on the street, the Festival has little visible connection to that tradition. For that reason, I’m tempted to recommend a name change to something like Corri-Fest.
That’s a little over the top, but at the very least, it’s good at this time of year to pay tribute to a man who has given St. Thomas so very much.

Soon, no more trips to the Zoo

by Terry Carroll, August 24, 2011

It is a truth universally acknowledged in these parts that times will be tougher when the Ford plant closes.
The St. Thomas Assembly Plant sometimes seems distant from St. Thomas and Elgin society – among other things, the plant is enormous and looks otherworldly to anyone who has never worked inside it – but Ford has been a stable and generous employer for about 44 years and a strong supporter of the community through organizations like United Way and many capital projects.
Working at the Ford plant has meant bread on tables, mortgages paid and good vehicles in driveways for families since the plant, that is now 2,600,000 sq. ft., opened in 1967 to produce the Ford Falcon. The vast majority of workers have been decent, hardworking people who raised families and cared about the communities they called home.
All that is changing come September when the plant closes and the remaining 1,000 or so workers lose their jobs.
Typically, about a third of these workers reside in the St. Thomas area, a third in London and a third commute from other communities.
Morale is not good at the plant these days. How could it be?
While there has been plenty of advance notice, and theoretically time for people to adjust and to try to decide what to do with their layoff packages, the reality doesn’t truly sink in until people no longer go to work every day.
The shuttering of the Zoo, as one of my Ford-worker acquaintances loves to call it, means huge psychological adjustments, particularly at a time when jobs aren’t exactly growing on trees unless people are willing to locate to northern Alberta or northern B.C.
No doubt some will. Others will find other careers or pursue interests they’ve never previously had time for. And some of these interests may turn into successful businesses, funded in part by layoff packages. When the going gets tough, the tough get going.
It’s getting over the feeling of a punch to the gut that comes with a layoff that’s the hardest part.

The doctor’s own medicine

by Terry Carroll, July 20, 2011

One of my neighbours has taken to calling my Doc, as in “How ya doin, Doc?” or “Pretty hot, isn’t it, Doc?” Apparently I acquired the nickname because he was perplexed about my profession. He told me he thought I dressed like a doctor. I said no. I think maybe he was confusing the noose all small businesspeople carry around their necks (making payroll, taxes, yada, yada) with a stethoscope.
One interesting thing about his mistake is that it comes with a history.
When I was in high school, my aunt Dorothy Walker, a nurse, said I should perhaps think about becoming a doctor. I told her I didn’t have the stomach for blood or setting bones. She said that shouldn’t matter because, from her observation of doctors, the most important qualification was a good bedside manner.
In retrospect, maybe I could be driving a Porsche instead of an Aerostar if I’d listened to her. But I couldn’t get past the blood and bones.
The first person to nickname me Doc was Don P. Campbell, a.k.a. Baldy, after he moved from the Cowal area of Elgin County and started Embrun Farms Ltd. When I worked for him, I had a moustache, and he called me Doc. He thought my ’stache looked like the one sported by the lead character in the movie Doctor Zhivago.
A few years ago, one of my bosses took to calling me Doctor Carroll. It was meant as a joke, but one with a barb. At the time, I had a strong amateur’s interest in psychiatry, and I was happy to give him my observations about all employees and why they acted the way they did.
One day, I mentioned to him confidentially that I thought another one of my superiors, a close friend of his, should be fired. I used my best bedside manner, but apparently not everyone appreciates Freudian analysis no matter how accurate. I can’t imagine that there was a connection with my own dismissal from the company some months later, can you?

Change, it’s coming

by Terry Carroll July 13, 2011
I’m not sure this means anything in socio-economic terms, but I’ve been panhandled twice in the last three weeks in St. Thomas.
The first time was on a beautiful Sunday morning, and the asker was a woman in the parkette at the corner of White and Talbot. “Excuse me sir, do you have any spare change, for food?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “I don’t.”
What I didn’t tell her was that she was asking the wrong question. If she had asked me, “Do you have any spare change?” I would have had to answer, “Yes, I do.” And there could have been a follow-up question such as “Can I please have some?”
But when she added “for food,” that put her out of the running. She had a bottle of brand-name diet cola on the picnic table, and she didn’t look malnourished to me. But that’s just me being judgmental.
The second time was at the corner of Talbot and Ross. I was driving with Nancy and a husky fellow asked Nancy, who had the window rolled down, if she had a spare toonie. Nancy told him she didn’t. Heartless perhaps, but these simple questions carry with them whole worlds of complications.
When I was with United Way, I took a desperate call for help – hungry kids, eviction looming – after 3pm on a Friday. It was too late in the day to work with an agency, so I helped out personally. The next Friday afternoon, I took a call from the same person and thought, “Wait a minute. Does she think I was born yesterday (with a silver spoon in my mouth)?” The third time, I said “No,” politely. I’m not saying her family was or was not hungry, but people hunger for different things.
Last week, I saw the woman who first approached me hit up a man for change in the same parkette on Talbot. Maybe she asked a better question, or maybe he had a bigger heart than I do. He reached in his pockets for change, for food, I’m guessing.