Saint John TIMES GLOBE Thursday December 30, 1999
THE OPINION PAGES
Cecil Doyle, who turns 100 in two weeks, has worked the woods, fields and waters of this country
'I would jump from log to log, and a good many times, I would fall in.'
In Their
Own Words
Older residents recall their past
With Valerie Evans
Cecil Doyle was born in St. George, N. B., on January 15, 1900. He has worked hard all his life-toiling as a lumberjack, working in pulp and paper mills, tending weir for sardines, harvesting wheat in the western provinces, driving a cab, hunting guide, and selling hot dogs on the side of the road. He also played baseball and an instrument in a band. In 1952, he married Margaret Hatfield from the Kingston Peninsula. Mr. Doyle now lives in the Dr. V. A. Snow Nursing Home in Hampton. Here, In His Own Words, he tells us about his life.
My parents were John and Minnie Doyle. My father had a store and my mother was a seamstress. There were two girls and four boys in my family. My people were poor and I had to do things like cut wood and I always used that excuse to keep clear of school, so I only went to Grade 6.
After leaving school, I worked for the St. George Pulp Company. These great big three-masted schooners used to come in and haul 100-pound bundles of pulp from there to Norwalk, Connecticut. That is where they had their paper mill. I worked on them and in the mill for as low as $1 a day. I worked off and on there for quite a few years.
When I was about 20 years old, I went out on the Harvester trains. Sixty five cars left Saint John. They were advertising in the paper for 400 fellows to help gather in the grain out west. Twenty-five dollars from here to Winnipeg and half cent a mile beyond there if you wanted to go.
I went with fellows that couldn't harness a horse-they put the bridle on upside down. This fellow told me he couldn't get the bits behind the horse's ear. I said, "We don't put it behind his ear, we put it in his mouth." I was out there for about a month or six weeks. Then I came back. We were paid $5 a day and board. That was a big pay then but we were working long hours, stooking wheat by hand with a pitchfork.
In the lumber camps, we would cut the lumber down with a crosscut saw. There was a handle and a man on each side and you would have to get right down and sometimes you had to dig the snow out to get down to the bottom of the tree. Cutting was always done in the winter because that is when they could go over the brooks and everything with the teams and the roads were frozen so hard you didn't go down in them. We never got cold; swinging an axe and using a saw, you very seldom get cold. We would be there usually after Christmas--January and February.
It was generally breaking up in March. I also was involved in bringing the lumber down the streams in the spring. I would jump from log to log and a good many times, I would fall in. The food was the very best--apple pies, biscuits, molasses, beans, fish. We had everything.
There is so much machinery today and we did everything by hand--that would be one of the biggest changes. I remember one time I was out and something fell off a tree and cut a fellow in the face pretty bad. They asked me to bring him in with a horse and the common delivery cart, one that is just like a box with sides on it. He must have suffered like hell because I couldn't go slow. He was bleeding pretty bad and that thing would hit and bounce. It must have been hard on him.
Everybody played jokes on you. One time another fellow and I came into town and there were a couple of nice-looking girls there. We were getting in pretty good with them until one of the fellows in our group came in and he stood back and he said; "My heavens, Doyle, if your wife could see you now."
The darn thing, I could have killed him. I wasn't married but that girl jumped off my knee and ran out the door and I have never seen her since.
We tended a weir for Connors Bros. They built it and paid for everything that went in it and another fellow and I fished it for a quarter of the catch. We didn't make any money, though, because we weren't catching any fish. There were times when they had a thousand hogshead of fish in the weirs. Just imagine!
I drove a taxi in St. George and during prohibition, I was driving a bootlegger up to Saint John. The roads were bad, just outside of West Saint John. There were 18 or 19 ruts with mud and brush and pulpwood sticking out of them and I didn't know which one to take. He said; "I would take that one with the brush in it, because if your wheels go down, they will only go down to the brush. But if we go down where the sticks are sticking down, we will go right down with it."
I had to wait outside a house in West Saint John while he went in and saw some other bootleggers. He was wanted bad by the government and I was trying to keep out of the way of the police because they would seize me, the bootlegger and the whole works if they caught me. Most of the bootleggers lived in off the road, where I would be cornered if they came in, so I couldn't get out any other way. I was scared to death, but they paid well.
The liquor would come in on a boat and the bootleggers would pick it up and bring it into New River, Pocologan, but especially in Musquash where that stream comes in. They would bring a load of it up there on the flat bottomed boat. The big boats would stay outside the limit.
Another way they used to bring it in, the bootlegger used to get it and instead of holding it in case he got raided, he would sink it at high tide, quart bottles in sacks, and it would go right down. And then when it came low water, he could take a pick pole and feel around with it until he got a hold of the sack and bring it up. It was a good way of hiding it, though. At that time, it was $6 a gallon for rum. They were in tin cans just like oil cans. Some of the whisky, though was in bottles.
The government had a boat with a colored quilt or something on the bow, and that marked it as a government boat. The plane that watched the bootleggers in their boats off shore would drop a note down to that boat with that thing on the bow giving them their location. This bootlegger went and got one on his bow so the planes told him where the bootleggers were by dropping the notes on his bow. Ain't that something? That is the God's truth.
I lived on the Kingston Peninsula for a time with my in-laws and then I bought a house in St. George. It was a valuable, beautiful place--seven rooms, bathroom downstairs, hardwood floor and a verandah the whole side of it.
Valerie Evens is a retired museum curator whose interviews with senior Saint John residents appear here each Thursday.
Obituary--Cecil Doyle--Passed away on November 22, 2001, at the age of 101, at the Dr. V.A. Snow Centre in Hampton, New Brunswick. He was born in St. George, the son of the late John and Minnie (Dunbar) Doyle of St. George. He worked at many jobs while he resided in St. George during the first 58 years of his life. He was employed as were so many men at the time with the St. George Pulp Mill. He operated a taxi business, he and Margaret operated a tourist home and for a few years operated a restaurant and take out in St. George. During the Depression he traveled to the West to work on the harvest excursions. Cecil was an avid sportsman, playing on the Saint George Papermakers baseball teams into his late forties. He was an avid hunter and continued hunting into his nineties. He shot his last moose at the age of ninety three. Cecil and his family moved to Fredericton in 1958 and he operated Doyle's Taxi in that city until he retired to the Kingston Peninsula in 1971. He and his wife Margaret had many friends and enjoyed wonderful neighbours at Clifton on the Kingston Peninsula where he continued to live after his wife Margaret's passing in 1993. In 1998 he moved to the Snow Nursing Home in Hampton. Cecil was loved by all who knew him. He had a remarkable memory and would relate stories for hours about his life and the lives of his acquaintances, especially about their hunting trips. He was loved by all who knew him and will be sadly missed by his son Harry (Sandra) of Lower Coverdale, his grandson Shannon (Janice), his granddaughter Kelly (Richard) and great grandchildren Zachary and Emily. He is also survived by a brother Fred in Ontario and a number of nieces and nephews, especially his niece Frances (Jackson) Burke and Danny (Theresa), Hughie (Regina) McNeill and their families. Cecil was predeceased by his wife Margaret (Hatfield), sisters Grace and Marie, and brothers Harry and Ralph. Resting at Brenan's Select Community Funeral Home, 111 , Paradise Row, Saint John (634-7424), with visiting on Friday 2-4, 7-9 PM. Funeral service will be held at Brenan's Chapel on Saturday, November 24, 2001, at 11:00 AM, with interment to follow at the St. George Roman Catholic Cemetery, St. George, N.B. Telegraph-Journal November 23, 2001 edition
©Charlene Beney 2008