Uncle Gaston and the Travelling Circus of 1962
Marguerite's own great-uncle Gaston left a farm in Trois-Rivieres at 17 to feed elephants for a touring circus. His daughter Lise tells what he really did, and what he made up.
The Mail Came by Snowmobile
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Show notes
This week's family story
Edna Mackenzie was the only postal worker for a hundred kilometres of northern Ontario, and she did the route on a 1974 Ski-Doo. Her grandson Caleb, a nurse in Timmins, heard this story every Christmas and finally wrote it down.
- The teller: Caleb Mackenzie, recorded over the phone with the wind actually blowing
- The winter of 1978: a priest, a goat, a frozen river and a very late parcel
- What the family argues about: whether the goat was on the sled or walking
- Edna's rule for bad weather, which Caleb still uses at work
- Running time 31 minutes
Next Sunday: a wedding cake, a car wash, and a marriage that survived both.
Transcript
Welcome back to the table, everyone. I am Marguerite, this is Grandad Ran Away With the Circus, and this week we are going north. Really north. Moosonee, Ontario, where the road ends and the train stops and in 1978 the mail still had to get through. The person who got it through was a woman called Edna Mackenzie, five feet tall, on a 1974 Ski-Doo, with forty houses on her route and no one to help her. Her grandson Caleb has heard this story every single Christmas of his life, and he called me from Timmins to tell it, with the wind howling behind him like it knew. There is a priest in this story. There is a goat. There is a frozen river that should not have been crossed. Get the hot chocolate. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts.
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