The Mail Came by Snowmobile
In the 1970s Edna Mackenzie delivered post to 40 homes around Moosonee by snowmobile, in any weather. Her grandson Caleb tells the winter she rescued a stranded priest and a goat.
Uncle Gaston and the Travelling Circus of 1962
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Show notes
This week's family story
The show begins with the story that named it. In 1962 Gaston Tremblay climbed onto a circus truck outside Trois-Rivieres and did not come home for four years. His daughter Lise, now 68, brings the postcards.
- The teller: Lise Tremblay, Marguerite's cousin, recorded at her kitchen table
- What is true: the elephants, the tent collapse in Sudbury, the ring master's wig
- What is probably not true: the tiger
- Listen for: the postcard from Winnipeg that explains everything
- Running time 29 minutes
Next week, a grandmother who delivered the mail by snowmobile in northern Ontario.
Transcript
Hello, hello, come in, sit down, there is coffee. I am Marguerite Tremblay and this is Grandad Ran Away With the Circus, the show where every family's best story gets told properly, once, for everyone. And since it is our very first episode, I thought I should begin with the story that gave this show its name. In the summer of 1962, my great-uncle Gaston was seventeen years old, working on a dairy farm outside Trois-Rivieres, and very, very bored. A circus came through town. Gaston went to see it. Gaston did not come home. Today his daughter, my cousin Lise, is here with a shoebox of postcards, and she is going to tell us what he actually did for four years, and which parts he invented later. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts. Pass the sugar.
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