Last week we carried a story on this page about Christmas in a northern mining camp in the early 1930s, in which painted macaroni and tinfoil from tobacco tins served as tree decorations, and partridge had to stand in for the turkey at a family dinner.
The spirit was there, nevertheless, (or maybe even because of), and probably in spades. It’s that kind of season.
We’ve just heard of another example of it as manifested in the hungry ’30s and as told to us by Don Parrott, a contributor to our Odds ‘n’ Sods column.
It seems that on Christmas Eve in 1933, a bush pilot named Art Schade, determined to deliver the Christmas mail to some mining communities in the Red Lake district of northwestern Ontario, landed on some pretty thin ice and sank through into the water just as he was taxiing up to a dock.
Undeterred, he and the local postmaster, getting very wet and very cold in the process, managed to rescue the mail through an escape hatch in the roof of the aircraft as it lay, mostly submerged, beneath the ice.
That pilot had the spirit, and to paraphrase Tiny Tim, we say to him and his kind, “God bless them, everyone.”
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