Annual Foolishness 2014

Dear Kith and Kin

Hurray! the  quilt square I contribute every year to the quilt we raffle to raise money for Storytellers of Canada’s recording project is in the mail to Alberta.  For the story of the inspiration for quilt and this year’s Annual Foolishness Greeting Header- a quote from a 14th century English mystic named Julian of Norwich  - a woman actually, see details on my other blog http://elinorbenjamin.blogspot.ca  There are stories and pictures of  previous quilts on our website http://www.storytellers-conteurs.ca/quilt.html   

With God’s help and a toothpick - as my Aunt Ruth used to say -  I will soon be free of my marathon stint as webmaster of this organization. This escape has been slower than the lava flow from Kilauea.  

Our Dartmouth Choral Society (DCS) concert was a great success yon Dec 7th. You can hear our exit number at  https://soundcloud.com/dartmouthchoralsociety/hearth-and-fire.   I’ve sung another Kurt Weill song  - Youkali - at my singing teacher’s end of term recital to positive feedback. A field recording exists as proof but is not going on YouTube. I also sang an “amusing”, and almost unknown, Irving Berlin number at DCS’s 60th birthday party - That Mesmerising Mendelssohn Tune (1909). It has a very slight YouTube presence, probably the measure of its worth, but it was suitable for the occasion as we were singing a Mendelssohn piece at our concert.  I should now aspire to learning a real song by  Mendelssohn. Now, at last, I can think about getting Annual Foolishness up and running and get some Christmas cards out into the world before Groundhog Day.

I’m still waiting for that Wordsworthian moment of tranquillity in which to reflect upon the emotions of 2014, but it’s not happening. That, dear kith and kin, is why I write prose instead of poetry. Be grateful -  very grateful!  I used to write bad poetry in my youth. Ron just arrived home with the first box of clementines this season.  Each of us remembers the citrus of childhood. In my case, the exotic tangerines came shipped from my grandfather’s orchard in Florida to frigid northern New Brunswick in a wicker hamper. Greater suspense proceeded the basket of grapefruit, fancy oranges, tangerines and the kumquats, than the safe arrival of Santa, who, after all, was comfortable with northern climes. Would the fruit arrive without having been frozen en route?  Not always. I once got in a fight with a boy in grade 5 - a smart-aleck from Montréal whose mother had a mink coat - who tried to tell me that kumquats were a kind of nut. I knew my citrus, even though I ‘minds’ that it was a rare thing in ‘them days’.  In Ron’s youth, mandarins from China arrived on the West Coast and thence to Calgary. I suppose if mandarins came from China, tangerines must originally have come from Tangiers. Wouldn’t you think clementines should come from Clemencey?  Perhaps you wouldn’t. This box says Maroc and we will enjoy them anyway. We seldom see mandarins around here - unless you count that crowd in Ottawa :-(  

What has happened to the globe since last I wrote?  So much grief in the world, it seems impossible it can be contained on one small planet, and occasionally, an item of note such as The European Space Agency’s landing a robot on a comet - the equivalent of landing a mosquito on a speeding bullet, as I heard one commentator observe - an astonishing feat, even though the robot is now in a shadow and has lost its power.  I’m not sure how much humanity benefits from sort of thing, but you never can tell. It certainly does not benefit from the never-ending terror, torture and intimidation, any more than it did when my ancestors were beheading and/or being beheaded for reading the Bible in English - not so very long ago in the history of the world. 

Our Dear Leader is basking in the glory of having one of the Franklin Expedition ships discovered on his watch. Much money was poured into this project to ensure it would happen on his watch, perhaps the money “saved” by slashing and burning many other less projects with less mythic potential, like the CBC, services to our new war veterans, or research on how to avoid the more extreme effects of global warming. They have already admitted they were doing it to assert Arctic sovereignty. I suspect that it is more about “seeking gold and glory” than our sharing our wonderment with Stan Rogers at “hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea.”  It’s part of Canadian mythology. By coincidence, a day later we accompanied Dad to a rather odd, almost secret, ceremony hosted by Veterans’ Affairs  where we met the personable, Rear Admiral John Newton, just home from the Franklin discovery; we enjoyed hearing his first hand account. His enthusiasm was infectious. Media representation was curiously thin - perhaps through fear of ministerial gaffes? - which do abound, frequently, from the minister involved.  We were not alone in wondering when this event might surface as a photo op to offset the public outcry at the our government appalling treatment of our current veterans. Ron heard a cynical grumble from one of the elderly vets he encountered in the loo. I confess, I ate the sumptuous hors d'oeuvre, swallowing my guilt, thinking of homeless veterans a few blocks away, and enjoyed the lovely woodwind quintet, too. Canada has added a few members to the club of celebrities falling from grace, which, of course, offers great distraction from Canada’s larger failings on the world stage - especially on the environmental front.  It is hard to remain unaffected by all the noise. Mercifully, we are among the fortunate to have found a few things to keep ourselves somewhat distracted until it all falls apart. 

With Dad, Pete Luckett and
Aunt Doris, now 90

We haven’t strayed far this year. We don’t like leaving Dad on his own, but there is lots to do right here in Nova Scotia, and we did enjoy some company - especially stragglers from my storytelling conference. When Dad was visiting my brother in New Brunswick, we  had a mini-vacation visiting Annapolis Valley wineries and stayed in a beautifully situated B & B near Cape Split. Lunch on the terrace of Luckett’s vineyard in Gaspereau, overlooking the World Heritage approved view of the Bay of Fundy on a beautiful sunny day in August is about as good as it gets anywhere. We took Dad and my Aunt Doris for lunch in September but it was a little chillier then. They provide blankets. Pete greeted us in person at the door. He started his career as a vegetable barrow man, then became a charming presence at the Saint John, NB market, a TV personality, an entrepreneur of an upscale grocery in Bedford with branches in Halifax and Wolfville, and finally launched his own vineyard - which is, I think, a great passion. What fun he seems to be having.  A worthy immigrant!! - from Nottingham.   Annapolis Valley white wines are getting better every year, but more expensive than their foreign competitors. We buy them anyway. There is a very exciting producer located at Benjamin Bridge, site of an ancestral saw mill operation. We have nothing to do with the vineyard, alas. They are producing some spectacular sparkling wines in the traditional style, but we can’t afford the most spectacular. The lesser ones are still very good. 

Marthe Bernard, Mary-Lynn Bernard, Andy Jones,
Elinor Benjamin and Kate Sanders,
The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party Mar 15, 2014
after our children's show.

I got to the March Hare in Corner Brook, always a time of re-connection with many dear , dear people like those on the left.  I took a short trip to New York for a workshop with my storytelling mentor, Laura Simms, which included a “field trip” to the weekly storytelling session at the Hans Christian Andersen statue in Central Park, quick visits with my two high school friends in Westchester and New Jersey and a wonderful lunch with a bedsitter flatmate from my days in London  (Eeek!  1976?) and his lovely wife, whom I had never met. They live in Nyack, very close to Pearl River, where I went to High School. I  also went to Ottawa for a week-end to hear the Ottawa storytellers present their day-long epic telling of The Iliad, and visit more friends.  All this was stupendous. 

Kith and Kin at the Shore Inn,
Hubbard's, for Dad's 93th Birthday July 27.

Ron’s only venture out of the Maritimes, alas, was to fly to Calgary for the funeral of Ron Stevens, a dear friend since elementary school. That was a shock for everyone. He was able to stay another day and spend it with Ron’s wife, Phyllis, whom he has known since university days. Our family has lost a major elder - Dad’s cousin Allen, who was living in Florida. He was the family historian, and published his results in a little book which we have all cherished for years. This leaves Dad as the last of 10 Benjamin  cousins still alive, which has to be a little strange. We celebrated his 93rd birthday in July with a lobster supper at the Shore Club in Hubbard’s. As a result of the memorial service for Allen, we had the opportunity to become better acquainted with a number of relatives and finally got to see the old family burial plot in Brookfield, and visit Allen's son and wife in Pugwash.  I hope I can find the cemetery again. If you are reading this on my blog, you can go back to August and read the tribute I delivered at Allen’s memorial service. 

A 4-pounder to share at the
New Glasgow Lobster Supper

My annual storytelling conference was in nearby Prince Edward Island. We took Dad with us there, and spent a few days afterwards eating and visiting friends and relations, partaking of summer theatre, and an old Richards family tradition:  the lobster supper in New Glasgow, the village where Ron’s mother was born.  It is truly the best we’ve had anywhere. At the conference, I took advantage of my little spot on the conference programme to tell Pete Seeger’s version of Dick Whittington and his Cat;  it is a kinder and gentler version, less a legendary testament to capitalist speculation. It seemed like the right thing to do. Pete Seeger was a sublime inspiration to so many of us - a life to be celebrated, remembered and emulated. Too bad the efforts to get him a Nobel Peace Prize did not succeed. 

Undoubtedly, one thrill this year was organizing a successful concert for Laura Simms at the St. Mary’s Art Gallery which took place in the midst of Dartmouth Artist,Rose Adams’ wonderful 25 year retrospective Bird, Bones and Brains, an inspiration for an exciting evening of storytelling with a good crowd.  Our friend, Michael Parker is part of a group called Musikon. They produce several concerts a year of contemporary Canadian music at the Gallery, which is where I got the idea. Their recent conference presented during a wonderful show called Camp Fire: Queer Baroque   http://thechronicleherald.ca/artslife/1250878-musikon-goes-crazy-for-baroque

Another highlight was singing with Canta Mara, a once-a-year choir organized by the Nova Scotia Choral Federation to participate in a workshop and “Big Sing” with a guest choir. This year it was the splendid Elmer Iseler Singers, from Toronto. You get the music in advance, practice on your own, and show up for a day-long rehearsal 9:00 am - 9:00 pm with the Choir’s director Lydia Adams and Assistant Director Mitchell Cady, “ready to make music.”  Then you sing with them in a concert the next day.  Ron had a mathematician friend, sadly gone, who was a fine jazz pianist, who stated that one of his life’s ambitions was to be good enough to “play with the black guys”.  It’s one of those useful little catch phrases that crops up on various occasions in our lives when the subject of excellence comes up.  After the concert Ron  said: “You were singing with the black guys.”  Actually, all I did was pay for the workshop, which was a bargain, spend a week closeted with the music and YouTube, and get myself to the rehearsal, but I did feel ready to make music with a grand group of people.  It was a uplifting experience. 

Canta Mara and Elmer Iseler Singers with honoured audience member,Scott Jones, the young choir director from Nova Scotia who was so badly injured in a hate attack last year, and who has become such a inspiration with his “Don’t be Afraid” campaign. I’m in middle row, 2nd from left behind piano. Lydia Adams is in front with Scott. 

Ron’s had some lyrical moments this year, too. His performing group, the Thistle Dancers performed a nearly error-free version of a difficult dance, The Saltire Cross, at St. Matthews Church Summer Noon Concert Series. This is the church where Wayne Rogers is the musical director, and coincidentally the church in the picture above as well. I sang in several of Wayne's choirs when we both lived in Corner Brook. As the non-dancing "groupie",  I  shot the video. They were the first group to post it on You Tube:

He also performed at Government House where: Their Honours were pleased to welcome the Jane Austen Society of North America (NS) and the Playford Dancers for a fascinating presentation on the enduring fascination of Jane Austen and her world.  
https://www.flickr.com/photos/lieutenantgovernor/13630775253/in/photostream/

He’s also had very positive feedback on his skills at “briefing” dances, from a real Scottish Dance Expert 

My First Selfie

Bits of Constantine   

My first Selfie:  Chanelling a body part remaining from the huge statue of Emperor Constantine in the Capitoline Museum, to express my opinion on the microbe that invaded my arm after carpal tunnel surgery in May.  Actually - not  quite the first. Years ago I took a picture  of my toes in the Roman Bath at Bath with a film camera. A what? !  ? ?   Constantine employs a different one of the 250 known Italian hand gestures than I have chosen.  Care to speculate?   The Turkish marble in our bathroom was as close as I could get it get to the original setting. Speaking of body parts, I am now on “The List” for a knee replacement, as are half the people I know. Could be an up to two years wait, but I’m not exactly that enthusiastic to engage in more surgery. I still have to get the other carpal tunnel done.

The silver lining of illness is permission to be slothful. I went on a Josephine Tey binge while recovering from the infection. Having the complete works on my Kindle was a “deal” and didn’t require two hands to hold. I read my favourite, Daughter of Time, once again (3rd or 4th time?), and as for the others I have the kind of memory that never remembers who dunnit, which means I can re-read  favourites over and over again and still enjoy them. This enforced “rest” period, also brought on a indulgent week of Netflix binge-ing - including the entire House of Cards series. I should have been watching and reading more upbeat and edifying material, no?  It makes you wonder if there are any honest people anywhere in positions of power.  I tried reading a bestseller, a Joy Fielding novel, and made myself finish it even though it was boring. One of the non-boring books I read was Raj Patel’s  The Value of Nothing. He tells why a McDonald’s hamburger really costs us all $250 - if you add the taxpayer subsidies to agribusiness, food stamps and social assistance that enable corporations to get away with paying such appallingly low wages. There were some things that Adam Smith didn't even predict. Observant as he was, who could have predicted the amoral multi-national corporation beholden to no one. Aha!  Eisenhower did.  I read Adam Smith while in the hospital 10 years ago with the Real Infection. Quite a charming writing style, too, and not too large a tome for holding in a weakened state. Each chapter is a concrete little nugget, good for one sitting.  His  ideas have been co-opted and corrupted, just like every other wise man's.  Joseph Boyden’s The Orenda, a novel based on re-telling the story of  the first contact between the Jesuits and Hurons in a new light, was high on my list this year - a most worthy addition to Canadian canon. My cousin, Chris Benjamin, has just published Indian School Road on the shameful history of the residential school in Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia, another sad chapter in the long history of imperialism and cultural destruction. Then - on to a life of self-destruction Savage Beauty, a life of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Nancy Milford. And even more grim, I turned to The Rape of Europa by Lynn Nicholas. I haven’t seen The Monuments Men, the film that was based on the real events, but I cannot imagine it could reproduce in the time of a film, all the evil. Oh my dears, imperialism, cultural destruction, and looting art are nothing new under the sun - obelisks, Elgin Marbles, Roman horses nicked from Constantinople, etc, etc  - but the scale was unimaginably Byzantine. The 20th century was pretty unimaginable, and the 21st looks to be shaping up to follow closely in its tracks. If people think they can get away with things, they will certainly try. I continue to send grumpy letters to editors, and government ministers and the PM, and post links to outrages on  Facebook. I am turning into a fine old termigant. People prefer my cat photo and food postings, and who could blame them. 

Our household is diminished. Who would believe that we would be down to one cat in one year. The two elders, Clara and Sam, “dwindled,” as our friend Lorraine puts it, after having lived respectably long lives for their species, but bouncy little Amanda, acquired a mysterious infection at age 12, and we lost her suddenly, in the spring, just before Clara. We think Otis, the orange one, the survivor, may still be in shock, or a state of gratitude. Unfortunately we can’t tell which. The week before Thanksgiving 1) we took Sam to the vet, and he did not return home; 2) I went away with my friend, Kira, to the wonderful Singing Storytellers Symposium in Cape Breton, and did not come home for a week; 3) Ron took Dad to the hospital after a dizzy spell and fall, the day after I left, and left him there overnight - he was rescued by a caring postman who brought him home and came by later to follow up. Who will do things like that in the new Canada, the one that Harper promised we “won’t recognize?” ; and 4) Ron and Dad drove to Cape Breton to fetch me, and stayed overnight for Thanksgiving dinner with Ron’s relatives. All of these departures in one week left Otis an altered beast. We are not quite ready to commit our hearts  to acquiring and vetting a new feline, but are going to take in a winter boarder for a few months while his owners go south after Christmas - a cuddly, long-haired black fellow of 17 named Denver. He has been over one afternoon for a play date, and no blood was shed, and he is here for a sleepover as I write. 

We are, all three of us  “dwindling,” but are generally in good spirits and grateful for the good life we live in our cozy little house in Dartmouth. Our community contains its measure of the evils of the world - and the good, too.  For now, we stave off despair over necessary losses with the things that keep us all afloat - family,  friends, good company and the arts. We wish that - All will be well  - with you this Season and in the coming year. 

Elinor (and Ron and Bob and Otis)

This portrait of Claire/Clara mainly know as "Mummy" was painted by my new "cousin-in-law-in-law" Janet Warnes-Morris. She is a retired primary art teacher.

And below is the one she did of Amanda. Why won't blogger let me space these pictures the way I want them :-(  


Here we are with Sam the day in October when the vet confirmed that he had cancer.

and poor Otis, our sole survivor. 

He didn't like having his picture taken by the vet.

Remembering Allen Benjamin, Family Historian

Remembering Allen Benjamin, Family Historian  Nov 3, 1920 - Jul 25, 2014
Spoken at Wyndholme Christian Church, Aug 7, 2014

I first wish to express my condolences to Rod, Scott, Jamie on the loss of their father and to all other members of the family. A special thank you, Rod for asking me to say a few words today. I didn’t know him well in my early years, but later, especially after he married my Aunt Shirley, and became not only my first cousin once-removed, but my uncle by marriage, we connected over our interest in genealogy. That is mostly what I will tell you about today. I do have fond memories of Allen and Shirley showing up in their RV at  my doorstep in Corner Brook, with a huge salmon they had acquired from a fisherman by who knows what sort of negotiations. At the time I didn’t have a big enough pot, but we got ‘er cooked anyway. Dad tells stories of riding his bicycle from Brookfield, with Cousin Fred, to visit John and Allen in Dartmouth. In those days, that was a bumpy trip. 

I’d like to read an email from Bruce Benjamin, also a cousin-once removed, who is presently en route to Winnipeg for work.

I have always been so very grateful of Allen’s massive undertaking regarding our family tree and his publishing and sharing of the book and 'tree' booklet with the coat of arms. Countless times I've been able to proudly state a long lineage in Nova Scotia, and in fact back to 1598 in Kent, England. I've not actually met many people that can do a similar ancestral reflection. When I recite the trip of John and Abigail Benjamin, their ages, the date, the name of the ship, etc., [that brough them to North America in 1632] jaws typically drop a little and their eyes do a wee gloss-over with amazement.  Allen  supplied me with copies of the booklet to give to my sons who also take pride in their roots and a gratification to have such a fine resource at their fingertips. I hope it's a great gathering, my thoughts will be there.

With Bruce’s message in hand, I am confident, that I am speaking on behalf of all the Benjamin family when I say how lucky we are to know the story of how we came to be  Nova Scotians of  the 21st century.  I am always sad to hear of people who cannot find their stories. Stories of people finding their long-lost relatives make for some of the more uplifting shows on television these days.  I can’t think of a more intimate and enjoyable way to learn history than to know how you fit into it - for good or ill - and that is the gift that Allen bequeathed to our entire family. As I talk, I shall quote  generously  from Allen’s booklet Obadiah Benjamin of Nova Scotia.  

Allen began his project to trace the Nova Scotia Benjamins because of  a promise to his bachelor Uncle Frank, who spent many years collecting and making notes in an effort to trace his own  grandfather, James Harvey Benjamin of Gay’s River. When Frank died in 1967, Allen received the notes but couldn’t begin the job until he retired from his career as professional photographer in 1972. Looking back to the work of Uncle Frank and Allen in the age before the internet, I stand in awe. 

To Frank’s notes, Allen added the power of the Public Archives, the telephone and the car. His son, Jamie, collected all the Nova Scotia phone books and listed all the Benjamin phone numbers he could find. Then came conversations and cups of  tea enjoyed  around the province with people pleased to share their wealth of information and stories. Every now and then I have found myself in a conversation with people like Gloria Fisher (nee Benjamin), long-time proprietor of Fisher’s Stationery Store on Portland Street who remembers Allen in the days when he was “on the trail.”  

The Benjamins were not the first tribe to enjoy this pleasant land. As is so often the case in history, the first Benjamins came as part of a wave of immigration that displaced others -  in our case, the Acadians, expelled by the British in 1755, after over a hundred years of settlement upon land previously inhabited by the first nation peoples. It seems the British had not considered that expelling the people who supplied your food might be not be the wisest way to colonize.  “Thus, an announcement of free lands in Nova Scotia was published in the Boston Gazette in April 1759. Meetings were held and an agent sent to Nova Scotia to inspect ...  He reported that the land was of excellent quality with fruit trees and upland fields of flax and corn and dyke lands growing five tons of hay per acre. “ And that was how Allen’s 4th great grand-father, Obadiah Benjamin, and his first wife, Mary Hurd,  arrived from Preston, Connecticut at Horton’s Landing on June 4th  1760 with 22 boat loads of other settlers known to history as the New Englander Planters. You can visit the modest memorial cairn by taking a right turn onto Horton Crossing road, a little before the Just us Coffee Shop in Grand Pre, then right again onto Railway Street onto Wharf Road which ends at a farm. Then, you will have to walk into the middle of a farmer’s field. I am sure you will be walking in Allen’s footsteps. I know I am walking in them as I wander through the old graveyards in Noel Shore, Wolfville and Scott’s Bay. I followed them further onto the internet in the 80's when access to the huge Mormon data base was free. Although I learned many facts, I do  envy Allen those cups of tea and the stories shared in country parlours and kitchens with living people. 

One of the amusing facts I came upon, which I am sure that Allen would enjoy,  was that we - like 20% of North Americans - have our  Mayflower Ancestor - one  John "Billington, Allen’s 8th great-grandfather, my 9th.  Billington was  an ancestor Obadiah’s wife, Mary Hurd. He was not of the puritan faith, but one of a number of other travellers on the Mayflower, and known both aboard the vessel and in the Plymouth colony as a “troublemaker”.  In September 1630 he was tried by a jury and hanged for the murder of John Newcomen, whom he saw as an enemy. This was the first such execution in the new  colony, confirming the opinion of another New Englander, Ralph Waldo Emerson, that  “Man is physically, as well as metaphysically, a thing of shreds and patches, borrowed unequally from good and bad ancestors, and a misfit from the start.”  

The stories collected and recorded by Allen prove the astuteness of Emerson’s observation, and demonstrate the great variety of lives lived by the many descendants of one of Nova Scotia’s English-speaking pioneers, as they moved on from the difficulties of pioneer life to the challenges of our own interesting times. The Benjamins have transformed from being a close-knit tribe in the Valley to a family enriched with new members from around the world.

As we join here today to remember our family historian, Allen, you will, no doubt,  be recalling your own stories of his time among us, and I hope we’ll be hearing a lot of them.  To quote the wisdom of Doctor Who   ...  we’re all stories in the end.

Elinor Benjamin

The link to the Chronicle Herald Obituary is no longer active. Here is the text of the Obituary published on July 31st ?

R. Allen Benjamin

Robert Allen Benjamin passed on peacefully in The Cloisters Retirement Community in Deland, Fla., on July 25, 2014, at the age of 93. Allen was born on November 3, 1920, in Brookfield, to Stairs Benjamin and Frances Helen (Titus) Benjamin. In his youth after his family moved to Dartmouth, Allen was active in Scouting; he and his brother John were the first in Dartmouth to become King's Scouts. Later he was active in the Kiwanis and the Maritime Professional Photographers Association. Allen was an entrepreneur and local pioneer in photography, a passion of his from an early age. His father having died young, Allen started early making a living.  Being disqualified from the Military for  health reasons he took several newspaper routes, hiring friends to assist as needed.  At the age of 17, with a staff of 12, he opened the first photo-finishing laboratory in. Dartmouth. He also had exciting times in press  photograahy;  being on the VE  Day riots and the Bedford Magazine explosion.  After studying photography in New York City,  he opened the first photographic business in Dartmouth, with studios and shops in several locations over the years. He also owned several apartment buildings around. Dartmouth.  

Upon his retirement he devoted his time to researching the history of the Nova Scotia branch of the family,  from its arrival in America in 1632 and its roots prior to that.  He published his findings in the booklet, "Obediah Benjamin of Nova Scotia".  He relocated to Florida and remarried,  spending his time in travel  and enjoying retirement.  He was predeceased by his daughter, Wanda; brother, John and wife Shirley (Roberts) Benjamin.  He is survived by sons, Roderick (Judy), Scott, James and his first wife, Elizabeth (Jones);  grandchildren, Jacqueline, Michael and Susan and great-grandchildren:  Chase, Oliver and Nygel.  He is also survived by sisters-in-law, Audrey Hemmin, and Pauline Benjamin;  brother-in-law, Bob Benjamin; stepdaughter, Sharon (Hebert);  step grandsons, Tyler and Noah and special friend in Deland, Fla.,  Mary Lou Bauer and many nieces and nephews.  Special thanks to the staff  of The Cloisters Of Deland  and to Vitas Hospice Care for the care and attention they afforded Allen while he was there, and  particularly during his illness. A memorial service will be held in Windholm Christian Church, Windholm Avenue, Dartmouth, on Thursday, August 7 at 2 p.m. His ashes will be interred in the family plot in East Side Cemetery at Brookfield,  in a private ceremony at a later date. Memorial donations may be made to the [Wyndholme]  Christian Church or to the charity of your choice.