Page 93 - With George Prosser of Whitney Pier

ISSUE : Issue 74

Published by Ronald Caplan on 1999/6/1

(that) you didn't have to bother the city for no help or anybody for no help. Make sure you were all right yourself. I saved a few dollars. Them days I stayed away, like I tell ya • I was a year away from home. The wife saved on one thing or the other. Things were cheap down in New? foundland 'cause you didn't get nothing there. There was nothing down there to buy. We lived off of wildlife. There was no such thing as turkeys.... We had chick? en, or laying hens we called them, ducks and geese--but outside of that there was no meat. You never saw no meat down there or nothing. Christmas time--you might buy meat for Christmas. That's the only time. Christmas had to come again before you'd see any more. Times were bad down there. We lived off fish. Flour was cheap. The Limeys had flour, too. They had what you called brown flour, but it wasn't brown, it was grey. Canadian flour, that's the thing we wished to get. That's the only two things there was no duty to pay on, was flour and coal. Everything else was duty. So we come over here and we'd get a load of coal and take over enough flour for the winter. Tea come from New Zealand. That was Limey, too. The Limeys owned New? foundland in them days. I went in the Na? vy, and like I said, the Limeys, oh...I still owe them something I can't pay them back. (George 1aughs.) St. Pierre was only a hundred and twenty- five miles from where I lived down the coast, so you were only twenty-four hours (and) you were down there and back again. We smuggled whiskey. All kinds of liquor. Sugar and cigarettes and tobacco. Sugar was only two and a half cents a pound in them days. You'd get a whole bag of sugar, a hundred pounds of sugar, for two dol? lars, which is pretty cheap. That was com? ing from the West Indies. White sugar. That's the cheapest thing you could buy. You'd buy five or six bags, or ten or twenty bags of it. And tobacco. Twenty- five cents a carton. A carton of cigar? ettes! But they were American- made cigar? ettes. Camels and Lucky Strikes. All American brands, for twenty-five cents a carton. Twenty-five, thirty cents, maybe. It was up to forty cents one time. (If you paid twenty-five cents per car? ton, what did you sell them for?) A dollar for a carton of cigarettes. You'd get a whole case of liquor, and only pay a dollar twenty-five for a 19 YEARS of SERVING VCAPE BRETON'S/ NEEDS! Makita Power Tools Kohler Windows Donat Flamand Windows All Types of Cedar Sidings CGC Gypsum Board Iko Roofing Plywood Peach Tree Steel Door Systems 199 Townsend Street, Sydney 564-5554. Vinyl Replacement Windows Prefab Houses & Garages Pressure Treated Lumber Cedar Lumber SICO Paints & Stains Weldwood Vinyl Siding Fibreglass Pink Insulation FrjBC Computerized Estimates 93

Cape Breton's Magazine