John Buie comes from a long line of farmers and construction workers starting with his great grandfather in Scotland, his grandfather in Canada, then his father and John, himself. The families of John Buie and his late friend Duncan McDermid can boast of ‘being neighbours for more than 200 years,’ as related in an Expositor article by Duff McCutcheon dated August 11, 1993. Both families hailed from the east coast of Scotland and immigrated to Canada when the Scots were moved from their land so more sheep could supply the industrial appetite of woolen mills. The two friends traced their histories to within five miles of each other in the late 1700s.
In order to make a living, John became multi-talented over the years, as many of his generation had done. As a teen, he wrapped bread for 25 cents a week for Mac’s Bakery in Gore Bay, taught school for a while before changing to bank messenger for two years. Then he molded manhole covers in an iron foundry for another two years. He went sailing on a tanker for a year and a half. “When this included refueling the Queen’s Britannia yacht, which involved too much regulation, I left.”
For the next 10 years, he worked in a Sault Ste. Marie paper mill and the steel industry. Finally, back on Manitoulin, John became a bookkeeper for McQuarrie Motors and Grant Oakes Insurance, both Gore Bay businesses. John has also been a dedicated historian, documenting many related family trees as well as the background of the Salem Missionary Church in Spring Bay.
“Great Grandfather Angus Buie came to Canada in 1832 with his father, John, from the Island of Islay,” as recorded in the family bible. They arrived by schooner and settled in Chinguacousy, near the present city of Brampton, moving to Duntroon near Collingwood later. Angus moved again to the Providence Bay area about 1880 when this Island was opened to white settlement. He brought nine members of his family, all but his daughter who was married. One of his sons who moved with him, was William who had been born in southern Ontario, the first generation in Canada. Their new neighbours were Scottish also: the Gilpins, the MacDonalds and the McDermids.
Grandfather William bought a farm in the Providence Bay area beside William McDonald, Walt’s father. He put an extension on his barn and sold the farm in 1911 and decided to go west to look for farmland. He became discouraged and headed back to Manitoulin and bought a farm across the road from his first homestead. He married Jane McEachern of Spring Bay and had six children. John explains that, “Verden, my dad, Milton, Wendel Buie’s dad, Hughson, Willis, Grace and Thelma.” Verden met Blanche of Kitchener at a dance on Manitoulin. She hailed from Old Spring Bay originally and had been visiting friends at Stanley Park. Blanche had worked for two local tourist resorts, Treasure Island and Mac’s Camp. Later, she worked at the Mindemoya Post Office for a few years. A long-distance romance led to a wedding in North Bay in May 1934.
John was born to Verden and Blanche (Bock) Buie, on September 27, 1935, two farms from the McDonald farm and one farm away from where his dad had been born on the Sand Road. Jane Buie, the midwife, was his grandmother. Dr. R.B. McQuay had to attend three births at the time and John was the second in as many days. He was born on a Friday and the family joke claimed that there were no messengers available so “Mum sent John down to tell dad that John was here. Dad was helping the threshing at a friend’s farm.”
John would have two sisters, Margaret and Cathy and a brother Joe. Margaret married Bill Smith and lived in Shakespeare, near Stratford. She was a secretary for a lawyer, an insurance company as well as for some government jobs. She and her husband started a trucking company in Kitchener. She dispatched and kept the books; sister Cathy became the wife of Doug King of Mindemoya. She worked at the curling rink in town and in several restaurants. Joe was a pipefitter and foreman for Algoma Steel in the Soo. He died of a heart attack in 2016. “We are related to the late Doug Tracy. Doug’s grandmother, Lizzy Tracy and my mother’s dad, John Bock, were sister and brother.”
His parents always included John on outings. “I would be bundled up and nestled into some low bushes while wood was cut and loaded on the sleigh,” John explains. “Mother told me I had been ‘a great baby for sleeping.’” We left that farm in 1938 when I was three, and my dad got MD (muscular dystrophy). We rented our farm out and lived on Great Uncle Angus’ farm nearby and my dad had to quit farming. He had an auction sale and sold his livestock. The rest of our belongings were sold from a subsequent farm in 1944 including my sleigh dog Fido and all my toys. Those were hard times.”
John also harbours some remorse about the day he dropped the cat into the outhouse hole. At age four, it was about exploring the limits in his world. “I remember that the cat came back. He was likely very stinky, but he survived my bold experimentation.” John also had a friend, Don White, son of Trevor White, who lived on his old farm. “One day I decided to visit Don. I was still four and he was three. I crossed the laneway and headed to his farm without asking first. I learned the hard way that you don’t do that. I had to dance all the way home as dad was ‘polishing’ my behind with long strips of cedar bark, each step of the way. I never did that again.”
“Another time, still four, I realized I could see all the turkeys in the enclosure if I climbed the ladder that went up to the roof and up to the chimney on our wood-shingle roof. The ladder was there in case of a fire. I crawled up to the top and was standing beside the chimney when my mother found me. She was afraid to yell because she thought I might panic and fall off the roof. She called to me and then went inside. I found out years later, that she was sure I would have fallen had she stayed and watched. I carefully climbed back down intact.”
John’s first day of school at Grimesthorpe was memorable. There were 10 grades and lots of rules. He didn’t know about lunchtime protocol, so being hungry at 11 am, he pulled out his lunch and began to eat it. “One of the older kids charged with keeping an eye on us little ones, told me to put it away until 12 pm. When we got older, it was our turn to advise the younger kids about the rules.”
Going to school was fun. “Fido was fitted with a harness and he pulled me to school. During the day he would wait for me at one of the three dog houses near the corner. When I got out of school he would leap about in circles, so glad to see me and fulfill his assigned task to get me home again. He tried to protect me once from Duncan’s rowdy dog while in harness. Neither of us was hurt.”
“That winter, I lost my glasses riding backwards on the sleigh. Dad found them damaged by a team and sleigh on the road. They were bent but hard to replace, so dad fixed them. I always respected my dad. He was ‘strictly honest,’ a man of his word, and he expected to be treated the same way.”
When John was older, he was lucky to get a bike because of the shortage of steel during the war years. “You had to be at least a mile away from school to qualify for a bike.” There is a photo of John and his bike with two of his younger siblings in the basket.
“When I finished Grade 2, we briefly moved to the Kitchener area where mum got a job at Smiles and Chuckles, a chocolate factory. When I left Grimesthorpe, I was writing already, but in Kitchener the kids were still printing their words. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find a place for the family to live, so after a few weeks, we wound up back in Gore Bay. I could write again in school. We lived in a big double house at the bottom of the courthouse hill. It was the only house with two stairways up to the second level. My aunt and grandmother lived in part of the home and we lived in the other.”
“I was nine when the war ended in 1945. I had started school a year late, so they advanced me a year to let me join my cohort. I was in Grade 3 from September to Easter and moved to Grade 5 in June. I was doing well but doing a lot of work at home to catch up.”
John got his first job at Mac’s Bakery across the street from his home. “My buddy Craig and I were wrapping bread for 25 cents a week. We covered the loaves with wax paper and then placed them into a chute which heated the ends to seal the bread with the wax. Sometimes people were so eager to get the fresh loaves they would be lined up outside and grab a loaf before we could wrap it.”
Soon the family moved back to the Providence Bay area again. “This house had a very long laneway and no well, so we had to carry buckets of water daily from a neighbouring farm. We stayed one year then bought the neighbour’s house. I had to go to school in Providence Bay again to finish elementary school. Over a seven-year period, I had attended five schools and had seven teachers.”
Mindemoya’s Continuation School came next. Favourite subjects were math and history. “French, Latin and English grammar left me cold, but I finished Grade 12. There was no Grade 13 at that time.” After he left high school, John realized the schools needed teachers, so he went to summer school for six weeks and was hired to teach at Alcona, 10 miles from Sioux Lookout, in Northwestern Ontario.
“There was just a train to get us in and out of that community. I stayed from the fall of 1954 to Easter 1955. I slept in the school but got my meals nearby. There was a small cook stove and I used it to heat a lot of water when the school floor was scrubbed every month. It was a challenging place to live alone despite having gone home for Christmas. By spring of 1955, I realized I was not cut out to be a teacher.”
“After being in a remote area of the North, coming to Toronto’s Bank of Commerce head office as a bank messenger was a real cultural shock. In time, I realized that one didn’t move up from the role of bank messenger; some were there for their entire career, so I moved to the Galt-Kitchener area in May of 1956. My grandparents were celebrating their golden wedding anniversary. Mum’s oldest brother, Alvin offered me a job.” John went from wearing a suit and tie to the dirtiest job he ever held. A. E. Bock Foundry made molds to create manhole covers and sewers, as well as grates for road edges and many other cast iron items. “I spent much of the next two years covered in black sand.”
His next job was on the same tanker that Austin Pickard had worked on earlier. A subsequent assignment was a contract to refuel the Britannia, the Queen’s yacht, about the time the seaway was to open. The late Dick Chapman, father of Joe of Little Current, was there too. “The crew didn’t need them, but the captain and his mates had to wear uniforms. This job became even less attractive when we were not permitted off the boat to enjoy warm beaches on days off. Since Royalty would not be using the boat soon, Dick and I left. It was too much spit and polish for my taste.”
In June of 1959 John joined the track gang at INCO. Dick Chapman was there, working underground. John stayed at Dick’s home for the summer then joined Dick’s father Max and headed for Sault Ste. Marie. Max sold cars and John worked at the paper mill for five years. In 1965, John’s own dad died at age 64 of cancer; his MD had been in remission for years. “Mum came to live with me in the Sault. We rented a house.”
For their Centennial project, John and Herb Galbraith studied and documented the history of the Salem Missionary Church of Spring Bay. John was still in the Soo at the time. “We found photos of all the members of the first congregation dating back to about 1890.” The small rural church on Highway 542 near Spring Bay has been closed for several years.
John spent another five years at the steel plant in the Soo until they went on strike. This gave him the impetus he needed to get back to the island. It was 1969 and McQuarrie Motors was looking for a bookkeeper. He moved his mum back to Gore Bay in a truck that the late Ron McQuarrie had lent him. “I stayed 11 years in that job. It was good work. I could still see my good friend Lynn Allen of the midnight coffees in the Soo when he came for a visit.”
In April 1971, a broken collar bone from a snowmobile accident kept John in the new Mindemoya Hospital where a pretty English nurse named Mary Coomes happened to be working. He was very interested in getting to know this nurse he was attracted to. He thought she had taken a trip to England. “I was glad to see I was wrong. I ran into her visiting my mother’s friend in the Mindemoya Hospital. I asked her out that very night for a fun time smelt fishing. It was not the ideal first date because we were both cleaning tiny fish for hours, but she did very well, and I was impressed.”
“At age 35, I had given up on marriage. Now I was engaged in the first part of June and we married in England on December 30, 1971. British wedding licences insisted on three Sundays being spent in Britain prior to marriage. We were just short of that, so we needed a letter of permission from our next of kin to get a special licence. I’m sure my mother got a kick out of that. Our Anglican minister back home wrote me a glowing letter and our special licence was signed by the Archbishop of Canterbury.”
During their honeymoon, the newlyweds participated in the Scottish Hogmanay on New Year’s Eve. It included a celebration for persons who had travelled the farthest and the Buies won. “We lost track of time and no buses were still running, so we had to walk back to our hotel.” After three weeks of marital bliss in England, the couple returned to the Island.
The Buies have three children, Neil, Robert and Jennifer. Neil has a vet clinic in Callandar. His wife Meaghan teaches high school in North Bay They both live in Corbeil and have two boys. Robert flies for WestJet and his wife, Kathryn, is a dental hygienist. He and Kathryn have two girls and they live in Lindsay. Jennifer is a physiotherapist. She and her husband Dwayne have two physio clinics in Calgary and Aidrie. They have a boy and a girl. “We now have six grandchildren,” John adds. “I was lucky to have a flexible job when our children were growing up. I spent many hours at hockey arenas and school functions. When bodily contact began, there was a consensus by most family members, to move the kids to other sports.”
“In the spring of 1981, Duncan McDermid and I decided to manufacture cedar doors. About that time the economy took a steep downturn and we were beset with 24 thousand board feet of cedar that would take two years to sell.” Meanwhile, John worked with the late Norris Pearson’s construction and trucking business. Sadly, Norris died and the business had to be shut down. Meanwhile, John had found a bookkeeping job that filled his evenings at Grant Oakes Insurance. John retired from regular work at 67 in 2002 but continued to work part-time for Grant Oakes for another few years until Grant died in 2010.
These days, Mary has come out of retirement to work part time at the M’Chigeeng Health Centre. She loves this work and John is very proud of her. “She is a good nurse, as I can personally attest. That snowmobile accident was the best thing that ever happened to me.” John has started to write his memoirs. A history buff, he also attended a reunion at the Grimesthorpe School two decades ago. John still sees Keith, a friend from the paper mill days, every two or three months. He also sees friend Gerry occasionally. John got a mite emotional recalling that his two friends had come to his dad’s funeral.
“I like the slower pace of Manitoulin. We are at least 20 years behind the times here, and I like that. I am happy too that my job in the Soo ended with a strike and brought us back here to this special place. At one time you could hear a family name and know the part of the Island they came from, but Manitoulin is still unique, and I am so happy that we will pass our twilight years here. Our recipe for happiness is spending time among our friends and family here on this island laden with charm and so much history.”
