Columns and Letters

-by Frank Macdonald

    I don’t remember the men and women returning to Inverness after the war.
    It must have been an exciting reunion of families and friends. Inverness had, we had always been proudly reminded, the highest enlistment rate per capita in Canada, and the highest mortality rate. But most of our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and merchant seamen returned.
    While I don’t remember their return, I do remember them 10 years later.
    They were young fathers and uncles and neighbours who had done their duty for their country, then returned home to do their duty concerning the Baby Boomer generation. Inverness was filled with kids.
    It was a town full of unemployment, too. The soldiers had returned to a doomed town, coal from its last mine was trickling slowly towards closure. It was a fate these young men and women tried to fend off. Over the next decade, while headlines tolled the death of Inverness, these young men and women, who had won a war, didn’t intend to lose their hometown.
    Economically, they didn’t have a lot of luck, but some things are more important than an economy. They had come home to a town that needed people to fight a different kind of war, one that would allow them to stay in the place where they were born, that would allow them, after years of horror none of us could possibly imagine, to stay in the homes for which they had fought, the place where they wanted to raise their children.
    What I recall as a boy isn’t that they were soldiers back from a war. Except for November 11th parades, these men and women  didn’t seem anything like the soldiers in comic books or in the war movies they never went to see. What I recall as part of that post-war generation was that they made a tremendously successful town, and they did it for their children.
    The town we grew up in through the ‘50s and ‘60s still had four grocery stores, four garages, three clothing stores, a movie theatre, a pharmacy, a Rexall, and a liquor store that one year sold more liquor than any other liquor store in the province except for a single store in Halifax. Perhaps you had to be here, or from here, growing up in a culture that had no acronyms such as PTSD, had no understanding of the pain and suffering our parents had gone through and continued to endure, nor any understanding of their questionable solutions to that damage, so among us kids that sad liquor store statistic was a point of pride, suggesting that people here could out-drink just about anybody in Canada.
    But that was only one aspect of what happened here in Inverness when the soldiers returned. They came home to a town that was much like it had been when they left, still scarred by the Depression, its houses  mostly unpainted, streets unpaved, open sewers, a town bordered by toxic mountains of grey mine waste, a town that was slowly, one by one, losing family after family to places that offered a better future; was losing too, one by one, the Central Avenue businesses that had survived since the turn of the 20th century. They were slowly eroding out of existence, boarded up windows, empty buildings.
    It is a memory that paints a grim image of Inverness unless you knew what else was happening here. Growing up through the ‘50s, the energy of so many of the returned soldiers was focussed on the town’s children. They may have been soldiers once, but we knew them as coaches and managers and organizers. The town was filled with Boy Scouts, Army Cadets, and fielded enough kids to fill a six-team Little League league. (And to nurture in that league enough athletic talent to field teenaged ball teams that always mattered, and often mastered, in island and provincial championships.)
    It was these young veterans that conceived amid the last gasps of the last mine, a refusal to accept the inevitable. In 1954, they organized Old Home Week.
    It is not enough to say that Old Home Week was just another small town’s annual summer picnic. It was infinitely more. It was produced on a scale that only dreamers are capable of producing, arguably the largest community-based event in Nova Scotia that summer. It was a week of entertainment and parades and boat races and dare devils and horse races and dances and a community dinner house feeding hundreds daily. It wasn’t just a picnic. It was a living monument to the future of Inverness that these veterans believed the town possessed.
    Old Home Week was an event that seared itself into the souls of the children of these veterans, became the past’s touchstone moment for us, a shared memory of a place we would never want to leave, although many, perhaps most of us did leave, needed to leave for various reasons. Most who left, though, have had trouble taking their hearts away with them. In the far from here places where they have thrived, raised families, and made new homes, even 30, 40, 50 years later there remains a need among the many to make an annual pilgrimage back to a place some still describe as still their ‘spiritual home,’ or more simply as ‘home.’
    The truth, though, is that Old Home Week is already a wavering mirage receding into the past, mistaken perhaps by younger generations as an old man’s sentimental memory. But I believe Inverness, now thriving, is still here because of a definitive event, an act of faith called Old Home Week, the spirit of which had been picked up and pursued by succeeding generations, until that faith in Inverness’s economic future has found a fulfilment.
    There is, on a wall of the Inverness school, a monument where the faces of a couple of hundred veterans are encased in glass, a tribute to our veterans too seldom visited perhaps. I think of them as November 11th approaches, not only as images of war-clad soldiers, but also as vibrant young men and women, mostly parents, who turned this town into a playground of parish and community halls, outdoor rinks and baseball fields, created Old Home Week, which gave birth to a small harness racing industry. These uniformed portraits are of men and women who were still young enough to plan for us and to play with us in a town they believed would someday be a place from which people would not be economically driven away.
    The number of those veterans has dwindled down a very few, but there still remains quite a few of those young children, aging themselves, who look at the veterans  and see the young soldiers, sailors, airmen, merchant marines who did come home, came home to build a town we all continue to call home.