Hats off to Calvin Bailey

Faith of our fathers ! living still...

We will be true to thee till death.

__________

- an excerpt from a hymn contained in a church pamphlet found pressed between the pages of Calvin Bailey's Hunt Club book, dated 1929.


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Calvin Stuart Bailey—my great grandfather—stood 6”2, with a body hewn from Ontario oak, and shoulders as wide as a damn door frame. Born 1905, in the twilight of the cowboy era, Calvin Bailey was of that last generation of hardy men who built buildings with their bare hands, and wouldn't flinch at the prospect of living off the land. In fact, in his 85 years on this Earth, Calvin lived off the land as much as possible: hunting, fishing, felling trees, and selling furs.

Calvin was a classic Canadian. In a 1925 photo, he can be seen mounted on a horse—outfitted in riding gear and a big 10 gallon hat—staring sternly off into the distance. He was only 19 years old at the time, but looks every bit a grown man. Men grew up quick then. None of this live-at-home-till-you're-30 bosh that we see today. Back then, there was no alternative for an upright man.

Calvin married at 20, to a Miss Beatrice Maude Hodge, with whom he had 5 children and stayed married 65 years. Carpentry was his primary means of supporting his large family. Armed with little more than an axe, a jack-knife, and an old-fashioned hand drill, he built heaps of barns and houses from Milton to Stewarttown. Calvin always got up early. He shaved with a straight razor, and had Red River cereal, a soft boiled egg, and toast every morning of his life. He'd be out before the dew dried to check his traplines, and back home by sundown.

Calvin loved hunting. He mainly hunted deer—from which he ate the meat, sold the hide, and used the antlers to fashion tools—but wasn't opposed to hunting bear, when they needed thinning out. He was known to bend an elbow with the boys at the Hunt Club on occasion, though he never drank to excess. A single drink from time to time was all. His only vice was smoking cigarettes, which he rolled himself. But, seeing as he started roughly 40 years before the science was out on smoking, he can hardly be faulted for that.

Yep, life was simple then. Beatrice Maude always kept a garden, and she'd share and exchange the produce it yielded with neighbours, not because it was part of some trendy organic health movement, but because it was the sensible thing to do. Electricity was handy, but coal oil lamps worked just fine, so they used those instead. People made their own fun. Socialized. Talked face-to-face, long before the internet and cell phones came along and balled everything up.

Calvin, I might infer, was a slightly secretive man—though his secrets were of the honest variety. In the 50's, after he'd moved to Haliburton, Calvin bought a snowmobile strictly for trapping. He kept it in the ice-house under lock and key, and nobody ever saw the machine but him. Curiously, the first 250 pages of Calvin's Hunt Club book were left blank, with the writing starting on the last page, and working its way back towards the front. A few pages have also been cut out. Most interestingly, the inside of the back cover contains a warning, written in stylized script:

Steal not this Book

for your Life,

For the owner carries

a Big Dirk Knife!

Calvin, it would seem, was also a poet. However, this is not his only surviving creative work. Apart from his extensive woodworking and construction projects, there is also a placemat-sized piece of metal into which he pounded some maple leaves, a boarder, and the words, “The Emblem of Canada”. I have to wonder what else he might have written, had all those blank pages of his Hunting Log been filled, after the last supply entry was made.

In his later years, Calvin would sit on the back step, with his rifle propped on his knee, and shoot the mice that were raiding his garden. I imagine a great many mice helped to fertilize that garden.Calvin Stuart Bailey died of natural causes on April 29^th, 1990. A contemporary of his—my non-biological great grandfather Pitkanen—died while hauling a deer carcass out of the bush on his back as an octogenarian. Though I don't know whether these two men ever met in life, I think they would have had plenty to talk about in death.