A South Huron teen died Saturday after he and a sofa fell off a moving pickup truck. Sixteen-year-old Cody Johnson was sitting on the sofa, riding in the back of the pickup on a private property west of Exeter, when the sofa fell off the back at about 6 p.m. Saturday. He was taken to South Huron Hospital, and was later pronounced dead. The driver of the truck, another 16-year-old boy, was taken into police custody and released.

Let’s Play Bridge

Musical comedy presented by the Grand Cove Musical Theatre Group
Fri. October 2 – 7 p.m.
Sat. October 3 – 7 p.m.
Sun. October 4 – 2 p.m.
Grand Cove Caddyshack. Tickets: $7.50; on sale Mondays and Fridays from 1-3 p.m. at Caddy Shack or call Jo Dabrowski at 519-238-5156.

Grand Cove’s actors are back at it with another adaptation of life in the Grand Bend retirement community. This year, writer-producer-director Doreen Newell took her inspiration from the Cove’s most popular card game: bridge.
“It’s about the people playing bridge,” Newell says. “It highlights the type of characters we have in the Cove and the different walks of life. Everybody here has lived their lives, everybody has been captain of their own ship, everybody has their own ideas of what it should be.
“The Cove’s a melting pot. We’ve all walked our lives all over the world. We’re getting old. We have to come somewhere to melt down, and this is where, and this is a show about the meltdown (laughs).”
Building on the success of two sold out productions in a row, Let’s Play Bridge gives audiences what they expect: familiar music, great costumes, and local flavour.
“We incorporated the gossip of the Cove and the Bend,” Newell says, noting the importance of this last aspect, “and all the little funny things in every day life here. The familiar put into a story that’s not old hat.”
Newell writes what she sees, and the story is inspired by the characters she casts.
“Isabel Sweeney is the hostess with the mostess. Seeing Isabel walk around the park, she’s an elegant lady. She’s an immediate part. And she sings beautifully.
“Georgina Bellamy originates from Liverpool. She was at the wedding of one of the Jerry and the Pacemakers! She was a policewoman on duty for several of those things. She can slip back, after 30-odd years in Canada, into the Liverpudlian mode. She knows it.
“Peg Seller does all the costumes for here. She’s a magical fairy. She belongs in fairy land. She loves pretty things and creating. She lives in Never Never Land; make-believe land.
“Bev Breen is fairly new to the Cove. I felt when I put her in there, she could relate to the country scene. She typifies the typical Canadian from the country.
“Brenda Clark is the clown. When we had a winter teach-in, we gave everyone parts. It didn’t matter what we gave her, she could clown around and do it.”
To Newell, life at the Cove is “one big pantomime” and the play is a projection of what its characters believe are “the highlights of their lives”.
“It’s a really good sing-song with good humour,” Newell summarizes. “They’ll have a really enjoyable evening. It’s going to be a fun show with a lot of class.”
Tickets sell fast, so act soon.

Story by Casey Lessard

Although it’s not very common in Canada today, polio had a serious and sometimes deadly impact on Canadians until the 1950s. Today, polio (or poliomyelitis) affects about 1,000 people worldwide, with almost all cases occurring in India, Afghanistan and Nigeria. That’s down from 350,000 cases in 1985, when Rotary International pledged to eradicate the disease from the planet. Since then, Rotary has raised billions of dollars to fight polio, and plans to continue until it’s history.
“There is no cure for polio,” says Grand Bend Rotary’s Foundation coordinator Brian Hall. “The only cure is to wipe it out.”
Hall’s father contracted polio at age two. The virus destroys neurons, stopping communication between the nervous system and muscles. This can cause temporary or permanent paralysis.
“They told his parents that he would never walk,” Hall says of his father. “He did ultimately walk, but the leg that the polio affected was two inches shorter than his other leg. He could never run, skate, or walk like a normal person. He limped and was lucky to be able to walk at all.”
For Rotary, the only solution is to immunize all of the children in the countries where polio still exists.
“Our big push this year is the Rotary toll road on the Labour Day weekend,” Hall says. “This year, our club has committed all of the funds from the toll road to polio.”
Each shot costs between $0.50 to $0.80 to administer, depending on the child’s location. India alone plans to vaccinate 172 million children in a series of six national vaccination days, and another 69 million children after that.
“No question we’re going to eradicate it,” Hall says. “The quicker we get this done, the sooner we can direct the funds toward other causes.”
To show your support, the Rotary club will be at the main lights in Grand Bend on the Labour Day weekend collecting donations. Anything you can offer will help.

Survivor stories:
Hugh Marsh
Reg Copeman
Marian Maguire

“It’s always with you.” – Hugh Marsh

As told to Casey Lessard

Hugh Marsh is a former area resident whose family ties remain in and around Grand Bend. He has lived in California most of his life, and spent much of his career teaching engineering writing at the University of California Santa Barbara.
A polio survivor, Marsh has long fought for improved accessibility for people using wheelchairs.

I had just turned 14 in the summer of 1948; it was August 19th as I recall. We went to a family picnic at Springbank Park in London. My friend Greg Seabrook and I were playing miniature golf and running back to the picnic table where our families were; I could always beat in a foot race, but this time I couldn’t keep up with him.
That was a Friday night. Late afternoon Saturday, I went to go to the bathroom and I fell on the way to the bathroom and had to crawl in. That was the last time I walked.
I don’t remember the moment when they told me I’d never walk again. I don’t remember it being a traumatic time for me and I never had any psychological trauma from it. I’ve thought about the months in the hospital, and there must have been times when I was depressed, but I just kind of took it as it was. I always expected I would live a normal life, and my parents made my life as normal as possible.
I was in the War Memorial Children’s Hospital (in London, now Children’s Hospital of Western Ontario) from the 21st of August until the following May. For the first month, you’re in an isolation ward and really sick. The polio virus settles in the spine and, depending on where it settles, it affects you from below that point. If it settles behind your belly button, you become paraplegic. Mine was a wee bit higher than that, so it also affected my left arm a little, but that appeared later.

Those were the days when they kept you in the hospital. I recall it being a rather enjoyable time. There were five or six of us boys, and an old lady teacher would come in and give us our lessons, so I didn’t miss a grade of school as a consequence.
I don’t remember anything bad about the hospital at all. We were always getting into mischief. In the spring, there was a roof garden, and we would go up there and play on the roof. I had a big old wooden wheelchair and we were racing around on the roof one time. It had a board floor, and one of the wheels caught between the boards and flipped the chair over. It shattered into a pile of kindling.

Moving on
I was treated pretty much as an ordinary kid, except for the fact that I had a wheelchair. My parents did what the doctors told them to do and that was not to do anything for me that I could do myself. I was taught to be independent and I pretty much was. When I was old enough, I got a driver’s license and hand controls for the car.
The biggest change was figuring out ways to get around. My dad always made it happen. But it was always something that we as a family had to deal with. I’ve dealt with access issues all of my life.
London Central High School had steps into it. My brother Barry, who was a couple of years younger than me, would simply pull me up the half dozen steps into the first floor. If I had to go to the second floor, a few of the boys would grab my wheelchair and lift me up the stairs. We’d find a way around it. Now, it looks a lot the same, but there are ramps and elevators, so you can get everywhere.
We moved to California in 1953 when I was 19, mostly for my father’s health because he had asthma. I went to college and did some graduate work. In my last year of college I was working full-time. I had married young and had a baby girl, so coping with polio had a real life lesson for me to deal with the issues I had to deal with myself. Polio taught me how to do that.
I got a job in the aerospace industry as a publication editor for a while. I started to run technical publications groups in the California area for a company making infrared spy satellite technology. While I was there, I was asked to teach a class in engineering writing at the University of California Santa Barbara. I taught one class and then they asked me to teach two. A few months later, they asked me to teach three and that meant full-time. I left aerospace and spent the last 20 years of my professional life at the university teaching, and I just loved it.

Pushing for access
I’ve been involved in all sorts of disabled rights groups here in California, and as a matter of fact I was information officer for the state’s department of rehabilitation for a couple of years between my years in aerospace. I’ve been very involved in getting access here. I’ll continue to be involved. It takes people who care about it to get in and do it. Change doesn’t come unless people who are involved participate in that change. That’s a must.
For every disabled person who needs access, there are up to a dozen people who the lack of access affects if they want to go places together. It’s taken a long time, but it’s slowly changing.
I remember I got a job at Aerojet, a big corporation. I was hired May 9, 1960, and they had to modify bathrooms so I could get into stalls, and offices had to be enlarged where I was working. There had to be access into the buildings I needed to go into, and there were some buildings that wasn’t possible, so I just wasn’t involved in working in those buildings. The publications department I worked in eventually got to be pretty accessible. Later on, when I worked in Sacramento for a few years, when I was part of the state government, I was essentially advocating for more access to businesses and public buildings in California. I’m still involved in that on a city council committee here in Santa Barbara.

Post-polio syndrome
It turns out that polio isn’t a disease that, once you’ve had it, you stay pretty much the same. I began to notice symptoms of increasing weakness and pain around 1980. My slightly weakened right arm became much weaker, and about 10 years ago I had to go from a manual wheelchair to a power chair. And, the progression of the weakness and pain hasn’t slowed down, even though I’ve been through various courses of physical therapy and pain management. Pain management has brought new problems that accompany the “hard drugs”, OxyContin and Norco in my case.
After the the Salk vaccine in the early 1950s, most research on polio stopped. Now it has picked up again, but – to my knowledge at least – no explanation for the phenomenon of post-polio syndrome has appeared, to say nothing of a cure.
Organizations like Rotary who put their financial resources behind the project are doing a tremendous amount to finally get rid of polio. It’s absolutely important to get to that final step. It was getting to the point where it was almost eradicated and a generation of young parents came along who weren’t sure that all of these vaccinations were good for children. There was an uptick again because parents weren’t having their children vaccinated. It’s a simple thing to do and it needs to be done.

“You either get better or you die.” – Reg Copeman

Reg Copeman of Port Franks grew up in London, and in early 1952, he contracted polio at age 10. He has few aftereffects today, but the memory stays with him.

As told to Casey Lessard

I came back off summer holidays, and the first week of school I got feeling sick. They thought I had the flu or something, so they kept me home, but it kept getting worse. My doctor was an older fellow and didn’t really know what he was getting into.
It got to the point where I couldn’t swallow food at all. My aunt would make me mashed potatoes, but it was like soup. I got really sick and the doctor sent an apprentice doctor to look at me. He put his hand on the back of my neck and pushed my forehead back. It was just like someone drove a knife into my back. He said, “Get him ready and call an ambulance; I think he’s got polio.”

A scary experience
I was ten years old and really scared. I remember going from the main hospital where they did the tests on me down this long tunnel into the children’s hospital and into isolation immediately.
The type of polio I had, you either get better or you die because it affects the muscles around your lungs. They get deteriorated to the point where the muscles don’t work.
It kept getting worse and worse and they put me in an iron lung for a couple of months. You’re sealed in there. They alternate putting air pressure in and taking it away and that’s what makes your lungs work. There were two or three in the room where I was. The iron lung totally covers you and your head sticks out of the end. It’s sealed at the neck. They had sealed holes that they could stick things in or turn you over. Your whole world is a mirror in front of your face.
Your relatives couldn’t come in the room with you. They stood outside in the hallway and talked to you through a window. If they brought you something, books or toys or whatever, the nurse would bring them into you. If you dropped an item on the floor, you couldn’t pick it up. The nurse would come in, pick it up and sterilize it, and it would be three or four days before they gave it back to you.

Survival story
Once they got my lungs working again, it was back into isolation. That’s when I saw some of the other kids who were a whole lot worse than I was. There were crippled babies whose bodies were wasting away. I don’t know how many of those small kids survived.
I kept in touch for years with one boy my age, and the last I heard he was still in Paris. He never did get the use of his legs back.
I have no lasting effects that stop me from doing anything. I still have problems swallowing, and I have to be careful what I eat. To eat steak or any kind of beef, I have to make sure I cut it up into really small pieces and chew it well or I’ll choke.
The rest of my body, the right side muscles are smaller than the left side. I have very little reflexes in the right side of my body. I have a lot of fun with doctors at examinations.

A sleeping giant
I think about it all the time. They brought the vaccine out a year after I got out of the hospital. I remember my mother taking me to get the vaccine shot, and they told her I didn’t need it because I would never get polio again. It’s just like having chicken pox. Well, my younger sister adamantly refused to have her three kids vaccinated. When I found that out, I was very upset. We had little kids of our own at the time and I gave her quite a talking to. She figured no one gets it anymore. But that’s why we vaccinate.
It’s a monster still out there lying there waiting for enough people foolish enough not to get the vaccinations. Once you’re affected, vaccinations won’t do anything. We’ve got it licked. Let’s keep it licked.

“There are different ways you learn to cope with it.” – Marian Maguire

Although Marian Maguire of Grand Bend had a mild case of polio as a child, the disease has more of an impact on her life today than ever. She, like so many others, has post-polio syndrome, which progressively disables nerves and muscles in polio survivors.

As told to Casey Lessard

There was an epidemic in the summer of 1938. My cousin had it and I had been visiting her in Parkhill the week before, so they were keeping an eye on me. They caught mine very early because of that.
I was only about four at the time, and all I can remember is being in the hospital in isolation. My mom and dad would come to the hospital but they couldn’t come into the room.

Giving it a second thought
My parents told me I had had it, but I never had any aftereffects from it. I never gave it a second thought until 1970 or ‘75. Someone noticed that I had a slight limp.
It progressively got worse. The muscle in my right calf has deteriorated. The second toe also drops, and you have to watch it or you’ll trip very easy. In the last couple of years, I’ve also noticed my right arm getting weaker.
When you’re younger, some of the nerves will take over and compensate for the ones that are dying. When you get older, they can’t compensate. That’s when you really notice it. They call this post-polio syndrome. I was diagnosed in 1996.

Coping mechanisms
I get muscle spasms, especially at night. You have to get up and move or it drives you nuts. I’ve been dealing with this for 20 years at least.
We used to do a lot of walking, and you can’t do that as much. Fatigue is a big thing.
The drug Mestinon had side effects that I thought I was better off without. But I was on another medication that really helped. No more aching leg at night, and I could sleep. After about two years, it wasn’t working as well and got to a point where it wasn’t working at all.
There are different ways you learn to cope with it. If it bothers me in the evening, I go out for a walk. You need something to get it off your mind. If I have company playing cards, it doesn’t bother me. If I’m sitting watching TV, it bothers me.

Prioritize
Until recently, I have been able to do pretty much everything I wanted. I’m 75, so you can’t expect to do what you did when you were 50. But I notice now that I prioritize things. I don’t want to do something I won’t enjoy because I know I can’t do everything; I can’t stay at something as long as I used to.

Marian’s experience led her to discover post-polio support groups, which she attended for some time. The one she attended was in London, and meets the third Saturday every other month including October. Call Heather McAdam at 519-764-2481 for more information. The March of Dimes (http://www.marchofdimes.ca/) is also active in supporting polio survivors.

Alternative View
By Lance Crossley

In his weekly radio and Internet address this past weekend, U.S. President Barack Obama lashed out against critics making “phony claims” about his health care reform bill. He urged “an honest debate, not one dominated by willful misrepresentations and outright distortions”.
To be sure, the debate on health reform south of the border has been hotly debated. Angry crowds have jammed into town hall meetings across the country. At some of these meetings, the confrontations have even turned physical. Some people call the reform bill socialist, others call it fascist. The problem is that there has been a lot of emotion but not a lot of context.
One of the central features of the bill is the idea of saving dollars through the targeted cost-cutting of Medicare, a government health insurance plan available for Americans 65 and over. These cost-cutting proposals were inspired by some controversial studies at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice. The studies wowed people in the Obama circle by showing how government could cut Medicare spending by hundreds of billions without affecting quality of healthcare delivery.
How did they arrive at these conclusions? The studies found that when it came to end-of-life care, some regions spent more than others on Medicare. The “great discovery” was that the ones that spent more had no major difference in patient outcome than the lesser spending regions. To make a long story short, the Dartmouth Institute championed these lower spending regions as models that should be emulated by the rest of the country. The higher-spending regions, according the studies, have no justification for spending more because other regions get the same results with less. Therefore, there should be essentially the same budget ceiling applied to all care across the country.
Sounds reasonable, right? But hold on a second. One glaring omission in this study is that it fails to take into account data such as the economic status of the patients. For example, the least expensive medicare facility in America is the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. The most expensive facility is found at the New York University Medical Center. Huge socio-economic differences between these two areas were simply ignored in the Dartmouth studies, even though it is well known that economic conditions have a huge impact on health. For example, lower-income people are more vulnerable to chronic diseases, which are extremely costly to treat. The study also didn’t take into account the amount of family support a patient has, which is important because those with more help at home can have more home-care rather than rely on expensive overnight stays at the hospital.
If this cost-cutting proposal is passed in the reform bill, the poorest are the most likely to suffer. While President Obama laments his critics, one wonders whether he has been critical enough of the ones advising him.

To the Editor,
Here’s a bit of verse I wrote about ten years or so ago,  With the upcoming enhancement and change in the appearance of Main St., I thought it might be appropriate.

Ageless Grand Bend
 
Every weekend, rain or shine,
People flock in cars so fine,
Lining up with engines running,
Hoping soon they’ll all be sunning
On our beaches, vast and sandy,
Cheek by jowl, and often randy!
Red and burning, sleek with lotion,
Coolers full of “magic potion”.
Later on they cruise our Main Drag,
Check the shops, the games, then brag
How until six their party ran.
(Sleeping an hour in an old sedan!)
On the sidewalks, road and front lawn
Cups and plates and forks get thrown down
Flow’rs get torn and tossed around,
Dying on the grungy ground!
Miraculously, The Bend maintains
It’s own mystique. And see those stains?
Those blots you walk on everywhere?
Your Grandpa dropped his bubblegum there!
Oh! Oh! New plans will pave it over.
Century-old stains go undercover.
These paving stones – a fresh new page
How will they fare in this bold new age?
 
(The last four lines were added today.)
Cheerio,
Marie Strapp (via email)

To the Editor,
I, too, attended the library room meeting a few Thursdays ago to see the plans that are going forward. It was clear political types and designers were going through the required motions of ‘public input’ and ‘public participation’ to get on with it as soon as they can to capture the much revered infrastructure/stimulus money from other levels of government.
The first $2.5 million comes from the provincial and federal tax base (Editor’s note: prior reports stated the total cost was $2.6 million, but the Lambton Shores municipal website now says that is the amount of funding received); the tremendous funding balance will come from our municipal tax base. It’s very much a Larry the Cable Guy program: Git R Done now or lose the lion’s share of this found cash.
As I type this letter, I am sitting in Grand Bend’s most popular meeting place (Tim Hortons). Wouldn’t it have been creative to have exposed these plans to the people over the last three months by using some wall space?
We might have then seen the green spaces and proposed trees, etc., and been able to compare the green spaces drawn on the beach enhancement sketches and ask if the green would be the same brown spaces of excessive mulch ground cover employed in that glorious job. One might have asked with the reduced parking at the beach whether we can really afford another “just 20 parking space loss” on Main Street?
Like any good plastic surgery clinic, the town has the deposit so let’s get on with the face lift. And as I head next door for breakfast at a business far from the pending minor distraction this enhancement work will be, I think about a good omelette: if they break some eggs, let’s hope we don’t end up with scrambled eggs when served up by reopening in June 2010.
Robert Webb (via email)
(see lambtonshores.ca for draft proposal)

Advice from Mom
By Rita Lessard

On Tuesday, August 18, Tom and I attended the annual chicken barbecue for the Crediton Zion Church. This event is always well attended, and a lot of fun with plenty of food and good fellowship. It’s so nice living in a small town, knowing so many people and hearing the stories about the health and welfare of the many friends one has acquired over the years. I find that a lot of gossip is spread at these affairs, and although the women probably hold the record for being gossipy, the men seemed to be just as good. As a matter of fact, I was listening to a conversation with two very humorous gentlemen.
“So Gerry,” the one man said. “I met Gladys the other day on main street.”
“Oh, ya,” Gerry replied. “I hear she hasn’t been feeling too well.”
“I don’t know about that,” said the other fellow. “When I mentioned that I had heard about her being bedridden, her reply was, ‘Hardly. I haven’t been bedridden since my husband died five years ago.’”
That Gladys always was a cracker.

Sports injuries
My best regards for a speedy recovery for my young friend Tanya, who fell off her bike and now has her arm in a sling. It’s so sad because she will be out of action for a while; there go her golfing and slo-pitch seasons.
My mother was quite active in her day, but wasn’t exempt from injuring her limbs. I recall the evening she had a bowling date and put her knee out.
This was a fluke of an accident. As she was wiggling into her girdle, she somehow veered right when she should have gone left, and snap, the knee went out of place.
“Darn,” she exclaimed, “this will never do.” Always quick thinking, she just gave her knee a good whack and put it back in place. There, good as new, and she went on to bowl the best game of the season. Feisty, that mother of mine. Lord only knows how she could bowl in that contraption in the first place. I guess fashion was important. Comfort must have been secondary. You certainly wouldn’t want to pass gas. It wouldn’t have anywhere to escape. Like they say, “Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide.”

This week’s tips

Keeping the Peace
By Tom Lessard, C.D.

It all began many many moons ago. This is the saga of the bridge, sewers and roads.
“We need a new bridge,” they said. “And your septic systems are shot, and have to be replaced by sewers.”
Detour signs began going up, which meant there would be no entry or exit at the east end of town. Jordy’s Gas Bar immediately felt the brunt of this move as there was no through traffic. This detour had one positive effect on the town. The “race track” (the main road) was virtually shut down and there was no loud truck noise. One negative effect was that, as my wife and I have to clean the Huron Park Post Office, we were obliged to go down Parr Line to Mt. Camel Road and turn left at Airport Line to get to Huron Park (quite the detour).
We took up residence in Crediton on November 8th, 2002; first-time home owners we were. Two weeks later, we received a notice in our front door inviting us to a meeting at the town hall that would explain everything we needed to know about the upcoming installation of sewers. No one had told us of this project prior to this. It was a bit of a shock to find out that it was going to cost us up to $20 000 per lot. From what I have been told by many residents of the town, this sewer project had been in the planning since 1995. Prior to amalgamation there was, so I’ve been informed, $1 million in a fund in the Stephen Twp. budget for just such a project, but that money disappeared when we were taken over by South Huron. At the meeting we were told that requests had been made to COMRIF for federal and provincial assistance to cover two-thirds of the cost, leaving us to pay the remaining third. This would have been no real hardship to most Creditionites. It sounded good, especially to those whose septic tanks were in bad shape. We organized the citizenry of both Crediton and Centralia after we were told that there would be no COMRIF funding because the fund had been depleted.
The push was on. Signs were made up with “No Grants. No Sewers” inscribed on them. Most of the households of both villages attended the next council meetings to voice our displeasure with the powers that be over their caving in to the MInistry of Environment to push the sewers through without any financial aid coming in. I even had sign boards, which I wore, and paraded around in front of the town hall. It didn’t do us a lot of good. It was no money out of councillors’ pockets (all residents of other towns), so they didn’t seem to be bothered by our woes. Projects will proceed with utmost speed.
Thank God for Diane Faubert Tripp. She took it upon herself to make an appointment with the provincial Finance Minister, who was going to be in Goderich. From him, she received $1 million to be shared by the homeowners in both villages, amounting to $3500 per house.
You get a get a gold star in heaven for your efforts, Diane.
To be continued….
Happy Birthday Millie Lessard and Patsy Gray. You both look just as pretty as you did 60 years ago. Love you both.