-
-
Rum Tales Down Home Yarns Around a Pot-Bellied Stove
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Welcome to The Shop.
Arthur Benjamin Lohnes was proprietor of a small country store known locally as The Shop in Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia, from 1919 through 1957. AB, as he was called, provided a welcoming haven to people eager to indulge in the venerable art of loafing and storytelling. The yarns were spun by some of the most colourful characters of the first half of the twentieth century.
With the blessing of their wives, menfolk met there regularly around the warmth of AB?s pot-bellied stove, a cozy forum in which to relate experiences and share their concerns of the day. The practice was carried out almost to the point of ceremony. Starring actors in this pageant of patriarchs ranged from grizzled old blue water sea captains through ordinary seamen to shore fishermen, a preacher, store owner, and a part-time postmaster. The tales are spliced with a biographical narrative – glimpses of adventures and misadventures ? of a gentle, kindly woman, once a child, to whom the book is dedicated.
The tales recounted within the walls of AB?s store take the reader back to a bygone era of daily poverty and everyday adventures in a coastal Nova Scotian community. Thanks to these storytellers, the past survives and comes alive for the modern reader.
-
The Legend of Gladee’s Canteen Down Home on a Nova Scotia Beach
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95“Everyone remembers the famous food at Gladee’s Canteen, especially Gladee’s fish and chips and her coconut cream pie.” — Calvin Trillin
Gladee’s Canteen, several times voted as one of the ten best restaurants in Canada, was a special example of co-operative and communal spirit. At the centre of the operation were Gladee and her sister Flossie, supported by the extended Hirtle family. They offered a warm welcome and a memorable menu, in a setting brashly open to the forces of nature.
The Legend of Gladee’s Canteen tells the story of a popular Nova Scotia beach and a pioneer family who, against the odds, constructed a simple canteen at Hirtle’s Beach in1951 and ran it for forty years. The book draws on the author’s family associations, personal memory, and the outlying stockpile of collective recollections — a tapestry of events woven through the evolutionary fabric of a small, relatively isolated Maritime coastal community.
The era of Gladee’s Canteen is remarkable story that takes place in a small coastal Nova Scotia community blessed with a spectacularly dynamic living beach. In its time, the Hirtle family and its sparkling enterprise thrived in spite of relative isolation, uncertain funding, and domestic demons. As a Nova Scotia epic, the success story of Gladee’s Canteen mirrors the recent history of Hirtle’s Beach, exemplifying the twists and turns locked up in legend.
-
Random Shots
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Random Shots tells the stories of survival against the odds, the life of a well-travelled risking-taking Maritime son. Fortunate to have survived numerous near misses during the lead-up to his eightieth trip around the Sun, Mossman has much to be grateful for along the paths taken to adventure.
As a strong defense over the passage of time, memory is everything. As narrator, Mossman, aided by diaries and recordings across the years, shares with vivid insight his travelling experiences in and around Lesotho, Northwest Territories, Gabon, the Bay of Fundy, Australia, the Congo, Zambia, Nunavut, New Zealand, the offshore Atlantic Ocean, Ontario, and Brazil.
Survival–the act of staying alive despite the odds–is the theme of the book. Many of these stories of adventure took place in a world far from the one with which most people are familiar. They are at once both startling and revealing and told with a bold style and wit that the author’s fans will immediately recognize.
-
Oceans of Rum
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$22.95Prohibition, legislated in the U.S. in 1921, was intended to ban the manufacture, transport and sale of intoxicating liquor. However, it soon became obvious that successfully policing the entire coastline of the Pacific, Atlantic, and the Great Lakes was impossible. In eastern Canada the door was suddenly wide open for fishermen willing to make the remarkable switch to smuggling. Even with the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, rum-running remained a profitable venture in Atlantic Canada up until World War II.
Excitement, camaraderie, drama on the high seas, love affairs, big payoffs, and fast cars – these were the returns for a life of smuggling in Atlantic Canada during Prohibition for those who dared. And David Mossman’s uncle Teddy, Captain Winfred “Spinny” Spindler, certainly dared. Like so many others, the former deep-sea fisherman seized the opportunity to turn use his sea-going skills for rum-running between the years 1923 to 1938. Adventuresome and resilient, charismatic and resourceful, Captain Spindler matured and endured through necessity, hard work and tragedy, toward the end persevering like proverbial Job through his allotted ninety-three years.
In Oceans of Rum, Mossman once again draws on family, community and Canadian history, this time to bring the story of rum-running in Atlantic Canada to vivid, pulsing life through his uncle’s actual experiences. Mossman’s book is a three-cornered chronicle involving Spindlers, Ritceys and Romkeys – all South Shore families. It is an account tinged with tragedy and intrigue and shows how seemingly ordinary folk can find themselves thrust into the most extraordinary activities.
-
Going Over A Nova Scotian Soldier in World War I
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Going Over is the biography of Titus Mossman, a veteran of the “Great War” who served with the 85th Canadian Infantry Battalion (Nova Scotia Highlanders) on the Western Front. This book blends social, political and historical issues of those turbulent times with the story of one young Canadian turned soldier, caught at the sharp edge of history.
