Candlelight, tugboats and 10-cent beers… this guy’s seen it all

Every week, I will be profiling an extraordinary human being who lives in our community. If you know someone who is doing something interesting with their life, I want to hear about it. Send me an email at [email protected].

Ken May has never lived more than a few blocks away away from where he was born.

He welcomes me into his beautiful home on Lake Vernon. We sit at his kitchen table and begin to reminisce about the good old days. Despite the 55-year age gap between us, we happen to know a lot of the same people.

May has so many stories to tell and he recalls each of them with an uncanny attention to detail. He knows names and dates as if they are etched into his memory. He’s as local as someone can get. He remembers people going to town with horses and buggies, tugboats pulling logs down the river, the tannery when it was a bustling place and when a pipeline exploded in town and “you could read the paper from the light of the flare.” He was around when it cost 50 cents to see a movie at the theatre, 25 cents for a haircut and 10 cents for a glass of beer. He recalls during the war when special cards had to be issued in order to buy sugar and booze and when everyone went to town on Saturdays to get their supply of eggs and butter. He still can’t believe there isn’t a grocery store on Main Street anymore.

His eyes twinkle with a certain wonder when he tells me all about what it was like growing up in Huntsville almost nine decades ago.

“We had to make our own fun back then,” he says. I tell him kids are plugged into video games and cell phones nowadays. He tells me he owned a .22 rifle when he was 10 years old. “I used to ski to school, too. And back then the roads weren’t plowed and we had really cold weather.”

May holds a photograph of a time gone by with his son.

May was the second eldest of his four siblings. He tells me a heart-breaking story of how is sister Verna died when she was nine years old. She only survived a month after being diagnosed with spinal meningitis. That was a really difficult time for his family. Two of his other siblings have since passed away and his youngest sister is in the hospital right now.

When I was growing up, we didn’t have electricity… that didn’t come around until 1939. We had to wait a bit for that.

His great, great grandparents were some of the original settlers around Lake Vernon. He grew up on the lake his whole life. The century-old St. John’s Anglican Church on Ravenscliffe Road wouldn’t be there if it wasn’t for the efforts of his great-grandfather. In fact, it’s named after him. May even went to school in Ravenscliffe’s one-room schoolhouse.

His family pictures line the walls of his Lake Vernon home.

“When I was growing up, we didn’t have electricity… that didn’t come around until 1939. We had to wait a bit for that.” He chuckles, then adds that indoor plumbing was also a luxury not many people could afford at the time. “But my dad was quite the inventor. He made a contraption where we had a hand pump that pumped water to a pipe going up to the attic into a tank, and when it got full it overflowed outside. We had a water tank by the stove with a pipe going around into the firebox and back out into a water tank. And that was that. We had hot water.”

In the late 40s, he started a job as a roads superintendent for the Chaffey Township. He was around when the township got its first snowplow and the plow’s hydraulics were all powered by hand.

“We thought we had the cat right by the tail,” he says of the 1949 Dodge five-tonne. “Plow trucks operated a lot different back then.”

It was long after that he started working for the Ministry of Transportation, a job he maintained for 35 years.

He facilitated road infrastructure and helped build the main road from Skeleton Lake to Rosseau, and from South Portage Road in Lake of Bays to District Road 2 (now Muskoka Road 2) to Baysville. He also worked on Ravenscliffe Road and Port Cunnington Road ­– and many others too numerous to mention.

He was married for 60 years to his wife, Helen, who passed away three years ago. He had three children but lost twins and says back then there wasn’t as much knowledge as there is today about premature births.

He’s a kindred spirit and anyone who knows him will tell you that. He’s faced hardship but more good times than bad.

“I figure I’ve had a good life so far,” he says as we wrap up our hour-long chat. “We never went hungry. I still drive. I have my health. I love to hunt. As a matter of fact I just got back from deer hunting and went moose hunting the other week. Yes, I guess I do consider myself lucky.”

Never too old to hunt. May, here, with his hunting buddies.

He gives me a big hug and tells me I’m sort of interesting myself (maybe it’s my face piercings or my bleach-blonde hair). Or maybe it’s that he’s never met someone my age who’s totally enthralled by his stories. He tells me to come back the next day so I can see his place in the daytime. He has a great view of the lake, that’s for sure.