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Bill Redekop
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You can bet the farm on housebarns
NEUBERGTHAL -- It turns out some people weren't slipping into the barns just to check on the livestock after all, a century ago in this heritage village. Neubergthal, renowned for its Mennonite house barns, once had a liquor problem. Not only was alcohol the ruin of several farms, but at least three families operated stills in a village of 40 housebarns. Part of one of those stills is a museum piece here.View Full Column | 05/24/2013 3:17 AM | 0
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Tapping sweetness from birch trees
GRAND MARAIS -- There's the Call of the Wild in the birch syrup produced here. It doesn't have that saturated sweetness of mass-produced syrups. An apt comparison might be wild game versus store-bought meats. Beyond the wow factor, birch syrup has a sweet tang that lingers, similar to a wine. One taste, and you want to sit in the corner like a bear with a jar of honey.View Full Column | 05/17/2013 1:00 AM | 0
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Oldest 4-H club in nation continues to shape youth
ROLAND -- That this small Pembina Valley village holds bragging rights as the oldest 4-H club in Canada is an honour, indeed. But less mentioned is that Roland was Canada's first 4-H club by just a matter of days. Seven other 4-H clubs started up in Manitoba that year, 1913, in the towns of Darlingford, Manitou, Neepawa, Oak Lake, Starbuck, Stonewall and Warren.View Full Column | 05/6/2013 1:00 AM | 0
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Birtle Collegiate students learn to construct entire homes
BIRTLE -- If the women don't find you handsome, they should at least find you handy, in the immortal words of Red Green. That could also be the motto at Birtle Collegiate.View Full Column | 04/15/2013 1:00 AM | 0
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Mennonites return good for evil in town
When some Mennonites arrived in the Ukrainian village of Molochansk in 2000, local people were suspicious. In the Russian Revolution and Second World War, the 80,000 Mennonites living in Ukraine were completely displaced: killed, or shipped to Siberian gulags, where scores died; relocated to the eastern Soviet Union, especially Kazakhstan; or escaped to the West. Mennonite buildings, but not Mennonites, are all that remain in the farming town of Molochansk, as in most other former colonies in southeastern Ukraine.View Full Column | 03/18/2013 1:00 AM | 0
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A simply terrific Tim's
SAGKEENG FIRST NATION -- Treaty number, please. Ummm...View Full Column | 03/9/2013 3:23 AM | 0
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This joint relieves pain, but if you try to pull a fast one, you'll be the one getting smoked
BRANDON -- During Prohibition, some people could still obtain alcohol legally, only not through the local pub or liquor store. They got it from a pharmacy. People would go to a doctor for a prescription to consume liquor for, ahem, "medicinal purposes," wink, wink.View Full Column | 02/25/2013 1:00 AM | 0
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Dad happiest with Christmas over
The punctuation mark on our family Christmas always came right after we opened the last present. That's it, our dad would proclaim. It's over for another year, he'd say, as if he'd timed it with a stopwatch. All that planning and preparation, he'd say with private amazement, over in a brief flurry of crumpling and tearing Christmas wrap. His proclamations were always like hitting the nadir in the manic-depressive cycle. Two months of running around. Now, just a feeling of nothingness. Then our dad would tell the story about the time he got a single toy car for Christmas and broke it before lunchtime.View Full Column | 12/24/2012 1:00 AM | 0
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75 years for province's first credit union
ST. MALO -- In the early 1960s, a young Louis Gosselin of St. Malo was looking to get a loan to buy his dream car, a blue Dodge Charger with dual exhaust and a 440 Magnum under the hood. But the Caisse populaire de St. Malo, the first credit union ever created in Manitoba, had been founded by a Catholic priest and it still had a certain religious ethic: It didn't lend for luxuries. Even into the 1960s, members couldn't get a loan to buy a TV set, for example.View Full Column | 12/10/2012 1:00 AM | 0
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Fort Ellice will greet visitors again
Manitobans are about to gain access to a historical fort site and it's not Upper Fort Garry. The old Fort Ellice site, which governments have been trying to buy for at least four decades, has finally been purchased from private interests and will soon be open to visitors.View Full Column | 11/19/2012 1:00 AM | 0
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A bridge too fine
RIVERTON -- The previous four bridges here, dating back 120 years, were all wiped out by floods. Those bridges spanning the Icelandic River were built in 1892, 1910, 1932 and 1974 -- the last one knocked out by flood and ice floes in 2011.View Full Column | 11/3/2012 1:00 AM | 0
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Covering Elma and district for 45 years
ELMA -- She's Manitoba's longest-serving news correspondent, yet hardly anyone knows her name. Patsy Kozak has been filing dispatches from her bureau -- her kitchen table in Elma -- for the Carillon weekly newspaper for the past 45 years.View Full Column | 10/20/2012 1:00 AM | 0
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Her grave is 'just like a lost soul'
NEAR SUNDOWN -- Splotches of sunlight penetrate the forest's fretwork, falling onto the grave of the little girl who died here a century ago. One story people tell is that she was killed by wolves. The girl had wandered away from the cabin, which would have bordered swampy Horseshoe Lake, and all that was found was her shredded clothes. Another story is that she was born with serious deformities and simply didn't live much beyond two years of age.View Full Column | 10/1/2012 1:00 AM | 0
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Housebarn puts tiny town on map
NEUBERGTHAL -- While cleaning under the sink of an abandoned housebarn here several years ago, Margruite Krahn received a start. She thought she'd discovered a dead rat. She soon realized it was just a braid of hair from the widow who last lived there.View Full Column | 09/24/2012 1:00 AM | 0
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Fish for change in a walleye wallet
LA RIVIÈRE -- Nothing says you're from Manitoba quite like... a walleye-skin wallet? Walleye wallets have started flipping open at cash registers in Manitoba and are about to go on sale across North America.View Full Column | 09/17/2012 3:17 AM | 0
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Broken bridge troubles political waters
NEAR WASKADA -- That's some detour. To get home, Shirley Kernaghan parks her car on the highway shoulder, crawls through a barbed-wire fence without snagging her garden-green slacks or blue windbreaker --"I'm a farm girl," she explains -- and hikes 300 metres across an uneven pasture thick with burrs and foxtail.View Full Column | 09/14/2012 1:00 AM | 0
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Mars Hill draws tourists, gunfire
MARS HILL -- Peggy Kasuba had just given a tour of damage to Mars Hill from ATVs and target shooters when, as if on cue, we encountered a target shooter with at least six rifles. Robert Burkard was taking his nephew and nephew's friend out for target practice, which is perfectly legal on unoccupied Crown lands. There are four sites that people use as unofficial rifle ranges in the Mars Hill Wildlife Management Area, about 70 kilometres northeast of Winnipeg.View Full Column | 08/9/2012 1:00 AM | 0
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They love to get into the swing with scythes
COOKS CREEK -- It's all in the hip action, says scything guru Angela Temple. Swing your scythe low, blade up, and twist. "You're using your whole body," says Temple, sounding like a fitness instructor.View Full Column | 08/4/2012 1:00 AM | 0
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A guided tour of Riel's North Dakota hideout
WALHALLA, N.D. -- With his provisional government in disarray and Gen. Garnet Wolseley's army in hot pursuit, Louis Riel fled Fort Garry, which became Winnipeg, to a fur-trading post in North Dakota run by his friend, Antoine Blanc Gingras. Gingras (1821-77) was a dominant figure in the Red River and Pembina valleys. A fat, jovial man -- a Red River missionary remarked that Gingras once drove him crazy on a trail ride singing ad nauseam about the Métis victory in the Battle of Seven Oaks -- Gingras was an astute businessman and the richest man in the area. He owned trading posts in Pembina, N.D., and along the Souris River in North Dakota, as well as in Fort Garry.View Full Column | 07/13/2012 1:00 AM | 0
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Log movie theatre a feature attraction
WASAGAMING -- The exterior isn't much. The Park Theatre is a log building, but the exterior is coated with a thick, chocolate-brown stain, more like a paint. It provides protection from the elements but mutes the magnificence of what's inside.View Full Column | 07/9/2012 1:00 AM | 0
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Conversion to digital equipment means end is near for drive-in theatres rural cinemas
MORDEN -- Marlene Nelson's magic drive-in movie moment came while watching the tornado flick Twister. It was a dark and stormy night at Morden's Stardust Drive-In: screaming winds; thunder and lightning all around. Then a great gust of wind blew across at the precise moment in the movie when a tornado whips a cow across the screen.View Full Column | 06/16/2012 1:00 AM | 0
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Will the lights go down in Beausejour?
BEAUSEJOUR -- Growing up in England, Mick Baxter used to sneak into movie theatres by walking in backwards. If the custodian looked up, he switched to walking forward as if walking out. When the custodian looked away, he walked backwards all the way into those dark, magical movie theatres.View Full Column | 06/16/2012 11:17 AM | 0
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Ukraine mission beats new rules on immigration
The province is leading a delegation to Kyiv, Ukraine, next month to drum up immigration one last time before the federal government narrows the door. The province is making the trip before the Harper government tightens English-language standards starting in July. The trip runs from June 7-11.View Full Column | 05/26/2012 1:00 AM | 0
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Where there's a willow, there's a way
GIMLI -- The lowly willow bush grows like a weed and has been of little use to people except as willow switches to keep children on the virtuous path. But conservation districts across Manitoba are having great results planting willow bushes for erosion control on our lakes and rivers.View Full Column | 05/12/2012 1:00 AM | 0
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Time capsule of fun for sale
WINNIPEG BEACH -- The illusion behind the arcade, Playland, the longest-running business in Winnipeg Beach, is that time can actually stand still. So the arcade walls are plastered with iconic posters, everything from a psychedelic Bob Dylan to a Ghostbusters movie poster, from K.C. and the Sunshine Band to cheesecake posters of TV stars from the 1970s such as Adrienne Barbeau, the daughter in Maude. "Some people come in here just to look at the posters," said Tony Pimentel, who, along with wife, Rochelle Hykawy, owns Playland.View Full Column | 05/5/2012 1:00 AM | 0
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