Last fall, I was walking a Caribbean beach with a group of business people. We were on a Small Business Cruise and had the day to roam sandy beaches together. Terry Coles, one of the cruise organizers, turned to me on the beach and said: “If you could be walking here with any famous person,…
Let’s roll back the clock for a bit… back to 1970. It was the year I got married, and the year before I moved to Barrie. It was the year that RPM Magazine owner Walt Grealis and record label owner Stan Klees launched Canada’s Gold Leaf Awards to recognize the very best in Canadian music….
Thursdays with the SBNA in Barrie are the best kept secret in town, according to Donna Douglas There are miracles all over the place and Barrie is full of them. One of these miracles happens every Thursday morning. Every Thursday morning, at precisely 9:15 a.m., the doors to Barrie Public Library open and a group…
Let’s see… I’m rummaging around in my paper recycling bin trying to find the letter from Rogers. Hmmm, here’s that nifty looking ad for yet another wooden filing cabinet. Don’t need that; all I need to is purge some files in the cabinets I’ve got. And here’s where I dumped the contents of my three-ring…
There’s a fellow we’re going to call Kevin. That’s not his real name, butit’s the name that will do just nicely for this story. Kevin was going through a rough patch. When he split up with hisgirlfriend, he turned to go back home to ‘Dad’. His father was having hisown rough patch and was actually…
What makes a community? This would actually be an excellent topic for community response, a way to build our understanding of what that really means to people. One of the best definitions I ever heard came from Figure Skating Champion Kurt Browning when he described his home town. His community was so small that everyone…
Every summer, when J.C. Mitchell Insurance hosts a Business After Five for Barrie Chamber members, Elaine and Nadine Carr are flipping burgers for hungry participants. Great burgers. They flip them again for a fundraiser for the Seasons Centre. And again for United Way. They hold Dollar Days for Big Brothers. In fact, Nadine and Elaine…
There’s a time in every parent’s life when keeping your mouth shut and a smile on your face just makes sense. Brian and Cheryl Cartwright faced this time last fall when their seven year old son came running in from his Beaver Pack meeting at the church hall in Coldwater. Denham Cartwright was a foot…
So, here’s the situation. Individual puts a load of money on the line, hoping to build a bit of a nestegg for retirement. Self employed for years, there was no pension plan in site and the RRSP’s had taken a beating. So the individual buys a house, spends a fair bit of time and money…
Last fall I wrote a column about the Old Boys Club. So often people sneer about the ‘old boys’ and I wanted to draw attention to their contribution to our community welfare. Well, there’s a new opportunity to honour the do-ers in our community, but this time it’s not for people who’ve been in Barrie…