The Need Is Great

It might have been interest the election generated. It might be Aurora's population is growing younger. Or it might just be my imagination and a natural tendency to marvel at things.

But I swear, the crowd at the Parade this year seemed considerably more than in the past.

I thought it was great last year as well. But last night was spectacular.

It reminded me of something former Councillor Walt Davis once told me. Walt's family were several generations Auroran. His mother was the proudest Auroran I knew.

I wrote a column about a visit to Orangeville and how people clustered in groups on wide sidewalks, caught up in conversation.

Walt said that's how it used to be in Aurora on a Friday night.The crowds were so dense, a person had to step off the sidewalk onto the road to move.

Pay packets were handed out on a Friday. People came in from the country to shop and a good part of the expedition was catching up on the week's gossip.Town and country blended well.

In the town centre, there was a millinery shop. Two ladies wear shops. Two men's wear. Stedman's. A paint shop. A butchers, a bakers and Thompson's furniture. Two drug stores, a couple of barbers, a pool room, Queen's Hotel on one corner and Bank of Montreal stepped up from the sidewalk on the other.Doctors and dentists' and lawyers' offices were part of it.

The street frontage doesn't seem like much now.

I forgot about the two jewellers facing each other on opposite sides of the street and shoe shops. The further my mind's eye roams the more stores I remember.

Caruso's Fruit Market with the family still there, more than a hundred years later,still with the memory of the night they arrived in the dark of winter. At the entry to the store. a shovel to clear snow from the entrance and a bucket of coal and kindling to make a fire to warm the house for the young mother and father and two small children.

I couldn't help thinking last night. If just half the people thronging Yonge Street for the parade, made a habit of coming in to Yonge Street to get to know the merchants and what they have to offer, it might not be long before those merchants are joined by others.

Why should re-growing a town be any different from growing it in the first place.

Why should people to-day have less of a pioneering spirit than years ago?

The need is just as great.