When Parry Sound hosted its annual winter carnivals, John Macfie always seemed a natural to play the part of that rough and wild mascot Seguin Sam.
And why not? He invented this endearing axe-touting rough-around-the-edges maverick whose character seemed curiously akin to John’s own. With his often outrageous on-stage style, dry-witted humour, mischievous antics and flirty teasing with the lovely Seguin Sarah dance hall girls, John’s alter ego Seguin Sam was sure to stir things up at any winter carnival event.
“When 1967 was coming up as Canada’s centennial, communities were encouraged to have a blast,” John recalls. “A recreation committee was appointed in Parry Sound and I was on it.”
Just in time for having a blast that first winter carnival in 1967, he invented and sketched an artistic caricature he called Parry Hoot. This stuck until a contest was held three or four years later, and Parry Sound’s lumberjack mascot was officially renamed Seguin Sam.
“The character was a lumberjack who arrived on the Parry Sound river drive determined to have a good time,” John says. “It was historically correct because in the pine logging days, the boom days, when there were three huge saw mills grinding out lumber down here on the waterfront, the logs were being herded down from the interior by people like him, in a 30 to 40 man crew. The legends grew, of course. Most of the lumberjacks were quiet, home-loving people that would never allow a drink of liquor to pass their lips, but the ones that stood out were the ones who whooped it up and got put in jail.”
Seguin Sam symbolized those colourful characters of the pine logging era which slowly began in this district in1850 and peaked between 1870 and 1920, when Parry Sound became sawdust city.
Seguin Sam assumed a busy social whirl that first winter carnival, becoming a familiar presence on floats in parades and at various community events.Wearing the lumberjack costume of a red plaid flannel shirt, worn mackinaw, oversized sturdy work boots and floppy pioneer hat – as authentic as he could invent based on his research – John embraced the role with gusto.
It was this deep affinity for the pioneers and loggers who shaped the Parry Sound district that prompted John to interview the area’s real Seguin Sams over the years. Although few were as colourful as John’s alter ego, they were characters nonetheless, all with enlightening lumberjack stories and anecdotes which would one day fill hundreds of bi-weekly North Star newspaper columns and 11 local history books.
John’s fascination for the real life Seguin Sams began on the Macfie family farm in Dunchurch.
“I was a logger since I was old enough to pick up one end of a cross cut saw,” he recalls. “My dad logged every winter, so as soon as we were old enough, we learned. Teaching someone to cross cut saw is very hard work. Once you get good at it, the rhythm is just like walking, but teaching someone on the other end of a cross cut saw is difficult. You’re doing most of the work and they’re pushing when they should be pulling. My father used to complain, that being the oldest, he had to break his three brothers in on the cross cut saw, and then his five sons, in the next generation. So he spent his lifetime breaking people in on the cross cut saw. He logged heavily in the winter.”
During his youth, John remembers developing a strong boyhood distaste for farm chores and demanding expectations for cutting and stacking wood.
“Which made the second world war – when it came along – seem very attractive,” he says. “It did to all the boys in the country who’d never been anywhere. This was a chance for adventure.”
So at 17-and-a-half, he joined the Air Force and was called just after he turned 18. His service, however, fell short of the adventure he’d anticipated and when he had not been called into action oversees, young John returned home at age 20, disillusioned and aimless, to “drift around trying his hand at various things.”
He considered studying geology there, but found the grim granite-faced towering buildings at the university campus “forbidding” – so much in contrast and far removed from the bush country of the Parry Sound District where John felt in his element.
He picked up a job in meteorology for a while, working as a technician plotting weather maps. Although he learned to type, a skill which would later prove invaluable when he began writing, the job itself quickly became intolerably boring.
“It was a watershed moment when I left that job,” he recalls. “I told my brother that I wanted to get out where it really mattered whether it was raining.”
At 22, John was ready to return to the family farm and spend a full winter logging with his father.
“When I was drifting around, wondering what the heck I was going to do with the rest of my life, dad said I could log with him during the coming winter.”
It turned out to be the winter when John finally became proficient with a cross cut saw, and when Mel McEwen, from a neighbouring farm, would come by to scale their logs for the Department of Lands and Forests (which later became the Ministry of Natural Resources). John was quite intrigued with Mel’s job, so in the spring of 1949, he decided to apply for any chance openings with the Department.
Not only did he get a job, but in the process, met his wife Joan, who was a Lands and Forests employee at the time. John’s long career with the Department of Lands and Forests, began with a position with the wildlife branch, scaling logs in the winter and fighting forest fires in the summer.
Later, he accepted a posting with the department at Sioux Lookout working on trapline management in the Hudson Bay watershed. Here, the former meteorology technician found himself at last where weather really mattered.
The fellow who loved his time in the bush, was getting plenty of it with the Department of Lands and Forest.
“Travel in the far north at that time was by snowshoe and dog team instead of snowmobile, because the snowmobile had not yet been invented,” he explains. “And dog teams go at a dog’s pace.”
His travels in the muskeg and on the Hudson Bay coast, afforded opportunities to observe what others interested in natural resources might not see. So he began writing about these experiences for a Lands and Forests in-house magazine called Sylva. Outsiders also subscribed to it and one day in 1956, he got a letter from the editor of a publication called The Beaver, who to John’s delight, offered him his first chance to write for money. In return, John wrote about native life on the trapline and stories similar to those he later published in his 1990 book, Hudson Bay Watershed.
After Sioux Lookout, he moved further south to Gogama where he had been promoted to fish and wildlife supervisor, and then from 1960 to 1981, he completed his career as a sish and wildlife supervisor in the Parry Sound District. Although this was a management position in Parry Sound, it wasn’t uncommon to find John out in the bush, at all hours, dedicated to his mandate.
“It was my job to see that people didn’t spear pickerel during spawning season and I took my job very seriously,” he says, adding. “I suppose the people who would notice the most would be a poacher I came upon in the dark.”
In 1981, he retired – at least from the MNR.
Like many in retirement, he chose to combine his hobby with his passion. He’d always had an inexplicable penchant for writing and had acquired a fascination with the daily lives of the area pioneers and loggers early in his Dunchurch upbringing.
Along with other wet-behind-the-ears lads, John remembers working on road crews with the old timers, listening to them “yarning away”, bragging about the glory days of the lumber camps and river drives.
“I would start to jot things down,” he says. “At first it was just the funny stuff, jokes, but then I got into the whole milieu of logging.”
In later years, as he worked in the bush, John was frequently reminded of their stories, so when he returned to Parry Sound in 1960, he seized the opportunity to go back to tape record some of these oldtimers as they talked about their experiences.
Conversations of more than 75 area loggers were painstakingly documented in countless books of transcriptions, before the advent of personal computers.
“And then, when I exhausted that subject, I started branching into life on the farm and early life and times in general” he says. “Some were first generation here. Some of them went way back to 1870. So it was a bridge back into the beginning of time in Parry Sound.”
These latter interviews led to the publishing of Tales from Another Time, accounts of the pioneer days and the not-so-pioneer days – community life and how pioneers lived and farmed in the Parry Sound District.
So, armed with a wealth of information about the area’s pioneering history, and real stories and anecdotes from the local folk who lived them, he began writing regular newspaper columns in 1981, initially for the Georgian Bay Beacon and later, the Parry Sound North Star.
“You never run out of ideas,” he says, flipping through a thick file of notes and ideas jotted down for future columns and books. “This file is cooking ideas that are sitting there for columns. For a lot of them, their time will never come, but sometimes something happens that will bring them into focus, or I’ve assembled pages for a future column and may never use them.
“I’ve struck a vein no one else is touching,” he says, explaining that he perceives his columns and books of accounts, as “filling in the cracks and crevices with mortar – the small things” in the area’s logging and pioneer foundation.
“Not so many people are really doing that. I would never attempt to write the history of Parry Sound, partly because I’m too lazy to do the heavy research. I’m an anecdotal writer. I write the one-liners of history.”
His columns, now numbering well over 500, began as weekly submissions, and later became bi-weekly. They were published in five books. The first, Now and Then, a collection of 75 columns was published in 1983, and John shudders when he thinks of how he’d never really heard of proofreading back then.
“They only improved from then on,” John shrugs. “I quickly caught on after the first book, that I needed someone to proofread and check the grammar in my books.”
Since then, his wife Joan has proofread his books, and in recent years, daughter Beth, who is a professional proof reader, editor and indexer of books, is the final arbitrator “polishing up” his book manuscripts. His newest release is called Lots more ... Parry Sound Stories, and like several of his most recent books, features one of his own oil paintings on the book jacket.
“I like it when a new book comes out,” says the author of 11 books. “You get a little adrenaline out of it, like an actor does on stage after a good performance. It is fulfilling to produce something people are actually willing to pay money for. My books eventually do sell out. Most are self published, but three were published by publishers.”
Not bad for a fella educated in the one-room Sunnyslope School between McKellar and Dunchurch, where he returned to obtain his Grade 10 to qualify for admission into Air Crew in the Air Force.
Later in life, John upgraded his skills by imitating writing and photography styles he liked. His readers appreciated his ability to bring history to life through stories about people they may have known, or are related to. Humanity adds that third dimension to his columns, offering colourful snapshots often missed in textbook accounts.
“It makes you picture a person standing there who’s made a stupid mistake or something – a load of logs upset on him or something like that – those snapshots bring it to life,” he says. “You can write flat history or you can write history that is in three dimensions, by putting people into the foreground and using little anecdotes.”
These anecdotal accounts, mixed occasionally with his own commentary, bring life to the dusty old history textbook accounts of logging and early homesteading in the district.
Often he accomplishes this through the simple things he spotlights in his columns, like the bridge he and his readers often pass but never really think about,
despite it being an appealing piece of architecture linked to threads in the oldtimers’ yarns and significant local history.
“I try to bring the stuff that has impact up front where it affects people” he says, clarifying that this all has to be framed in a 1,000-word column. “So you have to make it punchy.”
Like the Seguin Sam character who came to life at his easel 40 years ago, John thoroughly enjoys bringing local history to life in his bi-weekly columns for the Parry Sound North Star. It seems to be a self-perpetuating game, with one column or interview prompting notions for another tale that has to be told.
“People who can dance, they dance, people who can sing, they sing,” he says. “I find I can write. It’s my way of getting on stage. That’s partly it.”
But it’s much more than that fondness for being on stage which, of course, both John and ‘Sam’ relish.
Having acquired a disdain for meetings while working in government services, he’s not one to join a local service club. So, his books and columns – along with the historical photos he’s collected – have become his community service.
“It’s important that the little things be preserved. I believe I’m doing a public service in putting what was oral history or myth into print, putting it into available form, making it available to those who happen to want it. And the thousands of people who have bought my books make it appear that people want it.”
He agrees that his drive to write his columns and books has a lot to do with leaving a legacy.
“Because books tend to last, it’s my claim to fame – fame or infamy?” he jokes.
Seated at his computer, comfortable in this basement work zone surrounded by his books and files, and his own colourful caricature of Seguin Sam on the wall, John describes himself as an office-bound tour guide.
“Doing it this way, sitting in a chair, is easier than talking to a busload of tourists touring Parry Sound’s history,” he comments. “And it’s easier for the consumer because they can do it at their leisure instead of sitting in a seat, as we tour back into history in easily digested morsels.”
John Macfie: Office-based tour guide takes readers back into logging history one easily digestible column at a time
Local historian John Macfie
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