San 77w's group o/ young people was photographed at the Souris breakwater The cast of an Irish play presented in St. Patrick's Hall. The hall is today the Yeo Theatre, operated as a cinema by Claude Richards . Irish societies still have the right to use the hall. Bathing at Souris beach before bare skin became the fashion. main feature — and over and above all, a speech from the manager, Bruce Yeo . "But our favourite actors and actresses were the live ones in the local St. Patrick's Day and Easter plays — beautiful heroines like Ethel Hughes , Delia MacDonald , Kit Granahan, Alice Lavie — and heroes like John D. Maclntyre , Mel McQuaid, Strut Brennan, Eddie Mac- Donald, Russell and Brenton St. John, Marcus Mooney and Art Allan MacDonald — to mention a few. The plays were most often directed by Peter MacLellan . "But you didn't need money to have a good time then. Ike Cheverie had high jumps and broad jumps in his backyard, and everybody was welcome. Pitching horseshoes and knifie were popular games. The beach, the rocks, the wharves have always been playgrounds for the Souris children. You could fish smelts or tinkers from the wharf or breakwater, borrow a dory from a ves¬ sel, climb the storm signal tower, or jump ice cakes in the spring. On New Year's Day it was usually safe to skate on Norris's Pond. The boys would scrape the ice and light a bonfire. In the evenings you walked home from the skate singing and shouting to keep warm. "Later an ice rink was built in town from money raised from open air dances. Here Angus Lavie was manager and referee. His word was law. When he pointed the mid¬ dle finger (why the middle finger no one seemed to know) and said, "See bully ..." order was instantly restored. His job wasn't an easy one. Would-be hockey players from the country who didn't know one blueline from another still remember his muttered exasperation, "Swamp hockey!" And the girls' hockey team often had trouble trying to collect the five cents apiece the players needed to get on the ice; each time it looked as if this time Angus wouldn't let them on for less than the full amount. But he always relented. "Angus was also deeply involved in the local theatricals already mentioned. He looked after the costumes and the stage. One play, titled "Smiling Through", required a fence and a garden scene. Angus made most of the roses himself. A neighbour, Rosella Mclsaac , remembers them well. 'They were gorgeous. That man could do anything. The Lavie house before a play was beyond everything!' "Another excitement that no one forgets was the first landing by an aeroplane in Souris . It was recess time for the students at St. Mary's Convent, and all took off across town to what is now the , where the craft had come down. 'Did we ever catch it when we got back!' recalls Gen Roach , who was in Grade 10 at the time." Not all Adele's memories of her childhood are happy ones. She recalls seeing a man with a large family of small children hauling a hand sleigh along the railway track in winter collecting pieces of coal that had fallen from the train, and hearing another time of how a neighbour, George Neil MacDonald , entered the home of Dan 10