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Kaslo.org is intended to be a place where we can share and swap info and stories with one another. Kaslovian Jessie Kennedy Herreshoff has come up with a great suggestion - here's how she put it in a recent email: "Like many of us, David and I over the past 23 years have regularly been asked at parties or neighborhood get-togethers,'how did you two find Kaslo?' or "how did a former American and Scot with strong individual opinions manage to reach consensus to abandon their previous lives and move to a village one of them had never heard of and couldn't even find on a map?' It occurs to me that virtually every person who has moved here from somewhere else is asked some version of the same question. So my suggestion is that there could be an entertaining and informative segment on this website for the stories of those who made the carefully considered (or perhaps spur of the moment) decision to abandon previous careers and lifestyles to come to Shangri La. I'm not the Webmaster of the Kaslo website but how about calling it 'How We All Found Kaslo'?" Sounds like a great idea to us. Who's next?! Move to Kaslo?
This of course was an impossible request as I had never seen Kaslo. He had found the village while visiting old friends in the Balfour area. He was scouting around for our future retirement home and decided to drive further up the lake. But I had never been in British Columbia and could not have found Kaslo on a map if my life depended on it. I knew vaguely that it was somewhere in Western Canada, but like most Brits I had no idea how huge Canada was. However I had spent too many years living and working in the greater Detroit area of the U.S. and would probably have moved to Siberia in hopes of a better lifestyle so I finally said (but in many more words) “O.K.” One other irrational reason why I said yes was that as a young child during the Second World War the highlight of each Christmas (assuming the ship had not been sunk by German submarines) was the arrival of a huge box of British Columbia apples from distant cousins of my mother. I had carried that wonderful taste with me all through my adult life, partly because B.C. apples are special, but also partly because we World War II children were close to starvation by the time the war finally ended and that annual box of B.C. apples literally helped my family to stay in reasonably good health in spite of the food shortages, particularly in the last two years or so of that terrible conflict. Long time, and much-missed Kaslo resident Truus Meijer Drees and I used to sit in her comfortable kitchen eating chocolate and reminiscing about being children during the Second World War. She of course had a much tougher time than I, as Holland was occupied by the German army during that war. She said they had to eat the special tulip bulbs sometimes and I tried to keep my end of the story up by elaborating on the delights of chewing red sealing wax and pretending it was chewing gum. (we did not know until much later that the red dye in sealing wax was toxic). She sometimes discussed this period in history with Kaslo resident Bruce Tate. Bruce had been a twenty year old soldier in the Canadian regiment that liberated Truus’s home town, with their regimental colours proudly held aloft, while Truus and her parents stood in the street waving Canadian flags and cheering their liberators. Her father was a member of the brave Dutch Resistance and her mother (a physician) hid wounded freedom fighters and Allied airmen in their attic. What I am trying to say in too many words is that from the first day I strolled along Front Street with David I have felt completely at home in Kaslo, and have known and enjoyed the friendship of many fine (and frequently delightfully eccentric) people over the years. I have lived in quite a few different parts of the world during my lifetime: (the Scottish shipbuilding town of Port-Glasgow on the River Clyde, “the automobile capital of the world,” Detroit; Istanbul, Turkey; and two years in Romania during the dictatorship of the madman Ceausescu for example), but Kaslo and those who live here won my heart right from the start. ...
When I first saw the acreage David had bought at Fletcher Creek, right next to the waterfall, my first reaction was that this pile of rock and cliff did not even have enough level ground to build a cabin on, let alone a permanent home. And I was right. So David (the eternal optimist in our marriage) said we would just have to build it on the Old Road and hope for the best. That was over twenty five years ago and the house is still sitting solidly anchored where it should be. Sometime during the first week I spent in Kaslo I was standing in the grocery store and heard someone with an unmistakable Glasgow accent making a wisecrack with another customer. The accent belonged to Dick Smith, the Kaslo Boatbuilder Extraordinaire. It turned out that Dick had served his shipbuilding apprenticeship in the same Clyde shipyard in which my father had spent his working life, and my grandfather and great grandfather before him.
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