Looking in New Places

Once I got to know more about William's world, 1904 did not seem as long ago as it had. It was less than a hundred years ago. William Pender was not the last cooper that ever was. Maybe there was a cooper who was still alive. Someone who could tell me what it was like. What kind of tools he used. What a cooper's shop smelled like. What a cooper was like when he was a little boy.

The Centre for Newfoundland Studies has a file pile called a vertical file. I asked if they had one about coopers. They did. It was a thin file. It held one article. About a cooper who lived on Leslie Street.

The article was old. The cooper was old. I wondered if he was still alive. I looked him up in the phone book. I phoned him. He said I could come to his house and ask him about his life.

One thing about crafts like barrel making is that they don't change. The barrels Gordon Snow made in the 1920s were the same as those William Pender made before 1904.

Gordon Snow told me many things I could put into my story. He talked about where barrel hoops came from. About games boys and girls used to play with the hoops. About games they played throwing their hats on top of schooner masts. About changing times. About strikes, and working man's wages, and moving away to find work in Ontario. About what a cooper did to make extra money when the barrels were finished for the season. About the times and dates the fish were salted and put in casks. About swimming with girls on the south side of the harbour. Girls in woolen swim suits.

Gordon Snow sat on his couch and held a bit of paper the size of a playing card. He drew small lines on the paper. One for each merchant's premises around St. John's Harbour in 1926. He looked at each mark, and saw the merchant's place. He knew how many barrels that merchant bought from the cooper. He knew how many barrels were made from scratch, and how many were rebuilt from old margarine tubs. He knew the names of the candy the children ate. He knew where cooper lads went with their girls to see a penny theatre show. He knew how coopers felt when coopering was replaced with barrel making machines and cold storage.

Then I visited the Newfoundland Museum on Duckworth Street. They had a replica of a cooper's shop, with his tools and his fire and his barrels. There was a replica of a small grocery store too. A cooper's wife would often run a corner store in her house. Gordon Snow told me his wife had one. I sat and looked in the windows at the cooper's tools, and at his wife's boxes of dried apricots and raisins for sale, until I felt like I was there.