By   Muriel  Tucker

                                     Fourth child, third daughter

                                                      " Be glad of life

                                            because it gives you

                                             the chance to love

                                          and to work and to play

                                                 and to look

                                               at the stars."

    That he was a business man, an entrepreneur, his career will attest to.  His belief in education for his children and the community is attested to by his continuous work as trustee of the Bloomfield Graded School and his encouragement of continuing education for his children.

    That we, his children, loved him, respected him, feared him, worked for him, there can be no doubt.  That we remember him now that we are grandparents and he is gone from us is a definite fact; we tell our anecdotes about Daddy with affection, humour, admiration, and with possible exaggeration, but personal enjoyment.

    In the early years he smoked a pipe. He would come into the house and get comfortable with his feet on the open oven door of our old wood stove, light up his pipe and, holding the current baby on his lap, would talk with our mother. At the age of five or six I was lying in bed sobbing from the pain of an earache when Daddy came up and blew smoke into my ear. Miraculously the pain subsided, and I was at last able to sleep. In later years Daddy switched to cigarettes; I liked the pipe better. Daddy was concerned when he caught me smoking. I had smoked for a few years before I got the courage to light up in front of him, and when he saw me, he touched me on the arm with affection, but with sorrow. What he said on that occasion is lost to my memory, but his expression of sorrow is still with me. Although I gave up smoking in a few years time, he never succeeded in giving up his habit.

  In his later years he had a condition called Burgers Disease which was aggravated by smoking.  It caused the blood vessels of the extremities to contract, thus his feet and hands would rapidly become cold.  That may be the reason he relaxed with his feet on the oven door after being out in the cold.  He did a lot of cruising in the woods, that is, assessing the value of a property he was thinking of buying. The chilling effect of trekking through many a woodlot certainly exacerbated his condition, but he never stopped cruising. After his death we discovered just how many woodlots he had bought when they were distributed to the family members.

   All of us have the same memory of going to the dentist in Sussex.  Our parents believed in taking care of our teeth.  We all experienced sitting in the dentist's chair in Dr. MacDougall’s office.  Facing the victim was a picture that seemed to be a skull, but as our eyes focussed on it through the ordeal it was really a charming country scene.  From the next room you would hear the voice of a parrot saying with great clarity, "Hello Laura".  Our chair sat upright and the doctor would work from that position while talking to Daddy, who sat smoking just behind the patient about their war experiences.  Every one of my fillings were drilled out and refilled
when I moved to Edmonton at the age of 30 , by a young and modern dentist.

  Daddy was a churchgoer and a member of the Masonic Lodge. He had been brought up Presbyterian but our Mother was Baptist. In time Daddy also became a Baptist so that the family would have the stability of one denomination. Nevertheless, he kept to his own likes and dislikes, one of which was favouring the King James Version of the bible. One new minister tried to change the word "charity" to "love", its more modern meaning, in a weekly reading of 1 Cor. 13, and each and every time, Daddy's sharp, penetrating voice would be pronouncing "charity". Soon the practice was discontinued. His Lodge activities were, of course, secret. He moved up to become Grand Master, a position he held for many years. At his funeral, his lodge brethren stood around his coffin with their aprons attached over their sober suits and conducted the Masonic service as we, his adult children, stood back and observed for the first time, the reverence and ritual of this organization.

  At the time of his last and only illness I was living in Grande Prairie, Alberta, and Jamie and Susan lived in the Calgary area. When the word of his death came we three flew together to Fredericton and drove in a rented car to the farm, already full of the rest of the family. He was laid out in a splendid casket set on rollers in a prominent position in the parlour where the neighbours from miles around gathered to see him for the last time and to say their words of comfort to us, his children, and to Maude his second wife. Their anecdotes of his generosity, his kindness, combined with their genuine admiration of him, and their open sorrow, were both surprising and greatly comforting.

  One night, unable to sleep, I went downstairs in the dark; the moon was shining upon his face. Though shrunken and emaciated from his illness, the bones of his jutting nose still held firm; I stood there for a moment in fear and reverence, realizing what a diverse and strong man my father had been.  At the grave side, taps were played and the crowd of mourners stood with bowed heads as tears welled up in response to that haunting mournful call.  In later days we wondered why no one had thought to have bagpipes played.  He was Scotch to the bone, loved the pipes, especially the tune, Road to the Isles, and taught us severely the importance of being Scottish.

   Ivan William Reid was born February 17, 1897 in Clintondale, New York.  His parents had moved there from Southfield, New Brunswick where his father William Torrance Reid had a position as telegrapher until he died while Ivan was still an infant.  His mother Margaret Baxter Campbell Reid later married Tilley Keirstead of Saint John, and died in 1903 of unknown causes.  So five-year old Ivan was brought up by his aged grandparents, James and Matilda Campbell of Southfield, New Brunswick.  At the age of 16 or 18 he joined the army and spent four years in France as a gunner.  Upon returning home unscathed except for a shrapnel graze, he got the pandemic flu that killed more people than the whole war, and was left for dead with a blanket drawn over his face.  He recovered, however, and came home and married Gladys Rebekah Allaby with whom he had gone to school, taking out a Soldier Settlement Loan from the government for the farm that nurtured all of us, and is still lived on by our stepmother, Maude A. Rogers Reid, whom he married a few years after the death of our mother in 1947.

 Many stories are told by the children of the amount of work they did in running the farm.  There were always the cattle to be taken care of: feeding them, milking them, pasturing them, and so on, not to mention the processing of the milk, separating the cream, and washing the separator. This last was my job for a long while, one I detested.  Those disks, as well as the pails, were always coated with sticky cream and had to be shiny clean and dry before the next load of milk was brought up from the barn. I don't recall what kind of soap or cleanser we used, but we did not have the good detergents of these present days.  Our cows were mostly Guernsey, a lot were pure-bred, but some were scrubs.  Milking was also done by every member at some time in their lives, with the possible exception of Susan. By that time he had gone into Hereford cattle, his workers having departed for more education, or marriage, or jobs.

Many times memories of my father have warmed me or strengthened me over the years.  The circumstance of my trial at the time of my divorce stands vivid in my memory.  As the divorce was contested by my husband, I had to be questioned, and the subject of his will was the issue he and his lawyer attacked.  The memory of his grit, his stamina and nerve strengthened me and I was enabled to answer to my advantage.

Our father and our mother gave us life. We too, like they, have looked at the stars, have loved, have played, have been glad of life.  They gave us a heritage to be helpful in our community, to have high moral standards, and to seek the betterment of others.  Some of us have passed through the valley of the shadow now.  All of us have our own children in whose blood flows the strength of these two strong and brave progenitors who believed in life, and who lived it to the fullest.

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