A new item has been added to my web site: the ongoing episodes of Fearless Phoebe the Super Model written by my dad when well into his nineties. I suspected my father had wanted to write but after leaving school at fourteen and battling for existence as a farmer all his life, there was not much opportunity. He did produce some little stories and satirical verses for fun. However, in his later years, after he got to retire, after he had outlived his wife and two best friends as well as his driving license, he found himself idle on the farm with time to kill.
Tired of TV and shutting off his favourite CBC radio, he hauled out the old Smith Corona typewriter and set to work. Pecking way with one finger, day after day, he wrote up the thrilling tale of Fearless Phoebe the Super Model. I knew he was thumping away at something but it was not until after his death that I found the foot high stack of brown envelopes all about Phoebe and realized the scope of the work.
Access was another matter. Due to dimming eyesight and iffy grammar, he typed everything in capital letters with no breaks and no punctuation save commas wherever he thought one took a breath. Each page was a solid block of single spaced lines with mistakes covered in whiteout, often in thick layers. Digitizing it was certainly a challenge.
I did not give up. Eventually, I got a large chunk of it into the computer. And, as an experiment, I am putting episodes online. I have done the basic, sorting out who is talking to whom and what action is going on. Rather that further editing, I am putting it online as is, repetitions, creative spelling and all. Just the way dad wrote it. The tale is set in 1932. Despite its flaws the work is a window into the Depression era in rural Ontario by someone who was actually there. And also a look into the surprising things that go on in an old farmer’s head when left alone with a typewriter.
Dad picked a lot of tomatoes and pitched a lot of hay so the least I can do is put his magnum opus out into the world and see who wants to read itl