The Legend of Gladee's Canteen: Down Home on a Nova Scotia Beach

Prologue

The Legend of Gladee’s Canteen: Down Home on a Nova Scotia Beach tells the story of a popular Nova Scotia beach and a family who, against the odds, constructed a simple canteen at Hirtles Beach in 1951 and ran it for forty years as a shining, sociable, homespun enterprise. That Gladee’s Canteen punched well above its weight in the restaurant business is confirmed beyond question by its inclusion in eight issues of Where to Eat in Canada. Thereby is Calvin Trillin confirmed an honest man, because as a globe-trotting foodie he steadfastly reminds his gourmet-conscious readers that of all the places in the world on which he reported, Gladee’s was the best of all.

Riverport Captain Douglas Himmelman (he of Bluenose II fame), while expert in a vastly different discipline, has seen probably as much of the world as Mr. Trillin. A frequent visitor to Gladee’s in his youth (he was thirty years old when the Sea Breeze opened for business), in 2017 he went on record with the following straightforward recollection: Everyone remembers the famous food at Gladee’s Canteen, especially Gladee’s fish and chips and her coconut cream pie. Customers enjoyed Gladee’s happy personality. Locally as well as far away, customers were saddened when Gladee’s Canteen closed. It was a great place as well to meet and make friends.

With good reason Gladee’s was voted one of the ten best restaurants in the nation. It’s a pity that it did not endure, franchise-like, as happens to some lowly start-ups. But the founders did not approve of the idea of them or their beach ever becoming chained to pure commerce. Gladee’s called for a special co-operative and communal spirit. The heart and soul of the formula included patriarch John Hirtle; his wife Edna; children Paul, Gladys (Gladee), Florence (Flossie), and Cyril; Flossie’s daughter and son-in-law, Mary and Eric Creaser; and the Creaser children, Kevin and Wendy. They did it all, each contributing in their own way, but over the long haul, none more so than sisters Gladee and Flossie. To the general public, they offered a genuine welcome backed by a memorable menu, all in a setting brashly open to the forces of nature.

From the perspective of a stranger arriving at Gladee’s Canteen, the setup on Hirtles Beach must have seemed unusual, except for the fact that the visitor had likely already heard good things. High expectation well met was the dependable outcome, and good news is quick to spread. The upfront, generous welcome extended by Gladee and Flossie became the trademark of all visits to this outpost of hospitality. The era of Gladee’s Canteen is part of a story remarkable in many respects, not least for the fact that it took place in a small coastal Nova Scotia community blessed with a spectacularly dynamic living beach.

Today, both despite and because of insults offered by the human element, the beach the canteen called home continues to evolve much as nature intends, though nothing is guaranteed in the long run. In its time, the Hirtle family and its sparkling enterprise thrived in spite of relative isolation, uncertain funding, and domestic demons. As a Nova Scotia epic, the success of Gladee’s Canteen mirrors the recent history of Hirtles Beach, exemplifying the twists and turns locked up in legend.

This book tells the story of a Nova Scotia beach and a celebrated Nova Scotia family enterprise as drawn from my family’s associations, personal memory, and the outlying stockpile of impersonal collective recollections – a tapestry of events woven through the evolutionary fabric of a small, relatively isolated Maritime coastal community. The objective is to gain a heightened sense of the past, even as creeping collective amnesia threatens.

Introduction

Saturday, August 3, 1914, dawned clear and sunny over Hartling Bay – with the promise of a scorcher except for the breeze generally marking these waters. Zenas Hirtle, great-uncle to my father Titus, set sail in his dory early that morning from Krebs Cove, a significant if rather precarious shelter for shore fishermen plying their primitive trade at the east end of Hirtles Beach.

Earlier that morning, despite his wife’s protestations that he should first repair the fence enclosing their precious cow, Zenas was adamant that he was not going to worry about a cow. His focus was on fishing which, weather permitting, he and his fellow fishermen relied upon to keep food on the table. And today, Zenas repeated, is the finest kind of day to be on the water. I’ll be back by noon. Just try and keep an eye on Bossie ‘til then.

As if I got nothing better to do than keep an eye on Bossie, Sarah thought, then turning in exasperation to walk back to the house, Mach’ dich auf den Weg! (Get going then!)

Sarah possibly missed hearing Zenas quietly singing an apology to his good wife, in fragments of an old German song familiar to the Hirtles and other Foreign Protestant settler families, as he launched his dory and made sail:

Kann i gleich nicht all’weil bei dir sein

Hab’ i doch mein Freud an dir.

Wenn i komm, wenn i komm,

Wenn i wieder d’rum komm,

Kehr i her’ein, mein Schatz, bei dir.

Although I can’t always be beside you

My pleasure is all with you.

When I come, when I come,

When I come ’round again,

I’ll return here, my darling, to you.

The sun was well above the horizon when Zenas hauled and reset his last net – the result, several baskets of herring and a dozen fat mackerel. And even a couple of squid, the best kind of bait. Could be they’re about to start running. May as well take a spell of hand-lining before I head in, he thought. That damn fence will just have to wait.

Glancing up gave Zenas pause because a formidable mass of dark clouds was closing in from the west. Rigged in slickers and with his dory anchored to the net, Zenas thought little of it, expecting the storm to soon pass. And it did. The sudden increased blast of wind was followed by heavy rain laced with flashes of lightning and accompanying claps of thunder. No matter that Zenas believed lightning to be thunder’s child – belief often counts for little. That day’s tragedy was a classic case in point.

It was late afternoon when fishermen ashore sensed something amiss. Zenas’s dory had remained in the same location since mid-morning. His brother Nathan sailed forth to investigate while their elderly father, Leonard, waited on the shore beside the family’s fish shack.

Zenas’s body bore severe burns. It was left to the old man to make the prognosis. Leonard Hirtle had heard tell of such things happening. It was the will of

God.

Half a world away, that same afternoon, the forces of human nature took over the world as France and Germany declared war on each other. Ten days later, when Britain declared against Germany, the Great War thoroughly ensnared Canadians. Not even fisher families in isolated communities like those on the Kingsburg Peninsula would escape intact. The very waters of Hartling Bay would experience the fallout.

Part 1

Background

Kingsburg Peninsula

The territory covered in this book is primarily an approximately sixteen-square-kilometre portion of Riverport and District, here referred to as the Kingsburg Peninsula. It includes Riverport, Lower LaHave, Upper and Lower Rose Bay, Upper and Lower Kingsburg, and West Ironbound Island – south of an ancient overgrown kilometre-long corridor said to have been a minor Mi’kmaw portage from the east end of Ritcey Cove through a small lake (Lennie’s) at the halfway mark to reach Rose Bay Beach. Indian Path, three kilometres to the northwest, is a major old Mi’kmaw portage route and part of a parcel of common land designated in 1785 by King George III as open for use by all residents. This trail marks the principal Indigenous portage route from the LaHave River to Lunenburg.

During their seasonal wanderings, the early Mi’kmaq commonly camped at various locations along the LaHave River estuary. For example, they erected their homes on Parks Island until the early twentieth century, and traded baskets for tea and sugar at local stores like Samuel Ritcey’s in Riverport. Moshers Beach in Upper Kingsburg was popular with the Mi’kmaq too, as evidenced by the discovery of numerous arrowheads in the vicinity. Eighteenth-century oral history recalls the existence of shell middens beside Moshers Pond prior to a major storm which changed it into a lagoon. Moshers Beach dune was subsequently re-established during a later storm and the pond was born again. There are stories too of settlers and Mi’kmaq sharing the land for berry picking and the common land upon which settlers’ fish stores were built. Trading of baskets and beadwork for fresh eggs, milk, and vegetables was carried out amicably among the people.

Apart from artifacts, the accounts of early European settlers, and the shreds of oral history, little remains to identify the activities of the Indigenous people. The French knew them as Souriquois (men of the salt water) and then through the eighteenth and the first half of the twentieth century they were called Micmacs. Their track record, as newcomers to the area over 10,000 years ago is, like their carbon footprint, remarkably subtle – countless are the missing details. The challenge of uncovering even a rough outline of the prehistory of those hunter-gatherers is akin to identifying the Indigenous woman reportedly discovered washed up on the shore of either Kingsburg Beach or Hirtles Beach in the mid 1800s. Unfortunately, opinions differ as to the general location of her burial site.

Descendants of the Foreign Protestant pioneers readily acknowledge their important association with the Mi’kmaq. There are not many granite monuments inscribed in Mi’kmaq in Nova Scotia. But there’s one in Upper Kingsburg at the foot of Vinegar Hill beside the entrance to the tiny pioneer cemetery. It reads: Migwite tg in Mi’kmaq and Sich entsinnen in Old German – Remember. It’s difficult to remember exactly how things used to be.

Kingsburg Peninsula and various place names referred to in the text.

Mysteries aside, the extent of the area, its story, and the essence of Kingsburg Peninsula were indelibly imprinted on my impressionable young mind by a tale told by my uncle Teddy long ago. Here’s the gist of the thing.

Fisherman and rum-runner Captain Winfred Oswald Spindler, known to family as Uncle Teddy, or simply Teddy, loved to hunt black ducks near his home in Lower Rose Bay. To this end, he always kept his double-barrelled shotgun above the kitchen door. However, Uncle Teddy’s favourite gun was an ancient muzzle-loader that belonged to his father, John Solomon. It is a beaver-cap muzzle loader (not a flintlock), eight feet and four inches (2.54 metres) long – a huge weapon. Compared to his shotgun, my uncle found it such a challenge to properly load that when on a hunt he only planned on firing it once before heading home to reload. It was not a well-designed weapon to do battle, nor, I suspect, would my uncle have made a very good soldier.

Uncle Teddy (Captain Winfred Oswald Spindler), age 92 in 1991, shows off his favourite gun in the kitchen of his home in Lower Rose Bay.

The gun’s checkered history includes a trip circa 1994 across the Canada-United States border courtesy of Uncle Teddy’s younger (American) sister, Emily. A compulsive collector, Aunt Emily, during her annual trips home to Nova Scotia, would raid family attics for antiques and collectibles – without so much as a how-d’you-do to their owners – and truck them back to Connecticut for sale. Eventually, the muzzle loader made its way back home following the passing of that generation. But I digress. It was his shotgun and not the muzzle loader that my uncle took with him on a windy, rainy Saturday morning in early November 1920 to hunt black ducks around Rose Head.

During the ideal duck-hunting weather just described, black ducks love to rummage about in the swirling seagrass and kelp exposed on a falling tide. My uncle hunted them in the numerous small coves – Rocker Cove, Levy Cove, Devils Cove, and others – which indent the rugged headland known in the 1750s to the French as Cap Rosse, and to Foreign Protestant successors as Rose Head, Rose Point, or simply the Head. In the early going, this promontory knew something like a real forest, as evidenced by a few impressive black spruce trees, the toughest of their species, up to a metre in diameter which hang on for dear life close to what remains of a ragged tide-beaten trail along the northern coast.

So much to discover and enjoy – everywhere a thin clay glacial soil overlies the black slate and somehow supports close-packed stands of second-or third-generation varieties of spruce, balsam, and lots of hackmatack (larch), all of the older stuff well hung with pale yellow-green old man’s beard. On drier ground, low bush juniper, blueberry, teaberry, and wild rose vie for control, although thoroughly boggy bits reminiscent of central Labrador, complete with patches of cranberry, clumps of Indian pipe, pitcher plants, and Indian cotton are generally nearby, ahead, or off to one side or the other. Pine, with its preference for well-drained sandy soil, is a no-show on Rose Head, although lone red or white birch, careless of ground conditions, are