Time now for the Vinyl Café Story Exchange

Time now for the Vinyl Café Story Exchange

Music up, establish, dip for:

You know how this works…this is the part of the show where you send us your stories. They have to be true stories and they have to be short. After that it’s up to you…we’ll read everything you send us and we’ll read some of our favourites on the radio. If we choose to read your story on the radio we’ll send you a copy of our latest book: Time Now for the Vinyl Cafe Story Exchange.

We have one today from David Raithby of Muskoka Falls, Ontario.

Dear Stuart, writes David:
Autumn was always a busy time in our house growing up. My mother was quite a cook. In October, she would spend hours in the kitchen putting up preserves for the winter...jams, jellies and her special home made chili sauce.

She was so prolific that she always ran out of containers and jars.

One year dad solved her problem by brining home a pile of half pint containers from his work.


See, my Dad operated a dairy. Not the one with a red barn, split rail fences and black and white cows lazily chewing their cud out in the field, but a processing plant in the heart of the city. It was a two-storey red brick building full of steam and ice cream.

The dairy had a number of steam-heated vats for heating the milk, a homogenizer and various stations to package the milk. Overhead ran a series of pipes and valves so the processed milk, milk shake mix and ice cream mix could be diverted to the milk can filler, the packer or the half pint machine.
My Dad was busy in the autumn too. Every year, in late October, he would switch the overhead lines so chocolate milk shake mix would head to the half pint machine. He would run a couple of hundred half pints of milk shake, package them up and take them home. Into the freezer in the basement it went. This is what my family gave out on Halloween night. The day after Halloween, the lunchtime cafeteria at school was full of kids drinking chocolate milk shakes. This was a popular event at our house. So popular that it wasn't unusual to get a couple of hundred trick or treaters on Halloween.

The year I’m writing about my Mother was out on Halloween, so my Dad was managing the masses. When he ran out of stock at the front door, he would go to the downstairs freezer and restock.

Everything was going well until the phone rang around 9:00. It was the neighbour.
“Jack,” she said. “I think you have a problem.”
Dad had in inadvertently handed out 40 half pints of my Mother's chili sauce to trick or treaters.

There was going to be some unhappy kids at lunch the next day.

Mom arrived home a half hour later. Dad reluctantly had to tell her what happened. As you can imagine, she wasn't pleased. But my Dad...the forever optimist...said, “Just think...next year we will have half as many kids and twice as many mothers!”

The dairy was sold in the '90's. There is a 7/11 located there now. My optimistic Dad has been gone for 20 years now too. But I still smile every Halloween when I think of this story.

That story came to us from David Raithby of Muskoka Falls Ontario.

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