Angusville
2011/08/15
Angusville is the closest town to our property in Manitoba at 11 miles distant. It was the place we picked up our mail (no rural mail delivery) and did our banking.
Bustling downtown Angusville, circa 1992:
That photo was taken from the empty lot that used to be the site of the Angusville Hotel, which was standing and in use (as a hotel and weekend strip club) when we moved to the area in 1982. It burned down a few years later and the empty lot is now a picnic site.
Returning now, the town is pretty much dead. Only the municipal office still seems open. The post office appears closed, replaced by a row of locked mailboxes. The credit union branch also appears closed, as are the two businesses that mattered:
The Angusville Cafe, run by a nice man named Curnie. We sometimes ate here, but the real attraction for me was that he had an arcade machine; my parents would set aside time for a leisurely coffee so I could play for a while. For a while it was Warp, and another while it was Arabian.
Chuchmuch Store – run by a member of the Chuchmuch family, though I don’t know his first name. He was an aging, grumpy man who watched all his customers like a hawk – he had trouble with the natives from the nearby reserve drinking vanilla off the shelves and spread the same mistrust to outsiders, which means us since we’re not from one of the local Ukranian clans.
It wasn’t a terribly good store, and his prices were high, but occasionally it saved us the extra 20 miles to Russell or Rossburn.
What’s important about this store is that he had a comic rack.
You know how as kids we used to be told about how the Eskimos have 22 different words for snow depending on its type, and the Japanese have so many ways to say thank you? In Manitoba I learned that there are many qualitatively different flavors of boredom. Comics were one of my outlets; I read every book I had many times over. At the time I was into Disney talking animal comics and Gold Key / Whitman adventure comics.
But at the Chuchmuch store I discovered something new. The unusual cover art led me to pick up an issue of the justifiably famous Demon Bear arc of The New Mutants. I was hooked instantly – this was something new. Here was a superhero comic (a genre which hadn’t really captured my interest before) but with characters my age, good character development including strong female characters, and really innovative art that went beyond mere representation and into interpretation. After that I picked up every issue I could find, and branched out into Uncanny X-Men as a result of the crossovers. The New Mutants is still my all-time favorite comic series, and one of only a couple I went out of my way to complete. It was my NM collection that I took with me to Coombs to pass the time.
Another Angusville-based thing I did for entertainment was that I subscribed to a stamp club to get exotic postage stamps to look at and collect. So a trip into town to check the mail had me anticipating some new brightly colored pieces of paper to look at. Yeah, different times.
Back to today. I saw a couple of interesting things on the community bulletin board:
I admit to being surprised as how good internet and cell phone service is in these parts, by which I mean they exist.
Also, auction sale!
Auction sales are a popular form of entertainment here – a chance to get together and gossip with people you perhaps don’t see quite as often, and paw through some poor deceased neighbor’s stuff.
Yes, the word “sale” is redundant and no, they’re not selling auctions. That’s just what they call them in these parts.
Arnold & Hedley used to be the main auctioneers in this region. I imagine they’ve retired now, but man were they good. They could talk a mile a minute but you could still understand them, and they had eagle eyes – don’t scratch your nose while bidding is on or you might end up buying something. I loved going to auction sales half to listen to them work and half to paw through the goods.
