Letters to the Editor - Stompin' Tom
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LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Ah, those missed opportunities for a touch of fame...
It was a who-are-you situation when this guy walked into The Tillsonburg News office, located, then, on Broadway where the Town Cafe now sits.
He was trying to get some free publicity... a singer, you know.
Now, if he had been from Cultus or Corinth or Cornell or anywhere else in our area we might have listened to him, but a tobacco-picking guitar plucker from away wasn't news.
Thousands of folks showed up in the tobacco belt at harvest time back then. You could make good money. I made more priming tobacco as a high-schooler than I did working at the newspaper after getting a degree in journalism, but that's another story...
I suggested this guy, if he was a musician, try the radio station down the street.
Afterwards, the late John Lamers Sr. could beam as he told of being asked to write down some words or phrases peculiar to tobacco farming... things like "makin' the kil'."
And so it was that this guy wrote a song about "Tillsonburg," and it spread the name across the country... maybe even moreso than the Livvies, twice national basketball champs and the nucleus of Canadian Olympic teams, or E.D. Tillson's pan-dried oats and the name Pan-Drieds for town sports teams that persisted into the 50's.
Drat! I had a chance to say I helped launch Stompin' Tom Connors career (well, locally, at least) and I blew it!
Even my ex-cop buddy could say he helped provide some quiet and free overnight accommodation for the guy after things got a bit noisy up at Riley's.
And the Lions Club brought him back to town three times to help with fundraising.
Me? I'm left with an ache in the back and a pain in the memory.
Bill Pratt
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Canada in general, and Tillsonburg in particular has lost a real touchstone with the recent passing of Stompin' Tom Connors.
Back in 1972, when his song "Tillsonburg" put our town on the musical map of Canada, people in town no longer had to explain where they were from.
That year was Connors’ first of at least three local concerts when he performed at the old Strand movie theatre. (Subsequently, he played at the Community Centre arena.)
Invariably, back then, if I told someone I was from Tillsonburg, they would smile and reply, "My back still aches when I hear that word."
In 1990, when Connors gave his second of three concerts in town, I presented him with a plaque of appreciation on behalf of the Tillsonburg District Chamber of Commerce.
He accepted the award very graciously and even mentioned the experience in the second volume of his autobiography. He contrasted Tillsonburg's appreciation with the disdain that Sudbury officials had expressed over "Sudbury Saturday Night."
Sitting in the audience that night at the Tillsonburg arena was the tobacco farming couple who had given him the job that inspired the song that made our town famous.
He never forgot the roots he planted as he took his guitar and stompin' plywood across Canada.
Matthew Scholtz