This book represents the twenty-first volume of what will ultimately be twenty-five volumes in a series of verbatim transcripts of the diaries of Howard Leopold Morry, written by him starting in 1939 and concluding with the last known volume in 1965.
Howard was a raconteur and oral historian cast in the same mould as dozens of other men and women in Newfoundland in those days who carried forward the history of the small outport villages in which they lived. In many cases, their knowledge, gained by word of mouth from generation to generation, is our only record of the events that took place in these tiny villages for many decades and even centuries.
Howard was 54 years old when he took up pen or pencil to write the first of his many diaries in December 1939. What motivated him at that time was the belief (wrong, as it fortunately turned out) that he would not live much longer, as a result of a bad heart condition resulting from diseases he endured during his time in the trenches in Gallipoli, on the Somme and in Ypres during WWI. He was worried, and in this he was justified, that many of the stories of the old days that he faithfully retained would be lost forever if he did not record them in writing. The younger generation even then had lost interest in such things and the race of community oral historians of which he was one was coming to an end.
In his diaries, he spoke of his own personal experiences, at home in his youth and in his later years, his adventures in western Canada as a young man, and overseas with the Royal Newfoundland Regiment in WWI. But he also recorded observations on the significant and insignificant (to most historians) events of daily life in a small outport village on the Southern Shore of Newfoundland in the early to mid-1900s. And he also recounted events from the history of his village as passed down to him by earlier generations of oral historians.
The current volume is, for the most part, an example of the daily diary type. There are only a few short anecdotes in this diary. But there are frequent comparisons made to life and conditions in the old days versus the current times.
In this twenty-first volume, the diary transcribed covers a very brief period between March 1, 1959 and November 26, 1959. The diary was written in the same type of school "scribbler" used for many of the previous diaries, but only about half of the pages were filled. This is because Howard broke short his diary writing at the end of November 1959 to embark on another lengthy series of visits with his children and their families on the mainland and in the USA. During such trips, Howard did not keep a daily diary unfortunately, so the events that took place in each location remain a mystery.
At this time in his life, Howard found himself feeling his age, which is not surprising considering he turned 74 during the writing of this diary. He was no longer in charge of the Morry fish business in Ferryland. That phase of his life had all but ended in 1954 when he ceased outfitting his own trap crew. Interestingly, though he had given up setting his salmon net two years previous to the writing of this diary, when the twine in the old net became too worn out to repair, in 1959 he made another attempt at salmon fishing, though evidently with little success.
Howard continued functioning as a small scale farmer and livestock owner and also continued his work harvesting wood from the surrounding barrens and groves for a variety of purposes. But his age and increasingly limited mobility had reduced his efforts in these areas.
As in previous volumes, in order to provide readers not familiar with the "cast of characters" or the local and international historical events mentioned in the pages of the diary a clue to their identity, an extensive set of endnotes has been provided as an assistance in reading and fully understanding the context of the diary.