Hummer Bartlett

Predeceased by his wife Fern (Bucky), he is survived by his children: Patti and Don, Maureen and Charly, Rob and Sandie and his grandchildren: Allison, Laura (Lila and Annie), Steven, John and Brynne, Liam and Luke. The youngest of 6 he is also survived by his sister Beth, nieces and nephews and his many friends.

The funeral service was held in St. John’s Anglican Church, Fort Qu'Appelle, Saskatchewan on Saturday, February 25, 2023 at 11:00 a.m. with Rev. Ed Dunfield officiating. Audio video service was available in St. Andrew's CE Centre.

In lieu of flowers, friends so wishing may donate to All Nations Healing Hospital, Box 300, Fort Qu’Appelle, SK S0G 1S0.

Eulogy

Thank you all for coming today.

What you will hear are mostly Dad’s own words, we added a couple of comments along the way. Hummer was born February 5, 1931, at home, 100 yards from his current house. When he was 5 months old his grandmother and mother died. Friends and neighbours took turns keeping Hummer, the changes in routine and feeding affected his general health. Finally, Mr. and Mrs. White took him in where he stayed for the next 6 years. During this time, he was the apple of their eye. In May 1937 his father remarried, and Hummer returned home.

Hummer’s sister Joan had the idea for a family history book. Dad wasn't sure of what to write for his bio, Maureen gave him the idea to write it like a letter.

Here is where Hummer picks up the story.

1993 for my children when they are old and my grandchildren when they are older.

Dear Joan

I’ve been blessed with good health, an excellent family complete with a strong sense of family and probably cursed with a happy sense of the optimistic.

I can remember a few things about living at the White’s...going to the San with milk, a terrier called Spot, Mrs. White as a very kind woman and Bill White singing in a very deep voice, and cows in the barn in winter. Before I was at the Whites, I think I was passed from hand to hand. I must have been 50 before little old ladies stopped patting me on the head and saying “I helped raised you.” Maybe that’s why I’m bald!

After Pop married Di I came home to start school - we rode the milk truck to town. In February of 1942, while playing shinny on the road in front of the school at recess (I like to think it was forty below) I lost my right eye. I have some vivid memories of this-sitting in the office while someone ran for the doctor (maybe I was the cause of the first phone in the school), blood on the scarf I got for Christmas, going to Regina in the combo hearse/ambulance and coming home on the train.

All artificial eyes were made in Germany then, and there was a shortage. Dr Martin had a couple of cases of mismatched lefts and rights. They were terrible things really. If you dropped it, they shattered. After the war they started making them out of plastic. Spook Sinclair came to B-Say-Tah every year from Winnipeg on the train with his family, he had one eye too. The first summer he came with a new plastic one he took it out and threw it against the wall. I did the same thing and almost gave him a heart attack, he thought he had the only one in Western Canada.

B-Say-Tah and the Fort were great places to be a small boy. Perhaps if they hadn’t been I might have moved away and been better off as a result. Swimming, running through the hills, building forts in the coulee, hanging around the store on summer evenings. Winter time was cleaning the ice to skate, walking across the lake to movies at the San….the creaking ice on a cold night is a guarantee of improved circulation.

The winter population of B-Say-Tah then seems to have consisted of oddballs. The Jennings, the James, the Simpsons, Uncle Kenny. The Jennings lived west of the hatchery and had no indoor plumbing…. George would make a daily walk there to use the facilities. Years later Jane Jennings would have Christmas dinner with Bucky and I.

I can remember being at the James’s when Mabel, she of the quick temper, threw a gas lamp at Fred, missing him and putting it through the window into the snow. The Simpsons squatted in an old log house the village had repossessed for taxes. Late one Christmas Eve Pete and old Frank came up to the house and hammered on the door. I went down and they said that Norman was shooting at them and could I help? I went back to their place with them and sure enough, he was. Every time the trees would crack in the minus thirty cold, he’d let go with a blast and you could see flame shoot through the open door. I said that he’d soon get drunk enough to pass out and went home and got them blankets and coats. I guess he did pass out because they all lived.

The fish hatchery, I remember the steam boiler and steam driven pumps, pumping lake water through jars full of fish eggs, the kerosene lamps on chains hanging in the corner, the loft full of nets and a great place to go on a Saturday morning.

I remember when my brothers-in-law came. Teaching Nick how to “ski”, Buck Graham on air force leaving sitting in the kitchen with his feet in a pan of water after walking from Indian Head. My Bucky says they aren’t brothers-in-law, they are friends. Stan, more a brother than friend, memories of duck hunting and upsetting a canoe in October (then you really know what cold is) Football games with Stan and watching Glen Dobbs in the 51 western final. Bucky and I have been privileged to have had my nieces and nephews (and later some of their kids) spend time with us during summers, and as they crossed the country. Chris, Jamie, Gail, Neil, Don, Jim all made lasting impressions on my kids.

After Bucky and I were married we lived in one of Uncle Kenny’s cabins. Uncle Kenny was another of the strange people who inhabited B-Say-Tah, kindhearted, very generous. Bucky has been known to look at me and say “there but for the grace of me goes Kenny” I have memories of playing in his big old house with my sisters on winter Sunday afternoons, partying at his house with friends in my late teens and twenties, and when I was 15 walking into his house unannounced and catching him in bed with a woman who shall remain nameless.

Our first house was built in 58/59 while we were still in the dairy business. The builders built in stages as we had money. Both brothers had large families, they got most of their pay in milk tickets. We had some funny incidents during building…..funny from a perspective of 35 years. The drunken cat skinner that pushed in a basement wall, the well driller who hit a stone and quit (I had to go find him and beg him to come back). Bucky was home with a small baby, Pat, and I hauled water from the dairy in 8-gallon pails. The driller did come back to finish. He got rid of the rock by dropping dynamite down the well. That well was never any good, the pump forever losing its prime. We cured that by hiring two more drunks to dig down around the five-inch pipe and put a 30 inch cribbing as they dug. One hauled rocks up on a rope while the other stayed in the well. Why one wasn’t killed I’ll never know.

After I left school in 1949 I spent the next several years in the family dairy business: milking cows, delivering milk and hauling hay. We had the first automatic baler in the area, an International 45, invented to drive sober men to drink -- wouldn’t or couldn’t tie bales properly. That fall I custom baled hundreds of bales, sometimes fifteen or twenty miles from home. I hated that machine. I still enjoy baling more than any other farm operation. One of the most pleasant sounds in the world is cattle at a feed trough on a cold clear day in the winter eating the hay you baled.

Dad was magical in his ability to work with cattle. Calm, present, and quiet he could work a pen of cow’s quieter, gentler and faster than anyone I’ve seen. To this day I in my work helping people with change I can hear Dad saying “the only way to move cattle quickly is slowly”, and “rammy gets you a rodeo”

Hummer continues

In 1954 Pop and I built a pasteurizing plant on the farm and from then on I ran the plant and did deliveries in the afternoon to Lipton, Dysart and Cupar. Looking back, I realized I worked too hard but it was a very enjoyable period of my life. However, it was never a financial success and when pop died in 1957, we had a hard time keeping it together. I’ll always remember our biggest creditor sending the president of the company from Ontario to see me. The province expropriated some land to form Echo Valley provincial park and we cleaned up the debt. We then built a new plant in town just as the era of the small dairy was ending - that damned optimism again.

We sold in 63 and I went to work for Delaval as a salesman calling on creameries in Saskatchewan and southern Alberta. I installed equipment in places like the Prince Albert penitentiary where a murderer that helped with the install gave me a gift of a wallet he had made, that I still have that wallet today. That story shows how Dad had a unique ability to make friends, from prisoners to judges, and people form all walks of life.

I left DeLaval in 1967 because I was tired of being on the road. In 1967 we bought a ½ section north of the valley. The old gentleman I brought it from wouldn’t sign an agreement of sale and the mortgage company wouldn’t lend money without one. He only had a about a third grade education and I’m sure he was afraid of being cheated. In desperation I took him into Regina and the manager said to him “if you’ll shake hands on this I’ll have your money by October”. Years later they told me it was the only mortgage they'd ever written on a handshake.

In 1979 we bought the B-Say-Tah store. Maureen and Bart worked there while I worked as a steam engineer at the hospital. As it was all borrowed money the high interest rates of the 80’s killed us and we sold out in 1985. Unfortunately, we are still paying for it.

If some of the above sounds gloomy, it wasn’t meant to. I’ve been lucky in marriage and health and friends and the fun we’ve had. Friends made through involvement in community organizations like the Lions Club. I was a charter member in 1961 and have held every office. I’m proudest of two things I was responsible for, the Lions club reviving the Victoria day Echo lake marathon and being given a lions international award.

I belonged to the Qu’Appelle valley lodge #4 Ancient Free Accepted Masons. I served, at various times, on the vestry of St. John’s church were our parents were married in 1912.

I was lucky, in a way, to have grown up in the 30s and 40s when there were old-timers still alive. Meeting an original North West Mounted Policeman who came on the march west. A standing buffalo member who told me of his father going on a buffalo hunt and a camp in the San coulee being wiped out by smallpox. Another friend whose grandmother, as a little girl crossed the line with Sitting Bull. These sorts of memories are likely why I have an interest in and a love of the history of Western Canada.

Along the way we’ve had lots of fun times -- cross country skiing and ski parties at the house. First of July parties in the backyard with fireworks, with guests from age 2 to 92, swimming with the kids, games at Taylor field, Christmas Eve Santa, short trips on the lake in the canoe.

I’ve been lucky to enjoy laughing with people-- on coffee row, in the legion after lions, with neighbors on the road allowance. I’m always amazed when friends of thirty and forty years make a point of stopping when they are in the valley and I’m further amazed at the people who thank us for our hospitality due mainly to Bucky. Friends and family have been and I hope will always be the most important possession to me.

I haven’t written about our children; they have their own memories and can write them as they see fit. I am proud of all our children, they have character, a sense of humour and a sense of loyalty, you could ask for nothing more.

Joan, you know Bucky, she’s supported me through thick and thin and I won’t embarrass myself by trying to put my feelings for this gutsy, pretty woman on paper. I’ll give the last word to a young, intelligent friend who calls her “the Guru”

That was the end of what DAD wrote.

He continued on laughing and building memories, marking special occasion like births, weddings and Christmas with art he found or commissioned from area artists. He continued showing his relentless resilience and optimism through the death of his wife and the impact of macular degeneration, COPD , and his second episode 4 years ago that he up until recently refused to call a heart attack. He carried on; cutting his grass, making ice candles at Christmas, working at the museum, chopping wood, growing Begonias, Corn and Pumpkins all watered with his special manure enhanced water.

Hummer had a special connection with his grandchildren, spending lots of time with them.

Laura and Allison are forever grateful for the time they got to live with him and grandma. His grandchildren share memories of helping with the cows, going for canoe rides, Skiing and tobogganing, listening to his stories and calling bullshit on the ones they thought he was making up, his coffee, his sense of humor, his love of family, his fireplace that was never hot enough.

His love and pride in his grandchildren and great grandchildren shone through.

The way the community and his neighbours supported him these last few years was incredible: rides to lions, to the museum, to town for mail and groceries, stops in to visit with him, coming to the parties and outings for burgers he organized, or encouraged to be organized. Trips for coffee to the valley bake shop, or out in the area to see things. And later bringing him things to the house and supporting him. There are too many names to list of those who helped but, Gerry and Lila Banks, Mark and Andrea Banks, Mark and Andrea Norgaard are best neighbors you could hope for. We are incredibly grateful for all who provided their support to dad in the way that they were able to.

The past few days many of you have told us how important Dad was in your life and how he was a great friend. A dear friend of his told me “Your dad was many things, he could be loud, obnoxious, proud to a fault, but mostly he was a true gentleman, kind and sensitive” He was a loving husband, proud father, prouder grandfather and great grandfather, great friend to many, good neighbor, and a cattleman to the core. We will miss him but we will remember his deep resilience, fueled by his love of family, his connections to friends, his connection to community, his optimism, and humour.