Legacies, Legends & Lies

Joseph Jones is a reference librarian in the Koerner Library at the
University of British Columbia.

This is Joan Finnigan’s third collection of oral history material from the Ottawa Valley. A native herself, she has taken her tape recorder in pursuit of anyone who might have a good story to tell. Preferred varieties are humorous anecdotes and sketches of “characters.”

Most of the 15 chapters are organized around the narrators whose interviews have been taped and edited. Three chapters collect — and sometimes expand on — stories about individuals: Taddy Haggerty, Charlie Channigan, Harry McLean. The pseudonymous chapter on Nellie Finnuken is an autobiography in the Studs Terkel mode, which gives a vivid picture of a nurse’s training 30 years ago.

The large double-columned pages, interspersed with 80 black-and-white photographs, are suited to the presentation of local history. The layout is pleasing and the paper is good. But the quality of production is slipshod in several respects. End-notes are missing from Chapters 7 and 15, while in Chapter 1 the strange variety of superscript numbers in the text generally cannot be matched with the five endnotes. Pasted-in corrections on page 38 are not in line with the text. The print on page 147 is very fuzzy.

The book is a mixture of local history, biography, folklore, jokes, stories, and gossip — as the title suggests. Chapters vary considerably in content and organization. The entertainment quality of what has been collected and presented may account for Finnigan’s previous success in this vein. One of my favorites here is Ed Hubert’s chicken story, which should ring true for anyone with firsthand experience of a rooster’s arrogance.

Such a mixing of forms and genres can lead to self-indulgence. Lack of historical care and concern may be written off as secondary to the requirements of humor and narrative. Conversely, a story that begins to plod just happens to be the way it was — back then, or in the telling — and not attributable to the author’s lack of art.

Someone interested in historical content will suffer from this book’s loose documentation and especially its lack of an index. The person looking for tales and entertainment will wonder what happened in the middle of the opening chapter. Among other things, the character around whom the chapter is organized somehow disappears for about four pages.

Although described by the publisher’s release as the completion of a trilogy, this book can stand alone, having nothing in its form or content that requires acquaintance with Finnigan’s earlier volumes.