i. About Dr. Holley and his sled dogs...

BIG CREEK — A while ago, a year, maybe more, this
column was given over to the doings of Alec Holley, 2
retired doctor who now fools away time as a stunt man at
Barkerville shoot’em-ups, sometimes breaking pieces of

himself.

The column dealt with which
horse broke which part of Alec
and his financial adventures in the
cat poo industry.

Alec took exception to the col-
umn because it referred to him as
a wild, free spirit who had been a
general practitioner when it should
have called him a screwball who
had been a surgeon (MSc, MD,
FRCS (C), FACS and Qui Bono).

Also in the column the name of
the old sled dog that went blind
was transposed with that of the
one that was senile, and this upset
him a lot.

This newspaper column is put
forward as a shining beacon of
truth, showing the way to a bet-
ter, finer and purer society, so it
is important that this matter be
cleared up.

It was my honest belief that
Alec was a doctor in general prac-
tice and capable of handiing
warts, babies and whooping cough
just as well as any doctor. He
talked like a GP.

When a cowboy wouid describe
to him symptoms that even a
layman could recognize as evi-
dence of swamp fever, contagious

Paul
St. Pierre

4

PAULITICS & PERSPECTIVES

abortion or rinderpest, Alec would
instantly respond by saying
**You’ve got to take off 20
pounds, quit drinking and quit
smoking.”’

‘*Alec,’’ the patient might pro-
test, ‘‘I quit smoking 10 years ago
and I haven’t had a drink since
Lester Pearson was first elected.”’

Dr. Holley would respond

Sculptures commissioned

NORTH VANCOUVER City
Council gave the go-ahead Sept.
30 to enter into a contract with
local sculptor Richard Wo-
jciechowski for two Kogers Plaza
sculptures at an estimated cost of
$27,000.

The artist will also get free
work space in a city-owned build-
-ing throughout the sculpturing
work schedule. The site, in the ci-
ty’s old Hollyburn office, is
valued at $850 per month for ap-
proximately four months.

Council also approved an addi-

NORTH VANCOUVER
CITY COUNCIL

tional $9,000 for costs incurred to
install the two pieces in the plaza
at Esplanade Street and Rogers
Avenue.

Wojciechowski won an Arts
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a piece for the plaza, and had two
of his works chosen: North Shore
Rhapsody and Joe Bustemente
Trumpet.

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“Yes, | know it’s hard. But if you
can’t quit, at least cut down.’

‘*Alec, listen instead of talking.
I can’t cut down because I don’t
smoke or drink. You can’t take
away from zero.’’

“Anybody can cut down if they
use a little willpower. Aim for
half a bottle and one deck of
smokes a day. And eat lots of
aspirin. If your problem doesn’t
go away, remember you came by
it honestly. It’s inherited. Your
father, grandfather and almost all
your uncles died young because of
it. Now take off all your clothes
and we'll see if there’s anything
we can do for you.’’

Did you ever hear of anybody
who so closely resembled a general
practitioner? It sure fooled me.

However, I guess I was the last
to know. Lots of people weren’t
fooled. They knew that the gov-
ernment had licensed Alec only
for using the saw, the chisel and
the boning-out knife, but they
didn’t care. They went to him
anyway.

A check with his surviving pa-
tients in Chilcotin, Likely, the
Nazko Country, the Bazeko
Country, the Painted Hills of the

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Lillooet and all points in between,
has failed to reveal anyone who
didn't know he was a simple meat
cutter.

The point is, everybody felt he
could have been a GP if he hadn't
had such a tough start. They love
him and link him with the immor-
tal Doc Baker, after whom
Quesnel’s hospital is named.

This should clear up the matter
and relieve a lot of anxiety that
has been festering in Cariboo,
Chilcotin and as far east as Lucky
Lake, Saskatchewan, where Alec
is remembered across haif a cen-
tury as that crazy little Holley kid.

Why, you may ask, has it taken
a year or so to clear this up? It’s
good that you asked.

Up here time moves s!owly.
Sometimes it hardly moves at all.

A few years ago, when two
popes died within weeks of one
another, people in the ranch
country never got the two deaths
separated in their minds.

In their understanding there had
been only cne death, needlessly
written up twice by the press. To
this day in Quesnel and Williams
Lake the count of Supreme Pon-
tiffs remains one short of the tally

kept at the Vatican.

So it was with the Holley letter.
He wrote it only a monih or so
after the original column ap-
peared, but instead of mailing it
to the Quesnel Cariboo Advertis-
er, in which he writes a regular
column about the Doc Baker
Memorial Hospital, he wrote the
Williams Lake Tribune, 125
kilometres south.

He says he thought Tribune
readers might be more upset about
the column than those in his home
town.

This is a new idea — that
greater delicacy of feeling exists in
South Cariboo than in the nor-
thern portion which he helps in-
habit. Presumably there is a
coarsening of the spirit that takes
place at about the latitude of
Marguerite Ferry. Nobody else has
noticed.

Oh well.

In his furor scribendi, Alec
raised the question of why men
like me marry pretty women and
catch the most fish. If he had
been a regular doctor he wouldn’t
have had to ask.

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