By Esther Darlington
Bill Spelay is gone. He left us at age 90: a good age for a character as strong as Bill’s, and a heart as forthright, honest, and generous. Many of us older generation people will never forget Bill.
His barber shop in the Oasis Hotel in Cache Creek was for many years filled with patient customers, waiting for Bill’s special attention. Yes, one tends to expect barbers to be rather special. You see them in the movies, cutting, trimming, shaving, working with their eyes on your head, never missing a hair.
Trimming a mustache, a beard, eyebrows too. Then the massage, and the towel, and that whiff of something indubitably masculine.
And all the while listening, speaking, always listening, talking. Talking about fishing, hunting; fishing and hunting in his favourite place, Back Valley, or fishing in Pavilion Lake. And who can forget the signs in the window of the shop in the hotel: “Gone Fishing”? No date of return.
It was more than a little disappointing, when you drove to town for a much-needed haircut, and found the shop empty, with that sign in the window. Yet you understood. Bill had to go when the mood took hold of him.
And fishing the lakes he loved in the country he loved was a matter of course. There are some things you cannot change.
Bill had a name that he rather disliked as he aged. He was given the name after an incident; one that made him famous.
I happen to know how Bill acquired that name. It was Chainsaw Bill.
It seems that dirt bikers wending their precarious way in the hills around the subdivision Bill and his wife Edna lived in had become an intolerable noise. Bill and Edna complained to Village council, but the infernal racket continued, disturbing the peace and puncturing the ear drums as well as the sensitivity.
Thoroughly exasperated, Bill took up his chainsaw one evening and went down to the park, where Cache Creek council held its meetings in the hut, before the present village office was available. A council meeting was in progress, and Bill let the chainsaw rip, the racket reverberating between the council chamber and the swimming pool building, which of course increased the volume immeasurably.
Someone came out of the chambers, waving to Bill to stop, but Bill continued the racket. They knew why Bill was there. They knew the racket was a protest. Bill had made his point.
I think a bylaw or some kind of regulation was finally passed by council, to stop the dirt biking within village boundaries. I have no idea if the problem solved itself entirely, but the point had been made.
When the hotel closed the area where Bill had operated his barber shop for so many years, it was a loss. Everyone felt it; particularly Bill. Still, Bill continued to barber. He would drive to whatever place he was needed, and he would cut, trim, massage, the works. He charged a mere $10.
Bill came to cut my late husband’s hair, and trim his mustache and eyebrows, in Cache Creek. When we moved to Ashcroft he came to our home, his barbering kit in hand. Bill barbered for the residents in Extended Care at Jackson House at the Ashcroft Hospital.
Bill had logged the Shuswap Lake area in his younger years, and he remained an outdoors kind of man all his life.
He loved the country and loved the people in it. Bill’s sojourn with us was a privilege to all.
Somehow, his memory should be preserved in the village where he and his wife Edna lived for so many years, and served us so well.
editorial@accjournal.ca
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