Fire Chief, Dial 13

A casual mention in conversation with my friend John Flood this afternoon led me to learn that the 1925 telephone directory for the Town of Cochrane, Ontario is digitized and is online.

There are several delightful finds there, including “Don’t Use Telephone During a Thunderstorm” (guidance that followed me into my childhood).

In the listings I see:

• David’s Variety Store, where my mother worked as a teenager (ring 329).
• Lady Minto Hospital, where my mother was born (ring 46).
• Smith, R.M., the furniture store and later funeral home that buried all of my grandparents (ring 239).

What’s remarkable about the R.M. Smith listing is that the funeral business lives on, under the name Irvine & Irvine, and the current telephone number, a century later, is 705-272-3239.

My favourite listing, however, is for my great-grandparents’ house on Fifth Avenue, under Caswell, E.:

And on the cover of the directory there is this section:

My great-grandfather, Edgar Caswell, was both the Fire Chief and the Town Foreman, and so their home telephone number was also the number for both of those. The calls they must have received, at all hours!

(Given Cochrane’s propensity for burning down, it’s ironic that the telephone number for the Fire Chief was 13).