Elisabeth Heslop
Tony Weir can remember the days before Alberton had a volunteer fire department.
“When a fire call came, everybody went and we just stood there and watched it burn,” he reminisced with bright afternoon sun beaming in through the windows of his Alberton farmhouse.
“And then there was a real bad fire just over half-a-mile from my house,” he recalled. “One night I looked out and it was burning so my son-in-law and I went over.”
A young man was outside in the snow, severely burned, so they put him in their truck and took him to the hospital in Fort Frances.
“I hung on to him all the way there,” Weir said.
They got him into emergency and “when we were coming out of there, we met another neighbour coming in with the dad.”
“The dad died that night and besides there was a little baby at home that they were babysitting and it, of course, died,” he added.
“So after that calamity, we had a meeting or two and that’s when maybe half-a-dozen of us decided that we had to have a fire department.”
Weir stayed with the department until he had to retire from it at the age of 65.
It was for that kind of determination, and a lifetime of contributing to the community, that the Township of Alberton named Weir as its Senior of the Year at last Wednesday evening’s council meeting.
“He worked quite hard to get it [the fire department] going,” said Sandy Haney, the current Alberton fire chief and also one of the original volunteers.
“A lot of us were younger and Tony was . . . kind of the stable end of it for a while.”
Born on an Alberton farm one year after his parents immigrated from Northern Ireland, Weir attended the Crozier #3 school through the eighth grade before completing high school in Fort Frances.
He remembers walking nearly two miles to school, which wasn’t bad except in the winter, when sometimes his “rubbers” were so frozen he couldn’t get them off.
Weir and his wife, Dorothy, raised purebred Hereford cattle and two children on the farm in Alberton, where the couple still lives today.
Weir spent 35 years working in the mill in Fort Frances before retiring, and was hurt not long after that.
While working on the roof of a mobile home, Weir was blown off by a gust of wind and broke his back, damaging his spinal column.
Confined to a wheelchair, he hasn’t let it get him down, however, and he continues to enjoy the cattle, though now they belong to a neighbour who rents the farmland.
