Our People, Our Stories

Meet Bud Van Alstine, a retired farmer and teacher from rural Ontario. In this video interview, Bud shares his journey from growing up on his small family farm to becoming a high school teacher, a home builder, a farmer, and a novelist. He recounts family hardships, his commitment to hard work, and his love for music, family life, and off-grid living. Discover how Bud's resilience and ambition shaped his life, from making ends meet to embracing retirement at Green Point on Fagan Lake.

Interview Summary & Transcript

Introduction: In this episode of “Stories from My Life,” Bud Van Alstine recounts growing up on a small farm in rural Ontario and persevering to become a high school teacher, a home builder, a husband, a father, and eventually a farmer again before finally retiring to write novels and play bridge. My name is Sharon Turner, and I'm pleased to be the host of this series. We caught up with Bud in September 2023 at Green Point, his off-grid lakeside home on Fagan Lake, just north of Maberly, ON.

Family Beginnings

Bud: My grandfather had the misfortune of falling into a scrub-tub, they were going to scrub the floor with scalding water and he fell in it. He was still in diapers and he got badly burned and cooked on his back, and he grew up a cripple. His right leg was more than three inches shorter than his left.

Sharon: This is your grandfather you're talking about?

Bud: Yes, he lived out in Kingston, near Sydenham. He was born in 1860 and grew up back in the day. There was no way he would ever be able to afford a farm, so the only way he could manage to get property was to migrate back into the North End of Frontenac County. He moved up to Crotch Lake. My dad was born and raised near Pine Lake. They grew up in poverty. How my grandmother raised nine kids, with her husband a cripple, is a challenge I admire immensely. I never knew her; she died before I was born, but she must have been an amazing woman.

Sharon: For sure.

Bud: So, when dad grew up, he wanted to do well. He was a very ambitious man. He went to the bush for two years, working up north, I think North of New Liskeard. He met my mother in 1922. She lived near Denbigh. Her family moved north in 1923, just in time to escape a massive forest fire that wiped out New Liskeard. They spent a night in Lake Temagami to escape the fires. My dad went up there the second year, married her in February, and they moved back to Sharbot Lake. Everything was going fine, then in 1929 the depression hit, and that whole operation went into the tank. Dad was looking for a farm. A man in Maberly, who had seen dad working as a boy, looked him up and offered him a deal to take over the mortgage and pay the interest. That’s how dad started at Maberly.

Bud’s Early Days

Bud: I had five brothers and one sister. I was born in 1936. My mother had worked too hard. She had seven kids in thirteen years, working hard to make money. When she got pregnant with me, she was sickly. I was born on November 13, 1936, and my mother lived for five days after that. I was a c-section baby. We grew up on the farm in Maberly, a busy concern with cattle, horses, sheep, pigs, and chickens. There were six kids older than me, so there was lots of help. Dad had an expression: if you weren’t doing something when everyone else was working, he would say, “Could you make yourself generally useful?”

Sharon: So he was instilling a work ethic.

Bud: Yes. We milked cows, separated and sold cream, and fed the skim milk to the cows. My job every morning was to take a 5 LB honey pail of whole milk to my neighbors. I would have been 7-8, and they gave me a dime for this milk. That was the first money I ever made. We were all good, hard workers. Saturday would start at 5:30 in the morning with milking cows. We all would sing as we milked, singing country songs. The faster you sang, the faster you milked.

Sharon: Do you remember any songs that you sang?

Bud: Most of them were old railroad songs, like #9 and #97. They were old sad songs.

Sharon: Of course, that’s country music.

Bud: Yes. Later in life, I got to thinking about dad’s kids singing their hearts out while working.

Maberly School

Bud: The first school we went to for six years was across the bush from our place, a bit over a mile. It was SS#4 Sherbrooke. We walked across the bush, rain or shine, winter or summer. There were grades one to eight, only about a dozen to 15 kids. We had one teacher who particularly won my heart. She taught us to sing songs, the first time I ever sang in school. After that school closed, we were bused to Maberly for two years.

Sharon: That would be for grade seven and eight? And after that, there was probably no high school around here.

Perth High School

Bud: No, the high school was 12-14 miles away. I started high school by renting a room in Perth. There were about fifteen of us in that rooming house. Off I went on Sunday night, my dad driving me with a basket of food. I had a bill at the store downtown for anything I needed. I didn’t enjoy the school; I was more interested in working and having a decent meal.

Sharon: You must have been tempted to just walk away from it all.

Bud: I nearly quit in grade 10. I talked to dad about it, and he said I was throwing it all away. I did quit working after school in grade 11, working at a restaurant, opening it up at 6:00 in the morning. I eventually went home and just worked on the weekends-- worked in the bush, and made more money on weekends than working in the restaurant. Near the end of grade 12, I found out I didn’t have the right subjects for grade 13, but by then, I liked school and was doing better.

Sharon: You were motivated.

Teaching Public School

Bud: Yes, motivated. I wanted to go to university but didn’t have the right subjects. One option was to teach public school. There was a desperate need for teachers after the baby boom. I had never considered teaching, but I thought I could teach for a year or two and then go back to school. My dad and I drove down to Lanark, and I was hired on the spot. I went to summer school in Toronto, learned to be a teacher, and survived. I taught multiple grades, feeling confident, though I felt I failed one little girl. It took 13 years to finish my teaching certification and university degree.

Green Point and Sandy

Bud: I brought Sandy down here and proposed to her. She said she’d be proud to marry me. That was the second most wonderful thing in my life. We moved to Perth and started teaching in Bancroft. We planned not to have kids for three years, but two years after we were married, Sandy was pregnant. Our daughter Vicky was born in Bancroft. We wanted to come to Perth, but the pay was pitiful. We looked at the Globe and Mail’s teacher section and chose Iroquois Falls for the higher salary.

Sharon: There was a big demand for teachers.

Bud: Yes, we went to Iroquois Falls, loved it, and I moved to the high school panel. Eventually, we returned to Perth.

Green Point

Bud: I kept saying I wanted to buy this property. Dad said Jimmy True Love never sold property, but I eventually asked him, and he sold it to me. I had to borrow money, bought an old log house, and renovated it with my brother and his son.

Reflections on Sandy

Bud: I built a house, she built a home. Sandy was the spirit and the soul, the beauty, the kindness. She was a wonderful woman.

Sharon: What was life like here for you together with your family?

Bud: Beautiful.

Sharon: What was Christmas like, for example?

Bud: We would often have people here, or we would go to other people’s homes. It was a typical Christmas. As long as her folks were alive, we would go there and partly have Christmas here in the morning for the kids. The thing about being out here was we had a family life. When we were in town, we had friends next door, but they would eat off the table and you’d sit down to eat, and there would be this nose pushed up against the screen door, asking if Cindy could come out and play. You’d send them home and say she would phone when she was ready, and they would go home and phone back again. Sandy’s dad had a cottage on Robertson Lake.

Sharon: So she was not unfamiliar with living on a lake then.

Bud: Not at all. She loved it. She loved swimming; it was idyllic.

Living Off-Grid

Bud: As soon as we accepted the idea that we were going to be off-grid, We had propane gas.  She would organize the day. If she turned the generator on in the morning, she would get everything done that needed electricity, maybe three times a day or so. You started out by filling up the water tank, and the rest of the time there was no problem at all. She had an electric washing machine and a fridge and a gas stove.

Music and Small Cars

Bud: Singing in the car coming home.

Sharon: Well, you were singing while milking cows when you were a boy, so that's not so surprising.

Bud: I drove very small cars all my life. My theory was if you couldn't push it, it was too big for you. I drove a small car, and if I got stuck, I would just get out and push it. I couldn’t get up a hill numerous times, but I could push it out. I remember numerous times, coming home with the three kids in the car, or mostly before Tom was born, we would be driving and singing our hearts out.

Sharon: Oh my goodness, so music was a big part of your life then as a family.

Bud: Oh yea, music was. I can play pretty much anything, but I can't play anything well.

Sharon: So you do play piano?

Bud: I can pick out a melody with one hand and a chord with the other. If I worked at it, and I do have good fingers yet, but I picked on the guitar and I play the violin. I’m on a bit of a violin kick.

Losing Sandy

Sharon: So you were unfortunately not given many more years together?

Bud: Unfortunately.

Sharon: Can you talk about that, Bud?

Bud: I want to include her. She is as much a part of the family and the history, and this is her history. She was such a key part of it that to leave her out is to deny reality. The problem started in June 2014. I called it our summer from hell. They let her die from the heart condition.

Back to Farming

Sharon: So what did you do?

Bud: I went back to farming. By the way, I became the biggest Van Alstine farmer there was. I had 50 cows, 50 calves, and 50 yearlings. I have no idea if that was me trying to prove something.

Sharon: So you went back to what you started, back to your roots.

Bud: My brother-in-law and I went to work, cutting cedar brush and stove wood. We worked there another 8-10 years, making pretty good money. Maybe we quit early because we liked to have a beer at the end of the day and feel good.

Sharon: You’ve had an extraordinary life. Thank you very much, Bud.

Bud: And thank you.

Recorded at Green Point on Fagan Lake, Ontario September 2023

Host: Sharon Turner 

Videography & Post Production: Marc Lattoni