Monday, Sep. 22, 1947
Native's Return
For his sentimental journey to his old home town of Kitchener* last week, the Prime Minister shucked his dignity and reserve to show an unexpectedly mellow Mackenzie King. "Welcome Home, Billy" read the banners on many a Kitchener business house, and for two days the 72-year-old Prime Minister got the full-dress treatment of the home-town boy who has made good.
He shook more hands than he could remember. He went sightseeing. He reminisced at every turn. Shown a 22-year-old portrait of himself in Kitchener's City Hall, he quipped: "I didn't look any better then than I do now." Once, a farmer who had known him for years edged up, called out: "Hello, Billy. How the hell are you?" The P.M. grinned and said he was fine. At a picnic in Waterloo Park, a crowd of 4,000 passed before his canopied stand while a local functionary kept intoning: "If you've had a look, kindly move along and let someone else have a look."
Looking Backward. During his first speech, on the City Hall steps, the Prime Minister recalled that he was born "a stone's throw from here, if you have a strong throwing arm." He remembered that his second home was on Margaret Street. Said Mr. King: "I understand there is some kind of holy tabernacle there now--that may have been the influence of my early days." To some of the schoolchildren of Kitchener and neighboring Waterloo, he presented citizenship certificates. When eleven-year-old Marie Good came forward in a plaid skirt and jacket, the Prime Minister asked: "How about a kiss?" He got one.
Mr. King spent an hour and a half at "Woodside," the twelve-acre estate on Spring Street where he lived for nine years. The big, yellow brick house is now owned by the W. L. Mackenzie King Woodside Foundation, which hopes some day to make it a national shrine. Meantime it is rented to Polish-born Tony Kielbasa, a tanner. Mr. King pointed to the spot where he and his brother had once pitched their tent and to a bank that had once been covered with violets. He talked of his mother's bed of lilies-of-the-valley. A giant tulip tree in the grove behind the house had grown so much he failed to recognize it. While he was wandering about the grounds, four-year-old Marilyn Kielbasa caught up with him, stuck a pink carnation in his lapel.
Looking Forward. Only once did the visit take a political turn--when the Prime Minister, at an Agriculture Federation outing, forthrightly spoke his views about Canada's burgeoning socialist CCF Party. After praising his own government's efforts to establish social and economic security, the P.M. said: "Let me warn you to beware of change just for the sake of change; or what, in national affairs, is even more dangerous, against accepting at its face value any untried Utopia, or any proclaimed panacea for social ills."
After the ceremonies were over, Mackenzie King returned to Ottawa. "I've enjoyed every minute of it," he said. "I felt 10-20-30-40 years younger."
* In Mackenzie King's boyhood it was called Berlin, was renamed in 1916.
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