"I REMEMBER."

Pahiatua Herald, Volume XLII, Issue 12890, 2 March 1935, Page 4

"I REMEMBER."

PAHIATUA—AS IT USED TO BE. [Wherever old-timers meet, and pause, and reflect, the doings, the places and the people of those early days of Pahiatua flash through their thoughts and find expression m happy reminiscence. To thoseof our readers who take a pride -n the n - trict’s transformation over fifty > ea r» and a curious delight In what u~ to be we offer at intervals, the recollections of these pioneers. J By "NOA KOROUA.” The School Jubilee last Friday proved to bo a erent re-union for dozens of us. It re-called faces 1 had not soon for forty years, and what things there were to talk of , to be sure. I am only, sorry that tbe Jubilee did not last for a week v o keep some of the earliest pupils longer m the district. We did not nearly exhaust the chief topic of conversation —the early days Questions were fired thick and fast from one to the other: such questions as the®©— Do You Remember — When the first !ime-bni mng voiks was established on Warren’s property, between anil Pahiatua ? . W'hen Hall’s Road was an alternative route to Scarborough, even though the river crossing there vas invariably precarious owing to tho frequent changes in the water channel due to frequent floods ? When Pahiatua’s progressive Chinaman, Chin Ting, imported a. bride from China, and went to Wellington to meet her, engaging a. small boat to take the Rev. Don and himself out into the stream to board the steamer, and marry the bride (whom he had never seen) there, so as to avoid payment qf the £IOO poll tax P And how the authorities made him pay just the same, because the marriage did not take place outside the three-mile limit? When, at the annual sports. *n what was for long called Oxley’s Paddock (somewhere near the present cottage hospital) Harry Knight was competing in the mile walk and his father ran alongside him liberally spraying him with lemonade in his effort to hand over the bottle for a drink? When the Reese boys rode two well-grown Aryshire steers about the streets, and younger members of the family sat sedately on the backs of the house cows as they progressed along Main Street from the farm to the milking shed ? When Professor DeLoree. tho photographer, used to give tions of conjuring and sleight-of-hand at public concerts, and. being a Frenchman, how difficult was his enunciation of English? When Best’s butcher shop stood on the corner of Main Street and Wakeman Street? When the Union Hotel was destroyed by fire, and the futile efforts of the Fire Brigade, under (I think) J. C- Taylor, to quell the outbreak?