Posted with permission from the Hamilton Spectator.
I have no date for this clipping, I would assume late 1980's.
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ByPAULWILSON
The Spectator
THE STONE lighthouse at the entrance to Hamilton harbor was built before this country was born and there's always been someone there to man it. But when Pete Coletti, 54, packs up his parrots, corncob pipes and old violins at the end of this shipping season, the era of automation begins.
"Your position has been identified as one that will become surplus to departmental requirements," says the letter from the Canadian Coast Guard that arrived at Pete's old brick house not long ago.
"I knew it was coming one of these days," says Pete, who started out as an assistant 19 years ago, hours after he and the head keeper found the deputy dead in the back cottage on a hot July night. He now earns about $24,000 a year.
Ottawa's campaign to "de-staff" lighthouses began in the early 1970s when most of Canada's 275 lighthouses were partially-automated — lightkeepers no longer had to activate the fog horn or the light. The coast guard has recently accelerated the processing of fully automating the lighthouses.
Within two years, there will be just one manned lighthouse in the coast guard district that stretches from Montreal to Grand Bend — Southeast Shoal, on Lake Erie near Point Pelee.
The man overseeing the coast guard's Operation Destaff in this part of the country is Cal Drake, helicopter pilot and now district manager.
"It's hard to convince people used to a human presence that the job will be done as well as before," he admits.
"But no one lightkeeper can be on duty 24 hours a day." Now, he says, the Hamilton-station instruments — such as lights, foghorn, radio beacon — will be monitored around the clock by the coast guard station in Toronto.
The keepers being nudged out are supposed to be first in line for coast guard maintenance positions. "Our-aim is that no lightkeeper will go without a job," says Mr. Drake.
He admits it just won't be the same for some of the men. "It depends on your psyche. Some people wouldn't be able to stand it, but for others it was a tremendous job. They had time to write, think, do their hobbies. They were their own men."
And that's Pete. He's a self-taught tinkerer, an ex-trucker who walked out of Millgrove Public School after grade 5. His house is jammed with old cameras, guns, Stompin' Tom albums, half a motorcycle, an 1850 fiddle he's rebuilding and electronics gadgetry that ranges from an old Philco TV to a big boxy oscilloscope.
Generations of keepers have used his bulging two-storey house. The old lighthouse, with 1.5-metre (five-foot) thick stone walls, is right beside it.
These days the 13,000 boats that slip past Pete's door annually are guided by the stark white automated structure at the end of the pier. "As far as I'm concerned that's not even a lighthouse," he says.
The old tower is the subject of a glossy 60-page account coming out early next year by Aldershot's Mary Weeks-Mifflin, who wrote a successful book last year on the Chantry Island lighthouse near Southampton.
She says both structures were built by Scottish immigrant John Brown of Thorold, an apprentice stonemason who became a millionaire.
He built seven lighthouses, all standing. He started the Hamilton harbor tower in 1858.
Mr. Drake says the Coast Guard will keep the Hamilton tower and house maintained, but he's open to negotiations with "some suitable heritage organization." Both the buildings are on Hamilton's official inventory of heritage buildings.
I have no date for this clipping, I would assume late 1980's.
_________________________________________
ByPAULWILSON
The Spectator
THE STONE lighthouse at the entrance to Hamilton harbor was built before this country was born and there's always been someone there to man it. But when Pete Coletti, 54, packs up his parrots, corncob pipes and old violins at the end of this shipping season, the era of automation begins.
"Your position has been identified as one that will become surplus to departmental requirements," says the letter from the Canadian Coast Guard that arrived at Pete's old brick house not long ago.
"I knew it was coming one of these days," says Pete, who started out as an assistant 19 years ago, hours after he and the head keeper found the deputy dead in the back cottage on a hot July night. He now earns about $24,000 a year.
Ottawa's campaign to "de-staff" lighthouses began in the early 1970s when most of Canada's 275 lighthouses were partially-automated — lightkeepers no longer had to activate the fog horn or the light. The coast guard has recently accelerated the processing of fully automating the lighthouses.
Within two years, there will be just one manned lighthouse in the coast guard district that stretches from Montreal to Grand Bend — Southeast Shoal, on Lake Erie near Point Pelee.
The man overseeing the coast guard's Operation Destaff in this part of the country is Cal Drake, helicopter pilot and now district manager.
"It's hard to convince people used to a human presence that the job will be done as well as before," he admits.
"But no one lightkeeper can be on duty 24 hours a day." Now, he says, the Hamilton-station instruments — such as lights, foghorn, radio beacon — will be monitored around the clock by the coast guard station in Toronto.
The keepers being nudged out are supposed to be first in line for coast guard maintenance positions. "Our-aim is that no lightkeeper will go without a job," says Mr. Drake.
He admits it just won't be the same for some of the men. "It depends on your psyche. Some people wouldn't be able to stand it, but for others it was a tremendous job. They had time to write, think, do their hobbies. They were their own men."
And that's Pete. He's a self-taught tinkerer, an ex-trucker who walked out of Millgrove Public School after grade 5. His house is jammed with old cameras, guns, Stompin' Tom albums, half a motorcycle, an 1850 fiddle he's rebuilding and electronics gadgetry that ranges from an old Philco TV to a big boxy oscilloscope.
Generations of keepers have used his bulging two-storey house. The old lighthouse, with 1.5-metre (five-foot) thick stone walls, is right beside it.
These days the 13,000 boats that slip past Pete's door annually are guided by the stark white automated structure at the end of the pier. "As far as I'm concerned that's not even a lighthouse," he says.
The old tower is the subject of a glossy 60-page account coming out early next year by Aldershot's Mary Weeks-Mifflin, who wrote a successful book last year on the Chantry Island lighthouse near Southampton.
She says both structures were built by Scottish immigrant John Brown of Thorold, an apprentice stonemason who became a millionaire.
He built seven lighthouses, all standing. He started the Hamilton harbor tower in 1858.
Mr. Drake says the Coast Guard will keep the Hamilton tower and house maintained, but he's open to negotiations with "some suitable heritage organization." Both the buildings are on Hamilton's official inventory of heritage buildings.