When Venetia Crawford booked the Little Red Wagon for a June 10 event, she prepared two dresses for the occasion. One was white with flowers, the other was black.

“It will either be for a party or for my funeral. One way or another, I’m having it,” she said.

As things turned out, the event this past Saturday was no funeral. Venetia wanted her 85th birthday to be fun, and it was. Scores of friends, live music, line dancing, buffet dinner, wine, a massive birthday cake, joyous . . .

conversation and general merriment made sure of that.

In her flowered dress, sporting a large sombrero and ready for a party, Venetia was first on the dance floor, swaying to the guitar stylings of local musician Robert Wills.

Venetia came to the Pontiac in 1960 to teach at the two-room schoolhouse in Otter Lake.

There, at a dance, she met Milton Crawford. They married and lived in Campbell’s Bay where they raised two children, Sally and Allan. Milton passed in 1989.

In the 1980s, Venetia helped found the Pontiac Archives, of which she is now president. In the margins of the party, she recalled how it happened.

“It was at a meeting of the Pontiac Historical Society. Pearl McCleary and I were there. Annie Gamble might have been the president at that time, I’m not sure.”

“One of us said ‘we need a place to store papers. The museum is a great place for things, but where are we going to store papers?’ And one of us said, ‘well let’s do it,’ and so we did. We started the archives.”

“Annie Gamble was with us all the way. And very shortly after we got started, Elsie Sparrow joined us, and she’s been the mainstay for all the years when I was away. I was away for 14 years. If it wasn’t for Elsie, the archives wouldn’t be here,” Venetia concluded.

Of the 14 years Venetia was away, seven were spent teaching in Wemindji, a small Cree community on the Quebec coast of James Bay.

Venetia was born in Philadelphia. Her mother had a PhD in chemistry and her father, K.A.C. Elliott, was a distinguished Cambridge-educated neuro-chemist who moved the family to Montreal where he taught at McGill and worked with renowned neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield.

Venetia got the idea early on that she wanted to teach, and that she wanted to teach in a one-room schoolhouse. She recalls being offered a position at the school in Shawville in 1960.

“I said ‘no,’ because it was a big school.

So, he said, ‘How about Ladysmith? It’s a four-room school.’

‘Too big,’ I said. ‘I can’t handle that.’

‘Well, how about Otter Lake? Two rooms, and you can be principal,’ he said.

So, I said ‘okay.’”

And the rest, as they say at the Archives, is history.

In her flowered dress, sporting a large sombrero and ready for a party, Venetia Crawford was first on the dance floor at her birthday party at the Little Red Wagon on Saturday afternoon.

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