Bob's Letter

"Fear them not, therefore; for there is nothing covered that shall not be
revealed; and hidden, that shall not be known.  What I tell you in
darkness, that speak in light; and what ye hear in the ear, that proclaim
upon the housetops."     -- Matthew 10:26

Hi Ted,

I know you don't want to disturb them (the photocopies of Bob's letter) but could you tell me if you can transcribe (re-type or edit) anything visible into an email and send it to me. With many sources of information, I am writing a story that includes its December 1938 King George Canadian stamp, the Pope - (when did he worked for I.G. Farben), the eugenics criminals at Shell and the worldwide Easter Island scenario known as Peak Oil. The genre is an Ingrid-based endless computer game/blog that unfolds into an autobiographically mixed fiction.

it begins :

Until you see both sides of Dad's story, the life of a repentant saint, maddened by an inability to write of it (his life), is all we have to go on. This is my story too; both of us being named Max. To avoid both of us answering at once, I was called by my middle name of Jim. In his case though he got no middle name and was named after a car; the 1908 Maxwell which is what his father was thinking about buying. In a failing memory Dad left a note that helped me connect these dots. It's been eleven years since he died and this is my first writing, though told recently to my immediate family.

It's the repentant part that is a fictional reconstruction of the reason Masons might give as to why he escaped them to become a baptized Catholic at forty seven. Sure my mum was an overbearing religious zealot who's own family were converts. Was this his cover story?

There was another side of Max that was unknown to her. So she said. Dots told me otherwise which is why I think she was so fixated about burning all records of their lives before dying. There were his engineering diaries that adopted a peculiar block printing style, which as a boy I loved to look at, and from where I got my maths foundation. The same block printing was used by the hand which wrote a confession that was found in the basement of our house by my elder brother and sister forty seven years ago. I'm not ashamed now to be the first in our family to write that Masons thought that this was Dad's doing. Mum must have guessed it though. Before he became a Catholic, I vaguely remember him taking me once or twice to the Anglican Church of St Mary Magdalene and maybe also there was talk of being a Mason.

This combination of clues was given to me orally and completed by a scribbled note that she didn't burn. I found this "back of the envelope" note in a pair of Dad's socks. This is all I got as my inheritance. The rest was unaccounted for by David Maxwell Legg, the trusted middle sibling with power of attorney over Dad's estate. Along with it came this insight now of how starvation was both a cause and an effect.

Bob's letter was what we called the confession and at the time everyone seemed to put it down to a sick hobo who must have crashed in the basement and hid the letter on top a rafter, dying unable to mail it. Bob's letter was stamped with a distinctive Canadian stamp commemorating King George's visit to Canada in December of 1938. The note in the sock said "May 1938 return to BG to marry" which means that an unfranked stamp turning up out of the blue could have given an incentive for Dad to start to think about the getting away with forging a confession using the synchronistic linguistics of a poorly educated French Canadian bum. Indeed Dad may have only known this story second hand. Nonetheless for Masons to think that Dad executed such a plan, even on behalf of someone else actually called Bob, they must have credited him with a strong motivation; i.e., to hide it from his six kids for what could have been decades waiting to be found.

When Bob's Letter was found in the late summer of 1957, Dad was working in the Arctic for the US Air Force as a civilian engineer on the last and hardest stage of the DEW line, so he was away for months and months. Finding Bob's Letter caused a sensation back then as the headlines got bigger when they spread across North America in the late fifties and ripped up the small town where we lived. I don't think it was the unsolved axe murders or the bodies in quicklime or the grave robbing and bootlegging or the "poison put in the vein of a Kingston inmate", but for the way it described how the "Gang Of Six" with colorful names were franchised out of Masonic Lodges with one of each six being the accountant. The news then was how the gang brainwashing / training "held up" Bruno Hauptman as an ideal to take the rap for killing the Lindbergh baby." The Global Brain now thinks that Lindbergh, himself a high Mason, suffered their retribution because he hired one of these gangs to cover his own practical joke that went wrong, killing his own child.

If it was Dad's printing, then he probably escaped the mob and only anecdotally he and a partner fled with a large "shiner" to the jungles of South America hoping to "find" it again and arrange it to be made "legit" by a jeweler in Georgetown. I heard his partner took off with the diamond and left Dad for dead in a clapped out digging operation. Dad's malaria and three week bout of hiccups probably left him high and dry on the mud banks of the Essequibo where he met mum teaching in a little settlement. This place called Ithaca was named by her Scottish kin who was one of Napoleon's jailers. The disbanded garrison at St Helena saw many people go to BG to become woodcutters in return for the deeds to hundreds of miles of riverbank.

Penniless, Dad probably went down the hard way through Panama because he spoke of the coca stomping grounds in Columbia and before he died he told me that he was fired by Shell Oil for absent-mindedly smoking dope in his pipe when he was called back to investigate a problem up a cracking tower. He was trying to warn me of the evil people behind the smoking of weed and he said that he never smoked it again. C'est la vie. The note in the sock said "Returned to Canada March 1953 on welfare". This oil field where I was born was in Trinidad, notoriously known as the starting drug route from South America. Trinidad, only a short thirty minute boat ride from Venezuela, hangs drug mules twenty or thirty at a time.

The town of Napanee in Ontario was where Dad bought a house from crooked lawyers and agents only to discover the Canada 401 was going right through our front yard. It was where Bob's Letter was found and for a bootlegger Napanee could be conjectured to be just another boarder town not far from friends inside the Kingston Penitentiary. After a small trip by boats "pushing off" at night laden with booze for the trip through the Thousand Islands the stuff would probably get unloaded at Syracuse in New York. Such border connections are common with a life in the underworld.

COLD WET STARVED AND DYING ON A STREETS OF TORONTO WHEN A LONG BLACK CAR PULLS UP AND A WELL DRESSED MAN ASKS IF I WANT WORK. I WOULD RATHER HAVE DIED THAT NIGHT THAN ACCEPT HIS OFFER. . .

That Dad nearly died then was recounted to me by his sister Marge who later helps him land a job on a Betchell project, which like Shell is also known for hiring criminals. That Dad was denied his father's estate by his step mother along with being out of work and having to leave university in his last year means he likely starved in the Great Depression. He went bald in his twenty second year and in a recurring fire theme he burnt all his university books and went on the road into any and every mining town he could; getting there playing poker mostly.

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E. J. (Ted) Legg wrote:

Yes and No.  No, I don't have the newspaper clippings themselves.  Mum had said that she wanted to keep them.  Did she burn lots of stuff?  But Yes, I have a photocopy of them.  In addition, I have been waiting for the both the Toronto Star and the Kingston Whig to get their archives digitized.  Once that happens, I'll be able to get a more permanent copy.  The photocopies is VERY old; VERY faded; and I do not want to open them up (disturb them) too much unless absolutely necessary.

PS:  There is a company here in Canada that has taken on the task of digitizing all of Canada's old newspapers.  It's a big, long job.
PPS:  The photocopies that I have are not like the modern day photocopy.  This is old, glossy, sticky type paper that has turned to an aged, sepia type color.

Ted

At 12:34 2004-04-04 +1200, you wrote:

I can't remember the words but some detail like a picture in the paper of you smiling and Mary holding the letter and pointing up to the beam where it was found.

Did you keep any newspaper clippings of the mystery? After Dad died I found some of his scribblings that Mum hadn't burnt and for me they shed quite a different light on the subject. Where to begin? I don't know.


E. J. (Ted) Legg wrote:

Interesting.  Imagine you remembering about Bob's letter after all these years!! Ted

At 18:33 2004-04-03 +1200, you wrote:

Corbans warehouse hit by fire <http://onenews.nzoom.com/onenews_detail/0,1227,265217-1-7,00.html>
BNZ vows to fight $300m tax bill <http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,2863117a13,00.html>

Ted,

Check out both of these stories from Friday's local news. The connection is that my landlord, John, is a Corban.

This affirms for me a series of co-incidences that I could have deduced are part of a psyops that I would recognize. In that regard it failed and I brushed it off but it did remind me of the Deseronto fire that resulted after you found Bob's Letter.

Jim

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