How did the CPR gets its station names? Where was Oscar Lake? What was the largest ethnic group to settle in Saskatchewan?
Ask Bill Barry.
The popular author of two books on Saskatchewan place names, Barry was in Eston last week talking to students at the local school and to adults at a reception at the weekly newspaper office and at the library. Barry says that his interest in place names is “Mom’s fault.”
As a boy, he was given a stamp album for Christmas. Realizing he would have to specialize or go crazy, he developed an interest in Saskatchewan’s postal history.
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The province once had more than 3,000 post offices and Barry’s object was to collect a postmark from every Saskatchewan post office along with a map showing its location.
From that hobby grew an interest in the names and locations of the province’s 6,000 school districts and several months of “steady slugging” in Department of Education files documenting those names.
Before long, he had a database of thousands of names along with interesting tidbits, “a classic case of a hobby run amok,” he jokes.
He approached a producer at CBC four years ago and, except for the strike, has been doing a weekly radio column ever since.
From the scripts grew his first book, a story of place names, and from that his second, a dictionary of place names. The first book, People Places, Saskatchewan and its Names, is one of the best-selling Saskatchewan books ever. His presentations start with a look at aboriginal place names. He then goes to railroad names, noting that at one time the CPR employed two clerks at head office in Montreal whose sole job was to make up place names.
There were four requirements: the names had to be unique, short, relatively easy to spell and pronounce and easy to type in Morse code on a telegraph key.
Thus we have such place names as Sovereign, Sanctuary, Viscount, Marquis, Khedive, Liberty, Stalwart and Witley.
Barry is hoping his next book will be about the 6,000 names of schools in the province.
Having Barry in our town was just what was needed in mid-March. It was an opportunity for young and old to learn something while being entertained, for Barry is nothing if not an entertaining speaker.
If I had my way, we’d have one such function every month in winter, an excuse to get out of the house and meet and mingle. Such occasions also provide food for thought and a new book to read.
