Health Centre

In the early 1960’s, the HSR waterfront was a vista of canvas-covered cedar strip canoes. Most were red (vermillion actually) with a smaller number painted in the historic livery of camp Kennaway; forest green with an oval splash of medium yellow covering the keel and the bottom of the canoe. Overlooking this landscape was a small cabin, noteworthy by the presence of a large second story deck complete with a “bridge” including a ship’s wheel and three “masts” (flagpoles). The deck was usually inhabited by bronzed waterfront staff, surveying their dominion while applying sun tanning lotion. (No sun block—this was the 1960’s and skin cancer hadn’t been invented yet). Waterfront staff lived in this cabin, known at that time as the Land-ship.

The interior walls had been “finished” in low grade wall board which created a winter wonderland for rodents with the accompanying stains and odours, and by the late 1960’s the cabin became “program” rather than living space, but not before the infamous hub fire, through which the waterfront director of the day, Alex LeRoy (62-65), soundly slept. As the “headquarters” of waterfront and composite camp activities, the cabin soldiered on in this guise for several years and proved to be a reasonable refuge for the entire program department during the noteworthy MOK/POK water-fight of 1970.

Over time, the deck was removed, the interior walls stripped and the Programme Centre, which had been previously located in the lower level of the hub now occupied by the trading post, was moved to the cabin. So, in 2008, after 30 years of housing the Programme Centre and substantially more years enduring the type of decay that wooden buildings suffer in this climate, the centre was disassembled in the last weeks of the summer.

In late September, 2008, new foundation beams for a new Programme Centre were laid in the same location