Stirring The Pot - May 14, 2008
Stew Slater, columnist If you didn’t know Sandra “Punk” Coulthard, rest assured: you were her favourite person she didn’t know.
“That’s how I started my talk at the memorial service – that I was her favourite old neighbour,” explained Stratford resident Susan Molenhuis.
“Because that’s how she made everyone feel.” You were either her favourite shopkeeper; or her favourite friend of her sister’s; or her favourite something-or-other. I’m 100 per cent certain I was her favourite guy who writes a column for the local paper.
If that seems to defy logic, consider her nieces and nephews. Talk to any of them and you’ll realize she somehow had the secret to making every one feel like number one.
Cancer took Punk from the Downie Township community last month at the age of 45. The phrase “too soon” was probably uttered by too many voices to count, but coupled with those lamentations were acknowledgments that hers was a life lived on an entirely different time scale (indeed, some occasionally wondered if Punk didn’t inhabit an entirely different plane of existence).
In those 45 years, she gave more towards the betterment of the community than most community members even realize is possible.
It’s no coincidence St. Pauls has been a training ground for some of the
most skilled ball and hockey players in the district. It’s no coincidence
the former Downie Township is chronicled so expertly and completely in the
two-volume Memories of Downie history book. It’s no coincidence hikers can
traverse confidently from Stratford to St. Marys along well-marked trails.
Volunteers made these things possible, and none gave more than Punk.
A previous generation of community-minded folks had the foresight to build
the hall and recreation centre in St. Pauls. As is noted in the family’s
submission to the history book, “with the ball park just across the road,
Wendy, Steve, Sheila and Punk all played on township teams. On summer
weekends, as soon as lunch was over, the Coulthards joined most of the
neighbourhood kids to play pick-up ball or football.”
(All five kids – there’s also brother Wayne – were given creative nicknames
by father John. “Punk” was the shortened version of “Punky the Porker,” a
name which stuck despite the fact that, according to Sheila “she was never
fat a day in her life.” The nickname was a godsend to teachers at Downie
Central Public School, however, since it represented a point of
differentiation from the two other Sandras in Punk’s grade.)
Following in the footsteps of Nelson and Roberta Dundas and family, Punk
served as park caretaker for several years.
Molenhuis, who operated the St. Pauls store with her husband for about a
decade (until 1998), was president of the Downie Recreation committee during
much of that time.
“She was my right-hand girl,” Molenhuis recalled. “Punk did everything at
that park.”
In the winter, a homemade backyard rink traditionally stretched between the
store and the Dundas property. Home rink to shinny players of vastly
dissonant abilities, it was also home rink for Punk.
“She was out there with the kids constantly,” Molenhuis said.
I met Punk when she took over submitting the Downie News to the Journal
Argus following the death of Jack Matthison. Taking on the job of recording
the township’s goings-on was a natural progression from the work she had
already begun as chair of the committee putting together the Memories of
Downie book. And, without a doubt, it reflected the axiom with which she
concluded her message on behalf of the committee in that book: “Treasure the
present, because it is tomorrow’s history.”
She certainly treasured the present. Organizing hikes, clearing trails and
negotiating access with landowners, Punk’s enthusiasm was contagious for
other members of the Avon Trail Association.
“She enjoyed people immensely,” said fellow Association member Shirley
Gotts. “Even with her cancer and her sickness, she was very positive.”
History book committee member Marion Ready, among a group of friends who
divvied up the responsibilities of driving Punk to daily appointments at a
Kitchener hospital, agrees. “She’d talk about the drugs and the chemo and
the treatments that she had coming up, and how they were affecting her. And
she just made you feel so good about what you were doing – that she really
appreciated what you were doing.”
Turning Punk’s Thursday cancer appointments into excursions through
Mennonite country, Ready would “take her to places she hadn’t been before.”
In return, Punk provided what Ready described as “a learning experience”
about staging a dignified fight, and eventually about being positive in the
face of one’s mortality.
“We made good use of those Thursdays,” Ready sighs.
The time spent on those excursions probably pales in comparison to the time
both women spent on the history book. Punk’s crowning achievement, according
to Ready, was following up on the advice of the book’s editor – brought
forward fairly late in the process – to include a section about Downie’s
wartime veterans. She got to work and soon came back with nearly 40 pages
worth of information.
The photo of the Memories of Downie committee, included alongside Punk’s
message, shows her wearing a fashionable mini-dress and her trademark smile.
But you can easily make out the farmer’s-tan whiteness of her upper arms,
betraying two facts: until the end, she bucked fashion trends. And, until
the end, she remained tied to her family’s farm on the edge of St. Pauls.
(Or, perhaps instead of in the farm fields, she acquired the tan while
holding traffic control signs – as she did for a while, kind of following in
the footsteps of her road grader-operating grandfather and brother – with
Perth South Township’s roads crew.)
The mini-dress – or any other fashionable clothing – was nowhere to be seen
at Punk’s recent memorial service at the St. Pauls hall. Instead, she was
laid to rest in the same outfit she wore when she used to walk each day
through the doors of Molenhuis’s store on the main corner of the village:
slippers and pyjamas.
“Punk was unorthodox,” an understating Molenhuis explains. “It didn’t matter
how anybody else thought. She was going to do it her way.”
Her sister Sheila has no objection to that comment. “She had those endearing
qualities of a youngest child . . . I don’t know. Is it stubborn? Is it
determined? If something needed to be done, it was going to be done THEN,
and in her way.”
Punk’s way may not have always been the most obvious way. It may not have
been the way most people would choose when they set out to become community
leaders. But, like the Avon Trail that has been made to jog this way and
that to avoid natural barriers and uncooperative landowners en route to its
ultimate destination, Punk’s way was usually the right way.