“I didn’t ever want to stop working… I like to be out doing something—making a sled or working on a lawnmower, or anything that comes along”

Everyone on Grand Manan Island, NB—population approximately 2,367—seems to know Smiles Green, who turns 100 in December. When I mentioned I was on the island in part to interview folks who liked to recall bygone times, I was told to talk to Smiles. But he was not easy to reach. I couldn’t get him on the phone, and when we dropped by his house, a neighbour pointed to the empty driveway (yes, Smiles still drives) and said, “He can be hard to get hold of. Sometimes he goes out at five in the morning and doesn’t come back til 8:30 in the evening. I once tried to get him for two weeks, and I live right across the street.”

My daughter finally found him at the Island Arts Café in North Head, chatting with patrons about some CDs he had in his car. Smiles, who has four sons between 50 and 75, retired from working on the Grand Manan road crew more than 30 years ago. He keeps busy with odd jobs and spends much of his free time in his workshop, where he builds model lobster boats, classically styled children’s sleds, and an invention of his own: a miniature RCMP musical ride, which features Mountie-shaped figures attached to a wheel that turns in the breeze.

I spoke with Smiles at the cafe (which has one of his model boats on display) and later at his home on Ingalls Head, close to where he grew up. His mother lived to 97, and his younger brother passed away last year, just a few months shy of his 100th birthday. “But I’ve lived the longest of any of us,” he says.

I don’t know how I got the name Smiles. I’ve had it ever since I could remember. There were nine boys and three girls in my family—I’m the 11th of 12—and we all had nicknames. My oldest brother was “Suzy,” and they called Sheldon, “Snooks.” Donovan was “Link,” and my brother Earle was “Carrot.” I know how Earle got his name. One night he was down by Ingalls Head, where my wife’s father had a garden. Someone got into them carrots at night, and he went up over the road and seen Earle, so he put that nickname on him. Earle was Carrot for the rest of his life, even though he was innocent.

We had a garden too in those days. That’s what everyone did. And I never saw a loaf of store-bought bread until Peter Reynolds—we always used to call him Peter Rabbit—came here and started a bakery, probably in the early 1930s. My mother would bake bread, and a lot of it.

We’d eat together. You could take a feed sack, fill it with lobster and bring it up from the wharf. My mother had a copper pot to heat water for the washing. We’d heat the lobsters in there, shell them, have a feed and make lobster sandwiches to take to school.

I remember sometimes we’d take a tent, row down to Wood Island and get some gulls’ eggs, maybe camp for a week. Other times the old man would take a boat of us down, and we’d bring gulls’ eggs back by the barrel. We’d eat whatever we could get our hands on, and we tried everything to keep them—I remember putting them in a heavy box with salt all around them.

School was two miles away, and we walked. There was a woman who lived about halfway. In the winter, she’d invite us in to warm up by the woodstove, and then we’d carry on. The school had three classrooms: grades 1 to 3, 4 to 6, and 7 to 9. If you wanted to go past Grade 9 you had to go to North Head. I went to Grade 6, and all I’ve done since is work at stuff. I never had an education.

The power came to the island in the early 1930s. They used a couple of diesel engines to generate it. My old man had the second electric washer on the island—a Beatty. It had an open copper tub that sat on top of a set of legs. Then everyone started getting electric washers. On Monday morning, they’d put the power on so women could get the washing done. Then they’d turn it off til the evening.

I started fishing lobster from a rowboat when I was 12 years old. I’d set about 15 traps and haul them in by hand. I made my own traps. You did everything by hand then. The price for the lobsters was 25 cents apiece, no matter how long they were. Then the buyers would come up from Boston. The lobster pound didn’t sell them to the buyers by the piece; they sold them by the pound. That’s how they made money on them.

I didn’t go too long before I bought a little powerboat. It was about 20 feet long, with a three horsepower make and break engine. I’d get around the islands with it and haul up by hand.

One time I hooked something and thought, “What the hell is on that thing?” I hauled and hauled, and couldn’t bring it up. And I noticed my brother Link’s boat in sight of me. Sometimes when you bring up a trap it has some rocks in it. He’d saved up all of these little rocks and chucked them in my trap. When I got the trap up I thought, “I knew who that was.” I emptied it out, chucked my trap back overboard and then stuffed one of his traps with the rocks. The next day Link said, “Smiles, I didn’t put them rocks in your trap.” I said, “I seen you watching me!”

I used to run boats for other people too. I’d run down to St. Mary’s Bay and get a load of herring. I had no real use for haddock. It doesn’t take the salt well, and there was no fresh fish market on the island at that time. You might throw out a line if you wanted to catch one for a chowder—and if you caught one you’d just as likely get two.

For three summers I worked in the factory in Blacks Harbour [on the mainland], making wooden boxes. I lived on a lobster boat. I lengthened it out a bit, put a room on the back and an awning, and I slept in the cuddy.

I fished on and off until around 1960, and then I went on the road. There were only two asphalt strips on the island then, and the rest of the roads were gravel. For a long time most of what I did was grading—I was scraping all around and I went through a set of blades a week. In the winter, I ploughed snow. We used to have a lot of snow, but we haven’t had no snow to speak of for years now.

I was good with the front-end loader and the ‘dozer too. We hauled gravel for the foundation of the post office building in North Head, and we got it all off the beach. Now you can’t take a shovelful off the beach. I once walked the ‘dozer at low tide across Cheney Passage and Cow Passage, and onto White Head Island. I dug out three or four basements out there, then I walked that thing back across the passage and smoothed up a road when I came back.

I didn’t ever want to stop working, but I had to retire when I turned 65. I didn’t have a choice.

I had two or three Chev trucks—the first one was a ‘45 Chev—and when I had trucks I done all my own work on them. If anything happened, I would take the engine out and overhaul it. I did quite a bit of engine work. People would bring me lawnmowers to fix. If I couldn’t find a part, I’d make a part.

Now you open up a truck and there’s nothing in there that looks like a damn engine. It’s frustrating to me, because we didn’t throw anything away.

Now I make these little lobster boats—I sold three of them in the last two weeks. It’s minimum wage. I just figure, $10 an hour for the time it takes me. One of those little rowboats I make is $30. The larger replica lobster boats take about a week and they’re $350.

I got the idea for the musical rides when the RCMP Musical Ride came here a few years ago. I thought of making one with a bike wheel. Sometimes I give them away, and sometimes I sell them. I made five in one week once, and the biggest one I made had 10 horses on it. I’m just playing around, really.