The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #37722 Message #552796
Posted By: Charley Noble
17-Sep-01 - 09:15 PM
Thread Name: Obit: Fare thee well Bill Bonyun (1911-2001)
Subject: RE: OBIT: Fare thee well Bill Bonyun
Jeri - you're right. It's always better to tell people we appreciate what they're doing and we love them while they're still around. Most of us were able to do that with Bill. And I was able to introduce a lot of my singing friends to Bill over the years. I need to contact whoever has his master recordings and made sure they're re-issued as CD's.
About three years ago I also made a major focused effort to organize a trip for him to Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, where he's been back in the 1930's and in typical Bill fashion talked his way onto a fishing schooner, got himself signed on as an overaged cabin boy. He took some remarkable photographs of people fishing on the Grand Banks, and I was able to make arrangements with the fisheries museum there to receive a set of negatives; they had few photographs of people working on the schooners. They put us up at a local motel, arranged an interview with the local paper and Bill lighted up with his wonderful stories. We also tracked down some of the teenagers he'd met back then, and true to form they had not forgotten him either. We both overslept the next morning and made record time back to Yarmouth in less than an hour flat to catch the ferry back to Maine.
We'll tell the story about Bill and the honey bees another time.;-)