Dear Editor:
I have just heard that Welcome Wagon Canada has closed its doors forever. I didn’t even wear down enough to retire until I’d put in almost 20 years and was 77 years old. How many aggravations! How much fun! I recall working in an unheated garage in January assembling packages so newcomers would receive their proper welcome to our community or the new mothers their baby’s gifts at Groves.
Three times I nearly wept at the honour of being national #1 Welcome Wagon representative, but that wasn’t why I did it at all.
I remember when my colleague Irene Bultena and I decorated the window at Doyle’s (paint and paper) in downtown Fergus to celebrate the company’s 50th anniversary. I still have my 50th anniversary lapel pin.
I remember attending annual conferences (always at our own expense because the company operated on a frugal shoestring to keep the costs down for our sponsors) in K-W, Ottawa and Orillia.
What a wonderful job it was! The people I met! Newcomers to Centre Wellington whose questions I was able to answer; our wonderful businesses who I was able to tell new people about; the folks who – at my insistence – would shop or eat out locally first; civic and county people who always helped; newly-welcomed people who’d tip me off when they saw an out-of-town moving van down their street; the festivals I could promote that someone moving from outside Ontario might not have heard of …the list goes on and on.
And a lot of the things that were on my “promoting Centre Wellington list” aren’t available right now. But Welcome Wagon would, despite COVID-19 and its accompanying shutdowns, still be telling people about them for the day when they’ll come back.
The fact that Welcome Wagon is gone breaks my heart. Do computer keyboards go into meltdown from salt water?
What a wonderful story this company has had – did you ever have a WW Welcome? Tell your grandkids; I plan to insist my great nieces hear all about it. Thank you to everyone – there were hundreds of you, too numerous to mention – who helped over the years.
Special thanks to those businesses who weren’t day-to-day sponsors (usually a budgetary thing) but who stepped up to the plate every December with something memorable for the first baby of the new year. That was one of the most rewarding parts of our job – and it was 100% voluntary. And I remember the new parents and the adorable babies and the great coverage we always got from the local press. Thanks to them, too.
Goodbye to the nicest, most rewarding underpaid and overworked job of my career – the most fun I ever had in my entire life. I shall treasure my awards and award pins forever!
Helen Marucci,
Fergus