In the height of 2015's altogether-too-short summer, I was emailed by the daughter of an olde time telephone lineman here in S.W. Ontario about a pile of insulators her dad had and was hoping to unload. He had kept them from his years of service in the St. Mary's, Ontario area and had had them stowed away in the basement for some 40 years or so. Despite his interests in collecting the things as a younger man, his perception of them had gradually turned from interesting light catchers for his window, to cumbersome dust-catchers for a pile in his garage. Nothing more could be done than expend them to the next hopelessly addicted collector to come along. I just so happened to have been lucky enough to catch wind of his predicament.

There are certain pieces one expects to find here in S.W. Ontario when called about such an accumulation. Brookfield, Diamond and B.T.C. CD 102s, Brookfield and Hemingray tolls, Hemingray 106s, etc, etc. Maybe even an MLOD unembossed 102 or two for good measure. What one does NOT expect to find is a telephone pony so far from its indigenous land that it boggles ones mind.

I could see in the photos that were sent to me of the group, that there were some purple CD 102s in the pile, but I wouldn't have dared to imagine there was an N.W. & B.I.T.Co. in a gorgeous light purple mixed in there.

After I had gone through them all and had found the N.W. & B.I.T.Co., some follow-up questioning was in order. After an hour-long phone conversation, I wasn't any closer to figuring out how it may have come to Ontario. He indicated that all of the insulators he owned had originated from the area around where he had worked. He had often brought home a scattered couple or a box full of glass from a job when there was something out of the ordinary, or something he liked - something that sparkled the right way despite a sooty carapace. He said he had given a lot away over the years, but none that he could recall had come from anywhere apart from his own work.

I was stumped. What the heck was this Vancouver piece doing here in flat S.W. Ontario, some 3000 km from the closest place it seems it could sensibly have originated from?

An interesting tidbit about these N.W. & B.I.T.Co. CD 102s that many on ICON may not know: some of these have been found in S.W. Ontario before this one. A scattered few stories over the years - an anecdote here, a rumour there - dating back as far as the 1970s-1980s all substantiate that something in the area of a dozen to a dozen and a half or so of these have been found in the province. One story traces back to another lineman who was once an active collector here in Ontario. This collector claims to have found several of these, all in a similar light purple shade, still adorning an active telephone pole in the London area. At least a few of these are still present in Ontario collections today, with provenance attached.

The two pieces shown here were keepers from the group I picked up last summer. I had never before found a [030] SDP Montreal CD 102 in my years of collecting, so that was a welcome piece. As a testament to the occurrence of N.W. & B.I.T.Co. CD 102s in Ontario, this is actually the second one I've found up to this point: I turned up another in a London, Ontario collection in the summer of 2014. It was also part of a hoard assembled by a long-retired Bell lineman.