Flight From Franceville: Kathy France, Guy Johnstone & Orville Wright

Postcard Memories is a weekly series of historic postcard views and photos submitted by René Hackstetter.

Kathy France, whose life has been intimately bound with Guy Johnstone’s , through marriage, is Wilf France’s daughter.

Her father owned Franceville, a tourist Hotel on Georgian Bay, close to Lambert Island, which served as the summer home of aviation pioneer Orville Wright. The France and Wright family were friends.

The Kittyhawk, once owned by Wright, passed into Kathy and Guy’s capable hands and they spent years restoring the boat.

If we regard the panorama and the sound of life in Midland, Johnstone’s MusicLand plays a prominent part.

That blinking neon sign in the seventies was a beacon to all those kids caught between math and music. It’s too costly to restore the neon to answer your question, but is that not the act of remembering, is this history not our present?

We speak of History, Math, Music, Art, Science, Left, Right, all as if discrete...this is the use of memory...to rejoin them all in one circle.

Guy Johnstone will be at the Legion Friday evening playing the sax and Kathy will be talking with friends. The band is playing and they’re telling tales at the BS table.

Living history is the act of life in town and country. All of us yearn for this one thing...to come home and know the place for the first time. If we hold this mirror up to our community, regarding the landscape from within or without, Kathy and Guy are strongly delineated figures.

Not merely shop keeping, sax playing, boat driving, hotel owning cut-outs, but fully living, breathing, caring and loving people.

Kathy and Guy’s act of restoring the Kitty Hawk is their way of restoring our collective memory of a first flight and the beginning of aviation history. By making this act they link us intimately with these events and our own present.

Copyright. René Hackstetter April 10, 2020