By Glen Herbert

‍

“As I’ve said a few times,” says Marg Lech, “when I get up there in May, there’s a few of those grads who owe me some drinks!” I suspect they'll be happy to. Marg was an important presence at the school as teacher, assistant head of school, and houseparent in Clarkson House.

“We were in a small community," she says. "We had to sort of make our own fun. We were a family-like community and everyone got along supporting each other.”

The yearbook from 1995 lists the residents of Clarkson including Cleo and Deuce. “Cleo was the cat of the other housemaster. I’m not a cat person. But Deuce was a Labrador Retriever and she roamed that house. I mean I just left my apartment door open, and she would just roam up and down the stairs of Clarkson house, in and out, up on the beds. The kids just loved her.”

Marg came to RLC directly from the University of Ottawa, having responded to a job posting. “I thought ‘that looks sort of neat,’” she says, “ and I went up and met with Greg Devinish and Elinor Cole.” She was a runner then and remembers running with Deuce down the Westgate steps to the sail dock and then jumping in the lake. “I think the whole campus is great. In the fall with all the leaves when they start to turn ... I just think the whole setting is fantastic. ... I used to do a bike trip along the Seguin trail. So, we’d go up the highway toward Parry Sound, not very far. And then we’d get on to the trail. It used to be over a rail line. We’d ride our bikes across this rail line all the way through the park. And it was phenomenal. And I did that every year. It was absolutely a stellar trip.”

She says that “that’s the kind of stuff that most schools don’t do. But at Rosseau you can do it because you’re in that sort of environment, you’re in the whole Muskoka area ... going sea kayaking on Georgian Bay ... Those are things that students just can’t do in other places.”

Both Marg and Greg Devenish spoke at the 90s reunion in Gravenhurst in May.