Just dad, doing his job
Ed Lorraine’s daughter recalls long Sunday drives mixing business with pleasure
A family outing with Ed Lorraine was never just a normal Sunday drive.
“We just knew we weren’t going for an ice cream and back home again,” said Lisa Patton, Lorraine’s second youngest of five children.
“It usually meant long chats with constituents or friends or anyone who had been in touch with him for one reason or another.”
The former Fundy Dairy Bar in North River was just a hop, skip and a jump from the Lorraine beef farm in Upper Onslow.
“And those Sunday drives tended to be a little longer than most families experienced,” Patton recalled with a fond chuckle.
After sitting outside and enjoying their ice cream, the trip would turn into several hours of visiting farms along the way or checking in with people her father had either helped or was in the process of helping, at first as a municipal representative and later a provincial MLA.
Patton said her family was “very pleased” with her father being honoured by having a building named after him.
“Especially for me,” she said, given that she now works in that very building for the Nova Scotia Farm Loan Board.
One of her dad’s greatest tributes, she said, was that he was “a man of his word.”
“We saw him work tirelessly running a large beef operation as well as fulfilling all the duties of a representative in all the levels of government that he participated in,” Patton said. “He never, ever turned anyone down. If someone needed help he worked for them ’til the end until he got them the help they needed.”