Stanfield’s, Truro, Nova Scotia

Lotta Hitschmanova inspired a legion of loyal volunteers supporting her and USC Canada’s work right across the country. Truro NS was no different in this regard, but they did have one key asset that other communities lacked, as related by Clyde Sanger in his 1986 biography of Lotta:

“Some [USC] branches had certain advantages, like the Truro branch which was just down road from Stanfield’s Ltd., the family woollen and textile firm that has never looked back since the Klondike Gold Rush spread the fame of its unshrinkable underwear across North America.

“Dorothy Legge, who started the Truro group in 1957, used to get lots of high quality seconds from the factory and also wool at a dollar a pound (about two dollars a kilogram) from the ‘sweepings.’” Her friends would knit them into shawls for Greek women after the earthquakes or into sweaters for Korean children.

“On one March day in 1958, Miss Legge organized a clothing drive for Korea around Truro and collected over three hundred kilograms. She also kept in touch with dry cleaners, who let her have garments that had not been claimed for two years. ‘Better clothes then, all wool’, she says.”

“And Dorothy Legge describes how she and Eva Munroe in Truro first got hooked by the agency in 1957. After deciding that a list of baby garments for UNRWA layettes was incomplete, as given in the Family Herald, ‘we wrote to the USC to say so. We got a letter back, explaining it all. That was the start. Once you’re on their list, they never let you be!’”