From the Smoky Lake Signal, June 25, 1980

Smithy Reopens for Radway Pioneer Days

The sound of a blacksmiths' hammer will ring out at Radway's Pioneer Days this July 26 & 27. Along with retired blacksmith  Monroe Coleman from Tofield will be Jack Kerns a retired DA and supervisor of beef cattle for the Department of Agricultural, who will be demonstrating his hobby as a wheelwright.

The old time business of making horseshoes & sharpening plowshares will be demonstrated on the forges and anvils in the shop of Radway's one time blacksmith, the late John Romanisky. The shop is in the 26 x 36 ft. square log building on Peter and Mike Romaniwsky's 2 acre plot at the entrance of Radway's Complex and fair grounds.

Radway's Smithy John Romaniwsky came to Canada in 1920 from Poland. He was 19, the war was over and he had not only lived through it, he learned a trade, blacksmithing, while serving in the Polish army.

His first shop in Radway was block south of his present location on land leased from John Rudyk. There he built his small shop and made the tools of his trade, tools that he continued to use for the next 30 years of his life. The anvil and drill press he bought. The forge, shoe tongs & hammers he crafted himself. The trip hammer he made out of car parts, the heavy steel of a CNR rail and the roller from a flower mill. To fan the forge, he adapted a blower from a silage cutter. To hold his grindstone he bolted a 1932 Chev block to a heavy wood base, then ran the shaft through the bearings to the long belts that wound up and around the shop. Everything ran off the belts that were powered from a one cylinder John Deere stationary engine.

With a hand lettered sign saying "Please do not ask for Credit" on the wall, John, his wife Paranka and the kids slowly earned their way through the depression. Faded letters from the Northern Porperties Company asking for more cash and demanding 8% interest on the 2 acre parcel testify to the struggle that everyone had in the 30's. Letters went back and forth for years. According to his son Peter, always were written by the postmaster Nester Kunnas, one of the few in the area who could pen a good formal letter in English. John could neither read nor write in English.

The shop itself was very successful judging from the number of plowshares stacked up in the busy season. The going price was 25 cents a share. If, by the time you came back the fifth and sixth time they still weren't done, he'd drop everything and finish yours while you waited, said his son Peter.

John Romaniwsky was 69 when he died. Cancer of the throat, the kids just put a lock on the door of the shop, but during this year's Pioneer Days the once familiar clang of the hammer on anvil will once again ring out in Radway.

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