(21 April 1891-8 Aug. 1964), jeweller and historian. (Clarence Ostrom) Born in Alexandria. Parents: Isaac Brock Ostrom and his wife Margaret J. MacGregor. Clarence Ostrom served overseas with the Canadian Artillery in World War I. Afterwards, he operated a jewellery and watch repair business in a shop situated at Mill Square on Main Street, Alexandria, while his brother Ernest Ostrom had his drugstore in the same shop. Known as “Ostroms” (it would be pedantic to worry about placing an apostrophe), this was one of the best-known businesses in Alexandria for many decades. Their father Brock Ostrom had originally sited his business a little farther north on Main Street, but he had moved to the Mill Square location before the end of the 1880s. In 1914 Brock Ostrom bought the building from John A. McDougald. (Glengarry News 20 March 1914) The Ostrom store also housed the local Bell Telephone exchange from 1905 till the late 1940s. Clarence was not only the concerned and conscientious manager of the Bell exchange over many years, passionately involved in the project of maintaining good telephone service, but also, as the years went by, he was deeply involved in the history of the area phone system. Among the phone operators who worked at Ostroms over the years were the “Sandy Ranald Sisters” (see John Joseph Macdonald). In the early years, when it was not thought necessary to employ night operators, Clarence seems to have slept at the store himself to take care of any calls that might come through. The Ostroms also sold school textbooks from the store.

     Clarence was a small, intense man, with skull-like facial features, heavy drooping skin, and a squinting appearance caught from years of peering through his socket eyeglass at the inner workings of watches. Clarence was a less private, more outgoing man than his brother Ernest. Dorothy Dumbrille (1954) wrote of “Ostroms” that “The Dutch name is exceptional on a Main Street whose merchants almost all have French names.” She added that the Ostrom brothers, and their sister Ethel Ostrom, “never tell of their good deeds, but they are legion.” Though sometimes called a watchmaker, as the technical name of his profession, Clarence repaired watches rather than made them. However, at least one fine Swiss-made gold watch survives with “C. Ostrom Alexandria Ont.” inscribed on the dial.

     In 1922 Clarence Ostrom and Dr H.L. Cheney installed Alexandria’s first radio in Dr Cheney’s home. During World War II Clarence was active as a blood donor and active in driving groups of blood donors to Ottawa to donate. He was the local correspondent for the Ottawa Citizen over a period of some 50 years. (editorial of tribute, Glengarry News) The Citizen appears to have used his material, however, without according him a byline. He was a devoted student of the passing life of Alexandria, frequently appearing at the door of Gerald McDonald’s barbershop (only a few seconds’ walk from the Ostrom brothers’ store) to inform the men lingering there of the latest developments in some local drama, and sometimes, it seems, as the following indicates, entering to take part more fully in the discussions that went on there unceasingly. Eugene Macdonald recorded that “The years had mellowed him to the stage where he could preside at the morning meetings of the so-called Senate in Gerry’s Barbershop, argue with good humour and participate in the practical jokes that are a part of that daily assemblage.” A long-term, dedicated good citizen, his interests were national as well as local. In 1962, two years before his death, he successfully protested on election day to the chief elections officer at Ottawa, Nelson Castonguay, that the kind of numbered ballots being used would enable the scrutineers to determine how he had voted, and he got an immediate remedy, at least so far as his own polling station was concerned. (Glengarry News 21 June 1962)

     When Ernest Ostrom fell ill in the spring of 1955, the drugstore part of Ostroms was sold to Frank McLeister. (Glengarry News 21 April 1955 ) In 1959, the building which housed the Ostrom store was also sold to Frank McLeister. (GN 22 Jan. 1959) For some time after the sale of 1955, Clarence continued his watch repair business at the old location.

     The warm and eloquent editorial Eugene Macdonald published in the Glengarry News on Clarence Ostrom’s death, under the title of “We Lose a Valued Neighbour,” (Ostroms was situated next to the Glengarry News office) will be a permanent written memorial to his importance. Clarence Ostrom was unmarried.

     Clarence Ostrom was a great authority on the history of Alexandria. The Glengarry News, which often benefitted from his information in settling difficult points of Alexandria history, on 17 Nov. 1960 termed him “our local jeweller-historian.” In the tribute to Ethel Ostrom by Harriet MacKinnon and Ewan Ross (1976, 1982), it was observed, perhaps with a trace of affectionate exaggeration, that after Clarence’s death, Ethel kept his historical collection “in locked suitcases close to the front door where they’d be sure to be saved in case of fire.” Clarence published a number of articles, including a note in Maclean’s on the Lord Dundonald story and a long article, of the highest historical value, in the Glengarry Historical Society’s annual volume of 1974-1975 on the history of the telephone in Alexandria. He compiled a typescript history of Alexandria of close to 400 pages, which contains many sharp and uncompromising observations on many people and families. Copies of this “secret” or “private” history, as it may be called, exist in private collections, and it has been often cited in the notes to the present dictionary under the single word Ostrom. The work is a wonderful portrait, perceptive, unfailingly intelligent, and very well-written, of the life of a small town. It seems as certain as anything relating to the interests and values of posterity can be, that the work will be published in due time, which will probably not be until at least a few decades into the twenty-first century. This can only be, however, when it can no longer give offence to anyone living. The work is organized as a sequence of notes, rather than as a narrative.

     One has to face it. Acrimonious though Clarence Ostrom could be in his writings, he loved Alexandria. There is a passage in The Wind in the Willows in which the riverbank dweller Ratty explains to the Mole how much the river meant to him; it was a home, a friend, recreation, even washing. And so Alexandria was to Clarence. Yet his delight in the restless life of Alexandria often takes the surface appearance of excessive severity. For in this remarkable history, Clarence Ostrom held to the ancient precept, well-known to the Romans, that one of the main duties of historians is to hold evil-doers up to the scorn of posterity, and thus to discourage evil-doers to come. In the history he shows himself the implacable enemy of giddy people, and wary of strangers in town. One may detect a certain readiness to criticize people who settled in Alexandria but soon left again, without trying to “stick it out.” Clarence Ostrom’s extreme severity in his history in censuring actions that might otherwise not unreasonably be interpreted merely as the predictable failings of human nature was evidence that he was very much a Glengarrian of his time. For the record, it may be noted that Clarence’s own personal failing, which would have been included by anyone else attempting a similar history, was that he was frustratingly dilatory in repairing the watches brought to his shop.

     Questions of family origins and genealogy do not seem, so far as the Alexandria history indicates, to have interested him. And as a man of the present, had he found himself facing the task of writing the history, like Harkness, of SDG, most likely he would have made short work of events before Confederation.

     The approximate site of Ostroms is still home to a pharmacy, but a big one in brightly-lit premises, contrasting with the the dimly-lit (and as it seems in memory, almost dark) shop which the Ostroms maintained in accordance with the customs of an older stage of merchandising.

     See also McLeister (John), Monahan (R.).

Glengarry News 13 Aug. 1964 (with editorial tribute) * R.H.S., “The Watchmaker of Alexandria,” The Blue Bell [Bell Telephone publication], Feb. 1950 (with portrait of the youthful Clarence), repr. GN 17 Feb. 1950 (with an excellent, and most characteristic, portrait of the two Ostrom brothers, Clarence and Ernest together), repr. also Standard Freeholder 18 Feb. 1950 * adverts for Ostroms in GN over many years * Harkness 368 * Dumbrille, U, 68 * Ostrom 281 and passim * Bibliography of Glengarry: index * personal knowledge * photog. of Clarence Ostrom & two Bell operators, GN 28 July 1939 * radio: GN 24 Feb. 1922; Ostrom 120 * blood donor, GN 28 Nov. 1941 * one of first two Alexandrians to get gas rationing books, GN 27 Feb. 1942