Sandy was born Gordon Cline in St. Catharines, Ontario, in 1938, just before WW2.

   "My mother told me that I was a free spirited soul, I think the word she used was "hellion", always curious to find out how things worked. I and my brother were the Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn of the neighborhood, building forts in the farmers asparagus field and taking four mile hikes to Port Dalhousie to go swimming. We played on the Black bridge, a remnant of an old railroad bridge that had spanned the second Welland Canal. We built boats out of old trunks to cross our fishing pond".

   Because of the war, there was a shortage of money in our neighborhood and we took to carving our toys out of wood. We would spend hours carving wooden pistols, using the pictures in my grandfathers "Gun Digest" magazine as models.

   While in public school, I developed an interest in drawing Lil' Abner and I can still find my cartoons in many of the school books I used in that period.

  I was very inquisitive, but soon discovered that some things were very difficult to accomplish.

  This adventuresome spirit often had its bad points. I put a nail through my foot in our baseball field that had been turned into a construction site. My brother threw a file at me which stuck in my head. A falling cement block hit my head, broke in two, causing deep gashes to my leg. Altogether it was a normal childhood for our neighborhood.

  Tom Dailly created a Boy Scout Troop from these free spirited boys and before long you would find us hiking and camping in the woods almost every weekend.

  Our special camping experience was at Easter. Irregardless of the weather, we would spend the Easter vacation living in lean-to's and cooking over an open fire. Of course the yearly highlight was to go swimming in Ten Mile creek on Good Friday. From these days I developed a love of the woods that has remained to this day.

   In 1955, I was able to attend the Boy Scout 8th World Jamboree in Niagara on the Lake where I became close friends with boys from Ireland, Trinidad and other parts of the world.

  When I was ready to enter high school, the guidance counselor came around to give us the Minnesota Aptitude Test. This was to ascertain what classes we should take in high school. I wanted to be a cartoonist and take art, but the counselor told me that the tests showed I had no artistic talent whatsoever.

  I decided to take draughting .

  Shortly after I graduated from high school, I met Brian and Wilf Cooper. Brian was a rock hound and his father Wilf a part time prospector. From Brian I developed an interest in geology that has taken me far afield. Prospecting plunged me into the wilderness of Northern Ontario searching for silver, precious stones, minerals and other rocks for our little company, "Canadian Shield Rocks and Minerals".

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