Canada: ONTARIO: Her Honor the Reeve

In Manhattan's Times Square last week a big woman stepped out from the Hotel Astor, shouldered her way to a waiting automobile. The doorman stopped her.

"Sorry, lady," he said. "These cars are for the mayors." She gave him a look and said:

"I'm no lady. I'm a mayor."

She was indeed. She was fast-talking Anne Shipley, 46, Reeve (administrator) of the Township of Teck by official title and Mayor of Kirkland Lake by unofficial fact. She was in New York City to attend the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

In Kirkland Lake no one would have made the Astor doorman's mistake. Anne Shipley was beaten the first time she ran for reeve after her physician-husband died in 1941. But next year she was elected, has been unbeatable since. Well informed and judiciously profane, she has been a popular official.

At the conference Anne Shipley was the only woman delegate. Americans fell into the habit of introducing her as "the Mayor of Canada." She was much photographed, much interviewed. And there was New York fun for her, too. She had seafood dinners, saw Oklahoma!, shopped for a dinner dress, but found only impossible size 16s.

Then she went back to Kirkland Lake. With things booming again in the district's 13 gold mines, she would be busier than ever. And her three children would be glad to have her back in the kitchen.