Gwendolyn Poole Molnar’s recollections offer us a rare look into the life of a child growing up in Pilley’s Island in the first decades of the twentieth century, before roads, electricity, and telephones connected the island community to its Newfoundland neighbours. Rich with real people and vivid scenes, redolent with roasted caplin and Nujol oil, Tapestry of Yesteryear quietly accepts the strength of past generations as a given and reminds us that all was not doom and gloom in the outports of pre-Confederation Newfoundland.

For over seventy years Gwen Poole Molnar has entertained friends and family with special occasion missives and poems. Weddings, birthdays, retirements, births, deaths, and anniversaries, including the 1981 fiftieth anniversary of her graduating class at the Grace Hospital, have been enhanced and memorialized by her poetry, and at the age of 93 she signed the book contract that will enhance the history of her beloved Pilley’s Island.She lived for over sixty years in North Tonawanda, New York, where in the 1980s she wrote a column called “Seniors on the Move” for the Tonawanda News.Her husband, Paul, died in 1990, and she now lives in a senior’s facility in adjacent Wheatfield. Her daughter Gail Andrees and her family live in nearby Akron, New York, and her son Paul and his wife live in Midland, Texas.She can be contacted through Flanker Press or Janice Wells, 15 Fleming Street, St. John’s, Newfoundland.

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