Lorraine ODonnell Williams - Memories of the Beach: Reflections on a Toronto Childhood

MEMORIES OF THE BEACH

MEMORIES
OF THE BEACH
Reflections on a Toronto Childhood

Lorraine ODonnell Williams

Copyright Lorraine ODonnell Williams, 2010

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

Editor: Shannon Whibbs
Design: Courtney Horner
Printer: Webcom

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Williams, Lorraine ODonnell, 1932
Memories of the Beach : reflections on a Toronto
childhood / by Lorraine ODonnell Williams.

ISBN 978-1-55488-389-9

1. Williams, Lorraine ODonnell, 1932- --Childhood and youth. 2. Beaches, The (Toronto, Ont.)--Biography. 3. Beaches, The (Toronto, Ont.)--History. 4. Toronto (Ont.)--Biography. 5. Toronto (Ont.)--History. I. Title.

FC3097.26.W54A3 2010 971.354103092 C2009-907461-3

1 2 3 4 5 14 13 12 11 10

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and The Association for the Export of Canadian Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program, and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

Photograph (lr): Bll Williams, Velma Williams, Irma Glynn, Nina Cressy, Florence Byrnes, Frank Byrnes.

Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

J. Kirk Howard, President

Published by The Dundurn Group
Printed and bound in Canada.
www.dundurn.com

Unless otherwise indicated, all photos are credited to the authors private collection.

To my mother and father, who gave me the gift of life to live this life, and to my dear husband John and our children, Theresa, Megan, Harland, Maureen, and Barbara, who have made life so fulfilling.

Its by remaining faithful to the contingencies and peculiarities of your own experience and the vagaries of your own nature that you stand the greatest chance of conveying something universal.

David Shields, Reality, Persona in Truth
in Nonfiction, edited by David Lazar

Contents

L ike most writers, I keep stacks of clippings from newspapers, magazines, and other media stashed haphazardly in nominal files. However, an old clip I came across recently left me with a question: Modern life fills children with anxiety, study finds (National Post, December 15, 2000). It went on to describe a massive study of five decades, which concluded, The slow disintegration of the ties that bind society together is creating generations of chronic worriers.

It was then that I realized that the memoirs I was writing about growing up in the 1930s and 1940s were filled with some incidents of anxieties, but the overall tone was one of security interspersed with challenge. And certainly, the anxiety never led to me developing into a chronic worrier. Quite the opposite. I tend to be more in the things always turn out for the best school. Then I began to muse: was it possible that my childhood days marked the last, or near last, age of innocence?

Unwilling to be accused of being a Pollyanna, a non-realist, an idealist, I took a critical eye to the events of my upbringing. I knew that the decade in which I was born had not been free of stress and pain. It was the decade when Charles and Anne Lindberghs twenty-month-old son was kidnapped and later found murdered; when millions of North Americans were out of work due to the Great Depression; when Joseph Stalins wife was suspected of committing suicide; when the Second World War broke out. But good things were happening, as well. New Yorks Radio City Music Hall opened. The Toronto Maple Leafs won the Stanley Cup. If you had any money, the price of a house averaged six thousand dollars and a loaf of bread cost a mere seven cents. A new car cost $610 and gas was ten cents a gallon. Elizabeth Taylor was born!

Reviewing my growing-up years over those two decades and comparing them to the society in which my children and their children will have to live, I have an increased understanding of how difficult it is for todays generation to discern how to make positive choices. The growing prosperity after the war years, plus societal changes wrought by the war, were a prelude to the revolutionary social mores of the 1960s. Individualism and relativism are now dominant. Guidelines are often fuzzy or non-existent. By learning about times that were different, this generation may be encouraged to know that life was and can be different. That its possible to restore some of that innocence into their world.

I realize my life had an extra dimension that coloured it forever. Growing up at the Beach (or the Beaches, as many Torontonians refer to it) infused my nature with a resiliency as multi-faceted as the moods of Lake Ontario, and a foundation as firm as the grand old willow trees that line the boardwalk. I was truly blessed, as was every child who was a son or daughter of the Beach.

Bring back the old days? No, thats not possible or even desirable. But honour those old days? Yes and realize there are ways to integrate their values into todays anxious world.

Growing Up on the Boardwalk

Every man has within himself the entire human condition.

David Shields, Reality, Persona in Truth in Nonfiction

T oday The Beach neighbourhood is considered a safe stable place for busy Torontonians to live and raise a family. It is a trendy oasis of relaxation, and a refuge from the summer humidity that can wither city dwellers. But in 1793 when the Ashbridge family started to farm there, it was boggy, buggy, and plain hard work. The family, whod moved there from Philadelphia in 1793 when John Graves Simcoe was lieutenant-governor, was determined to persevere in civilizing this lakefront wasteland. By the 1850s, other pioneers had joined them, including a settler named Joseph Williams. Williams bought a farm near the present-day Queen Street and Lee Avenue area and named it Kew Farms. Ever a man of enterprise, he designated a sector of it as The Canadian Kew Gardens. Contemporary documents described it as a pretty pleasure ground of twenty acres, fifteen in bush, fronting on the open lake. It offered innocent amusements in great variety, including dancing, and temperate drinks, but no Spirituous Liquors. The resourceful Williams instead sold his own milk and buttermilk as the temperate drinks.