Finally, with special thanks to my many friends, whose love and support helped me complete this book this year. Space does not permit me to list all their names, but their names start with an: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, R, S, T, V, and W. You are angels!
—LG, February 2019
Stephens Family Tree
Straussenhoffer Family Tree
…Christmas! The word comes with a new meaning in 1914. We have known peace so long that we can hardly comprehend war; we have dwelt so long beneath the flag of liberty that we know not what fetters mean but in our ease and our content we have perhaps grown selfish and indifferent to those less fortunate. Christmas of 1914 has torn away our selfish indolence. We know now that the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God have a deeper meaning than we have realized…
Editorial, Conservator, December 24, 1914
PROLOGUE
How fleeting is contentment? How transitory peace? How ephemeral joy? When these states leave us, must they take with them our innocence? In my case, in the case of my family, and in the case of my community, it seemed they must. They would be lost by prejudice; they would be lost by ignorance; they would be lost by fear; and they would be lost by patriotism. But that summer—my twelfth—I did not yet know it. It was July 1914. I had never been happier. My future, I thought, had never been so bright.
You might think this a rather grandiose statement to be uttered by an eleven-year-old—a mere child. But I had in the days and years before been beset by many disquieting trials, most of which were, finally, contentedly resolved. That day, sitting on a park lawn, I marvelled at the joy I felt within myself and those around me.
My brother Jim, a tall, reedy twenty-two-year-old, stood in a receiving line with his lacrosse teammates. The Brampton Excelsiors and their retinue had just returned from a month-long excursion to Vancouver. Although they came home without the coveted national Mann Cup, as the reigning Ontario lacrosse champions, the athletes received a hero’s welcome. Hundreds of townspeople greeted the arriving train late that afternoon, participated in the homecoming parade that followed, and lustily cheered them that evening as they received the town’s tributes. “A testament to the town,” the mayor called them. The cleanest-living bunch of boys their professional coach had ever seen. Why, not a single one of them even smoked!
Not far away, near the temporary stage assembled for the tributes, stood my father, Jethro, or “Doc” as he was known to most people. As the president of the Brampton Excelsiors Lacrosse Club, he had raised the funds required to send the team west. Standing with him, wearing her signature full-length brown dress, was my sweet mother, Mary. My parents standing together in apparent equanimity with so many waiting to extend their approbation to my father was an amazing spectacle. It had been just over a year since his marital infidelity had been exposed. Our predominantly Christian town had demanded the penance, which might otherwise have been exacted by the Lord. Father’s dental business had been boycotted and nearly destroyed; his positions on local boards threatened. Their marriage had been saved by my mother’s grace; his reputation and his business by his efforts for the Excelsiors.
Near Jim was our sister Ina, eight years my senior. A round-faced, often dishevelled girl, she lived in a state of constant disappointment—a condition exacerbated by the rejection she experienced a year earlier from Eddie, Jim’s friend and the boy she long but mistakenly believed shared a mutual affection with her. Her disappointment was compounded by the deferral at that time of her university studies, necessitated, in that case, by Father’s compromised finances. Until recently, Ina had been one of the least happy people I knew. The source of the change in her demeanour was the person then standing next to her. Although she and Michael Lynch had been classmates for over twelve years, they seemed only to have noticed each other at their graduating class dance earlier that spring. Their affection was new and known only to a few of us. Michael took Ina’s hand for just a second as the two moved toward Jim and the other team members.
On the far side of the park, away from the crowds, my grandfather, Jesse Brady, stood admiring the peony bushes. A builder of much of the town in his long working life, he was, at seventy-nine years of age, an avid gardener, curler, and lawn bowler and an active member of the International Order of Foresters, the Odd Fellows Club, and the church choir. He was fit and sturdy, with thick grey hair that adorned his head and formed his moustache and his square-cut beard. A widower, my grandfather came to live with my parents for a short while in 1905—two years after my birth—and still had not left.
Other members of my family were also present in the park that evening, scattered among the jubilant throngs. It was a rare day, in fact, since all three of my father’s sisters were with us. My Aunt Rose, who lived down the street from us, was supervising the dispensation of cake. A widow for just over four years, she continued to own, though not operate, the local bakery that was once her husband’s. Their children, John and Hannah, six and four years my senior, were present in the park. There as well was my Father’s middle sister Charlotte Turner, her husband William, and their two children, Roy, who though the same age as my brother Jim, always seemed much younger, and Bill, two years younger yet. It had been seven years since William Turner resigned as mayor of our town and moved his family to Winnipeg. Since that time, we saw the Turners just one month a year, when they made their annual summer sojourn to Brampton.
Father’s eldest sister, the red-headed Lillian, attired in her signature green, was also with us. A spinster, Aunt Lil lived in Toronto, where she ran a boarding house for male university students and taught history at the local high school. Among her many eccentricities was her disregard for society’s customs—a characteristic that we children frequently used to our advantage, including when it came to bedtimes (there were none) and the proper order in which dessert should be consumed (there was none).
The park in which we were gathered that evening was located in the heart of our community, just down the street and across the bridge from my family’s home. Along the park’s eastern flank ran the Etobicoke Creek, a meandering watercourse that made its way through most of the downtown area, sometimes through underground caverns and other times in open streams. In the dry summer months, its small volume belied the need for the large bridge under which it flowed at the base of our street. But in the spring, the torrents produced by the melting ice and snow descending from the Caledon Hills to the north often proved the bridge just barely up to the task. Many lives had been sacrificed to those waters, including, two years earlier, that of my dear friend, Archie.
* * *
Gage Park was located in the town of Brampton in Peel County in the Province of Ontario, in the Dominion of Canada. In 1914, the town, comprised of four thousand people, had all the trappings of a county seat: a jail, a courthouse, a high school, churches of every Protestant denomination and even one Catholic, a hotel, a post office, and a library. The town had no taverns, its early forays in that area having been put asunder by the Primitive Methodists who first settled the area and its later forays having been extinguished by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, of which my mother was a dutiful, if not very enthusiastic member.
The town was dissected north-south by Hurontario Road, a former Indian trail that connected Lake Ontario to the south and Lake Huron to the north. As it ran through our town, it was called Main Street. In addition to pedestrians, horse carts, and coaches, the street was increasingly used by automobiles.
But the largest mover of the town’s people and goods at that time was not the roadways but the railways, and Brampton was blessed with two. The main line, running generally on an east-west axis, was the Grand Trunk. North-south lay a spur of the Canadian Pacific Railway. In July 1914, Brampton had plenty of goods to be moved, including flowers from its many greenhouses and manufactured goods ranging