Whatever Happened to Mary Janeway?. Mary Pettit

      They walked along the mountain brow, enjoying the tranquillity and beautiful wooded areas. By noon they were getting hungry. Mary regretted not bringing a picnic basket. They took one last look at the view before getting back on the incline to head down the mountain.

      “I take it you changed your mind about the incline. Did you get your two cents worth?”

      “And then some,” she replied.

      Life slipped into a quiet, comfortable routine. Mary made friends with two ladies down the street when they were out shovelling their front walk. Viola and Affie Berezowski had immigrated to Canada from Poland as youngsters with their family. They were close to each other, having lost both parents to typhoid fever a few years earlier. Affie was a seamstress and worked out of their home. Viola, who went by the name Vi, had a part-time job in the church office.

      Neither had married, but Affie, who was thirty-one, had had a serious relationship with a fellow from out east. He’d come to Ontario to work on construction and install power lines for the hydro company but once the job was gone, so was he. It was obvious that she’d resigned herself to spinsterhood like her sister.

      Mary soon learned that the girls were very different. Vi had a knack for “stirring the pot” and Affie was the peacemaker. Little things like hanging the clothes out or folding the laundry could turn Vi into a fit of anger but it was usually short-lived. Although only one year older, Affie seemed far more mature. Mary preferred her company but enjoyed chatting with both over a pot of tea.

      Hamilton was an interesting city. The brightly painted electric streetcars with their two-man crew smartly dressed in their HSR uniforms were an impressive sight. Mary usually walked downtown and rode home with her parcels. Saving the nickel streetcar fare meant that she slowly accumulated enough to buy a pearl necklace, a pair of stockings, or a glass candy dish.

      She liked shopping at the Arcade, a department store on James Street that sold groceries as well as meat in the basement. She was most familiar with the bargain basement merchandise. A uniformed, gloved operator manned the elevator and salesclerks wore black, brown, or grey since bright colours weren’t considered to be proper attire. Customers wore the same basic colours, usually accompanied by hats and gloves.

      Stanley Mills, another department store, was on King just east of James Street. It had lovely wide aisles and beautiful things displayed in glass showcases. One spring Mary found the prettiest straw hat there with pale pink artificial flowers on its big, floppy brim. She wore it with pride to church on Easter Sunday for many years. Young children loved this store, especially the enchanting Toyland around Christmas.

      Woolworth’s, four stores down from Stanley Mills, was just as popular. Seemingly, many years earlier in a Woolworth Store in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the first purchase made had been a five-cent fire shovel, which was why the store came to be known as the “five and dime.” Advertisements of the time tell of “lots of bargains and lots of products — from toilet paper to cream pies to parakeets.”[3] They established fixed prices at a time when bartering was commonplace. It was one of the first stores Mary had ever been in that had their merchandise on the counters for customers to handle. Woolworth’s was renowned for its great lunch counter and her favourite meal was the hot creamy chicken on a patty shell.

      Mary was impressed with the number of services available to city folks. There were home deliveries for milk, bread, ice, and fish. Her milkman, Pat O’Neill, worked for the Hamilton Pure Milk Company. Since opening its plant two-and-a-half years earlier on John Street North, it had earned a good reputation for producing sterilized, pasteurized milk at a time when unsafe milk was a concern. Customers were no longer satisfied to have farmers ladle milk out of large cans into receptacles left outside their doors. The company organized its delivery routes so efficiently that they eliminated a hundred milk wagons, proving that twenty-five could deliver milk anywhere in the city early in the morning. Pat knew exactly what Mary wanted by the number of washed milk bottles she left out. If she wanted something extra like butter, cream, or ice cream, she left a note with the money in her milk box. Cottage cheese was only available on Wednesday and Saturday.

      Every so often Mary would place an order with the Canada Bread Company, known for its good quality bread, oatmeal raisin cookies, butter tarts, and cinnamon squares. But most of the time she baked her own since it was cheaper.

      Hamiltonians enjoyed bread delivery right to their front door, just one of the many conveniences offered to folks living in the city. Aubrey Hunt is holding the first horse’s bridle and Horace Hunt the third horse’s bridle.

       Courtesy of Ross Hunt.

      It was common for fuel companies to deliver coal in the winter and ice in the summer. Competition for ice storage was keen since it was only gathered and stored once a year. Several companies stored the “cold stuff” that became invaluable in the warmer months. Every February the farmers went out on the frozen bay to cut blocks of ice with a crosscut saw and float them up onto ramps. Sometimes a team of horses and the bobsleigh would go through the ice and the entire team would be lost. The ice blocks, about four feet long and three-to-four feet deep were taken by sleigh to one of the ice and fuel companies and stored in buildings insulated with sawdust walls. They were stacked eight rows deep with sawdust sandwiched six to eight inches thick between each layer of ice. There was enough ice harvested in four weeks to accommodate the needs of Hamiltonians for that year.

      Elijah Dunbar, a friendly man with a Scottish accent, was Mary’s ice and coalman. Like the milkman, he was considered family. He picked up his load from the Abso Pure Ice Company down on Bristol Street early in the morning. By the time he got there, the ice blocks had already been removed from the building, gone through the scoring machine, and were waiting on the platform. After loading his wagon, he was on his way. Elijah sold tickets, charging half a penny for a pound. Ice was sold in blocks of twenty-five, fifty, seventy-five, or one hundred pounds and delivered three times a week. Mary would place a card in her front window to indicate the size of ice block she needed. Her card was usually on the “50” side, unlike some of the rich folks in the west end who had larger iceboxes.

      The neighbour kids loved to watch Elijah wield his ice pick. Sometimes he’d chip a little ice off the block and give it to them as a treat. Then he’d go on about his business, carrying the block through the back door into Mary’s kitchen. Her pine icebox, fortified with a metal liner to act as an insulator, had a pan underneath to catch the water. Still, the ice would only last two days.

      Mary found it much simpler to keep food cold in the wintertime in the three-sided metal box that hung outside her kitchen window. All she had to do was open the window to get the food that Mother Nature was protecting. When refrigerators became popular in the early 1930s, people gladly got rid of their iceboxes.

      Hamilton had three daily newspapers, the Spectator, the Times, and the Herald, as well as postal delivery twice a day, six days a week. The “pillar box red” mailboxes, which some called “royal red,” were a common sight on street corners. Tom Patton, Mary’s talkative postman, informed her that mail had been coming to the doors of Hamiltonians since 1875.