House of Providence, Power Street looking north to St. Paul’s Basilica. Food for the city’s indigents was supplied by its huge dairy and produce farm on the future site of the Scarboro Beach Amusement Park.
1927 Aerial view of Scarboro Beach Amusement Park. It was a drawing card for thousands to the Beach every summer.
The City had not been idle during this time. After the Dorsey purchase and the subsequent success of its amusement park, it started accumulating other parcels of land on the lake, including the grounds and adjoining properties of Joseph Williams and designated it as Toronto Parks’ own Kew Gardens. Eventually all of the waterfront lands from Woodbine Avenue to Balsam were transformed into well-manicured green parks with plenty of recreational facilities fronted by a three-and-a-half-kilometre boardwalk. The park area, known as Kew Beach Park and Balmy Beach Park was eventually divided into four — Woodbine, Kew Beach, Scarboro Beach, and Balmy.
There was one city-owned exception to the designation of all this acreage as parkland. There was a short block on the south side of Hubbard Boulevard. It ran along the boardwalk west from the bottom of Wineva Avenue to the bottom of Hammersmith. It was called Hubbard Boulevard and it was in the house at number 13 where I spent my childhood. Our house was built on the site of that amusement park which had been a place of happiness for so many thousands.
Beach residents were full of pride in 1939 when King George VI and Queen Elizabeth officiated at the King’s Plate run at the Woodbine Race Track.
Sometime after the seventies, the area, always known as the Beach, began to be referred to as the Beaches. For a couple of decades, residents argued as to the proper designation. Finally, a plebiscite by residents in the spring of 2006 decided the issue. On April 18 it was announced that the traditional name, the Beach, had won. Now it was official.
This memoir is a celebration of the Beach and its role in my life and the lives of ordinary Beach people who were moving from the Depression through the Second World War to peacetime. It is difficult to write about those times and places without indulging in sentimentality. Yet that such a contained area could produce the likes of Glenn Gould, Doris McCarthy, Norman Jewison, Robert Fulford, Jack Kent Cooke, Ted Reeves, Bruce Kidd, and other contributors to the Canadian fabric surely points to that “something special about the Beach” that is oft cited by former residents. There are hundreds of others not mentioned specifically here with whom I interacted. This is a celebration of their lives, as well.
It is my hope that this description of the intersection of a unique setting, a mixed historical era, and one family’s story will show how the places in which we are nurtured influence the people we become. The details may be personal, but the implications are universal.
“Till then, feed on innocent bubble air, enjoy your little life, and make your mother happy.”
— Sophocles, Ajax
I’m a water baby, floating lazily with my back to the pebbly lake bottom, full of wonder at the bubbles rising and the flashes of coloured light that break around me. The water is warm, soothing, wrapping me like a cradle as I rock back and forth with the rhythm of the waves. Time is measured by streams of bubbles languidly moving toward a sun that is almost too brilliant for my eyes to bear. I feel a sense of perfect peace. I am drowning …
If you’re born a son of the Beach (as we later daringly labelled ourselves), you know Lake Ontario intimately. When I was two years old, I almost came to know it too intimately when it tried to claim me. My mother was sitting on the sand with her friend Ev and Joyce, Ev’s daughter. Whatever it was they were talking about distracted my mother, because when she looked out she couldn’t see me. In panic, she raced across the broad stretch of sand to the shore. She spotted me, and my bubble-air reverie was violently interrupted, as she snatched me by my flimsy sunsuit and clasped me to her breast.
My mother, who always had a sense of style, prided herself on getting the best tan on the beach.
The miracle was that her panic didn’t stay with me. Forever, water will be only a source of solace and serenity to me. If my life should end by drowning, I will embrace my executioner as an old friend, reclaiming me to peace.
I grew up in a time when everyone knew how things should happen, even though sometimes things didn’t turn out that way. It was a time when couples got married for life, had their children after that, and lived lives of laughter, high spirits — and spirit — and made sacrifices for their family or their country because their parents has taught them that was what we were here for.
Where did my life begin? In my mother Velma’s womb, the fruit of her passionate love for Neil, the bright, fun-loving, youngest-of-eight-boys who was the love of her life. I’d beg her to tell me that story of their first meeting over and over again: “I was at Balmy Beach Canoe Club standing with my girlfriend Phyllis on one side of the hall. It was a dance. Your father was across the room with some other fellows. I watched him for a long time, then I turned to Phyll and said ‘That’s the man I’m going to marry.’”
The club had been a focus for Beach activity since 1903, and became so popular that its small boathouse had to be replaced by a larger clubhouse in 1905. Balmy athletes were well known. As early as 1924 they had won gold and four bronze medals for sprint canoe in the Paris Olympic Games. They continued to garner awards, including several at the national level. Balmy’s football team won Canada’s Grey Cup in 1927 and 1930. Fire destroyed the clubhouse in 1936 and again in 1963. The present clubhouse was reopened in 1965. But, for my parents and their friends, it was a social centre, an inexpensive place to have fun in dark economic times when, according to my mother’s girlfriend Phyllis, “we ate a lot of sausages, carrots, and tapioca pudding because they were the cheapest.”
In the full fury of the Great Depression, 1931 was a daring time to marry. Most businesses demanded that if a woman married, she had to forfeit her job. Dad was following in the footsteps of his older brothers — all of them salesman who surely in some prior life had kissed the Blarney Stone. Selling was in his blood as deeply as his Irish love of rum. When he announced his engagement, his older brother and mentor Arnold was not impressed. “You don’t have any money to get married on.” Undeterred, these true devotees of the flapper generation were wed by Father McGrath in a simple ceremony in Corpus Christi Church at Lockwood and Queen East. In 1931, the church, now designated as a heritage property and containing a little-publicized treasure — namely a three-themed mural by famed Canadian-Ukranian artist William Kurelek — was in its second incarnation, having been expanded in 1927 to accommodate the growing Catholic population of the Beach. Velma and Neil then went on a quickie weekend honeymoon to Buffalo, financed by Arnold’s generous gift of fifty dollars. This was the same uncle who confessed to me when I was a married woman, “You know, when Neilly brought your mom to my house to meet me, I thought she was a funny-looking little thing.” His expression obviously equated “funny” with “homely.” I wondered if he’d noticed the marks on my mother’s cheeks, spaced like seed pits of a strawberry, but devoid of colour. The ones I used to dare to trace with my fingers and count, enjoying the sensation of being that close to her. “I caught scarlet fever when I was young. I almost died from it. That’s how I got all these