There was more encouragement for Ted from Ruth than from Sarah. She wrote to Ted, “Don’t worry about your shingle. There is always room for a good lawyer.” To Sarah she wrote that she was happy that Martha now had a good school. “We have all got that wretched lack of self confidence “and with Martha in Sarnia and Ted in Toronto, “you must be very quiet with only Paul at home.”
Ted was still a most impecunious student, studying and working with great earnestness and with no social life, no money to spend on dating girls or any sort of student high jinks and frivolity. In his final year in the spring of 1920 it was Ted’s turn to succumb to the influenza epidemic that took more lives than the hostilities then known as The Great War. He was at home for three weeks, cared for by his mother, and was allowed to write his final examinations late.
On October 1, 1920, Ted was called to the bar. Although he had graduated from Osgoode Hall earlier in the year despite the influenza, he had to wait for the first graduation ceremonies succeeding his twenty first birthday. His were the highest marks, one of four out of a class of 244 who graduated with honours, a most distinguished record but at a cost of loneliness and with none of the light-hearted camaraderie typical of an undergraduate.
4 HIS EARLY YEARS OF PRACTICE
EVEN BEFORE HE WAS CALLED TO THE BAR, SAM HAD BEEN EMPLOYED in the firm of Ivey and Ivey in London. One of the first cases he worked on, an appeal case concerning H.J. Garson and Co., the plaintiff, versus Empire Manufacturing Co. Ltd., defendant, involved alleged short weights and dirty metals. In the Supreme Court of Ontario Ivey and Ivey acted for the defendant. The appeal was dismissed with costs by the plaintiff to the defendant. The case was heard before the Chief Justice of the Exchequer, Sir William Mulock, and Messrs. Justice Riddell, Sutherland, and Masten. Sam was well pleased to have helped with the presentation of the case and kept everything related to it in a special file.
In 1921, he wrote to the External Registrar, University of London, South Kensington:
“Dear Sir: I am in receipt of the pamphlet containing the Regulations relating to degrees in Laws for external students and after reading the notes upon State 116, I am in doubt about my manner of admission.
I am not a graduate in arts of any university, but I am a graduate of Osgoode Hall (Ontario Law School Toronto) where I received the degree of Barrister-at-Law before being called to the Bar. Does this entitle me to admission of your law examinations? I am exceedingly anxious to write for the LL B (honours) but cannot go to London for your matriculation examinations. I, of course, have an honour certificate of matriculation into the Ontario universities and have standing in several subjects equivalent to the first year of our universities (Toronto and McGill). I can give references as to my fitness and would point out that I have received scholarships at Osgoode Hall.”
There is no record of a reply. For many years an LL.B. to put after his name was to become a consuming passion. Later Sam would pull many strings in his quest to be awarded an LL.D., but to no avail.
In August of 1922, Sam registered with the University of Chicago for eight departmental examinations, all approved for those whose practice would be in Ontario. However he never enrolled. More than likely he found the load he was bearing at Ivey and Ivey too time and energy consuming to do justice to eight subjects of study. His object was to enrol in Law School in Chicago or to acquire an A.B. He would have been given one year of credit for “Home Study,” but the remaining three years would have had to be spent on campus in Chicago, a dream that had to be put on hold for lack of money and which was never fulfilled. He had hoped to be given all four years in “Home Study,” but that was impossible.
In the early twenties the firm became known as Ivey, Elliott and Ivey and later Ivey, Elliott, Weir & Gillanders. By 1923, the firm name was listed as Ivey & Co., in 1924 as Jeffery & Co. By 1925 it had reverted to Ivey & Co, in 1926 Jeffery & Co once more. In 1927, the practice was listed as Jeffery, Gelber, A.O. McElheran & E.G. Moorhouse. Ten years later in 1937, Sam was in business for himself.
In the early years of his practice, Sam would be involved in a bankruptcy suit brought by London Life Insurance Co. against Lang Shirt of London. A complicated series of actions began after the president of the company was found to have borrowed on his own life insurance policies from Aetna Life Insurance Co. in order to benefit Lang Shirt. When the bankruptcy of the shirt manufacturer loomed, the president took his own life. Sam helped to prepare briefs on the case which lasted over a period of years.
As soon as Sam started out as a young lawyer with Ivey and Ivey, he began to buy bonds and stocks with whatever bits of money he could spare. With memories of his father’s ineptitude in the management of money, taxes in arrears, the sale of property for realty taxes and bought back later with a penalty, in arrears again, then having to move, Sam was determined that his goal was to be solvent and debt free.
At some time in 1920 or possibly 1921, an entirely unplanned encounter did a great deal to change Sam’s life. An itinerant picture salesman called on him at his office, showed him Dame Laura Knight’s watercolour Ballet Girls and Sam fell under its spell. Forty five years later in a letter to L.A. Dowsett of Leger Galleries in Bond Street, Sam wrote:
“I was got into the art collecting by Laura Knight. A man named Carroll who used to travel pictures through Canada and the United States landed a watercolour on me which had been done by Laura Knight for reproduction in a magazine. It was of ballet girls.”
This uncharacteristic purchase marked a real change for him from the usual stocks and bonds. Acquiring something which appealed to him aesthetically and which was just to be hung on a wall to be admired gave him enormous pleasure. He was fascinated and, as time went on, collecting paintings and objects of distinction and beauty which caught his fancy and gave him delight competed with his compulsion to amass a fortune through an investment portfolio.
Samuel Edward Weir of London, Ontario, at the outset of his career in the early 1920s.
An early client, E.V. Harmon, who lived in the East Twenties, the Gramercy Park area of New York City, was landlord to over thirty properties in London. Sam looked after Harmon’s holdings, an example to him early in his career of the advantage in handling other’s finances as well as the advantages of being a landlord himself. On behalf of another client, Ben Baldwin, the young Sam travelled to Holyoke, Massachusetts more than once in order to effect the sale of a service station. A business and personal friendship began with Baldwin senior and his two sons, Bill and Bentley, that lasted for many years. Sam also acted for the W.R. Kent estate which was comprised of an impressive number of real estate properties stretching from Montreal to Manitoba and which was not wound up finally until 1937. Payments to Sam for handling these properties seemed rather sporadic, but eventually he was paid handsomely for his ministrations and he began to appreciate the possibilities of an international practice. Such early experiences whetted his appetite and expanded his horizons far beyond London, Ontario.
Ruth, now retired from the American Red Cross, and Wilbur Howell lived in Lower Manhattan on Washington Square with a kitten, Nicu, an offspring of Sarah’s cat. In one of the many letters to Sarah, Ruth recommends romaine and Simpson lettuces as well as asparagus, common enough perhaps in New York shops of the time but rare and pricey for the Weirs. Martha Amanda, now widowed for the third time, divided her days between her two daughters, Sarah and Eva, both living in Ontario. Her visits to Sarah’s household were rather dreaded if inevitable events.
In the summer of 1921, Sarah wrote to Ruth that a cow has freshened and that she is so very weary. “Why house clean?” asked Ruth in reply, “Let it go,” — not advice to be followed easily by a woman of Sarah’s pride. Sarah apparently had complained of eczema and Ruth commented that she doubted that diet had much to do with it. Sarah wrote that Martha’s hand pained so she bound live fish worms around it. The source of this bit of medical advice is not divulged and neither is the opinion of George M.D. nor of Ruth R.N.