During his youth, Dad attended public and secondary schools in the communities of Picton and Hillier  Ontario.

In the spring of 1941, Dad enlisted in the Canadian Armed Forces and was temporarily stationed at Chippewa barracks in North Bay, Ontario.  It is here that he met our mother, Dorothy May Beaton.

Dad proposed to Mom in June of 1941, and they were married  on the 30th of October, 1941 in Dad's parent's home at 36 Ferndale Avenue, Toronto Ontario by David A Smith - Minister from Church of Jesus Christ & Latter Day Saints.  Witnesses to the event were Dad's uncle Fred Barnes & his sister  Marion Selina McQuaid Edwards.

After to war, Dad struggled to find steady work to support his growing family. There were some very lean mean times, but Dad always took whatever work  he could find,  to make ends meet.  He worked as a truck driver for the Len & Fink Pharmaceutical Company; as an Usher at the Pix Theatre; he climbed inside the huge stainless steel cooking pots at Campbell's Soup Company to clean them. He worked as a Carman at the Canadian Pacific Railway; as a sales representative and repair person for Singer Sewing Machine Company, and as a sales representative and driver for North Bay News Service and also for Sudbury News Service.

Dad was in many ways a very quiet and private individual, but he was a joker and he liked to tease those around him....He enjoyed his coffee and chats with Mom at the kitchen table, his pearl peanuts and a good book or television, a snooze every evening after work and he liked to putter about his little  workshop....And oh yes....he also liked to let the odd fart go off, and didn't care who was around him at the time.

Christmas was perhaps the time of the year that Dad enjoyed the most.  He would go off hunting for that "perfect tree", and come home with one that was usually about a foot higher than the ceiling.  He'd trim off the bottom of the tree, mount it in the stand and then tie it to the wall so that it wouldn't topple over (in case you ever wondered, that's what the two screw-eyes were for that were permanently fixed in the wall of our living room).  He'd hand me seventy-five cents, and send me off to Harris's Drug Store to get him a pack of Margarita Cigars while he put the strings of lights on our tree.  When I came home with his pack of cigars,  he'd settle into his old green arm-chair and puff away while Mom and us kids would finish dressing the tree.

Dad became very sick after his retirement, and was diagnosed as having developed cancer of the Lungs, stomach and brain.  He was hospitalized on the 12th of July 1988, and passed away at the young age of 66 on the 12th of August, 1988. 

I love "the old man" very much, and often regret being away from home for so long, and for being unable to spend more time with him.