Meaford, Ontario, Canada
Image by antefixus21
Front row: Cousin Geoff, Kate and Linda at Aunt Marguerite Solomon’s memorial service.
Some words about her mom from Linda:
Thank you for coming. I’m sorry you’re so far away in camera, but there we go. I would just like to start by thanking everybody for being here, and for being such a good friend to Margaret. She was a good friend to many people. And I can see from the number of people that are here today, that that was reciprocated, so it’s lovely. Thank you.
I’m just going to tell you a bit about mom’s life. She was born in Clinton, Ontario, Marguerite Grace Shepherd, the daughter of Clarence Percival Shepherd and Lula Mae Harkness. She had three younger siblings, Ruth, Larry and Tom. Her dad was in the bank so they moved around a bit. So, after, after Clinton they were in St. Thomas, then Campbellford ON, and finally in Iroquois which was really fortunate because that was her mother’s hometown. She’d grown up there. Margaret was a good student. She was particularly good at mathematics.
She took piano lessons like lots of kids. She loved to sing. When she left Iroquois she was given a hymnal by the people in her church with that was inscribed. We found it when we were clearing things out after she moved to Central Place.
The other thing about Marguerite that some of you may know, but maybe most don’t know, was that she was a really good sports woman. She loved to swim in Iroquois. She swim in the canal. That was before the St. Lawrence Seaway, but there was a canal there that she loved to swim in. She loved to play tennis. She was a good tennis player. She tells a story of when she was about 16 she wanted her father to come down and play tennis with her so she could show him how well she played tennis. Dad, come and play. Come and play. So finally he came down to play tennis with her. He stood in the middle of the court and just went, pop, pop, pop to each side, and she ran back and forth the whole time. She said, I never asked him to go again. She was also good at athletics. She was the school athletics champion. And she did the long jump, and she was a sprinter, and it’s funny how genes passed down, because when I was in athletics at school, I was good at long jump and sprinting, and my son when he did athletics, was long jump and sprinting, so we’ve got something passed down from mom. It’s lovely. In her older age, she still was she still followed sports. She swam regularly. She went to her aqua aerobics. She did lawn bowling. She did lane bowling. She was a curler, and anything she did, she got good at very quickly. With her curling she quickly surpassed Harold her father in law, who she loved dearly. And they were once in a bond spiel. Mom was the skipper. Harold was the Vice, and they got an Eight Ender. We still have her little trophy from that. She used to go hiking hiking. She learned to ski when she was in her 40s, which is kind of late to begin, but she did it.
So back to her growing up. She spent her teenage years, the later ones in Iroquois, and then went to Toronto went to secretarial school. And after that was the secretary for Dr. Bill Robinson who was a pathologist at Toronto General Hospital. When she was in Toronto she met Keith, who became her husband at Grace United Church. They went to the same church and dad was in the choir. She had not made the choir. She was quite disappointed. They said she didn’t sing well enough to be in the choir, so it must have been a special choir. But she met Keith, and she told me once that she wasn’t really all that interested in him. She was really interested in guy called Mike Sayer, but her cousin Allison, who was her best friend nabbed Mike. Allison’s daughter is here today, Christy, thank you for coming.
And so, dad went then overseas. He went to war. She went out with Mike’s good friend Norm while Keith was overseas. She said, Oh, I felt sorry for him so I wrote him letters. They wrote regularly and she said we really got to know each other through those letters, and then when he came back, the rest is history for them. They were married in 1947.
Back in Toronto, though she was when she was still there, while he was away, she came into… she had trouble the shorthand, even though she was a secretary, and she she’d done a shorthand exam for the third time, and failed it yet again. So she came back to the office and she burst into tears and Dr. Robinson said, What’s the difference? I’ll never get out of here. I have to get out. And he said, Oh, and he questioned her a bit and he came back two days later and he said, How would you like to go to Kingston and learn to be a lab technician? Great, because in the meantime her father had died. Her mother was alone with three children at home. It wasn’t an easy time. So Kingston was a lot closer to Iroquois. So she moved back there to Kingston, and she learned to be a lab technician in the hospital. She learned on the spot. It was Marguerite that was sent down to New York to meet Dr. Georgios Papanikolaou, who had developed the pap smear. She learned how to do that. She was the first person to bring that back to Canada. So a lot of us of a certain gender are very grateful for that.
She showed her strength of conviction. I remember she told me a story one time about going on the bus from from Kingston to Iroquois, and the bus driver was so terrifyingly driving, and she stood up in the bus and said, You stop this bus and let me off right now, and he did. I don’t know how she got to Iroquois.
After she was married of course she moved to Meaford, and didn’t work as most women in those days didn’t, but she learned to play bridge bridge, under the tutelage of her mother in long Mernie who was a very good bridge player. She quickly surpassed her husband Keith, who thought he was a good bridge player, but mom left him for dead, and those of you who like grandmother know that she was pretty good at it. She also continued to play tennis. She had a friend called Mariel Grant. Some of you may remember Muriel. She had a private tennis court across the road from her house which I think is where the ball park was eventually built, so when the ballpark was built the tennis court went. There was no public tennis court in Meaford ON at that time, but she was pleased to play tennis with Muriel. I can remember going and sitting and watching her do that so, but that that came to an end, because there wasn’t a tennis court anymore. She loved an active life. I can remember as a child going on picnics and hikes, just all sorts of things outside, camping. We camped often with our cousins, with the Carthews. Scott’s here today. Thank you. One of the… we’d do on camping trips down east, and also we spend a lot of time with the Shepherds, and that was with her brother, Larry’s family. We’ve got quite a few of them here today. Thank you so much for coming.
She was a good friend. She was a good relative. She kept in touch with people, and I think a lot of people appreciated that.
She loved to hike, and when dad got involved in the Bruce Trail, of course she was involved as well. He did. He did the finding the landowners and getting the trail built, but it was mom behind the scenes who really was the driving force between behind setting up the Beaver Valley Bruce Trail Cup. She did all the paperwork and that stuff. Dad got the glory for it. She always stood in the background. She let him take the credit for things, but really she was a strength, I think, in their relationship, without ever letting anybody know that.
So she, she did sort of work, the things that her husband wanted to do, but she enjoyed them as well. And going hiking down in the United States in Vermont, New Hampshire and New York. Just all those things she just loved being outside. When dad died, even before he died, she went in and started helping the insurance business. She really transformed the business. Dad didn’t like asking people for money. Mom wasn’t afraid to ask people for money. She had the business incorporated which saved her when he had his early death. It was a very good thing that that had happened, but that was due to her. As Geoff said, I didn’t realize that. Geoff said that. But when dad died, she really blossomed. She was so strong. She tried to run that business herself, despite enormous pressure from somebody trying to buy it from her. She wouldn’t sell it because she didn’t believe in the ethics of the person who wanted to buy it. She really stood stood her ground until Geoff came, and then she helped with the business for many years. She once was visiting me in Australia, when she said, They’ve got a new computer system. She learned about computers before anybody else in town I think before they’d got a new computer system. It won’t balance. It’s a one cent every month. It’s driving me nuts. She said. I don’t need this stress. I’m 78 years old. When I go home I’m going to retire, and she did.
Marguerite did a lot of volunteer work. She was really active for many years in the United Church Women. She was an Explorer Leader. Later when I was a child, she was a Cub leader.
She was instrumental in getting the Midas Mart set up. So she was in the beginning of that. She helped set up the marathon branch, which I think is maybe defunct now but it went for many years, and she was very involved in the Bruce trail. Once again, as I said on some of these things she did it quietly in the background, but she did it, always very organized.
She was a terrific mother. Marguerite, like she just… she was very firm, very firm, but I think she was fair.
She was always there for us, because she didn’t go to work, so I can remember coming home and saying, Mom, I’m home, and she was just always there.
She loved parties. She loves Christmas, especially but she parties. There’s a picture we have of a Halloween party that that she did for us kids. I don’t know. Geoff maybe looks like he was only about five, we were quite young, but there all these children are sitting up at the dining table with her good China, and her good silver. I thought, I don’t think that you’d do that with kids these days, but if it was a party, it didn’t matter whether you were eight, or whether you were 80, she was going to serve you the same way.
She was saying what she thought about what you were, what you were doing. If she didn’t like it, which to me in particular, because, never mind, I don’t think you should be doing that Linda. And I said, Well, that’s too bad. I’m doing it anyway, and she never ever would say it again. She never harped on about it. She never nagged, Once it was said, you knew what she thought, and then it was up to you. And I really admired that, and valued that in her. She had real inner strength. You know I think in 1970-71, Harold, her father in law, whom she loved dearly, died. Then Geoff had his accident, then her mother died a couple of months later, all within that time. And you know she never, she never gave any sort of… she didn’t give any sign of being really needy. She was… she was terrific, real inner strength. She never complained.
So she’d come out of the shadow, after her dad died.
She just had real principles, I think. After dad died and after Geoff was here, and she was a bit freer she, she went into her travel years and she went all around the globe. She did a lot of elder hostile trips to Lapland to Great Britain. I don’t know where else, but she also came to Australia, every couple of years and stayed with me for a couple of months which was lovely so my children got to know her really well. She went cycling in Holland. That was a bit disastrous that trip, if any of you remember it, but she visited us also when we lived in New Zealand, and she always took me on a trip when she came to visit. We’d go off for a week and do something, or else she’d go on her own trips as well. Into her 80’s she stopped coming, and got her cats. She loved her cats we have a younger one earlier called Yogi that she had stolen from a child. Somebody had left her cats on the side of the road at lunchtime when kids were coming home from school, and this kid she’d been trying to get this little black kitten out, and some child came along and managed to grab this kitten, and she just pounced on it, grabbed it saying, He’s mine. She took him home.
As you will know, Margaret was blunt. She could be blunt. She spoke her mind. Sometimes she could be a little bit hurtful, but she never meant to be hurtful. It was always her heart. She had a heart of gold. She had many friends. She was a good friend to many people, an independent, no nonsense… You know she was still climbing up ladders when she was 90 and 92, which was a bit silly, trying to get up on chairs to try to get things out of top cupboards. So the fact is that she lived by herself until she was 95, just shows how independent she was. Though I’ve been really fortunate for the last 20-30 years to be able to come quite regularly to see her, and I’m really going to miss her.
Sally Anne said that she was Christian, yes she was, but she also said she didn’t think there was anything beyond, so that when you die, you’re just dead. That’s it. There’s nothing else. But I expect that she’s probably found out now that she was wrong, and I hope that she’s with all those dear friends of hers that she missed so much when they left before she did.
So, Thank you. Thank you mom for being such a good mother, such a good friend, and God bless you. Bless your spirit.
Thank you.
