All Entries in the "Margaret Haylock-Capon" Category
Remember Summer of ’54 with a gap-toothed grin
As a child growing up on The Commons, I always looked forward to the summer visits of my father’s cousin, Fern Jones. A spinster employed as a secretary by the Goodman Manufacturing Company of Chicago, she had always maintained close ties with Picton, her late mother’s birthplace. At the mention of one of Fern’s impending […]
Granny had few worldly goods, but a wealth of goodness
Although she, frequently, described herself as ” a poor, lone woman”, in our family, my grandmother was better known as Amazing Grace. Long before Women’s Lib, the late Grace Jamieson was an independent woman, capable of meeting any challenge head-on. Her inner stength, coupled with an abiding faith in her Lord guided her through a […]
In “the summer of the Peeping Tom”
It was in “the summer of the Peeping Tom” that my older sister Mary became a neighbourhood heroine. The year was 1960 and she and her family had arrived from Manitoba to vacation with us on The Commons (Hill Street). To make room for our house guests, my mother had made a makeshift bed for […]
Grandma full of clever counterplots
Staunch members of the Pentecostal Church, my grandparents firmly believed that their only son was destined to become a man of the cloth. Born in 1912, at the family farmhouse, on Chuckery Hill, Robert Thomas Jamieson was the youngest of their three children. Their daughters, Mary and Violet (my mother) had been born just 15 […]
Remember that wonderful sense of freedom on the last Friday in June?
When I was a child, growing up on The Commons (Hill Street), I counted off my birthdays with mounting impatience. I longed to be like my older sister Mary who went off to work at the Picton business office of Bell Canada each day. She had an interesting job, a car of her own, fashionable […]
Family in the swim of things – but none could manage a stroke
Flappers of the Roaring Twenties, the women of our family were in the swim, although not one of them could paddle a single stroke. In our family album are faded photographs of my mother in her swimsuit and bathing cap, posing with her young brother, Bobbie. There are also snapshots of Aunt Margaret, at play […]
East End Grocery’s customers were well known to Johnny Cavanaugh
In the summer of 1960, Johnny Cavanaugh, owner of the corner store on The Commons, hired me for my first summer job. East End Grocery was a long-established business. In fact, my mother remembered it being in operation when she and her family moved from Chuckery Hill to Picton, in the spring of 1919. The […]
Love on The Commons
Courtship on The Commons (Hill Street), in my parents’ day, sometimes featured more drama than a modern soap opera. My mother often told the story of her older sister Mary’s doomed attempt to bring love into the lives of two lonely singles who lived in the neighbourhood. Aunt Mary, who had a devilish sense of […]
Kara, Queen of Samoyedena, a best friend at The Commons
In my youth, our family owned a series of “Heinz 57’s”, with one notable exception, my older sister Mary’s purebred Samoyed dog, Kara. Mary’s spur of the moment decision to buy a dog came on the heels of a break-up with one of her beaux. Disillusioned by the fickleness of the suitor in question, impulsively, […]
Perfect Mother’s Day gifts last a lifetime
Overcrowding in Picton’s old Mary Street School, in the early1950s, prompted a creative solution for pupils in the grade three classes of Mrs. Coral Gardiner and Miss Eileen McAlpine. We were told that our classrooms would be moved to Benson Park Hall. The initial disappointment we might have felt, following the announcement that we were […]
