Life in Scarborough, 1950s, Ralph Shorter

From MemoryArchive

Who: Ralph Shorter
What: Random memories
When: 1950's 
Where: Scarborough

I remember the Simcoe ice truck making deliveries to our neighbourhood. My friends and I would chase after it and, depending on who was driving, either get a free chunk to chew on or try to snag a piece while the driver wasn't looking. We could see from our house near Danforth and St. Claire past Eglington all the way up to Lawrence. The houses in our subdivision were half-acre or better and most of the owners "farmed" it to some degree, usually for food for their families. My father usually dug up our lot (by hand!) with a shovel, but sometimes he'd hire it out to a local farmer, who would come and dig it up for a reasonable price with his draught horses. He would also give away horse manure free (at that time, no one would have dreamed of charging for manure). Part of our land would lie fallow every year and my dad would plant buckwheat and add manure to re-enrich the depleted soil. Usually, it would be the aforementioned horse manure, but once, we got pig manure because it's supposed to be much richer. The stench was so overpowering he never did it again. We grew potatoes, beans, Swiss chard, rhubarb, broccoli, raspberries, strawberries, parsnip, carrots and enough corn to share with all our neighbours. My brother and I would have chores like weeding and picking potato worms (I'm not sure if that's the right name, but I remember them as being thick, green-striped caterpillars with horns and without hair - ugly little buggers). Everyone had apple trees, but we had apricot, pear and peach trees as well. In the early fifties, our house was heated with coal. It would be delivered by a poor man who would empty the hundred pound sacks through a basement window. He would off load the coal from a rail car. He was so blackened with coal dust, it was hard for a child to reconcile him as a man, but what a man he must have been! Eventually, coal was supplanted by oil and the coal deliveryman stopped coming to our neighbourhood. In the mid-fifties, the developers showed up and bought the land between our houses and the farm beside Pine Hill Cemetery where the subdivision of Foxgrove now stands. Houses filled in all the intervening spaces. When I left Toronto in the early seventies, there was only one die-hard farmer left in Scaborough at Kingston Rd. and Eglington. By now, that's probably long gone. I now live in a subdivision, much like the one in Scarborough became, in Nanaimo, BC. I have a fair-to-middlin' flower garden in front, but don't grow any of my own vegetables. I think we're all losing out by not being as independent as our parents were in the fifties. Our children may come to regret not knowing how to do simple subsistence gardening.