Some old pictures I didn't take: Summer vacation

My brother Marty floats, Belmont Lake, Ontario, 1958

SUMMER IS ALMOST OVER, and over the crest of the warmth and sun we can see another year ending. This old photo of my brother floating in a lake in southern Ontario makes me think of those last days of the season. He told me that he remembered this as the moment he could no longer float; there's an inflatable tube underneath him, he recalled, which he needed for the first time that summer to keep himself buoyant - a childhood gift suddenly taken away. A small thing, but one of those memories that stick with you, since they seem to be a milestone. He'd be in high school in a year.

Marty says that this was Belmont Lake, outside Peterborough, where our father's brother, Uncle Tommy, had a cottage. He says he went there once, maybe twice, and stayed for a couple of weeks. He remembers fishing, the loons on the water, watching sea flea races and pitching horseshoes. It sounds idyllic - Canadian cottage life in an age before distractions.

Mary and Marty, Belmont Lake, 1958

He says our sister Mary, then only six, and our mom came up for a weekend. I'm assuming it was her behind the camera. This would be six years before I was born; I don't ever remember going to Belmont Lake.

Some old pictures I didn't take: Cottage Country

Cottage country, Ontario, late '30s

I CAN'T SPEAK FOR THE REST OF CANADA - it's a big country and our regional antipathies would be hard to explain to anyone who doesn't live here - but I can say with authority that "Cottage Country," an only semi-mythical place, exists in a vivid spot in the minds of people who've grown up or lived in Ontario.

My family never - or didn't until recently - have the money that got you to Cottage Country, which makes me wonder at these frames, shot by my mother and discovered in the pile of negatives I've inherited. They were taken in the late '30s - a time when everyone, we imagine, should have been on a breadline or riding the rails - and reveal a glimpse of leisure that I certainly didn't expect to find in my mother's past.

The lovely wooden speedboat pulling the water skier is hardly consistent with our image of the "Dirty Thirties," yet it's obvious that there were people with a financial cushion that meant their 1930s weren't markedly different from their 1920s. What surprises me, however, is that my mother somehow managed to find her way to a spot where she could catch this moment with her camera. It seems a long way from the Kodak factory and Mount Dennis.

Cottage country, Ontario, late '30s

I can't really guess where these were taken; it could have been the Muskokas or Georgian Bay or the Kawarthas. I'm assuming Mom was there as someone's guest, though I don't know who that could have been. In the context of the rest of the negatives and photos I've inherited - pictures of friends and family members posed in backyards or at weddings in Mount Dennis or Hamilton - these are exotic and unexpected, like finding a shot of Macchu Picchu or the Lascaux Caves.

We never owned a cottage, and my only memories of Cottage Country are a couple of day trips to Wasaga Beach and a crowded week in a tiny, musty-smelling, rented place where I spent the whole time scheming to get someone with a boat to take me out on the lake - without success. And yet I had a vivid image of places like the one in the photo above - a big old unwinterized cabin that smelled of pine and wood smoke, with a dark boathouse where the water lapped a hollow pulse against the walls.

I don't really share the Ontarian dream of Cottage Country despite this, but I wish I knew what brought my mother up there at such an unlikely time. These photos, more than any others I've dug out of the ripped envelopes where they sat for decades, remind me that my mother had a life full of incident and memories that I could never share, only some of which was captured in passing on the film in a box Brownie.

Dad

William McGinnis, High Park, Toronto, 1967

THIS IS MY FAVORITE PHOTO OF MY FATHER, WILLIAM MCGINNIS. It was taken on what looks like a fine summer day in High Park, the place of refuge for our very West End family. He is 60 years old. I have tried to find this spot in the park for years now, and while trees have grown and the layout has been changed, I will continue looking.

He would have a year left to live. My memories of my father are scant; I can only barely remember the faintest trace of this day. My most vivid is waiting by the big picture window in the living room on Gray Avenue for him to come home from work, sitting on the couch next to him, watching Looney Tunes on the big black and white TV. It is one of my happiest memories.

William McGinnis and Agnes Murphy, Toronto, 1943(?)

William McGinnis was born in Lanarkshire, Scotland and emigrated to Canada with his family near the beginning of World War One. His father, Robert, died not long after they arrived, and he and his brothers would leave school early to help support their family. His teens and twenties are a record of manual labour and factory work in Toronto's industrial West End: butcher's assistant, Canadian Cycle & Motor, Willys-Overland.

My father got a job at Supertest, where he would stay for the rest of his life, working his way up into white-collar middle management, thanks - or so the family legend goes - to a mathematical formula he worked out to estimate the amount of gas stored in tanks at service stations and depots all across the country.

I don't know when he met my mother, but they were an item when he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force in December of 1940, and it was on leave in November of 1943 that they got married at Our Lady of Victory in Mount Dennis - a church his father-in-law had helped build.

He lost an eye working on an airplane engine and had the first of a series of heart attacks while in service, but both times he refused an honorary discharge. He spent most of the war with the 168 Heavy Transport Squadron - the "Flying Postmen" - based in Rockcliffe, Ont., and was a Flight Sergeant when it was disbanded and he was discharged in October of 1945. He returned to Supertest and my mother, who gave birth to my brother, Marty, in December of 1945.

William and Marty McGinnis, Mount Dennis, Toronto, 1946

Here he is, demobbed and a new parent, in the backyard behind the house on Grandville. I have quite a few photos of Bill and Agnes and their new family, and they radiate with the optimism and prosperity of the post-war years.

Agnes, Mary and William McGinnis, Mount Dennis, Toronto, Christmas 1952

My sister Mary was born in 1952, around the time they bought their first home, at the corner of Gray and Outlook. This is the big picture window from my memory, where I waited for him to come home.

He was, as they inevitably describe such men, a "pillar of the community." He helped found the credit union and fundraised to build a new church. He bowled on a team.

Dad and me, High Park, Toronto, 1967

This is the only photo I have with just Dad and me. My sister and mother are sitting on the picnic blanket behind my cousin Terry, who took this picture. The bags hanging in the trees are keeping the food safe from ants. I remember being very fond of that blow-up dolphin, though what I was doing with a pool toy baffles me - we didn't have a pool and I have never learned to swim.

The book my father is reading is Dear and Glorious Physician, a Taylor Caldwell novel about Saint Luke. Caldwell was once a famous, bestselling novelist, but no one reads her much these days. I ordered a copy a week or two ago; I'm going to try and read it this summer, perhaps at a picnic in High Park.

My father died in his sleep on a May morning in 1968. I have no memory of that day, or of the weeks and months on either side of it. I would miss him bitterly, and still miss him today. Like most boys who lose their fathers early, I was desperate for a father figure; my brother and brother-in-law would be pressed into service, though I'm sure neither of them were prepared for the role at that point in their lives.

I think about Bill McGinnis all the time, and since becoming a father often wonder what he would do, and hope that he would approve.

Some old pictures I didn't take: Holiday

Mom and Mae Smith, location unknown, late '30s

MY MOM WITH HER BEST FRIEND, MAE SMITH. I'm sure they met at Kodak or the church. Growing up I called her "Aunt Mae," even though I knew she wasn't a relative. She was a spinster who lived in an apartment in a triplex on Guestville Avenue, just a short walk from the Kodak plant.

She had a brother, Jim, who had a sergeant major's moustache and a very military bearing; I remember him in blue blazers with a crest. They were always around when I was growing up, and then they fade away from my memory around the time Mom got really sick.

Judging by the clothes and the film stock, this is some time in the late '30s, at a picnic or a holiday camp somewhere. I'm guessing the latter - I have at least a half dozen frames taken on vacation, my Mom posing with her mother and various friends on docks and in a canoe and by cottages, with water somewhere in view or implied in the vicinity.

From the looks of it, the Depression didn't take a tragic toll on my mom and her friends. They were that small but lucky part of the working class that continued working; my mom was employed at Kodak from the late '20s till just before my brother was born, at the end of the war, and even if she was supporting her parents for most of that time, she found ways of keeping her wardrobe fresh.

Holidays were occasions. I'm sure my mom bought clothes especially for the trip, and even if you didn't work for Kodak, it was an obligation to document yourself at leisure, in various combinations with whoever was either guest or host.

I try not to romanticize the past, but it's hard, especially when I see the dignity of almost everyone captured in the foreground or background of these photos. I'm sure you'd be forgiven for taking off your tie on a hot day, and the jacket might end up on the back of a deck chair, but it would have been unthinkable to show up dressed like a sloppy schoolboy or in what was considered underwear.

 

Mom

Agnes McGinnis née Murphy, Mount Dennis, early '40s

MY MOM LOVED BING CROSBY. Sure there might have been other singers, but for her it would always be Bing. When I was learning about jazz - thanks to a Benny Goodman sextet record I used to hear in a vintage clothing store - I asked her what she thought about Billie Holiday. She didn't like her, she told me. She had a lisp.

My mother and father were nearly sixty when they adopted me, so I never knew the woman in this photo, taken twenty years before, probably by my cousin Terry, the family photographer. She was stylish; she liked her clothes. She also liked dancing, and was a regular at places like the Maple Leaf and the Palais Royale, apparently. I would have liked to have met this woman.

Agnes and Marty McGinnis, Mount Dennis, 1946

I love this photo. It's from the trove of negatives I've been slowly scanning for the last few months. Judging from the expression in her eyes it was taken by my father, and like the photo at the top - and so many others - it was taken in the backyard of the house on Grandville. My brother still makes that face today.

My mother was nearly a senior citizen by the time my first real memories begin, so I never knew this woman - the young mother in her late thirties, newly married and finally starting the family that she and her husband had put off for years while they took care of their own ailing mothers. It's such a happy scene, and her pride in her baby and her husband radiates from the picture.

Agnes McGinnis, Mississauga, Christmas 1985

My own mother was ailing for most of my life - a misdiagnosed ailment that, in the end, was probably ALS. This was taken at my sister's house, on the second last Christmas she'd live to see, just a few months after I bought my first camera. A year later she'd be unable to leave her nursing home, and we'd drive from Caledon to visit her there. She was wrapped up in blankets on the couch in her room and barely spoke. A few weeks later she was gone.

I have a lot of regret, still, when I remember my mother. I wish I had been able to cope with the illness that gradually sapped her strength for years. I wish I had been a bit older, and able to see past my own chaotic life. I wish I'd had a chance to see her as the young, energetic woman in the old photos I've been scanning. She has a granddaughter now who carries her name. It was the least I could do.

 

Some old pictures I didn't take: Double exposure

EVERYBODY LOVES A GOOD DOUBLE EXPOSURE. Well, nearly every photographer I know does; you really have to try to get a digital camera to double expose an image, and even film cameras have been mechanically foolproof for so long that an accident like this is rare to the point of being virtually impossible.

The poetry of a double exposure is how it evokes memory itself. We don't remember discrete images from the past but an overlap of memories, each one tipping into the other with some large or small overlap. A shot like this brings back several minutes in a memorable day, moments glimpse through each other like movements caught in a strobe light.

A wedding, of course, probably during the war or shortly afterward, judging by the fashions. My brother and I have stared long and hard at this shot; we're both pretty certain it's the backyard of the house on Grandville, and while my brother thinks it might be my dad's brother, Uncle Tommy, marrying Aunt Matty, I have a funny feeling it might be his sister, Helen, and her husband Tommy LaRose.

Whoever they are, they look happy, which is only right and proper.

Some old pictures I didn't take: Doing well

MOST OF THE PHOTOS I'VE INHERITED AREN'T JUST A DOCUMENT OF MY FAMILY but of postwar prosperity - a world I only barely remember. That "first three seasons of Mad Men" universe was ending by the time I arrived among these people, and by the time my memories come into focus it's all burnt orange and polyester and Watergate and stagflation.

I love how self-assured this young boy looks, leaning on the back of what I was able to identify after about ten minutes of research as a 1949 Ford V8 Club Coupe. It's a pose he might have learned from the movies, or pictures in magazines. He only needs to put a cigarette between the fingers of his hand to make the Glenn Ford or Robert Mitchum impersonation complete.

Maybe it's the private school blazer that's given him such confidence. You certainly can't fault the sharp crease in his flannels. The only problem was that I didn't recognize him at all.

I found this in the same envelope, obviously taken on the same day and, after a Google Street View search, identified it as the sidewalk, looking east, in front of 80 Grandville, the home where my mother lived with my grandfather during the Depression and the War and, for seven years after that, with my father and my brother, Marty. The boy's parents, probably, but who are they?

I showed the shots to my brother and he guessed that they were the Coxes, our next-door neighbours on Grandville. They certainly look prosperous, her in her suit and him in his well-tailored jacket and trousers, both of them proof that, style-wise, the '30s lasted pretty much all through the '40s thanks to wartime shortages and austerity and the rationing of frivolity for the duration.

A month or so later I found this in another envelope - Marty with the same boy, the latter looking a lot less suave with his tie askew, posing stiffly in front of the Ford with my brother and his pants with their dusty knees. It's definitely Grandville, and most of the houses are still there today, covered in stucco and siding, renovated and expanded. My brother says he's about five here, which dates the shots from 1950, maybe '51.

The car's the star of these photos, though. It looks minty new, and the Coxes were justified in showing it off to their neighbours. The '49 coupe and sedan were the first truly postwar cars Ford brought out, bulbous wheel arches giving way to a more streamlined design with the wheels absorbed into the smooth-sided body behind the cyclopean chrome grille.

It was the final triumph of Moderne on mass-market auto design before it went space age, sprouting fins and rocket-nosed tail lights and slashes of chrome trim. Along with the crest on the boy's school blazer, it shows that the Coxes were doing well, and my brother recalls that they moved away not long after this - out west, in his memory, to where the future apparently could be found. We'd move east in a year, to a new house just a few blocks away from Grandville on Gray Avenue, where I'd grow up.

So this would be the last glimpse of the Coxes and their son, wherever he might be now. The car, I'm sure, is long gone, rusted and crushed, but once it sat shiny and new on the still-dirt surface of Grandville Avenue, next to the new paved sidewalks, to be shown off and admired while its owners stood next to it, wearing their best.

 

Some old pictures I didn't take: A boy and his dog

Jimmy Barnes, Hamilton, 1940s

WE WERE A KODAK FAMILY. Mount Dennis, the neighbourhood where I grew up, was built around Kodak's Canadian plant, and my mother, cousin and sister all worked there for a cumulative eight decades. So it's no surprise that among the things passed down to me are envelopes full of snapshots, slides and film negatives.

The boy holding the struggling dog is my cousin Jimmy Barnes, probably shot in the backyard of their family home in Hamilton, where my aunt Cecilia Murphy went to live when she married John Barnes. My mother probably took this shot, on a visit to her sister sometime in the '40s. I never knew Jimmy - he joined the navy and spent two decades at sea before buying a bar in Halifax. He might still be alive today, but I haven't heard about him since I was a boy.

I have always loved snapshots, with their foursquare composition, artless lighting and occasionally awkward poses and expressions. Some people like to describe them as capturing moments of the past, but given the effort required to find the camera, choose a backdrop and corral friends and family into the frame, they're more like the a moment in time forced awkwardly to slow its onward rush for a brief, stumbling pause.

The boy has a name but the dog doesn't, as he struggles to elude the camera's gulping shutter. There might be, at this moment, less than half a dozen people alive for whom the boy's name and the houses glimpsed behind him might evoke a real, lived memory. I am not one of them; I am merely the caretaker of this image, for now.

I've been going through these old photos for the last few months, scanning the negatives and asking my brother and sister if they can remember names or places, since almost all of these photos were taken long before I was born. After all of this work, I've decided to share them as the first blog post of every month, if only to justify the painstaking labour required to clean them up, spot the dust, repair the scratches and squeeze as much detail as I can from images taken on whatever Brownie or Instamatic my mother or cousin had bought with their employee discount.

Jimmy, Gloria and Joanne Barnes, Hamilton, 1940s

Here's another shot taken on the same day - Jimmy and his struggling dog with his sisters Gloria and Joanne. I knew them as my cousins but they were, in fact, my uncle and aunts, though I wouldn't learn this until nearly twenty years ago - a not-uncommon circumstance in Catholic families, where an unplanned baby might have been inconvenient but not unwanted. But more about that another time.