Gordon's mother Beanie

Gordon’s mother Beanie (a diminutive of the name Rubina) was a complex person, eliciting very different emotions from among those of us who knew her. Born in 1880, she was the youngest of nine children of Scottish parents. While she claimed to be no great scholar, she also claimed that she could throw the ball further and run faster than anyone else in the school. At school she did learn to recite poetry and, as an old woman she would repeat “The Face On The Barroom Floor” with all the melodrama of the Victorian music hall. Above is a picture of her and Jack likely before they were married. Lois remembers her as being a good sport on the trip to Niagara Falls.

At the same time, Beanie was obsessively controlling of her son Gordon and she made Lois desperately unhappy when the older and younger couple shared the family farm home for a short time after Gordon and Lois were married. Beanie loved fashion and deeply regretted that they had no money to buy luxuries. After Jack died she went to work for a short time in a knitting mill in Stratford. Then she moved in with her sister Alice and her brother-in-law Charlie Ballantyne who owned a big red brick house on Elizabeth Street in Stratford. (As an afterthought: if you click on the picture, it will enlarge to full screen size.)