Wally Hern (pt. 3)

In previous blogs we have seen that Wally Hern, the first cousin of Lois' father was an excellent amateur athlete, a not-so-enthusiastic scholar, and a popular young man in Stratford. The picture on the left taken of Wally when he was on a road trip with his hockey colleagues to Humber Bay in 1908 shows that he was also a fashionable dresser. His overcoat is almost identical to the coat worn by the model on the right, and taken from an advertisement appearing in the Stratford Beacon in the same period. In the years leading up to the First War, Wally continued to play senior hockey with the Stratford Indians in the O.H.A , but by 1912 he was playing less and in 1913 he was no longer playing competitive hockey. In an emergency he filled in as a referee for the Indians' hockey games. Even though his name no longer appeared regularly on the sports page his name, continued to appear in the Beacon on a daily basis. In 1912 he was advertising a dyeing, cleaning, pressing and suit repair service but by 1913 he had moved two doors down on Downie Street and expanded his merchandise to include suits to order and trousers guaranteed to hold their shape and fit. This was likely a good time for Wally Hern and his career, long before the troubles that led to his losing his business. But that was in the future.

Visiting the Country Cousins

While the title of this piece may be accurate, its implication is misleading. Lois, on the left and Kelly on the right were not -- as it may appear -- rich kids from the city visiting their poorer country relatives. In fact, all three were country kids, and there was no way that Lois and Kelly Hearn were richer than Jack McMaster. The difference was that Lois and Kelly were dressed in their Sunday best because they were the visitors, while their cousin Jack McMaster was dressed as he normally would be on any regular day at home. The families were related through Mae Hearn's mother whose sister married a McMaster. The McMasters had a large family, most of whom were already adults by the time this picture was taken. It was only their youngest a boy named Jack who was close to Kelly in age. This picture with Wellburn as a backdrop was likely taken about 1926 when Lois was 12 and Kelly was 8. Their father Bob Hearn had a cream route which took him through the Wellburn area. It was arranged that he would drop Lois and Kelly off and the McMasters would pick them up and take them to their farm for some holidays. Lois remembers having lots of fun with the McMaster girls, who were obviously older, but who tried hard to entertain their younger cousins. On one occasion they played hide-and-seek and Lois can remember that one of the cousins -- likely Mary, but possibly Alice -- climbed up onto the roof of the house and hide behind a window shutter. No matter how diligently the rest searched, she was not to be found. The picture at the top was taken as Lois and Kelly waited in Wellburn for their father to pick them up. One can't help but wonder whose feet were more comfortable: Kelly's, in his too-big shoes or Jack's, in his Huck Finn barefootedness? Furthermore, in Kelly's expression there is the hint of a young boy who feels slightly silly in his wide-brimmed straw hat, and his woollen suit.

Thanksgiving 1938

Today is Thanksgiving Sunday 2009. Jessica and Carlos and I went to St. Marys to have a Thanksgiving dinner with Lois and her sister Roberta. Yesterday, October 12 is the 71st birthday of Lois's oldest child, Betty Lou. Lois remembers that Thanksgiving Day 71 years ago was a bright cool, day. As a teacher Gordon had Thanksgiving day off. In the afternoon they went for a walk over to the "other 50 acres" which was north across the road from the McEwan main farm. Lois remembers that they walked a long distance through the 50 acres and across to the side road leading to Sebringville. On the following day after coming home from school Gordon changed his clothes and went to the barn to help his father Jack. When he got to the barn his father said: "Go back to the house. I think Lois needs you more that we do." By the time he had returned to the house Lois said that she thought she needed to go to the hospital. They arrived at Stratford Hospital at about 6 p.m. and the baby was born about 8 p.m. the much loved first child of Gordon and Lois, the first grandchild of Jack and Beanie McEwan and the second grandchild of Bob Hearn. Here is a picture of the baby likely taken in front of the farm house on a pleasant spring day in 1939.

How To Get To The Dance?

It was Saturday night. Lois was at Helen Laing's place. They were teenagers. There was a dance at Lakeside. Neither of them had dates, but they wanted desperately to attend the dance. Helen's younger sister Marie was going with her date Ken Rea. Lois and Helen came up with a plan and Marie agreed: When Ken Rae knocked on the front door to collect Marie, Lois and Helen were to run out the back door, get into the back seat of the car and crouch down so that Ken could not see them. If they could get to the dance, maybe they could get a ride home, and Ken would never know. The plan worked perfectly, Ken knocked at the door, Lois and Helen scurried around from the back of the house, crouched down in the back seat, determined to stay quiet, but the question was: How long would that last? The                 plan progressed, Rae and Marie came out of the house, got into the car, Ken turned on the motor, pulled out of the drive and headed toward Lakeside. Helen and Lois crouching in the back hid their mirth, while the conversation of Ken and Marie, young people on a date, continued in the front seat without Ken realizing that every word was being overheard. Then, unexpectedly, Ken turned east when he should have turned south if he was going to Lakeside. Marie asked "why?" and when he replied that the had agreed to pick up another couple, the Helen and Lois knew that the game was up, and all that bottled up tension burst out in what Lois describes as "snorting" hilarity. The girls offered to be taken home but Ken, a generous man, said that all six of them could all go together to the dance. Lois remembers that they got to the dance, had a great time, and even managed to find a ride home so that Ken and Marie could be on their own. (The two pictures - one of rather poor quality -- which accompany this blog are taken from the collection of the St. Marys Museum and represent what the pavilion may have looked like on the evening in which Lois and Helen hitched their ride with Ken Rae.)

The Hern Cousins: Wally (pt. 2)

In the previous blog I introduced Wally Hern, the first cousin of Lois' father Bob. Wally was an excellent athlete who, as a member of the Stratford hockey teams, won three provincial championships: junior in 1900, intermediate in 1904 and senior in 1907. As such, he was one of only two people who could claim to have earned the "triple crown". In this photo of the Hern family, Wally is the young man with the straw hat standing next to his mother.


Wally appears prominently in stories told by Wally's nephew George Johnston. The reminiscences which began in the previous blog, now continue:

Margaret and her family visit the Herns in Stratford

"After two or three nights with Benson's folk [i.e., Margaret's in laws] on Nile Street we migrated to Water Street to be with Myrtle and Wally and their young. Life brightened up for us all. The bond of sisterly affection between Margaret and Myrtle was strong and remained so throughout their lives. Benson [Margaret's husband] and Wally were not compatible in the same way, but they were both young and as yet not burdened with the varieties of seriousness that awaited them. Both had loud laughs and gave them much exercise while they were together.

A child dies

Myrt had her woman's glory cropped and became a new person. All agreed that she looked younger and prettier. She had also been fetched by the alteration out of a winter of grieving for a daughter, Ruth, who had been born sickly and died after the first two months of her life. Spring came, and one fine day she took the notion, walked down town and had it done.

Wally's business fails.

Myrtle and Wally moved to Toronto with their daughters Margaret and Edith and son Walter. Wally's haberdashery business in Stratford failed, as Aunt Jen had foretold from reading his tea cup. Someone is taking money from your till she said. Her reading proved true. An important cause of his business failure was considered to have been the dishonesty of his one clerk, who seems to have got away with considerable money without being caught at it. So the story went at any rate.

The Hern's new home on Castlefield Avenue in north Toronto, a pleasant walk away from us on Eastbourne Avenue, through Pears' Park. Margaret and Myrtle rejoiced in the propinquity the move had brought them.

Wally tries being a Life Insurance Salesman

"Wally, impressed by his [brother-in-law] Benson's success, thought Life Insurance salesman would be right for him too, and Benson did not discourage him. The Sun Life was persuaded to take him on and train him. He made one small sale and then, after a long while, another. The sociability of contacting prospects gave him much pleasure, he could while away hours chewing the fat with almost anyone, but aside from that he was no salesman. Neither did he have the necessary convictions about life insurance. Finally, he gave up trying to be a salesman."

"Times were becoming depressed. After he was let out of Sun Life there seemed to be no other employment for Wally in Toronto. He settled down, uncomplaining, to reading the newspapers, for the positions vacant ads, he said, and rolling cigarettes for himself, and others who wanted them in the household, on an apparatus he had bought. Myrtle took in a boarder or two. Then Margaret and Edith began working and contributing money for their keep. They were loyal children to both parents, and seemed to accept that Wally should not contemplate employment beneath the dignity of an ex-mayor of Stratford, who had also, in other respects, been one of its prominent citizens."

Wally finds work in England.

George Johnston's stories continue: "In October '36 Walter Hern found employment again. He was brought to London, England, as referee for ice hockey, a newly popular spectator sport there. It seemed a gift for him. He set himself up in a comfortable flat in St. John's Wood and invited me to use it sometimes as a warm location for my labours with the pen. I went one evening when he was at a practice, but found it so warm I could not stay awake." .... "Uncle Wally, or U. Wally as we knew him among ourselves invited [me] to a hockey game at which he was officiating. He urged me to make use of his flat again, and I gave it another try, with no better success."

Wally gets hit by a bus

"On this second occasion, having dozed off as before, I was roused by the phone at abut eleven p.m., and a man's voice asked me in a London accent, if I knew one Walter Hern. I said I did. Well, don't be alarmed, sir, the voice said patiently. Your mite's been it by a bus. The calmness of the voice alarmed me from the first, but I was sufficiently alert to ask for more information. Walter Hern is in the Outpatients' at St. Mary's Ospital, the voice told me. Being attended to. It game me directions for getting there, and I followed them at once. The Outpatients' Clinic was dimly lit by a gas jet. Behind a desk in an alcove that was somewhat more brightly lit, sat a mildly authoritative-looking young woman in a white smock. A row of men and women, middle-age to elderly, all with unhappy expressions on their faces, were partly visible in the gloom, seated on a bench next to a wall, some with bandaging on a hand or foot or forehead. When they heard me tell the lady at the desk that I should like to know about Walter Hern they looked unhappier than ever. Ow, e did look orful! they all agreed. I joined them on the bench. After a while the desk lady gave me a sign and I stood up. A door opened, a wheeled stretcher came through it and across the waiting room to another door and on it was U. Wally, covered by a sheet except for his head, over one corner of which was a neat bandage. Hoo! hoo! hoo! he was saying through a tube stuck in his mouth, and he stunk of anaesthetic. For the week and half that he was in hospital I visited him regularly, and then I arranged a room for him at Thirty Doughty Street, rooming house and of the Admirable Mrs. Crichton, as we called her" .... "U. Wally got tea and toast for himself in his room and then came to our flat in Lamb's Conduit Street and spent much of each morning sitting by our coal grate, burning our coal, as we never did during the day, and reading our copy of The London Times. He would stay for lunch and then go the the Strand Palace Hotel and write letters home on their stationery. If a flunky eyed him he would say to himself, I don't have to care for you, you're nothing but a shit! or so he told us, at any rate." My roommates' "patience with all this must be considered supererogative, though they did find him and his ways somewhat entertaining, if unintentionally so. He would tell us about his sightseeing in London, how impressed he was by the Albert Memorial, for example. We were not to miss it, it must be one of the really great monuments in the world. He also informed us about one of our own favourite haunts, St. James' Park."

(On the right is a picture of the Albert Memorial at it appeared in August 2009 when Bob McEwan, Wally's first cousin twice removed, visited London. The memorial is just as impressive and unchanging in 2009 as it was 70 years ago when Wally visited it.)

Wally goes home

"At last he ran out of money, he had completed his convalescence, he was homesick and went home."

We have no record of what happened in the rest of Wally's life. The last note I have of Wally Hern dates back to the 1960's when his first cousin Bob Hearn (Lois' father) recollected that Wally had died sometime in the recent past.

The Hern Cousins: Wally (pt. 1)

Lois' grandfather Robert Hearn had a older brother John. Of John's four sons, one achieved fame as a goalie with the Montreal Wanderers, the illustrious hockey team which won the Stanley Cup for five years in succession beginning in 1906, and a second son who became "famous regionally" as a hockey player in Stratford. Riley, the one who became truly well-known is standing on the left in the above picture. His younger brother Wally is standing on the right. Albert and Frederick the two older Hern boys are sitting in front. This blog is about Wally. Born in 1882, Wally was the youngest of the seven children of John Hern and Frances Barnes. The family lived first in St. Marys and then in Stratford where the father John worked as an ostler at one of the large hotels.
Wally appears to have been a natural athlete. By the time the report above appeared in the St. Marys Journal on 10 February 1898, Wally already was the county speed skating champion for the five mile distance.

At the same time, the world of scholarship may not have been as satisfying for Wally as was the skating. In the St. Marys Journal of Nov. 11, 1897, W. Hern (presumably Wally) in Form II at the Collegiate Institute is recorded as achieving a 44 in arithmetic, and a 59 in Botany. Then, on Dec. 7 the newspaper reports that Walter Hern got a 36 in Latin, a 55 in Euclid, and a 44 in Physics.What was not in doubt, however, was Wally's proficiency as a hockey player. In the 1898- 99 season he played for the Stratford Junior team in the OHA league where the correspondent from the Stratford paper wrote on 1 Feb. 1899: "probably "Wallie" Herne did the best work on the forward line for Straford. He made many good rushes and on one occasion took the puck from one end of the ice to the other and scored the first game of the evening. It was a grand play and "Wallie" was the hero of the evening." During this period Wally lived with his mother and his older brother Riley on Brunswick Street in Stratford. He worked as a clerk in a dry goods store earning a salary of $100 a year. He continued to play hockey in Stratford and was considered good enough to be offered a professional contract in Montreal. According to family stories, Wally refused this exciting opportunity because he could not envision himself leaving his widowed mother on her own.Here is Wally with a group of friends in 1907 on a road trip to Humber Bay near Toronto. A notation on the back of the photo says that they were entertained by the Eatons. Wally is second from the left in the front row.

Wally later married Myrtle Black, a young woman who sang in the choir of the Centennial Methodist church. Myrtle's sister Margaret also sang in the choir. In later years, Margaret's son George Johnston wrote some reminiscences of his family in which his Uncle Wally figures prominently:

Wally and Myrtle visit with her Margaret"Myrte and Wally came and stayed for a fortnight, their young daughters Margaret and Edith with them. Wally then had his gents' furnishings shop and was well off and full of confidence. He had been mayor of Stratford for a term. While Benson (Margaret's husband) was in town, minding JOHNSCO'S thriving business, Wally put in the time, good-naturedly, with Myrtle and Margaret and the children, taking them shopping and on other junkets in his expensive, leather-upholstered McLaughlin touring car. Afternoons he spent at the Burlington Golf and Country Club. During the second week he proposed an excursion to Toronto.
They should take in a ball game, he said. The weather seems to have smiled on the trip there, and the picnic lunch on the beach at Sunnyside was sand and fly-bitten but a cheerful festivity. Then the two women were taken to Riverdale Park, where there was a small zoo, and left there with the four children. It seemed a likely enough place. The McLauglin stayed with them a a sort of headquarters. Neither Margaret nor Myrt knew how to drive.
There was no forgetting that afternoon for the men. Back they returned from the game in high spirits and were brought up short with It's about time! and fretfulness in their children of a degree they had not encountered before. An unforgiving calm descended for the drive home, and the children dropped off to sleep almost at once. By and by the women dozed off too."

( Stories to be continued in the next blog.)