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.)

Introductions: Lois and Gordon

Hello everyone! Welcome to our family blog! This is a little experiment, and part of a larger project headed by Lou .... We were at Grandma Lois' this past Saturday, brainstorming for some ideas on how to make Lois' 95th Birthday project a little more accessible to us all, regardless of where we are.

The idea is to have weekly posts with pictures from Lois' and Gordon's past and present, accompanied by a story. Jessica and Bob are administering the site at the moment, so if you have ideas for posts, questions about people, places, or things that relate to Lois and/or Gordon that you'd like to see, send them to us. We'll see how it goes!

Now, on to today's story:

In the summer of 1937, Gordon invited Lois to go on a day trip to Niagara Falls. This was before Gordon and Lois were married. Gordon didn't have a car of his own so he had to borrow his parents' car, which meant his parents wanted to come along too.

Lois' mother had been dead now for four years. Lois was acting as mother to her five brothers and one younger sister, two of whom were under the age of five. It was a real treat to have a day's outing. Lois had no money, but she wanted something special to wear for her day away from home. She knit herself a dress, especially for the occasion.

At the time, Gordon was working at his first teaching job at the Black Creek school near Sebringville, just outside of Stratford, Ontario. Gordon had little money, but he had enough to put gas in the car to get them to Niagara Falls. Gordon's father Jack, on the other hand, had even less money than Gordon, and felt this fact keenly. When Gordon, Lois, Jack and Binnie (Gordon's mother) stopped to fill the car with gas along the way, Jack wanted to be able to pay for the gas. Gordon slipped the money to Jack, and Jack proudly went in to the station and paid for the gas himself.

We're not sure who owned the camera, but Gordon likely took the picture of Lois.