Back in the late 1950s, my family lived in one of the last of the old farm houses right on Dundas Street in Toronto’s west end. That’s where I spent my first 10 Christmases.
Today, where once grew truly delicious apples, the stretch along Dundas St. West between Kipling Avenue and The 427 is now an extended condo farm. High rise buildings are rapidly replacing boarded up car dealerships and bowling alleys. Back in the late ’50s, however, it was still a two-lane surface route with the occasional single-dwelling homestead.
Mind you it was changing even then. My earliest memories are of being pushed in a stroller a few short blocks east to Six Points Plaza (and the ice cream shop where Apache Burger has stood for 50 years) or in the other direction to the grand, open-air, California-style mall that was Cloverdale — a once-thriving communuity gathering place set to undergo its own transition into history.
I didn’t know it at the time but now I think how fortunate to have been raised in a farm house in the city; to pick fresh apples off the remaining orchard trees and then hurl the cores at the modern Canadian Tire store right across the street.
This collection of home movies, however, is less about the neighbourhood and all about the family. My mom and dad, Margaret and Ross Brioux, bought 5308 Dundas in 1952 for $13,500.00. Before I was born, they had a boarder to help make ends meet (a Scottish bagpiper!).
Even though I did not have any siblings, I thought I did at Christmas. Ever year my grandmother, Peggy McCarroll, and my aunt Mary McDonald and her three children Bonnie, Eddie and Margie would join us for Christmas from their homes in Toronto. My mom and Mary’s big brother, Uncle Ed McCarroll, generally providing the lift.
The added family made Christmas more exciting around the tree and a lot more crowded around the dinner table. My grandmother also added an authentic slice of Scotland to the mix.
My dad would spring for 100′ of 16mm movie film and record the day. He shot four of the Christmases at 5308, including my first Christmas in 1957 and also in ’58, ’59 and 1966, and those images provide the basis for this 12 minute and 46 second video.
Because I was the new object of fascination in those early years, a warning: there is a lot of footage of little Billy Brioux. Trust me — I cut some of me out.
Christmas did not end there either. My memory is a litle fuzzy but I think we all got back into cars and headed clear the other sice of Toronto, to Scarborough, and continued to eat and unwrap at the home of my mom’s uncle and aunt, Pat and Isobel Moore. Joining us there were Pat and Isobel’s daughter Marion and her husband Ray, the Grisbrooks, and their children, Linda Marie, Greg, Patrick and Kathleen.
Also in this video are a couple of quick glimpses of friends who dropped by during the season, including Neil “Sping” Turner and his wife Eileen and their three children Ross, Ken and Carol, as well as an honorary aunt, Hazel Sinclair and Georgina.
This video will mean more to the surviving folks in the films, the children who are now in their sixties. My aunt Marion, for example, a nurse, died very young, still in her thirties, so I’m glad to be able to share these short glimpses of her with my Grisbrook cousins.
The holiday scenes, however, should be familiar to anyone who remembers a jolly jumper or who grew up in an era when an Original Six table hockey game or a Slinky Dog pull toy was a pretty awesome Christmas gift.
As always, I’m grateful to my dad for going to the bother of dragging out the camera and lights on these occasions and providing precious memories for future generations. They show that, yes, Virginia, there was a Santa Claus, and he did slide down chimneys, even in old farm houses that still stood in mid-20th century Toronto.
