I was five years old when our family arrived in Kitchener, Ontario. My parents, Jacob and Olga Hamm, had been able to pay their travel fare from Russia to Canada. I can remember a rainy Saturday evening when I was sitting on a wicker suitcase waiting for my father while he looked for our Reimer cousins. We lived in Kitchener-Waterloo for one year where Dad worked in an upholstery factory during the winter months. Here he found the dust very irritating. In spring, we moved into a log cabin the Leamington area, where the three roads form a Y at what is Deer Run Road today.
I started my education at Gore Hill School, walking every day with the Moody girls. When we moved to Concession One where Dad worked for Mr. Fursey, I attended the Ridge School for two years. Then we moved to what is the Walt Brown farm in 2008, on Highway 3. One night the large barn there burned down; this was very traumatic for me! I attended SS #22 on Highway #3 and by the time I was 12 years old, I was in grade nine at Leamington High School.
We lived in the Brown house for four years and brother Jake was born there. A log bridge spanned the creek near the railroad track at the back of our farm. One day, when I was coming from the field after raking hay, the horse ran away on me and the rake got caught on the bridge. When Mom and Dad saw the horse coming back alone, they ran to the field to look for me and were happy to see that I was fine.
Next we moved near the Imperial Tobacco Company on Oak Street of Leamington.
John Janzen, father of Margaret, John and Rudy, living on Churchill Street, directed our junior church choir. At first, practices were held in our home which could accommodate a large group of people. By 1934, our Mennonite church was built on Oak Street and subsequent practices were held there. Later Henry Krueger and Henry Braun were church choir directors.
In 1936, we bought the future Zollner property on Concession Two. Since I was five and ten years older than my two brothers, I left school at 15 years of age to work on the farm, disking the field with horses. I remember stripping the gears of Dad’s car while I practiced my driving skills on our farm lane. Dad didn’t say a thing; he had the car fixed and I got my driver’s license when I was 16. By the time my brothers were in school, times were better on the farm and they could finish high school. In those days, the church young people had regular get-togethers called Jungendverein. Here we played circle games and sang folk songs with piano accompaniment.
My father was not a farmer at heart; he had been an accountant in Russia where his brother had died of stomach ulcers. When Dad was diagnosed with the same malady, he was sent to see a Dr. Waddell in Windsor who prescribed a muscle relaxant. As a result, he lived to be 68.
Our family grew flu tobacco which we stripped in the winter months. One winter I worked at the Francis Gregory home where I did light housework. I was paid $4.50 per week and could come home for night. At about that time, Ruth Wiens, who had moved here from Nebraska, USA and lived on Elliot Street, would walk over to our house on her half-day off.
I well remember George and Mary Krueger’s Polterabend (get together and gift-giving on the eve of the wedding) at the David Cornies home on Highway18. Here Frank Toews, my future husband, told his friends that he would marry me; of course, I knew nothing of this at the time!
On October 14, 1941, Frank and I were married at the Mennonite Church on Oak Street by Rev. N. N. Driedger. The wedding meal was held in the church basement. Following this, we played games in the new hip-roofed barn with concrete floor on our farm. It rained all afternoon and no pictures could be taken outside.
We started married life on the second floor of the Sport Shop on Erie Street North, and the following spring we purchased a 25 acre farm on concession six, east of Highway 77 where we grew cabbage, early tomatoes, asparagus, burley tobacco and potatoes. The farm was not tiled, and nearly everything drowned during those first wet years. Things were somewhat better after the land was tiled, but one year, a neighbour sprayed his corn with 24D which wafted over our tomato field, resulting in cat-faced tomatoes – another bad year!
Our five children were born between 1943 and 1956. On the morning of Good Friday, 1947, our son Ronnie didn’t wake up. He had died in his sleep of rheumatic fever and was buried on Easter Monday in the cemetery on the Albuna Townline.
After 17 years, we moved west of the Albuna Townline on Concession 6, to the former Koop farm where we grew greenhouse cucumbers and tomatoes. In 1974, we took up residence two doors east of UMEI where we stayed until September 13, 1990, when we moved to the corner of Mill Street and Elizabeth Crescent in Leamington. Frank died in 1998, and I moved to Pickwick Drive in December, 2006.
Upon thinking back, the best time of my life was when the children were still all at home; we were very busy, but healthy and happy, too. What a fulfilling life!
AK 2008
