MOM'S AND DAD'S
WEDDING ANNIVERSARY
He was Edward Richard
Unruh, living in the small town of Hepburn, Saskatchewan. He came from a
respected family. His dad was Reeve, and hail adjuster and treasurer for the
Mennonite Central Committee. He was already bald on top but he was handsome,
with dark hair on the sides and a pencil-thin mustache. His brown eyes romanced
her. He had a pleasant voice, and a constant whistle. The tunes he whistled in
downtown Hepburn (Main Street), were secular tunes, dance band tunes. She was Tina
Martha Doerksen, with a sincere Christian faith in that Mennonite community. Edward was four years older than she. He was a
good young man but he was not a believer, that is, he had not made a public
profession of faith as many in his community had done. She married him anyway. In
the town of Hepburn, Saskatchewan in 1941, that decision carried a stigma. It
was an unequal yoke in the eyes of her church. In their wedding photos she is
wearing a pink dress and a matching pink hat, revealing that it had been
considered inappropriate for to wear white, and they were not permitted to be
married in the church.
World War II broke out
and Canada became involved as a member nation of the British Commonwealth.
Hepburn’s dominant Mennonite community held a pacifist position. Dad, in contrast,
felt that his father had emigrated to Canada from a Mennonite settlement in
Russian held Crimea, and Canada was now the family home where freedom reigned,
so he enlisted. I was born on September 13, 1942, and Dad was a member of the
Royal Canadian Air Force. When the war
was over, employment was scarce in a prairie town, so dad operated a service
station (gas), and mom and dad together began a coffee shop, with a reputation
for great pies. That comes as no surprise to anyone who remembers mom’s reputation
for baking and cooking.
When I was four years
old and with mom pregnant again, it became apparent that opportunity for the
family did not exist in Hepburn an longer. Non-farming prairie families were
moving either west to the B.C. coast or to Ontario. Dad and mom decided to go
east. Mom’s parents had already made the move to St. Catharines, Ontario, and
that is where our home was made. Job opportunity for an unskilled worker like
dad and the urgent need for an income to support his family meant taking a
factory job, first at Ontario Paper Mills, then Thompson Products pumping out
GM parts, and then for over 40 years at Anthes Imperial that produced furnaces.
He had a few different tasks in that company but most of his years until he was
65 he was on an assembly line, up and down, from his knees to a standing
position, screwing in metal parts. He was a hard worker and his sons, all three
of us respected him. Three sons, with Murray born in 1947, the year of
the move from the West to St. Catharines, and the year that I turned five years
of age. Neale, the youngest came later, when I was eleven and Murray was six. I
mentioned that we respected our father, each of us for our own personal reasons
and also for shared reasons. When the three of us were grown men, we asked him
why he had stuck with that same hard physical job all those years, and his
response humbles me still. “I did it for my boys.” Such was the loving
motivation of a family man. Nothing else needs to be said to explain him.
My parents made
incremental changes in our standard of living as they were able. From the
downtown St. Paul St. third-floor apartment, up three flights of stairs with
baby carriage and groceries, to suburban Rosedale Gardens and a rental home
owned by Ken Grimwood. Three years later we were back in the city, settled at
10 Clark Street in a rental home next to the old St. Catharines Bus yards that
contained old maintenance and storage barns and train tracks and trains and
streetcars. That two-story brick house was the home to which Neale came after
his birth in St. Catharines General Hospital. Years later other family
members whispered the story to us that Mom lost a pregnancy several years after
Neale's birth, and that time it had been twin girls.
When I was ten years
old, my father went alone to an evening church meeting and it was on that
occasion that he did make a conclusive choice to believe in Jesus as his
Saviour and LORD. Dad was not a theologian but he tried to understand scripture
and he sought to live by its principles. My mom and dad loved each other for
all of their 67 years together. There were occasional differences of opinion
between them, but I cannot remember a time that my father raised his voice in
anger at my mom. Instead, because mom
was entrepreneurial with her cooking and baking abilities, he became wholly
supportive of her catering business, launched from her home, serving meals to
hundreds of guests for various functions. She even operated a coffee and pastry
bar at Ontario Paper's home office for many years. She managed a kitchen staff
cooking at Fair Havens Conference facilities and Dad helped as he could. He loved her so much. He was never a wealthy person, but he impressed us all with his generosity to her, purchasing a special piece of jewellery to mark various occasions. Mom’s and Dad's dependability and
authenticity most certainly affected us, their three sons, each of whom became
involved in Christian service. Those who survive still cherish this legacy.
And note this. After
purchasing their first home for $10,000 in 1954, when dad was 39 and mom was
35, and living in it for 30 years, they sold it in 1985 for $65,000 when dad
was 70. They then lived off of that
money and modest government pension, and government pensions for another 23
years, enjoying annual month-long winter stays in Florida and trips to the West
Coast to which I moved in 1991. Still, when the estate was settled, dad left $39,000
to his sons – incredible frugality.
She died six months before he did. At her passing he told her, and all of our family heard him say, “ goodnight Sweetheart, I’ll see you soon.” He still romanced her. So while they have
been gone from us here for nine and ten years, I honour their memories today on
what was their wedding anniversary date.
We are at the time of life when we still are surprised but shouldn’t be, that our remarkably designed human bodies that have functioned flawlessly and reliably for 7 decades begin to demonstration the predictable attrition of wear.
