AUGUST 20, 2020
Jim was driving a Volkswagen Thing from Toronto to Burlington for his work with a developer. It really was too long a distance for a daily commute, because his job also required driving three hours north to Georgian Bay several times each month for planning meetings in the evening.
In the spring of 1980 we bought a house. All we could afford was a house in Hamilton. Not being from southern Ontario, we didn’t grow up with the negative prejudices towards Hamilton—the Steel Town— that others harboured.
Hamilton had a lovely downtown and we lived near the well treed Gage Park, that had the unique Hamilton Children’s Museum, a farmhouse from 1875. The original Tim Horton’s was in sight from our front door.
Our house, a fixer upper for sure, in the Junction came with good sized backyard and a pear tree. The property was zoned for business. We converted two of the bedrooms on the second floor into showroom and workroom space. We thought about having a dog.
the showroom with design table made from an old sewing machine table from a factory, clothing samples hanging on a pine rod
Our neighbour next door worked at the True Temper plant. He saw Jim as a suit because he carried a leather briefcase and dressed in office wear for work. Jim was more like him than his appearance let on. Jim looked forward to working on the house on the weekends. They had a lot of interesting conversations in the driveway but our neighbour never did get his head around Jim rebuilding windows.
Shortly after we moved to Hamilton, Jim joined a life company in Toronto. The commute from Hamilton to Toronto was the outer limits of the commute on the Go Train. The trains did not run as regularly as they do now. Missing your train was not an option. He studied during the hours on the train through distance learning at UBC to become a mortgage broker.