Tom Symons: A Canadian Life

Chapter 1: Becoming Tom Symons

Becoming Tom Symons RALPH HEINTZMAN T om Symons is a man of roots. The roots have a surprising result, the opposite of what you might expect. But if you want to understand the man, you have first to understand the roots. Tom Symons’s roots go deep not just in Canadian history but, quite literally, in Canadian soil. Many of Tom Symons’s family were and remained—until his own generation—farmers. And proud of it. With good reason, as we shall see. This fact may help explain why Tom has such a strong sense not just of history and culture but also of place. For Tom, there has never been any difficulty in answering Northrop Frye’s rhetorical question: Where is here? He is at home. In Canada, of course, and in all parts of it. But that’s just the beginning. Because being truly at home in your own skin seems to open you up, paradoxically, to the whole world. The most recent arrival in Canada was on his father’s side. Tom’s paternal grandfather, William Limbery Symons, was born in Devon in 1860.1 He immigrated to Canada with his parents, where he eventually married Georgina Ester Lutz, from a farming family of “Pennsylvania Dutch” (i.e., German) origin, long settled near Jordan village in the Twenty Valley of the Niagara peninsula, now known for its splendid vineyards and restaurants. The Lutzes were proud descendants of United Empire Loyalists, with roots, therefore, extending back to the founding of English-speaking Canada. Tom’s Grandmother Symons C H A P T E R 1 6 TOM SYMONS: A CAnAdiAn Life always emphasized that she came from Jordan “of the Twenty,” because that signified it was twenty miles distant from the American border!2 William Symons eventually became a prominent Toronto architect, a member of the new Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.3 And, by a happy accident of fortune, Tom’s eldest son and his family now live in a Toronto house designed by Tom’s grandfather. (Talk about feeling at home.) Tom’s father, Harry Lutz Symons, was twenty-one years old, a student at the University of Toronto, and—though not a big man and slight of build—playing “rugby” football with the Toronto Argonauts, when the First World War broke out.4 He initially joined the Canadian Expeditionary Force and served in France until August 1916, when he was seconded to the new Royal Flying Corps. With his athletic ability, he became one of the war’s celebrated flying “aces,” credited with six official victories in flying combat.5 However, from the point of view of Tom’s life—indeed whether there was even to be one—the important event in his father’s war years was the time he spent at a London convalescent hospital for Canadian officers, established and maintained by an expatriate Canadian, William Perkins Bull. There Harry met, fell in love with, and later married, Bull’s daughter, Dorothy. Tom’s maternal forebears had roots equally deep in Canadian soil. His mother was the great-great-granddaughter of Bartholomew Bull, of Tipperary, Ireland, who arrived in York (later Toronto), Upper Canada, in 1818, at the age of twenty-seven, and established a prosperous farm near the junction of what are now Dufferin Street and Davenport Road. Springmount, the house he built there in 1830, was reputedly the first brick house in York township.6 In 1842, Bartholomew’s eldest son, John Perkins Bull—“J. P.”—established his own large farm in the fertile area further north from the town of York: west of Yonge Street and north of what is now Wilson Avenue. A year or two later, when J. P. brought home his new bride, Caroline Amelia Carpenter—also a descendant of United Empire Loyalists, so Tom is descended from Loyalists on both sides of his family—she called her new house “Downs View.” Some years later the two words were joined, and Downsview became the name not just of the Bull farm but of the whole surrounding community.7 (By another happy accident of fortune, almost exactly 160 years later Tom became a member of BECOMING TOM SYMONS 7 the Board of Downsview Park, a federal government initiative to turn the de Havilland airport and aircraft plant—which later occupied much of the Downsview area—into a large urban park like New York’s Central Park...