I was born in Port Rowan, which is in the southern Ontario right on Lake Erie. It’s on the Longpoint peninsula.

I always say to my kids that I had the perfect childhood. I was the youngest of three children. I have an older brother who is ten years older than me. We grew up in a very small hamlet of maybe only 200 people. Town was a ten minute drive in one direction, so we had a lovely setting in this farm hamlet.

My father was a Farmer. He had several farms. He was a tobacco farmer, surprise!

There is a place in southern Ontario called the golden triangle. It’s not very big and it is tucked into the triangle of land that goes down to Detroit and the Great Lakes. There is a season where they can grow tobacco, and the soil is perfect.

He also had a general farm. The general farm was attached to our home in the hamlet. The fields and forests went back from our home. So I got to go ride horses in the field or coach romping down through the woods to the stream and catch fish. It was a Huckleberry Finn childhood.

On our general form we had a cattle, pigs, corn, rye, wheat, and stuff like that.

My dad was very authoritarian; he didn’t joke around much. He was very serious. He was a father to the family but not the kind of dad who did things with us. In those days of fathers didn’t. Mothers raise the family.

My mother was a professional. She came from the city and was born and raised in a big-city house. She was a Secretary. She had gone to secretarial school. It was a big step for her to marry a Farmer and come into this small town and live. But she took it on as a very interesting job. So I saw a very different side of farming. The other kids’ mothers would tell them about farming

One thing that bothered me about my mother was that she wrote in shorthand. I could ever believe it! She wrote grocery lists and a daily ledger that she wrote in. I used to sneak in and try to read it but it was always in shorthand, and I couldn’t read it.