Swansea Public School

by Bill McKinlay - an excerpt from “BRICK by BRICK: Swansea Public School, 1890 to 2020” by Chris Higgins.

Spend nine of the first 14 formative years of your life in one school and the teachers, fellow students, and even the building are bound to get under your skin and stay there. Fifty years after graduating, the aroma of fresh brewed coffee near the staff room and the clatter of Miss Reid’s typewriter echoing through the halls are still vivid memories. The years I attended Swansea School, from the fall of 1961 through spring of 1970, were ones of incredible change in the world, and in our little Village.

In September 1961 John Diefenbaker was Prime Minister, John F. Kennedy had been in office just nine months, the Beatles were a local bar band in Liverpool, and Swansea was a village with its own reeve. When the class of 1970 graduated in June a dashing Pierre Trudeau was Prime Minister, the US was in the midst of the Viet Nam war, the Beatles had disbanded, and Swansea was no more – gobbled up by the City of Toronto. In our years at Swansea we learned of space travel and the assassinations of two Kennedys and Martin Luther King, celebrated Canada’s 100th birthday and shared in the grief of our teachers on a Thursday afternoon in November 1967 when we learned former Swansea student, Bruce Leighton had been electrocuted in the Humberside swimming pool. We grew up in those years and Swansea formed who we all are today.

Many of the teachers were memorable, not so much for what they taught us on the curriculum but for the extra things they did to enhance our lives.

Suzanne Laurie was our grade one teacher. Our classroom was at the south end of the school, where we sat in wooden desks, in rows, with our hands neatly folded on top of the desk. I remember two things from that year, Fun With Dick and Jane and Puff the Magic Dragon. Fun With Dick and Jane was the reader and the first words we learned to read were from that book. Soon all of us could recite “see Spot run, run Spot run.” Puff The Magic Dragon was a big hit for a new folk group, Peter, Paul & Mary and it was all over the radio in early 1963. Miss Laurie taught us the song. She had the words printed on the duplicating machine, and we all learned to sing it. I remember she asked what had happened to little Jackie Paper, and I thought the line “a dragon lives forever but not so little boys” meant Jackie had died. She gently explained that he had grown up – growing up was a concept too abstract for this six year old in 1963.

Up until the City of Toronto Board of Education took over in the fall of 1967 our classes were all streamed. That meant the kids with the similar IQs started out together in the same class in grade one. Through the years they’d move out a few of the kids with lower marks, and replace them with kids from other classes who had higher marks. I stayed with the same students from grade one through to the end of grade five. We became pretty close friends – making friendships that have spanned the decades.

In the fall of 1965 I was in Mrs. Trent’s grade four class. She had a reputation for being a very good teacher and was older than any teacher I’d had in the past. She would not let any student coast and motivated us to do our best. To provide an added challenge, she decided our class was to produce its own newspaper, which we named The Room One Journal. The construction paper covers were hand drawn by each student, and the copy was written by the students. There were articles about the ice going in at the skating rink, the weather, Gemini Space Flights, fiction written by students, and a number of book reviews. In hindsight, it taught us to write, to research, to work with others and just a bit about the challenges of meeting publishing deadlines. We collated the pages and each student proudly took a copy home to their parents. My stash of papers survived three or four moves, and only disappeared when our basement flooded about 10 years ago.

Mrs. Trent produced a play that Christmas, A Christmas Carol. I remember I played Scrooge before and after the visits of the three spirits, while another student played Scrooge at night. Sometime, either just before the production of a Christmas Carol or during the Christmas break, Mrs. Trent suffered a stroke. That was devastating news to all of us. She never returned to teach and we never saw her again.

Bill Anderson taught Industrial Arts, or Shop, as it was commonly referred to. From simple jig saw puzzles made by gluing a magazine photo on a piece of wood and cutting it out using a coping saw, to the final projects in grade eight, a baseball bat made by laminating hockey sticks together and then turning it on the lathe, and a breadboard, also made with hockey sticks glued to strips of mahogany. Mr. Anderson taught us a love of working with our hands, and the value of a good story. He had an infectious smile, and loved to tell stories. I think he liked telling stories even more than he loved teaching shop. Mr. Anderson told stories about growing up, stories about his family, stories about cottage life and his brothers, in fact any story to make us smile or teach a life lesson. I can’t remember the details of those many stories but he always made us feel good about life and working with our hands. Everyone loved Shop and Mr. Anderson.

Swansea was annexed into the City of Toronto on January 1, 1967. One of the most apparent advantages students benefited from the change was the opportunity to take instrumental music lessons. Some students took brass instruments, others woodwinds, and many of us took string instruments. I’m not sure whether the opportunity was offered to all students, or whether you had to audition, but somehow I was offered the chance to study the double bass. Our instruction was first rate. Because there were only two double bass players the instruction was private. Imagine, private music lessons, and the loan of an instrument for four years, all for free. The instrumental teachers taught at several schools in the City of Toronto, but became as well known to us over a four year period as many of the teachers on staff.

All the instructors had symphony orchestra experience and were both excellent teachers and musicians. I studied the double bass under Boris Kersting. Kersting taught more than technique, he taught a love for music and that stuck for a lifetime. We even had a moment of glory when five of us competed as a quintet in the Kiwanis Music Festival in the spring of 1970. We earned first prize in the small ensemble category.

In grades seven and eight we had home room teachers, and rotated into other classrooms to study other subjects. History was taught by Mr. James Jasper Worfolk or J.J. as he was known to everyone. The second floor halls echoed with the sound of pounding fists on desks soon after the period started – J.J. had read the class the morning smile from the Globe & Mail. Pounding on desks, he taught us, was parliamentary tradition when members of parliament liked something they heard. J.J. loved Canadian history and taught us well. If you misbehaved, you were sent out to the hall and he’d joke that you were an outstanding student – out standing in the hall. One day the teachers held a volleyball game against the senior volleyball team. J.J. participated and to our horror appeared to collapse. Mr. Calhoun and Mr. Hocevar sprang into action pumping his legs and arms to revive him. It didn’t take long for everyone to realize it was just the teachers clowning around.

Miss Wansborough was a legendary science teacher. Nick-named Swampy, because she often took her classes on field trips to Boyd Conservation Area, or simply to Catfish pond near the school, she was an environmentalist before anyone knew the term. On an out of town weekend field trip up in Bolton we were taught about nature, cooked our own food, and even learned skeet shooting with a 10 and 12 gauge shot gun. One time a friend and I walking to school found a freshly killed squirrel. We stuffed the squirrel into a bag and showed it to Miss Wansborough. Phone calls were made, and before we knew it we were both on the subway that morning to the Royal Ontario Museum. She had arranged for a staff instructor at the museum to meet us and show us how to skin the squirrel and stuff it. In the process we had an incredible anatomy lesson.She knew the value of experiential learning and practiced it with her classes.

Our grade 8 graduation ceremony and dance in June 1970 was organized, in part, by the students and we chose The Age of Aquarius as our grad theme. The song had been a hit for the Fifth Dimension and in March 1970 won a Grammy for record of the year. It spoke of a dawning of a new age and its forward looking theme spoke to all of us. I don’t think we were quite aware that it was from the musical Hair, which was playing at the Royal Alexandra theatre and drawing lots of attention for its on-stage nudity.

The class of 1970 reunited in 2010 at the Swansea Legion to celebrate 40 years, and we were planning another to celebrate 50 years in June 2020. Alas, Covid-19 has put that on hold indefinitely.(Update: see us on the left in 2022).

Video of Swansea PS Overhead (Youtube link): https://youtu.be/DN7LONj1Gqs

Published by permission of the contributing author, Bill McKinlay, and author/editor, Chris Higgins

“BRICK by BRICK: Swansea Public School, 1890 to 2020” by Chris Higgins: https://www.amazon.ca/BRICK-Swansea-Public-School-1890-2020/dp/B08WJPLB1J/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=