Gus Redux and Sparky: Chapter Five

As may be clear from the elaborate fortification, Gus, the xylaria polymorpha that has taken up residence in our backyard is back after a tough winter that we had feared may have killed him.  

We first noticed Gus the year before we put Molly down and "he" is the closest thing to a pet we'll have for as long as we live downtown.

Gus is still growing - that's what the white tips represent - so there will be future updates for readers who just have to know about the state of the saprobic fungus in our back yard.

Sparky's Funtime Summertime Murder Mystery
Chapter Five 

Sparky here. This is Chapter Five of my story about how Gerry Ringbold met his untimely end. The story starts here.

Pea lived another forty years after she established the trust for the Thompson Gardens - more about which in a minute - so the ten million had grown to almost one hundred million by the time she died. In the five years it took to resolve the court challenges against the will, the principle grew to 125 million. Now, according to the Thompson Garden Annual Report, the endowment generates between five and six million dollars a year to spend on the Gardens.

The Thompson Gardens are an inner city remnant of the wealth that had once lined the entire length of the street where Pea and Stuart's mansion stood. But, after they had built their giant homes on broad avenues lined with trees and interspaced with impressive parks like the Thompson Gardens, the rich people felt they needed fresher digs and moved on. Those who followed in their wake did not have the resources to keep the place up, so the mansions were subdivided into apartments, and then rooming houses, and then torn down and replaced with public housing. The trees succumbed to inattention and disease. The parks - especially the Thompson Gardens - lapsed into genteel ruin, the once carefully tended turf transitioning to prostrate knotweed and plantain; the statuary and masonry quietly crumbling into dust. 

After Stuart's death, the mentions of Pea in the newspaper dwindled from about one or two a month to one or two a year to not a single mention in the last ten years of her life. Pea reappeared in the newspapers after her death in the rushing torrent of stories about her good works and her funeral and, almost immediately after that, the contest over her will.   

Pea and Stuart never had any kids. Stuart left her a widow when Pea was in her late sixties and she never remarried. At the time of her death, Pea lived with a small staff including a cook, a groundskeeper and, for the last few years of her life, a nurse. She remembered them all in her will. She also left comfortable sums to her many grand nieces and grand nephews, local hospitals, the art gallery, the museum. All of the last three have wings or galleries named after Pea and Stuart.  

And, like I said, Pea left the endowment to the Thompson Gardens.

I think estates as big as Pea’s are fought over probably just as a matter of principle – if there’s enough money at stake people will concoct any reason at all to try and get some of it. But, even treasure hunting law suits need some kind of pretext. 

An early article in the local paper said this phrase, referring to the trust that had already been established, launched a five-year, multi-million dollar lawsuit:

“The park shall be kept open and free for all people of the city, including and especially the people who use it most: the poor, the dispossessed, the addicted and the aged.”

Pea’s special notice of the “addicted” was presented in court as evidence that she was not of sound mind and under undue influence when she created the will. 

You can read Chapter Six here.

Sure Signs of Summer and Sparky: Chapter Four

'Love locks' on the Brooklyn Bridge

It's finally summer. I am certain of this because on the May 24 weekend, unaccountably held on May 19 this year, Bruce and I strolled around the deserted city and enjoyed a beer on an outside patio without freezing to death. 

Suicide Barrier on the Bloor Viaduct

Ironically death-defying placement of
love lock on the Suicide Barrier
on the Bloor Viaduct

No one risked their lives to lock these up

The other reason I am certain it is summer is that the last two movies I have watched were in 3D. They both involved major military efforts to destroy scary misunderstood beings. Both had lots of explosions and carnage, but on the internationally-recognized mayhem measurement of "most buildings destroyed," Godzilla beat X-Men: Days of Future Past handily. On every other measure - was it fun, did the characters appeal, was there genuine tension in the story line - X-Men kicked Godzilla's ass.

Sparky's Funtime Summertime Murder Mystery
Chapter Four 

Sparky here. This is Chapter Four of my story about how Gerry Ringbold met his untimely end. The story starts here.

"Pea," as she was called, was born in 1900 like I said, and as the towers of the World Trade Centre fell, she breathed her last in the 18-room mansion she’d lived in since her marriage to Stuart Chester in 1920.   

The marriage of Pea MacDonald and Stuart Chester was a very big deal. She was the daughter of a prominent family that traced its line back to the kings of England and Stuart was the only son of a family grown rich on the pulp and paper industry. There were no pictures of the wedding in the newspaper because the technology of printing halftones did not exist at the time. The article about the wedding described Pea as “famously fair” and Stuart as “the handsome only son of the Bracebridge Chesters.” Their wedding took more than half of the society page but most of it was about the guest list and descriptions of the clothes worn by members of the wedding party.  

There were lots of other articles about Pea and Stuart over the next many decades, but only about their parties - who were the guests in attendance and lavish detail about what they were all wearing - or about their gifts to charitable causes. There were no stories of scandals, or stints in rehab, or children born out of wedlock. By today's standards it was like there was a strict code of privacy between the Chesters and the press.

That code held for for almost fifty years, right up to 1969 when Stuart died at the age of seventy. His full-page obituary talked about his service in the military and his good works as a civilian, but did not say how he died. 

I'm going to guess that Stuart died of lung cancer. After half-tone printing was invented, photos of Stuart in the newspapers always showed him with a cigarette in his hand. By the 60’s, Stuart had that tanned from the inside out look that hard core smokers have. Pea’s first act as a widow was to make a very large donation to the then brand-new Queen Elizabeth Cancer hospital.

In the same newspaper photos that showed Stuart slowly turning himself into a piece of human jerky, Pea always looked more or less the same. Once every other year or so, she would change her hair, which was originally brown and then she coloured it for a while and then she just let it go grey. She was about the same height as Stuart and they were both pretty tall. They were these attractive people, rich by anybody’s standards, always throwing great parties to raise money for something. For fifty years, the only society address that really mattered in this town belonged to Pea and Stuart. 

Pea performed her most famous charitable act before Stuart died. On her sixtieth birthday – July 1, 1960 – Pea put ten million dollars aside in a trust to be used to create a charitable endowment for the Thompson Gardens upon her death. 

You can read Chapter Five here.


  

Song of the Bees and Sparky: Chapter Three

Photo credit: Kevan MacRow - Wolfe Island Bees

Bees featured prominently in the events of the past week. First, I received the above bee-filled photo from my sister. It was taken by her newlywed husband and chosen by the Kingston Weather Network as a wallpaper photo. It's now my wallpaper at work.

Second, on Thursday afternoon, I held another "branch day" for my staff. We did something useful last time, but this time we just had fun for a couple of hours running around on a phone-app-supported wild goose chase/scavenger hunt. 

One of the tasks to accomplish for points and record in a smart phone photo was "perform a music concert in a public square."

A member of my team is a gifted musician, so, while the rest of us goofed around making a dog leash and collar out of plastic bags, he wrote a song - in five minutes. The tune was kind of a cross between John Denver's "Country Roads" and "Yellow Rose of Texas." The lyrics were:

Oh it's branch day in the forest
All the buds are on the trees
The only thing that's missing is all the friendly bees
Where have they gone, I don't know where
O tell me tell me please
Please Mr. Monsanto,
Where's our friendly bees?

The song writer also happened to have his guitar with him, so, we stood on the north east corner of University and College and sang our guts out. In the photo, the crowds assembled to cross the street appeared to have assembled to listen to us. Good enough. We got our points.


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Sparky's Funtime Summertime Murder Mystery
Chapter Three 

Sparky here. This is Chapter Three of my story about how Gerry Ringbold met his untimely end. The story starts here.

The incredible coincidence of the place where Gerry's blistered corpse was found was lost on no one. Headlines declared "poetic justice" or noted the irony "Gerry Ringbold: Career Birth and Mysterious Death in the Thompson Gardens."  

That last headline was for a kind of obituary/personal remembrance by a local reporter - a guy named Bob Harrison - who had made his career writing about Gerry. 

The obituary said Gerry was born, raised and educated in the same city where he died. An only child, Gerry was orphaned at the age of twenty when his parents perished in a car crash. He got his law degree when he was twenty three and got called to the bar two years after that. Gerry never married, didn't live with anyone and never had any kids that he admitted to. 

Gerry's epic five-year legal battle against the Peony MacDonald Chester Foundation was what made him a household name and gave him a ticket to win municipal elections, which he did. 

But when he died, in spite of his public profile, Gerry did not seem to have anyone who cared that he was dead except perhaps Bob Harrison, whose career as a reporter may also have been over. There were no notices for a funeral service. There were no fond memories of Gerry posted on a funeral home web site guest book that I could find anywhere. 

Peony MacDonald Chester on the other hand - the woman whose endowment to the Thompson Garden Gerry so ferociously contested - her passing was a major public event.  Literally thousands of people attended her funeral in 2001. City flags flew at half mast and the Mayor declared an official day of mourning. 

I found all these details researching on the Internet. But, to dig into the full story of Peony MacDonald Chester, who was born on July 1, 1900 and who died, in another incredible coincidence, on September 11, 2001, I had to go to the library and look at microfilm of old newspapers.

If you want to figure out the death of Gerry Ringbold, you need to know about the life of Peony Chester (nee MacDonald).    


You can read Chapter Four here.

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Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen





  

Mob Rule and Sparky: Chapter Two

It's been busy at the office. A fresh batch of co-op students has just shipped in and, on May 2, the Premier decided it was high time for an election.

No one wonders what public servants do in the down time between governments, but I'm going to tell you - just like I told the co-op students - because its one of those daylight miracles we take for granted.

It's not the case everywhere in the world that governments fall and everything keeps working. But that's what happens here. 

Public servants and their one-time political masters shift into "caretaker mode" which means that electricity keeps flowing, roads keep being built, jail cells are still kept watch on and the lottery continues to award millions to lucky winners, even though there is no one officially in charge.

How cool is that? 

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Sparky's Funtime Summertime Murder Mystery
Chapter Two 

Sparky here. This is Chapter Two of my story about how Gerry Ringbold met his untimely end. The story starts here.

This is how I found out Gerry Ringbold was dead. 

I was about six weeks into my first summer on the job as a washroom attendant, employed at one of the works supported by the Peony MacDonald Chester Foundation for the Public Enjoyment of the Thompson Gardens. 

I had the evening shift. It was just past five in the afternoon and I remember being a bit startled when a man walked into the women's washroom.  

The man was a plain-clothes cop. He introduced himself by showing me his badge and then started asking me questions. 

            “What’s your name?”

            I told him.

            “How long have you been here?”

            “I started this job six weeks ago…”

            He gave me a look. “No, today I mean. How long have you been here?”

            “My shift starts at four,” I said.

            He looked at his watch and made a note. “What is your shift?”

            “I work from four to midnight, Saturday to Wednesday.” Today was Saturday.

            “So you weren't working here last night?”

            “I guess not.” 

            “Have you seen or heard anything unusual today?”

I gave my answer some thought. “Unusual” is usual in the Gardens. Over the first few weeks on the job I’d heard lots of shouting and screaming and maybe even distant gunshots but not any of that recently, so I said “No, nothing unusual.”

He made another note and then turned away. “Hey,” I said, “What’s going on?”

He turned back to look at me. “D’you know Gerry Ringbold?” 

Now I consider myself to be a leading expert on Gerry Ringbold, but I had no idea who he was then.

“Never heard of him,” I said. 

“Well, the guy you never heard of is dead in the garden shed,” said the cop. 

And so began my Gerry Ringbold research project. I googled him right after the cop left. 

I found out that Gerry'd been a City councillor for about eight years, famous for being opposed to just about everything, in the name of protecting the taxpayer. 

And, before that, he'd made his name as a lawyer litigating a long, high-profile case against the estate of Peony MacDonald Chester and her endowment to the Foundation for the Public Enjoyment of the Thompson Gardens.

You can read Chapter Three here.

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Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

  

The Price is Right and Sparky: An Introduction

Owl Burl - Allan Gardens

A Nest of Economists

On Monday and Tuesday this week past I was hanging out at the University of Ottawa at a conference. 

I spent Monday sitting next to a friend's favourite professor from back in the day almost twenty years ago when my friend was getting her degree at the University of Alberta.

Small world. 

The favourite professor was an economist, as were most of the 120 people in the room. They were all talking about climate change and how to save the world, preserve our economy, achieve social justice, restore natural ecosystems and, oh, I don't know, fly to Venus if only we could get the price of everything right. 

It was fun to talk about these things. I didn't have to pay to attend this conference (my ministry was a sponsor) but I would definitely pay hard cash out of my own pocket to go to a conference where people set about to not just talk about but to do these things.

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Sparky's Funtime Summertime Murder Mystery
Chapter One

My name's Rachel, but everyone calls me Sparky. It's a family thing that spread to my circle of friends and just kept going. When I was a little kid so the family legend goes I used to squeal with glee whenever Mom fired up the backyard grill and spun the knob that made the spark that lit the gas. So Sparky I became and Sparky I'll remain to my dying day I suppose.

I want to tell you about what I know about the death of Gerry Ringbold, that city council guy whose corpse they found in the Thompson Gardens last summer. It's all a big mystery what happened to him but I think I've got it figured out. 

Just so you'll believe what I'm saying, there are some things about me you need to know. I've already got a degree in journalism and I'm going to get a law degree. My plan for my life is to be a reporter who specializes in big legal cases. I got research skills. 

Right now I also have lots of time on my hands and access to wifi. It's my job to work the midnight to 8 a.m. shift at the Thompson Garden public washroom, generously funded through the Peony MacDonald Chester Foundation for the Public Enjoyment of the Thompson Gardens. This is my second summer at this job. That's a long story how I got here and I may tell you, but that's not my point.

I will tell you what everyone knows about the death of Gerry Ringbold. They found him in the shed where they store the cute little electric cart with the balloon tires that the gardeners use to tool around in. The cart was gone and has never been found. Gerry was laid out on the concrete floor, dead as a 27-year-old rock star, and covered in huge blistered burns on every part of his exposed skin. The autopsy said a heart attack and no one could say whether the burns were a cause of or contributed to his death.

They found Gerry on the morning of June 22, 2013, and while police say that the circumstances are suspicious, and the case is still open, no one really knows what happened.

Except me.

Read Chapter Two Here. **************************************************************

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Sparky's Funtime Summertime Murder Mystery

Readers who received the weekly e-mails that preceded this blog perhaps recall that I once sent out a three-part story about a sixty-year-old-man and a genii. 

I'm going to give telling a story over a series of episodes another shot.

This time, it's a murder mystery and the author's voice will be that of a fictional character nick-named Sparky for reasons that she will explain.

My blog posts will be, for the next twenty-one weeks, one part my voice and one part Sparky's voice as she recounts the events of last summer. 

The story starts with the next regularly-scheduled edition of This Week's Picture.

In the meantime, let's all be grateful that Rob Ford's flameout puts him on the path to getting the help he needs and Toronto on the path to getting rid of Rob Ford.

Thanks for reading!

Karen