100 years timeless amid birthday bashes
Colourful Marion Fair jokes that a long life can come by not ‘making babies.’ She had five children
We used to have a picnic table on our front lawn. I highly recommend it.
They somehow pull in passersby, and one day Marion Fair, then in her 90s, developed out of a summer’s afternoon and landed on the bench of our table, in front of me like an apparition. She’d gotten tired on her walk and needed to sit. I offered her a tea. We got talking.
She’s 100 now. On March 24, she punched that ticket. The Queen, governor-general and prime minister sent her congratulatory notes. She deserves it. She was born and grew up on a farm in Niagara region, dressed chickens, worked the milking machines, went to nursing school in Toronto, married a soldier, worked as a nurse at the General in Hamilton, had five children, worked at the Royal Botanical Gardens and the Victorian Order of Nurses.
She volunteered at the General, where she logged an incredible 2,503 hours over the years, comforting visitors, and with the Canadian Hard of Hearing Association, which recently ran an article on her 100th in its newsletter. She sang with the wonderful Duet Club for 50 years.
When I pop by to wish her happy birthday, she reminds me of the picnic table. I remember. But not as well as she. “You were tinkering at something on the lawn. I needed a rest. I never did get that tea,” she tells me in her big blue beret. I say it was her fault for being too interesting. And funny. I apologize for the tea. She compounds my debt by sending daughter Jean into the hall of Aberdeen Gardens, where Marion lives now, to get me a coffee.
She had four daughters in a row, she says while Jean gets the coffee. Then son John.
“We left the lights on so we could see what we were doing and we had a boy,” she explains, in her wonderfully droll manner. When Jean gets back with the coffee, its heat is producing a billow of steam, and Marion says, “That looks hot as Hades.”
Hot as Hades. Leaving the lights on. Who talks like that? Marion Fair does, 100 years timeless. She can make you laugh with a flick of a syllable, a tilt of her head.
Marion got recommended for nursing school after excelling on some exams, and that pulled her off the farm, but she would’ve left anyway as the QEW carved eight acres “out of our best field.”
She loved nursing school in Toronto (1938 to 1941). The camaraderie. The closeness. One day during that time, she and some others went to the United Church house on College Street to sing hymns. There she met young John (Jack) Fair, in Toronto for a radio course, preparatory to service as signalman.
“A few (including John) came home with us because we had a piano and we continued singing.” That lit the spark. Marion and Jack had to wait four years for Jack to return from war. When they did get married, it was in Vancouver, and “we drove there in an old Hudson that had gone into the Welland Canal.”
It had been fished out and “someone sold it to Dad,” Jean explains. That was 1946. Soon the kids started coming. Susan, Marilyn, Jean, Ruth and John. They held onto the car.
“Every summer we loaded up all our stuff on that old Hudson and drove out to see Uncle Jim in Thunder Bay,” says Jean.
The Fairs loved the outdoors, athletics, boating. Jack, an accountant with Revenue Canada, always lean and fit, had considered playing pro baseball. The girls excelled at track. John skied, and his son Shawn Fair is a championship snowboarder. Marion herself could high jump her own height in school. And she always loved to walk and so did Jack.
“He’d be ahead and I’d say, ‘Don’t walk so fast,’ and he’d say, ‘If I walked any slower, I’d be going backwards.’” Jack died in 2011, age 90.
Marion’s 100th has been a flurry — no fewer than four parties, including family from all over; Aberdeen Gardens, where the Duet Club sang with her; St. John the Evangelist Anglican, where after decades, she still goes every week. The pace would’ve felled a horse. But not Marion.
“She’s taken it all in,” Jean says, smiling. “She’s in her glory.” Aberdeen Gardens filmed her.
They asked for her advice to future generations. “Don’t make babies,” she says, in her droll Marion way. “It’s too dangerous — the world is set to fly apart.”
The personality, what a delight, at any age but especially 100. I’m going to have to get another picnic table. Many happy returns, Marion. I’ve got the kettle on.