After 50 years of never locking the door, it’s time to move
The Stonehouse home was where everyone congregated
Maxine Stonehouse put her house up for sale the other day. She had been there 50 years.
Her first home was a secondfloor apartment on the main street of Dundas. She was born there on a hot day in June, 1931, early days of the Great Depression. Her parents, Albert and Annie Wilson, had four other children.
After high school, Maxine worked in accounting at the Robinson’s department store in downtown Hamilton. That wasn’t for her. She decided to head to Calgary. Her parents were horrified. “I wasn’t wild,” she says, “but I liked adventure.”
She came home on a holiday, and a girlfriend asked her to the Alexandra roller rink on James South. Maxine didn’t know how to skate and promptly crashed into a young man named Harvey Stonehouse.
A month later, in February 1952, she married him. “It sounds like I was a real nut,” Maxine says. “But I’m very stable. I just get feelings about things.” And her feelings about Harvey were all good.
He worked at Dominion Glass and Maxine stayed home, because that’s what women did. They had a little starter house in the east end, Vansitmart near Woodward. Son David arrived in 1954, Michael two years later.
And in the summer of 1967, Maxine found them a new house at 67 Duncombe Dr., one street north of Mohawk. On the other side of Mohawk, fields galore.
The new place cost $17,000, a fortune to them. But it had a great backyard, a wide drive and three bedrooms. They soon needed the extra space. In 1968, 14 years after her first pregnancy, Maxine gave birth to Christopher. Yes, a surprise.
Much as she loved her house, sometimes Maxine just had to get out of it. She enrolled in the social services program at Mohawk. It’s three years full time. Part-time, it took Maxine 10 years. “But I aced it,” she says. “I was on the honour roll.”
Getting a job was another matter. “It was very difficult then for older women who hadn’t been working,” Maxine says. “They told me, ‘Go home and look after your children.’ ”
Maxine went to the YWCA, where they helped her draft a proposal for a one-year grant for a Women’s Information and Counselling Centre, that offered a series of sold-out 10-week employ-
ment-planning courses.
Then Maxine went on to St. Matthew’s House on Barton. There, over the next 20 years, she worked with young single moms, seniors, people with psychological issues. She gave it her all.
And at the house on Duncombe, she was matriarch, confidant and port in a storm to extended family of every stripe. “I never ever locked the back door,” she says, “because someone might need to get in.”
Harvey retired, then Maxine did, too. Together they saw some of this world. And when at home, he would tinker downstairs in his workshop and she’d be upstairs painting. They’d meet for lunch in the middle.
Thirteen years ago, Harvey died of cancer. And three years ago, Maxine lost her youngest. Christopher died after a blood clot reached his brain. He was not yet 50.
He had lived with Maxine in the house, a great help. Not long after his death, Maxine started thinking it was time to surrender the house.
And the street was changing. “It was going full circle,” she says. The widows were moving out.
Maxine has seven grandchildren. And there were tears when she finally delivered the news.
“At Christmas, we had a last hurrah,” she says. “It was kind of sad, but it was good.”
Over the next couple of months, she decluttered and made sure the house looked right. Everything’s original. The floors, the kitchen cabinets, the
milk chute. The house went on the market at $420,000. “My dearest wish is a young family goes in,” she says.
Maxine now has a nice apartment near the Brow. It’s in an older building, with a balcony. “There’s room for a wee garden,”
she says. “This feels like a place I should be.”