‘She was not a big person, but she was determined’
Mother of four, devoted teacher shared memoirs with family near the end
Her son, Don, is known as a digital guru, but when Mary Tapscott committed her 94 years to a memoir, she wrote it by hand.
That Tapscott would take matters into her own hands would likely surprise no one who knew her. Born in 1922, Tapscott wrote her own life story in every sense. When she wanted a new house for her growing family, she designed one herself. When she wanted to feed her five children fresh vegetables on two teachers’ salaries, she planted her own garden. And when she wanted to get an education, she paid her way through McMaster University with summer jobs.
She picked berries, worked in a canning factory and in her final year took up a job at Stelco, the Hamilton steel factory.
It was the 1940s, the days of the Second World War and Rosie the Riveter, but a woman attending university at all, let alone working on the line to help pay for it, was still a rare sight, says her eldest son Don, a media theorist and author and co-author of 15 books on the social and economic impacts of technology.
Despite her 5-foot-2 frame, he said, he can easily picture his mother hauling hot sheets of metal from the oven to a conveyor belt as a young woman.
“She was not a big person, but she was a very determined person,” he said. “I can see it, totally, because pretty much anything that she wanted to make happen, she made it happen.”
Mary shared her memoirs with her family a week before she died of pancreatic cancer on Jan. 23.
The book details her life, including her early days in a one-room schoolhouse — where she fell in love with teaching and learning, and made lifelong friends with her teacher, Mrs. Patterson — to her first teaching job in Rodney, Ont.
The family who put her up were such admirers they let Mary have the first round of water during weekly baths, she wrote.
“Can you imagine? We just found this in this book. We’re crying our faces off and laughing,” said son Bill Tapscott.
Don and Bill credit their mother for instilling in them a strong sense of social justice and insisting on impeccable grammar.
The first Canadian-born child of Russian-Ukrainian immigrants, Tapscott grew up with three siblings on a farm near Burlington. Her father served in the First World War and later made his living working in a basket factory. Though the family had little means, Mary’s mother would always welcome the travellers who passed through on the nearby rail lines to come in for a bowl of soup and some bread.
It was an early lesson that burned into her a lifelong sense of justice and equity, says Bill, a lesson she and husband Don Sr. passed down.
“They respected all people. They respected knowledge above anything,” Bill said. “They’re self-made people. She made her way and worked hard.”
She expected her children to work hard, too. When her sons Bill and Bob passed through her English class as teenagers in Orillia, Ont., she didn’t go easy on them.
“The homework was on the dining room table at 7 o’clock every night,” Bill said. “And consequently I remember that year of English better than any other.”
After graduation, the grammar lessons didn’t stop.
“I’m going to think of her 20 times more every day when I hear someone say, ‘before you and I’ or ‘between the three of us’ or ‘you are older than me,’ ” Bill said. “I’m always going to hear my mother correcting that. It’s going to be awesome.”
After the couple retired from teaching and moved to Toronto to be near their children and their growing families, Mary and Don Sr. would take in baseball games at the SkyDome.
She loved city life, said Bill, and when her husband died in 2006, she took herself to the ballet and the symphony, and kept up her avid bridge playing.
“She was, I’d say, a woman ahead of her time,” Don said.
Mary Tapscott leaves behind one sister, four children and five grandchildren.