MAPLE MEMORIES: Family has a long connection to the festival, dating back to the idea that started it all
first 17 years, that it was a good plan and interest steadily grew.
The two men and the other members of the board thought that it would be a good idea to spend a big sum on advertising because this was the first maple syrup festival in Ontario.
They spent $600 – worth more than $5,600 in today’s money – of their own cash on radio, TV and newspaper publicity.
After Ainsworth’s sudden death on April 4, 1965, there was an even greater determination to make the April 10 event a success.
And so it has proved to be as organizers this year prepare to stage the 60th festival on April 6.
Its popularity grew such that there were 66,529 visitors in 2000, making it the world’s largest singleday maple syrup festival, according to the Guinness Book of World Records.
Yet the man who made this possible had the humblest of roots.
He was adopted after his birth in Barrow upon Soar in Leicestershire, England in 1909 by John and Marie Ainsworth and he came to Canada as a child.
Ainsworth, who Mr. Biesinger described as “thin as rail,” also suffered from rheumatic fever as a youth and was plagued by ill health for much of his relatively short life, according to his niece.
“We knew that he wasn’t well, because I remember helping my aunt take him to the doctor’s office,” she said.
But nothing was going to stop him from following his dreams.
He opened Ainsworth Fruit Store, at 12 Arthur St. in Elmira, during the Great Depression and became both an active member of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church and the wider Elmira community.
Then he married Marie Duench in 1937. They had a son, Douglas, and one daughter, Ruth Marie, who are both now deceased.
The couple have three surviving grandchildren, Julia and Christina, who are both believed to live in Montreal, Quebec, and Alexander, who is understood to reside in Brantford.
“Uncle Herb was a really humble person,” Biesinger explained. “He talked very softly, he was really well respected and very kind.”
Among the charitable deeds the retailer got involved in was handing out candy from his store to schoolchildren attending Christmas theatre shows, she notes.
“He always looked out for me, too,” said Biesinger, who grew up as one of two sets of triplets in Elmira.
At this point in the interview, her husband, who she married two months after the first festival and who raised pigs for a living until retiring in 2008, interjected, adding: “He checked me out when I started going with Judy.
“He asked me how I was going to support her and I told him I was going to buy a farm.
“So we got married and after the honeymoon
I only had $90, but we managed to get a farm and here we are still.”
Mrs Biesinger, whose name at birth was Judith Duench, is also famous in Elmira as one of the Duench triplets.
Growing up on Church Street, just a “block away from my uncle,” she and her two sisters, Susan and Patricia, even featured in a newspaper advert for the Royal Bank of Canada.
“Back in 1944, when we were born, it was still pretty unusual for all three triplets to survive and so we became pretty well known,” she explained.
Amazingly, the trio, whose birth weight ranged between 3lb 1oz and 3lb 8oz, were not the only triplets in town.
Molly, Corrine and
Isabel Carbert also live in Elmira.
In 1947, when they were three years old, the Duench girls joined the Carberts and two other sets of triplets from Kitchener for a picnic that was photographed.
The others were Jean, Edith and Edna Vogt and Terry, Mary Ann and Teddy Kickham.*