Life’s journey more than they bargained for
Couple met and tied the knot at Honest Ed’s — it wasn’t lavish, but Ed was there
She worked in bedding, he worked in menswear.
In the aisles of Honest Ed’s in 1955, among the low, low priced merchandise, they fell in love.
“I thought this guy was just terrific-looking. And he had a car, a beautiful new car. And I thought: ‘Oh, he must be well-off,’ ” said Anne Staver, 78 (“but don’t look it”), chuckling from her home in Kitchener. “Was I wrong!”
Two years later, she and Carl were married.
It wasn’t a lavish affair, but it was a nice little wedding and Ed was there, along with many of the Honest Ed’s employees. They were probably the first employees to meet there and marry — she wonders if there are others.
“I had more or less just come from Northern Ireland, and that was where I went to work,” she says. It was a bustling place.
“Even today, everybody wants to go where they get a deal, right? Then they did, too.”
She worked there for less than two years. “I got fired because I talked too much,” she said. “But it was an experience to be there, you know, even though it was for a short time.”
They moved to Ireland in 1967 — a town near Belfast where no one was putting prices on their merchandise or in shop windows like Honest Ed’s did. So they opened their own Hon- est Ed’s — same name, same signs, same bargains, stocked to the ceiling with anything and everything. “You name it, we sold it,” she said. Then one morning, as she and Carl got ready for work, they heard a loud noise, a bomb blowing up. The IRA had targeted a pub opposite their store.
Pieces of the glass from the windowpanes sliced into the ladies’ purses strung up on display.
“Can you imagine if we’d been there?” she said. “We’d have been killed.”
They eventually reopened down the street, but a few years later returned to Canada with their two daughters and settled in Kitchener.
They opened another store — not Honest Ed’s this time, of course. It was Cut-Price Carl’s. She and Carl had the store for 23 years until they retired. Carl died 13 years ago.
“I felt kind of sad,” she said of learning that Honest Ed’s would be closing. “It’s such a landmark in Toronto that it’s a shame it couldn’t have been kept going . . . People who came from other countries, their relatives all took them to see this place. It always was a tourist place, as well as all the bargains they had. ”