My widely esteemed father-in-law, Edmund Joseph John Walters, Q.C., was (he died in 2015) a tough fiercely ambitious Parkdale Polish kid who become the astonishingly hardworking and, eventually, wealthy senior partner of an old West End Toronto law firm. He could also play Chopin on his various pianos with an intensity that might have distressed but would more likely have pleased the composer.
After 40 years at law Ed retired for another 30 to a large house he built and maintained with his own hands on a hill just east of Malaga. He seldom allowed himself to enjoy the exhilarating view he had of the port and bay of that ancient city, though I did see him once take a half day off to contemplate it on a New Year’s day he was nearing 90.
When 75 (the summer of ’91) and with us at Wegmar, he fenced two decks here with 36 + ’ of rail and 168 balusters, power sawing each vertical member to length and hand sawing and chiselling out space for each in the deck planking, built an eight-tread set of stairs, and installed a four-drawer, 15-cupboard kitchen he’d designed and built in his cramped Toronto furnace room workshop and transported in the trunk of his ’67 Eldorado, together with his circa 1950 table saw (a Sutton Tool & Die [Brantford] 8″ tilt-able, mounted on a homemade plywood box frame fastened to Beaver Power Tools [Guelph] steel legs and powered by a Teco/Eatons of Canada 1/2 HP electric motor).
It must be said this work did take him nearly a week of 10-hour days, and saw him briefly hospitalized for what was first thought to be a heart attack but was soon diagnosed as just pericarditis, the result of too much use of a 20 oz Estwing curved claw hammer (with “laminated leather grip”) I gave him, which he returned to me in his later 80s as then, finally, “a bit heavy” for him.
We afterward inherited from Ed a cut tin Portuguese rooster with green glass eyes, and one of two handmade white-on-black arrow signs which, nailed to roadside trees, used to indicate the Avon Bay, Muskoka cottage he built, improved and maintained for more than 30 years with his own hands but sold when family no longer wanted or could afford to use it.
After my dad died when I was 27, Ed was for me over 40 years an often if not continuously admirable and emulable father figure. I will always be grateful to and honour him.