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Click for Harry Symons Trivia
"The two-story, nineteenth-century manor sits in a leafy, established part of Peterborough. I’m glad that I didn’t know about the house before I entered it.
Learning within its walls convinced me that I was on to something. “He used to live here; in fact, I bought the house from him,” my host said in reference to a famous former inhabitant.”
Except from: What’s So Funny?
Lessons from Canada’s Leacock Medal for Humour Writing
Harry Symons was that he loved his cottage near
Pointe-au-Baril on Georgian Bay and saw it as his sanctuary. With Ojibway
Melody, he tried to share it, guiding us around the islands, pointing out the
good fishing spots, and describing the locals. Given Stephen Leacock’s association with
Ontario cottage country, the 1947 medal judges probably felt that this book
made a fitting first winner of the award established in Leacock’s honour.
"The two-story, nineteenth-century manor sits in a leafy, established part of Peterborough. I’m glad that I didn’t know about the house before I entered it.
Learning within its walls convinced me that I was on to something. “He used to live here; in fact, I bought the house from him,” my host said in reference to a famous former inhabitant.”
Except from: What’s So Funny?
Lessons from Canada’s Leacock Medal for Humour Writing
I started this chapter of my book, a review of the first
Leacock Medal winner, by describing my March 2013 visit to a very special
place and a meeting with a very special person that convinced me that I was on to something with me Leacock Medal student project.
It was this encounter, in fact, that made me think, for the first time, that my research and reviews might be fodder for a book.
It was this encounter, in fact, that made me think, for the first time, that my research and reviews might be fodder for a book.
The place is an old manor house in Peterborough, Ontario and home to Professor Tom
Symons and his wife Christine. My wife
and I visited them in March 2013 to talk about Tom’s father Harry Lutz Symons,
the author of Ojibway Melody: Stories of Georgian Bay. Little has been published
about Harry, and I wanted access to the family archives at Trent University.
Yet, as I describe in my book, it struck me,
initially, as a puzzle. The writing often seems like a stream of consciousness, nothing like the
one-liners, jokes, or comic stories that we consume as humour today. Harry
praised simple pleasures: “First we swing our feet out of bed, and dangle them
over the side, and keep our toes off the floor just in case it is cold. Then we
yawn a good deal and grumble, and flex our arms, and wish we were back in bed .
. . And quite often we just do give up and crawl back in again .” To
understand why this would have seemed funny to readers back in the 1940s, you
need to recall that Canadians were struggling with the strains of a changing
society, and they wanted to forget about the war. Harry Symons was a WWI
frontline soldier and pilot and had no desire to dwell on thoughts of war.
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| My Fading Harry Autograph |
He and Dorothy, the nurse he met recuperating in a
British hospital, had eight children including my host Tom, a man who served as
the founding President of Trent University and Chair of the national Commission
on Canadian Studies and in other roles that helped shape modern Canada.
His home, the one I visited in the spring of 2013,
carries formal designation as "Marchbanks House," a historic site and former home
of novelist Robertson Davies. Davies wrote his Leacock Medal-winning novel in
this house in Peterborough. Over the years, the home has also welcomed other
Leacock Medalists including W.O. Mitchell who taught for a while
at Trent.
For my research, Tom Symons described how his
father’s Leacock Medal book influenced his life and his perspective leading him
to establish Canada’s first department of aboriginal studies at Trent and to
define the field of Canadian Studies as we know it.
So, this is why I framed my review of the first
Leacock Medal book with the story of my visit to this particular home in
Peterborough.
DBD - January 2015