James Carruthers (Jim) Firth died peacefully in his sleep on August 11, three quarters of the way through his 92nd year, “a good run” as one of my friends said on hearing the news.
Jim was, in every positive sense of the word, a gentleman. Oh, he had his moments – I know that his habit of referring to women service people he encountered, such as an overly bureaucratic bank teller, as “the little girl at the counter” (despite her being well into adulthood) could cause a roundtable sucking in of breath when he told his stories at the dinner table – but he was a very great gentleman, and we were the only ones who would ever hear the “little girl” reference.
A 90th birthday commemorative memories album that his daughter Mary prepared with all our input features a cover image of him lounging casually on a cottage bench at the family’s cottage in the Muskokas looking every inch the cocky Harvard MBA student he would one day be.
It was a degree that the Government of Canada considered important enough to decline his offer to enlist in the army in WWII. Instead, they told him to finish his Harvard MBA, then come to Ottawa where he served in the Department of Finance helping to keep a wary government eye out for would-be profiteers.Another photo in the album shows him as a young boy swathed in bandages and as the memories of the injuries that were responsible for his glum look at the photographer would fade, I’m pretty sure that, much, much later he was bragging when he told us he was one of Hamilton’s early victims of a sound clocking from a Model T Ford when he ran smack into it after simply turning his wagon without the “shoulder check” drilled into those of who learned to drive in Ontario.
(Of equal import to him when he’d tell us that story was making sure we knew he’d been treated by a Dr. Payne.)
He still liked to dress for dinner and had many happy occasions hosting family and friends at a meal at his beloved Hamilton Golf and Country Club (HGCC) in Ancaster, Ontario, where he was once President and remained a member for more than 70 years! Club dinners were legendary when set against an occasion like Easter or Thanksgiving and I will probably spend my life searching for a butter tart that even comes close to the one that came from that Club’s baker. Leslie’s and my wedding reception dinner was held at the Club in 1982, a small but wonderful gathering of family and close friends.
Jim also served for a long time as a member and Chairman of the Club’s tree committee (they take their trees really seriously at HGCC) and much of the course’s visually stunning presentation today owes its beauty to the careful work done by that committee under his direction. Even when close to his last year of life, he was able to take my brother-in-law Bob, his son Morgan (Jim’s grandson) and myself around the course
and give us a thorough verbal history of many of the more prominent trees on the course, including why they were placed where they were placed. (“These willows trap hooks or slices that might otherwise soar into the adjoining fairway.” “This one blocks the direct afternoon sunlight and helps keep that green from drying out.” “You can’t see the green from here but just aim straight for that maple and you’ll land in perfect position for your next shot.”)
There are worse legacies than having your memory live on in the beauty of dozens of meticulously selected and carefully cared-for trees.
In his working life, Jim slid perfectly into the family business when he graduated. Firth Brothers Clothing on Hughson Street and its retail store, Fashion Craft, were Hamilton institutions for decades. After the business of manufacturing clothing in North America succumbed to the tide of cheap imports, Jim kept a thriving tailoring business going under the name “The Alteration Shop” and it’s safe to say there weren’t many well-uniformed police force members, firefighters, or ambulance crew members in southern Ontario who for years didn’t owe their well-turned out working appearance to their contracts with The Alteration Shop. He also had a good working relationship with Ottawa’s GL (George) Myles Ltd, known throughout the region for its quality men’s wear, and also tailored many fine specialty military dress uniforms of the types worn by officers to mess dinners. His clothing-related library was a wonderful place to browse if your interest was military garb through the ages.
Jim kept working beyond his 70s into his 80s. He was a man who’d clearly found something he loved to do and quality tailoring – which didn’t require heavy lifting – was a vocation easily carried well into years where many other jobs simply cannot be performed by an age-limited body.
Jim’s wife, Kay, was one trigger for Jim’s exposure to home computing. Kay was a volunteer Brailler for the Canadian National Institute for the Blind and one of Apple’s very early applications was to enable the adaptation of its IIe desktop PCs to Brailling. The heavy steel Perkins Brailler was retired shortly after Kay began sending her work to the CNIB on disk, rather than on stacks of the heavy Brailling paper.
PHOTO: Jim and Kay, a couple whose charm and obvious grace would have given any “Brangelina” of the day a serious run for their money.
And it wasn’ t long before Jim began to explore other applications for a device that some people his age would have considered unnecessary at best, and a pain to have to learn at worst.
Before long, Jim was managing his finances electronically, playing virtual bridge with players around the world and routinely e-mailing us digital photos he’d snapped on many of his afternoon drives around the more picturesque parts of his southern Ontario stomping grounds.
He kept himself busy with new ideas pretty much to the end. When two hip replacements forced him to adapt his golf game to accommodate an inability to bend over and place the ball on a tee, he designed a tee that was a miniature ramp up which he’d simply roll his ball using a club face. If the club’s swing destroyed his homemade mini-ramp, it didn’t matter because he’d made it with a degradable material that a few rains or waterings would simply dissolve into the grass.
When managing a house and enormous treed yard became too much for him, he had been in his retirement residence for barely a couple days when he accidentally tipped over a round-bottomed single-serving coffee carafe at breakfast one morning. He decided he was going to talk to someone about getting some sense into hot-fluid glassware design for seniors. (As he summed it up: “A round bottomed coffee carafe for seniors? Come ON!”)
He also never abandoned computing. Near the end, he occasionally would profess being mildly frustrated when his gradually failing vision rendered the keys themselves difficult to read. Software enabled onscreen text to be hugely magnified, so that at least wasn’t an issue. And so he kept sending messages to us – in 48-point Arial!
Jim was an early riser, so he tended to turn in early. Bedtime for him was typically about 9 or 9:30 at night. He would sigh, look around, say, “Oh boy”; then he’d push himself up from his chair and off he’d go. It was such a ritual that everyone in his family simply doesn’t talk about bedtime. To this day, to us, the end of the day is “Oh boy” time.
The aging human body has its limitations, one of which physicians seem to call a “biological wall”, the point that we all come to eventually if an accident or disease doesn’t get us first. It’s not a precise age; it’s different for everybody, but it is as inevitable as... well, as death. The body’s cells simply stop regenerating, but they do go on dying. If we’re very, very lucky, we’ll pass away quietly in our sleep. Jim’s body might subconsciously have written just such a script for him – an unplanned passing, no doubt, but thankfully painless – at least for him.
PHOTOS: Jim’s pride and joy – his four daughters, Alison, Mary and twins Leslie and Lindsay. In the first photo, Mary (L) and Alison (R) bookend Leslie (second from L) and Lindsay. In the second photo, Leslie and Lindsay are in their late teens or very early 20s, visiting with Alison in Mary’s Ottawa apartment. (L-R: Leslie, Mary, Lindsay, Alison)
As those of us he left behind work our way through the pain of losing him, I imagine the thoughts we’ll come to treasure most are the life lessons he passed along simply by sharing his most gentlemanly life with us. His was very much a generous life of the Golden Rule – that which you did for others was only what you would wish done for you. Over the course of his near-92 years, he built an enormous reservoir of lifelong friends. Several are still around to share in the memories of having known him (as two so willingly did at the small gathering we shared in his house after he died) and in the grieving of his loss.
PHOTO: Jim with two of his grandchildren, Morgan – in his lap – and Katie
I’d love to have shared even just a few more “oh boy” evenings with Jim. And yet there really was nothing left to be done, or said. He passed away knowing that his immediate family were close to each other – and close to him. And while I will go on missing him greatly, I know his surviving “grils” and their husbands – me, Bob and Dave – can eventually take real comfort in the complete absence of regret that anything might have remained undone or unsaid. There’s nothing at all under either of those headings.
Except good bye.
Good bye, Jim.
