We eat cones of ice cream on March 8 each
year in tribute to my father. My brother Murray began this tradition a few
years ago.
Ed Unruh loved ice cream. I was ten years
old when he took me to a junior hockey game. On our walk home we stopped in at an
ice cream parlour and he bought us each a cone. We had no sooner reached the
corner of the block when he was finished his cone, looked at me and said,
"That cone tastes like more," so we turned around and went back for a
second cone. So we emphasize more. Kids can dip their own, and more than one.
He loved Ice Cream. It was an inexpensive
treat in the old days. A triple scoop cost .25, yes, twenty-five cents. My mom
worked the counter at Avondale Dairy one year which served the family well. Into
his senior years when we visited one another and we were en route anywhere, ice
cream signage caught his attention, and he would suggest that we stop. No one
objected.
Edward Richard Unruh was my dad. Born to
immigrant Mennonite refugees from Crimea, Ukraine in 1915 and bestowed with
English given names to mark his new homeland.
Proudly Canadian, in 1942 my father enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air
Force while living within a pacifist culture. I was an infant. He and mom raised
three of us, all sons. He had acquired a grade eleven education but no skilled
trade. He earned a living using his body. He was 5 feet six inches in height
but in his youth and into his forties he was a strong man. After his post WWII
departure from the prairies, he found employment in Ontario factories, staying
with one company for well over forty years until his retirement. He worked on
an assembly line at Anthes Imperial building furnaces in St. Catharines. His
three sons grew up, received educations and were able to move forward. At about
his forty year mark in the company, we three asked him, "Dad, why did you
stay there doing that hard work for all those years?" His reply was,
"I did it for my boys." He aspired to little more than being a good
man, a good husband, a good father, a good worker and a good friend. He was a
man with a simple faith in God. He read the Bible. He trusted preachers. He
raised three boys who became preachers/missionaries. He loved us, and he loved
our wives and he loved our children, and he loved his great-grandchildren. His legacy entails far more than a love for
ice cream.
