R. Douglas Huestis [H12723]
Born 16 June 1895 at Toronto. Died 26 July 1974 at Niagara-on-the-Lake, ON. Married Marie Marguerite Hinde on 2 September 1922 in Toronto (b. 16 May 1899, Trenton, ON, d. 18 January 1950 in Montreal). Second marriage to Mary Donnelly in 1951 (b. 1906 in Michigan, d. 1997 in Vancouver BC).
Like many of the Huestis men and some Browns too, my dad went by his middle name, Doug. I can tell you lots about him, and have written a much longer account, but this will be more of a summary.
Dad was a practical man, active and outgoing. He was not given to introspection or navel contemplation, and neither understood nor attempted to understand those who might be of a different temperament. Including me. He was educated at Toronto Technical High School. Joined the Boy Scouts, and was selected among a group of other Scouts to attend the coronation of King George V in 1911, when he was 16. I believe that expedition was financed by Garfield Weston (Weston's Biscuits), but I may be wrong. He joined the Royal Canadian Horse Artillery in 1916 as a lieutenant and served in France, where he was gassed and invalided home.
The gas obviously did him no permanent damage. He returned to the University of Toronto in the School of Practical Science and graduated in electrical engineering. He moved to London, Ont., in 1924, then to Montreal in 1925 with the Bell Telephone of Canada and remained with them (with time out during World War II) until his retirement in 1960.
Dad was an extraordinary all-round athlete. He was short, compact and aggressive (5' 8" and about 180 lbs in his prime) and immensely strong, referred to by sports writers as "Pocket Hercules." He was championship caliber in just about everything he ever tried: football (U of T and Toronto Argonauts), rowing (crew and single sculls), gymnastics, swimming, fancy diving, you name it.
Opposites attract. He married Marie Hinde, my mother, in 1922. He was practical and outgoing, she was introspective and artistic (she was a talented painter). He was politically conservative, she was liberal. He was Protestant, she Catholic. He was short and powerful, she was tall and slender. He needled her a lot, she needled him right back. Unfortunately, she developed severe hypertension and died only a few years before the first anti-hypertensive drugs came out. His second marriage was to Mary Donnelly, a classic passive-aggressive, who outlasted him by over twenty years.
In 1940, Dad took a leave from the Bell and went into the Royal Canadian Corps of Signals as a Captain. He served all over Canada and the US, was involved in setting up the DEW Line (Distant Early Warning against possible air attacks over the Arctic). He ended up a full Colonel in 1945 and returned to the Bell as General Traffic Manager. After he got out of the army, and particularly after Mum's death, he became a bit of an eccentric, and took to riding a motorcycle to work.
Although he lived there for about forty years, Dad never liked Montreal. He could not get used to the dominant language being French, and never learned to speak it, except for a few words with a vile accent. Soon after his retirement, he and Mary sold the Montreal house and moved to Niagara-on-the-Lake, where they had a nice little house on the lakeshore. They began spending the winter months in Hawaii, where Dad took up surfing and got quite good at it.
His health began to fail in the early seventies and finally gave out in 1974. He died a month after his 79th birthday and is buried at Niagara-on-the-Lake.
An interesting thing is that my father was a compulsive diarist. He made notes almost every day, and after Mary's death we found a whole box full of his little notebooks. Unfortunately, there was absolutely nothing of any interest in them. They were full of details of how much gas he put in the car, what the mileage was, where he went and what he did. But nothing about what he thought or felt about anything other than his daily activities. Utterly boring. We didn't keep them.
Douglas Huestis [H127231] 2002