FRYS FETED AT HOME AFTER PROVINCIAL HONOURS
Mark Clairmont | MuskokaTODAY.com
GRAVENHURST — At 93 and to still be interested — let alone caring — about the politics of Alberta is amazing in itself.
But for Cyril Fry it ties in nicely with the provincial honours for each of he and his wife, Marion. They were feted at home last week in recognition of their recent Ontario citizenship awards.
And that was the theme of his acceptance speech.
“I wanted to emphasize the importance of women,” he said Wednesday, following Alberta’s return to its political Conservative roots.
Fry saw that as another disconcerting sign for women, one he noted also at the federal level.
He still thinks women “get a raw deal” in life and politics, and not just because now former premier Rachel Notley is a kindred New Democrat spirit.
For Fry — “at my age” — knows a lot about women’s power and the strength of the opposiste sex.
He and Marion have been married 74 years, and while he blossoms from the public limelight, she neither nor toils the furlough ground in his shadow; indeed it’s the opposite.
He called them “two weak straws trying to prop each other up,” both being born within weeks of each other in Kitchener and Brantford.
For theirs is a true love story, one that is captured in the Gravenhurst Archives and will remain there forever as its founders.
“I still remember looking down the aisle of the church at her the day we got married,” said Fry, welling up last Thursday at a Muskoka Discovery Centre fete for friends and supporters of the loved and respected couple.
Though one never to get overly sentimental, Fry said he did want to admit more publicly that it was often indeed he who was the flower on his wife’s lapel.
“It was a perfect marriage,” archivist Judy Humphries said.
Not only referring to the arrangement between the library and archives.
But to the Frys.
Yet it was Fry who was quick and sure to remind all that it was everyone of them in the room — and more — who made them what they are and allowed them to contribute so vividly to the preservation of the past.
Fry, a humourist at heart, likes to joke a bit that after a life of mastering the art of memories for the Town of Gravenhurst and area, that Marion sometimes forgets more than he.
In reality, he told the roomful including many former teachers, that it is their lives and memories that are the ones that have provided them with the tools. They are the paint the Frys applied to archives canvas to create the visage of more than 165 years of life in this small town.
A portrait of a village of boaters and railroaders that grew with each brush with a pioneer or person of vision, drawing this incredible mosaic you now see — an art work still in progress.
A picture they and others yet today believe is worth keeping.
From their earliest days in 1951, when they came to town, the Frys fastened themselves to their new home as if barnacles to a Greavette boat.
After the couple missed their honeymoon flight to the Gatineaus (and losing their wedding pictures stuck in a camera left on the next flight), Cyril ended up three years later at Rubberset; and a week after, en route to Gravenhurst before she got off the bus, Marion had a job at the TB hospital as a nurse/occupational therapist.
Thus begin their married life and a love affair with their hometown that continues close to three quarters of a century.
Fry said they are proud that the archives are an antidote to fake new, and that it has doneso by managing to survive “with no tax dollars.”
It achieves its importance and relavance through small donations, the hard work of its talented volunteers, the goodwill of the library, which gives them space today; and the support of the local heritage committee, the wonderful people, he said, who put on the luncheon catered by the Discovery Centre.
It was like attending your own wake.
He called the gathering “beyond expectations.”
Humphries calls the archives “second to none for a small town that few can rival. …
“It began when good people like Marion and Cyril started something.”
The Frys’ footprints are all over town — not only from traipsing the streets to ferret out historic photos or sites of heritage importance.
As could easily be seen from the fun slide show that showed just some of their accomplishments.
Cyril with the old Muskoka Township school board where he was a board member for 10 years and chair, before becoming a science teacher at GHS for 30 years; and at the Gravenhurst News which he co-published with the late John Christensen.
And Marion, who was instrumental for decades leading to and after the re-launch of the Segwun and it successful successor the Wenonah II and the Muskoka Steamship Society.
Both also led the Arthritis Foundation fundraising for years.
But they had help, said Fry, who described himself as a “fraud” not a Fry.
He said they couldn’t have done it without many people, noting in the beginning the late Cec Porter and Shirley Barlow — who couldn’t make it because she is recovering at the Granite Ridge after a slight fall.
And in recent years former librarian Robena Kirton, new librarian Julie Reinhart, computer genius Jack Cline and all the staff at the library and heritage committees.
Fry said although many of their “fast friends” have died, he’s confident the torch can safely be passed from their failing hands to a new generation interested in the past and future and who are already continuing well on the journey where they are trailing off.
The next chapters of Gravenhurst’s history will now have to be written not by the Frys but of the Frys.
