Murray Reid Fraser
May 31, 1919 – April 20, 2013
May 31, 1919 – April 20, 2013
The family is sad to announce the passing of our dear father today.
Dad was born May 31, 1919 on the family homestead near Pilot Mound, Manitoba. He was the good-humoured second child of Annie Reid and Peter Fraser.
“I don’t understand why my father didn’t just teach school,” Dad would sometimes say. “He went to teachers’ college back in Ontario.” Dad would shake his head over the choice to farm instead. He did not like farming, no thanks to the Depression. His parents were more philosophical, and took the hard times in stride.
Dad used to quote his father: “I used to drive a car, now I’m riding a bike, but another year or two with no crop and I’ll land on my feet yet!"
Neither did Dad inherit the Fraser passion for horses. Several uncles trained and raced standard breds on the harness racing circuit, and his father showed Percherons across the country. It was an expensive hobby, but outside of the show ring, the beasts earned their keep pulling farm implements and the undertaker’s fancy glass hearse. Dad, the most fastidious of men, explained that it is impossible to get nostalgic for horses if you’ve ever mucked stalls and tended to a constipated Percheron.
When he was in Grade 12 in Pilot Mound High School, he met his future wife, Hazel Stevens, who was in Grade 11. Dad used to tell people she was a “little slow” without necessarily adding that she was, in fact, three years younger than he was.
My parents met again in Winnipeg in the winter of 1940-41. Dad was attending the Dominion Provincial Vocational School prior to being accepted into the RCAF for airframe mechanic training. “The war was an honourable route off the farm,” he used to say.
Dad was posted to #6 Repair Depot, Trenton, Ontario after taking the airframe mechanics course and an advanced metal repair course. In the spring of 1945, he shipped overseas and was posted to #6 Bomber Group at Linton-on-Ouse, Yorkshire.
He used to tease us kids that we’re on earth today only because he was colour blind. That kept him out of pilot training and safely on the ground during the war. (It is also why we could forgive his chartreuse kitchen, which looked like a lovely French vanilla to Dad.)
After the war ended, Dad returned to Pilot Mound in January of 1946. Farming was not his choice of work, so in the fall he went to Winnipeg and took more technical training in machine shop and die making. In March, 1948, he began employment with MacDonald Bros. Aircraft at 83¢ an hour as a toolroom charge hand. He took great pride in his work and was well respected for his problem-solving abilities and technical expertise. He continued with the company when it became Bristol Aerospace, and retired in 1982 after 34 years of service.
It is hard to know what came first, Dad’s attention to detail and impeccable precision in all things, or his long career as a machinist and production planner at Bristol. Either way, the work reflected his nature, and vice versa. This was a man who would shave and put on a suit and tie to go buy spark plugs at Canadian Tire. He ate doughnuts with a knife and fork.
How we used to kid Mr. Neat-and-Clean about his tidiness. It’s no wonder he had no love for farming. In fact, after he returned from the war in 1946, he built his father a tractor cab from aircraft aluminum, to ward off the dirt and harsh sun. It was the first tractor cab in the district, and helped him land a job at Bristol Aerospace soon afterwards.
On July 9, 1949 Dad married the love of his life, Hazel Stevens, daughter of Zelma and Fred Stevens of Roseisle, Manitoba. For their honeymoon they travelled through the United States and up through the Rockies as far as Jasper.
Their first home was a little cottage at 230 Parkhill Street, then in the western outskirts of Winnipeg. They had electricity, but no sewer or water. Their son was born here.
In 1952 the Frasers moved to a big, old, brick house on the very western edge of Winnipeg, and within five years four more children were born and filled the place. Our childhood years were happy and downright idyllic in this semi-rural neighbourhood teeming with Baby Boom kids.
Farming aside, we imagine that Dad was very much like the father he loved and admired. Both were optimists with a keen sense of humour. Dad often sang songs he learned from his father, and would recall his wise words and wisecracks. A hammer was an “American screwdriver,” and when Dad said he had “paid George,” that meant he had paid his income taxes (that is, King George VI).
The rural life taught both Fraser men to be resourceful and self-sufficient. As children, we assumed all fathers could readily pour concrete, wire a house, shingle a roof, fix the car, insulate and drywall an attic, install linoleum, renovate the bathroom, build furniture, and machine a working steam engine model, just for fun.
Dad agreed with his father’s claim that “Frasers can do mathematics through a brick wall.” Some of us would argue for a window, but it wasn’t unusual for Dad to zone out at the dinner table, doing trigonometry in his head after a hard day at the office. He would rattle off the quadratic equation from time to time, just to test us. He was just as likely to recite from Shakespeare and Robbie Burns, but was equally versed in Peck’s Bad Boy and Will Rogers.
Although real horses held no romance for him, Dad was passionate and nostalgic about iron beasts. He rarely missed an annual trip to the Austin Threshermen’s Reunion. He would roll down his window as we neared the grounds, to smell the steam in the air and listen for the steam engines’ whistle. These monsters seemed alive to him, and he enjoyed the powerful breath and purr of a well-stoked engine. He would pose for photos next to the big Case steamer, but only “for scale” he’d say, shyly. When he tossed a few sheaves into a threshing machine, it was not because he missed it. At Austin, he enjoyed the fact that he could stop any time he wanted, and go for ice cream instead.
In 1981 our parents sold the family home and moved to 137 Bourkevale Drive in St. James. They enjoyed eight years of retirement until Mom passed away on October 12, 1989.
A few years later, Virginia bought Dad a membership in the St. James Speedskating Club. He’d always skated for fun, and so agreed to join Virginia and her sons, Edmund and Thomas, at the rink.
The coach couldn’t believe her stopwatch. “Do you realize you’re breaking records?”she exclaimed, as Dad cruised around the Sargent Park oval. She convinced him to make it official, and at age 74, Dad found himself in a spandex race suit, racing the clock. In short order he shattered every national record for men in the 70-plus category, at various distances on both indoor and outdoor tracks.
All but one record, that is. Dad deliberately left one record unchallenged. He thought the previous record holder should remain a champion, too.
On our branch of the family tree, Dad was the last Fraser of his generation. Knowing this, he spent considerable time writing a family history of sorts, preserving precious photos, newspaper clippings, and of course, his best stories. We have heard these tales several times, but wish we could hear any of them just once more.
My father always looked forward to “Bristol breakfasts” with his fellow company retirees. He had enjoyed working at “the plant,” and fondly recalled his eccentric and memorable friends there. “He was a good fellow,” he’d often say.
I can hear him now.
Dad was a member of the Royal Canadian Legion and the Western Canada Aviation Museum. He was the best curator you could hope to have, and could relate the intricate details of an engine overhaul or manufacturing contract well beyond our comprehension of them.
In his later years Dad especially enjoyed the company of dear friends who introduced him to line dancing. He didn’t think he was a natural dancer, and took a mathematical approach to choreography, but really had fun anyway. He was flattered by the attention of many dance partners, if only because the women usually outnumbered the men.
While we remember him for his great sense of humour, Dad sometimes used his advancing age as licence to be a curmudgeon. Specific things would make him grumble – like the Chrysler PT Cruiser, which he considered ridiculous. TV commercials irked him, and we learned never to say the word “Autopac” within earshot. But then he’d have some ice cream, and all would be right with the world.
The 1955 obituary of Pete Fraser, Dad’s father, ends with: “His sincere friendliness and ready smile were good medicine for all. No man had more friends and fewer enemies.” The same can be said of Murray Reid Fraser, but he would blush to hear it.
Cha bhithidh a leithid ami riamh
