We did something a little different this past weekend. Mark and I went to an estate sale down the street from us.
I have walked past this place a million times but I never knew the owner. All I really knew about the occupant was that it was an older gentleman who was fastidious about his yard and driveway. When we saw him he was almost always using a leaf blower to clean the dust off his driveway or snow off his car. He wasn’t close enough to our house to be considered a neighbour, but if I loosen my definition of “neighbour” a bit, I have to admit he was one and that I should have gotten to know him.
When we saw the for sale sign pop up we realized we hadn’t seen him around for a while. The cars were still parked beside his house but the driveway wasn’t cleared, which was unusual.
I wasn’t sure happened to William, known as Bill to his friends, but I overheard someone at the estate sale mention downsizing. Well, I decided to look it up, and this is what I found:
Larwill, William “Bill”
Dec. 16, 1927 – Jan. 26, 2015
Passed quietly at the Civic Hospital on Monday, January 26, 2015, moving on to join his wife Rejeanne who passed January 29, 2009. He will be remembered by his four children Ernie, Jim, Anita and Allan as well as his three grandsons and partners Kent, Alastair (Georgia), Mackenzie (Lyndsay) including his 2 great-grandchildren Carmyn-Rejeanne and Ronan. Special thanks to his longtime friend Dr. Barrett Adams for being there at the end. Friends may call at the Westboro Chapel of Tubman Funeral Homes, 403 Richmond Rd. (at Roosevelt) on Sunday, February 1, 2015 from 2 to 5 p.m. Interment Beechwood Cemetery.
William passed away in 2015, but someone had definitely been living there, albeit quietly.
For this post I decided to flip through the house history that we commissioned Dave Allston, a local historian, to compile for us awhile back. (I wrote about it here, if you’re curious.) I was fairly certain that I’d read something about the house at some point. I had! According to Dave’s research, the home was built in 1915 by Ernest G. Larwill, a 38-year-old carpenter and farm machinery dealer. This would have been William’s father. I can only presume that William lived there his entire life and that until very recently, at least one of his children did too. Whoever it was, they barely changed a thing inside. In fact, stepping into the home on that windy Saturday morning was not unlike stepping into a time machine.
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