Ruby Hicks.Courtesy of family
Ruby Hicks: Centenarian. Matriarch. Hard worker. Wordsmith. Born May 20, 1919, in Cobourg, Ont.; died May 15, 2020, in Peterborough, Ont., of old age; aged 100.
On the one hand I was pleased that my mother, while celebrating her 100th Christmas, could beat me fair and square in a game of Scrabble. At the same time, it was unnerving that she couldn’t remember playing the game half an hour later.
But the gurus of many belief systems profess that the best lives are those spent fretting about neither the past nor the future. For the most part, my mother was living in the moment.
Her preferred memories were ones involving her family. And so I began taking notes as I learned details about her long life, these stories I accepted like precious, previously unopened gifts.
Ruby was the youngest of 13 children born to former Alderville First Nation Chief Moses Muskrat Marsden and Nellie Orma Franklin, and when she died she was that community’s oldest member. She was the only member of the seven Williams Treaty First Nations who was alive when the treaty came into effect in 1923 and who was still living when a settlement was reached in 2018.
Ruby was also the only one of her siblings who was born in a hospital. She grew up in Lakefield, Ont., after her parents left the reserve around 1920.
Her first paying job was as a babysitter for the village’s Anglican church minister. She worked for the next 50 years, including stints as a seamstress in a garment factory in Toronto, where she married Harold Switzer, a Jewish cab driver. She insisted that she loved him, but not his passion for placing bets on horses, and brought their son Maurice back to Lakefield to live with her parents.
Ruby got a job measuring draperies at a Peterborough furniture store, and later worked on production lines at Outboard Marine Corporation and the Canadian General Electric Company. She recalled giving her parents $5 of her $12 weekly earnings for room and board so she and her son could live with them in a fieldstone house that had no central heating, running water or indoor plumbing. She paid another $3 for weekly bus fare to work.
Several years later, Ruby, Maurice and her second husband, Art – a Royal Navy veteran to whom she had been introduced by a Toronto neighbour – moved into a little house within sight of her parents’ home. Their family endured for more than 30 years until Art’s premature death from a heart attack at their kitchen table. The couple had been active members of Royal Canadian Legion Branch 77, which conferred an honorary lifetime membership on Ruby in recognition of hundreds of hours of volunteer work.
Her respect for veterans began during visits to read to wounded veterans in Toronto’s Sunnybrook Hospital after the Second World War.
During her last few months, Ruby frequently reminisced about her parents, and how her mother nursed her through life-threatening childhood diphtheria.
She always anticipated news about her grandson Adin’s family, including the birth of her great-great-granddaughter Adeline, whom she never got to hold because of restrictions imposed by the pandemic. She smiled broadly when shown photos of the baby.
Ruby never ever forgot about the really important things in her life.
Maurice Switzer is Ruby’s son.
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Lives Lived celebrates the everyday, extraordinary, unheralded lives of Canadians who have recently passed. To learn how to share the story of a family member or friend, go to tgam.ca/livesguide.