This week, we lost a very important citizen who touched the lives of many through her music and her acts of kindness and community spirit. Leah Swaddling was a true icon of Kingsville. Many will remember Leah for her regular column in the Kingsville Reporter “Social News by Leah,” for her music and for the multitude of social gatherings held at her farm “Happy Acres.”

Her loss is felt across our community and by her family. Leah Swaddling was dearly loved.

Tim Swaddling, her grandson, shared some insights into Leah’s life, her love of music and her Kingsville community.

What do you think that Leah valued most in life?

Leah valued love and happiness in life. She did a lot of activities, from playing music shows to writing her column to playing euchre and working with many different community groups. But the end goal for her was the same — bringing happiness and joy to people.

She loved to laugh and was never short of jokes and witty remarks, which was part of bringing a smile to someone’s face. She excelled at that and it was infectious.

How would you describe Leah’s character?

She was joyful and wholly unique. I was fortunate to have her for a grandmother. Every grandparent is special as we can all learn something from them if we’re lucky enough to have them.

Leah’s husband Fred died when I was just 2.5 years old, so I only have very vague memories of him. My maternal grandfather died when my mother was just 8 and my maternal grandmother, Beatrice McCarthy, died when I was 11.

So my Grandma Leah has been with me for my whole life. And I quickly noticed she was not your average grandmother. And she took great pride in those unique qualities. She was involved in so many things, she was never idle. Life is for living, make sure you wring it out for every last drop.

Did you learn any particular lessons from your grandmother or adopt any specific values that were important to her?

I learned so much from just being around her. How humour worked to make people comfortable around you, how to present yourself as a performer, the responsibilities that came with that role in society and being a musician made you “different” from everyone else, something she stressed was important.

She taught me to love bluegrass, country and western music, andold Ontario fiddle music. I grew up always knowing who Bill Monroe was. She taught me quite a bit about guitar, just how she played rhythm behind a fiddler — the push/ pull quality of how those instrumental songs worked. And she could sing her heart out — that has to come from a true place inside of you.

I learned that from using the range she had to belt out a song. And of course, adding in a few high-pitched whoops and hollers, as was her signature on stage, never hurts either.

Where did her love of music originate? How important was music to her life?

Music was most important, it was everything. She worshipped Jesus at the Anglican church, but in her home when I was a kid I didn’t get the impression that Bill Monroe wasn’t at least close to the same level as Christ.

Having come from Belgium as a child to Leamington on Wigle Street with her family in the early 1930s, she was learning about culture here. She listened to the radio and back then you could pick up The Grand Ole Opry out of Nashville on WSM and you could get those border radio stations out of Mexico with those mega wattage signals, so she heard The Carter Family on XERA.

She quickly fell in love with those sounds and realized kids in her neighbourhood loved them too. She convinced her dad to get her a toy guitar. He told her that if she could learn to play that, he would buy her a proper guitar. She learned some chords on it but it was hard to play.

The family took the WE&LS streetcar to Windsor for her father’s medical appointment at Hotel Dieu on Ouellette Avenue. After the appointment, they took a walk downtown on Ouellette to see the big city. They walked past Grennell’s, and in the window was a Hensel Parlour guitar, handmade by Arthur Hensel in Toronto. A uniquely Canadian guitar.

She stopped and admired it in the window and her dad noticed. It was $300. That was a lot of money back then, but especially for a poor immigrant family just having arrived from Belgium. They went in and she played it and sounded good, finally being able to play chords on a proper guitar that could stay in tune. Her dad asked her if she wanted it. She replied that it was a lot of money.

She loved to tell this story — no sooner than she said that, her dad turned around to the clerk right then and there and said “Wrap it up!” That was a special moment for my grandma, in such a big family to get that kind of expense spent on you.

Her dad had an ulterior motive though. He got her to play her guitar on the horse drawn wagon selling their goods from his shop around the neighbourhood. The music brought people outside to listen and buy grain, butter, sugar. She met a fiddler who lived near her named Jack Sumner and they played fiddle songs on the wagon and had a little duo that became popular.

She eventually played in a lot of different bands and on her own. She was constantly gigging. The Happy Acres Band — named for her Happy Acres farm — played all over in the ’70s and ’80s. In the 2000s and early 2010s she was playing solo at retirement homes — usually to people who were younger than she was. I made a Spotify playlist of her last setlist.

Tim, you mention in your social media post that Leah adored Kingsville. What was it about our town that made her feel this way?

She admired Kingsville’s appearance and the small town feel. She was proud of the old homes and buildings in Kingsville — The Conklin Building downtown, the shops. She enjoyed making the rounds downtown and visiting people on the sidewalk.

Kingsville was once a place where you knew everyone on the street, and her memory was so good she could keep up on everyone, remembering their names and what they were doing last time they talked.

It impressed a lot of people, it certainly helped inform her column and added a lot of local colour to it. People would always check to see if their little sidewalk chat with Leah would make the paper in her next column.

There was a certain modesty and humbleness to Kingsville that she liked. Leamington was a factory town. Kingsville had industry, but by the ’50s the tobacco industry was mostly gone and the industrial concerns in Kingsville were smaller in scale than Leamington’s huge Heinz plant.

Kingsville retained some of the lustre and prestige of its resort history, the beautiful Lakeside Park, the tree-lined Division Street South, being a major spot on bird migration patterns, a noble hobby pursuit for who those who appreciated beauty and nature in life. Kingsville was all those things for her and she loved it so much.

Was Leah’s love of Kingsville limited to our small town of the ’70s and ’80s, or did she appreciate the changes we have been undergoing in the last decade?

That feeling really began to change in the 2010s when the real estate in Toronto and other major Canadian cities started to spill over to destinations like Kingsville. She took pride in that.

She was always saying how Kingsville was a hidden gem, so it made perfect sense to her that anyone with any sense would find the southern-most town in all of Canada the place to come and live. But with that change, especially at the rate we’ve seen in the last 10 years, nothing can stay the same.

Some things will be lost to time. Kingsvillians of 100 years ago would’ve said the same of the Kingsville of the late 20th Century. We can’t stop time but we can preserve the memories of where we came from, and remembering Leah is a way to preserve Old Kingsville.

Kingsville was a secret to much of the rest of the country for so long, and her view was that it was about time the rest of the country realized what a beautiful town and great place to live Kingsville is. So it was only logical to her that it would eventually happen.

Do you think we can ever recapture the feelings that Kingsville gave us 20 or 30 years ago, a time when people appreciated the simple and honest observations that Leah shared with her readers?

As George Harrison once sang, “all things must pass, none of life’s strings can last.” That’s true, and nothing lasts forever. There have been previous periods of great growth and of population migrations around the country.

The 1920s was a period of great change and many people relocating within Canada and coming to live here for jobs, opportunity, the climate, or a good place to raise a family. My Grandma was one of them — 90 years ago not everyone was so welcoming of immigrants from Belgium or Italy or Portugal as it changed what Leamington was Bigger buildings were built to fit those growing needs.

We admire those red brick Art Deco-influenced 1920s and 1930s buildings today, but back then that disappointed a lot of people to see those buildings going up. Things have changed but history is repeating itself, we have new faces moving here from other Canadian cities, immigrants from countries across the ocean looking for a better life.

We’ve done all this before. Kingsville will never be the same, but we can carry the spirit of that small town that Leah loved with us and pass it along to the next generation of Kingsvillians — teach what we value about our town and how the traditions of the small town and community can shape our future.

All things must pass away, but we can never forget our past. It’s our responsibility to make new Kingsvillians admire who we were and what made this town. I try to do that with my Vintage Kingsville page.

I hope to repost the “Social News by Leah” column there from the Kingsville Reporter archives to keep the conversation going and remind people where we came from, because that determines where you’re going. And as the saying goes, if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there. In Kingsville though, that usually means Division or Main Street and always will.

Why do you think her regular column in the Kingsville Reporter meant so much to so many readers? What was it about “Social News by Leah” that connected with Kingsville residents for so many years?

Her column captured the essence of Kingsville and Kingsvillians better than the news reports of the day ever could. Town council meetings over policy, general news and events, schools, financial news — all these things show us the results of the community, but you have to read between the lines to distinguish what makes it “Kingsville.”

Leah’s column reported on Kingsville life that wasn’t “news” but was a true reflection of what life in Kingsville was like.

People who moved away subscribed to the Reporter and said that Leah’s column was the primary reason — the small town feel was captured there better than any news story of new bylaws. It was the essence, and it was uniquely Kingsville.

I was her grandson and even I was always proud when something I did made her column. And not everything I did would make her column! She knew how to balance what made the column every week and sometimes you didn’t make the cut because there was a couple of similar pieces in it that needed to be mentioned that week.

She had to have a bit of everything and knew she had bird fans watching her column to see if the purple martins were back or not. She loved that. Her phone rang off the hook in the spring as people scrambled to be the one to tell her they saw the first robin. She loved that too.

If you moved away from Kingsville, you could always take a walk down Main Street just by reading her column on any given week. She was as much a part of Kingsville as a Lake Erie breeze. Now she’s part of that breeze.

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Click here to visit Tim Swaddling’s “Vintage Kingsville” page on Facebook.

Photo of Leah courtesy of Tim Swaddling
“Social News by Leah” image courtesy of the Kingsville Reporter