John Barker Burgess 05/13/12 - 01/29/77

John and Mark were the most jovial ones of the bunch, always quick with a laugh or joke. Mark was quicker to jump into the fray than any of them, but John would be quick to follow. All of the Burgesses were quirky in their own way, and some more so than others. John was good company and would answer anything you would ask him about the family, and It pains me that I never got to talk to him in depth. I was visiting with him one day, and was starting to wonder about the Burgesses, and their history, and remarked to him that in the future I would be asking him some stuff about the family, and he said just ask away, and that he would tell me what I wanted to know if he knew. John like the rest of the family was born in the Port Hope, Cobourg area. In his early years for a while John worked on a fishing boat out of Port Hope when there was commercial fishing on Lake Ontario. When the family moved to the Kitchener area John met Beatrice, they married and had one son Billy, who was born a few months after me in Kitchener as well. The picture is Billy on Benton St. in Kitchener, with mother in the back ground with a couple other women. After the war I guess John divorced Beatrice and married Shirley, and they had two girls Bonnie, and Debbie. Bonnie had a heart problem when she was born, and was called at the time a Blue Baby. A week after arriving in Toronto in 1952 mother says why don't you go on the streecar and visit with Uncle John and I said I would. I called John and he said get on the Queen car and get of at Sherborne and walk up to Winchester and that he would meet me at the Hotel there. I got on the Queen car and it had to detour around Yonge St, because of the Yonge St. Subway dig. I got the Sherbourne and started walking up the street when a dog, a little Scottie rand of the porch of a house and bit me, at which I kicked him half way across the street. I walked up the street and met John and we continued, and an old guy lost control of his car and crashed into a cement utility pole just missing us, and was left with his horn blowing. John reached under the hood and pulled the wires out of the horn stopping the racket and we continued on our way to his house. What an auspicious start for my life in Toronto, was it an omen of things to come. One day not so long after, mother says to me, Uncle John is in trouble, the police have surrounded his house, and at first wouldn't let Debbie in, after getting there on her way home from school, she being eight or nine at the time. Evidently John's next door neighbor had asked Mark who had a friend who worked at Winchester, in Cobourg to get him a rifle, and John was looking at it on his front porch, showing it to the neighbor, who wanted it, and the neighbor's wife thought that they had threatened her with the gun and called the police. There were charges laid, there was some kind of a court case, where John got off, because it was a hot day, and it was blamed on the steel plate he had in his head as a result of a war wound.