Edith Eleanor Burgess

Edith Eleanor Miloff and Allan Miloff in photo taken around 1938 or 39 outside the house in Port Hope.

What can be said about my mother, for starters she was a very complex person, and in some ways very different from her siblings but in some ways, the same. Where she differed from the rest of them, was that she was a very hard working and ambitious person, and she never smoked or drank. Most of the choices and decisions she made were the wrong ones, especially the personal ones. I think that she thought that everyone was like a piece of clay that you could take and mould into what you would like them to be, and she could never do it, but never stopped trying. She was persistent to a fault, and where she resembled her siblings was that she was extremely competitive. Maybe because of the above I have always said, she never let the truth get in the way of a good story. She was very bright and could recite poetry by the hours and would cook up a storm if we even hinted of wanting a party for the guys at work, and loved doing it. When Rosemary, Max, and myself were in the orphanage from 1946 to 1952 she came down and visited us a couple of times but not much. She would always send a nice parcel at Christmas though. When and if my mother and father got talking about the family break up they blamed each other, and that I guess is not unusual. The facts were though as I perceived them, was that my mother was a Woman's Lib type before her time, and didn't even know what that was, and my father was an old fashion Eastern European who thought that women should stay at home a raise the kids. I remember mother taking off and living away from my father for a while and I was told it was in Hull Quebec, and I would have been about 3 years old. I don't know what happened to Max, because he would have been about one. Mother returned to father and had Rosemary in 1941. After that things get a little bit strange, because she always said, she had triplets but that, they had died. As I said I always took what mother said with a grain of salt, because she told so many conflicting stories you didn't know what to believe. One day in the 1990s when we went to Kitchener for a ride we decided to visit my fathers grave in the Woodland Cemetery, and couldn't find it, so we went to the office and told them we were looking for Nicholas Miloff, at which they check their records, and inform us that they have two Nicholas Miloffs, one was in the infants section, and was born in 1942, and where the other one, our father was. You could have knocked us over with a feather. Mother had never told us this. When we got home we told Aunt Shirley about this and asked her if she knew anything about it, and she said that our mother had said that when she went in the hospital, she indeed had, had triplets, but one had died, and the doctor said, she could not take care of the ones she had so he would find a good home for the other two. Lights started going off in my head, as I had always wondered why mother would have taken two girls from their mothers, hours after they were born, to raise them as her own, and incidentally did a terrible job doing it. Jesus Christ have I got two siblings out there somewhere that I have never met. Anyway I'm getting a little ahead of myself, and will try to stay in order. The final split came in 1944 mother left and we found ourselves in one foster home for a couple months and another with the Korbelases for over a year, until we were placed in the orphanage, myself for six years, Rosemary, for seven years, and Max for over seven years. The orphanage was not as unstable as our home had, or would have been, so I consider myself lucky to have been placed in there. I look at the job mother and George my stepfather did of raising Anne and Heather and shudder to think of what we, Rosemary, Max, and myself would have become had we been with them the whole time. In 1952 mother convinced me to run away from the orphanage and come to Toronto and live with her and George, which I did. I started school at Central Technical School but it wasn't long before hints started flying of all the things I could do, and get if I had a job. I was naive and it took me a while to realize that mother was a strict utilitarian, and she didn't really want me she wanted the room and board I would be providing if I was working, along with the other two roomers she had. In 1953 I went back to Waterloo, and got Rosemary, and 1954, I went back and got Max. It wasn't long after they had reached 15 or 16 that they were out working, paying room and board as well. As I said George was an on and off drunk and alcoholic, causing great friction in the house. Mother was not lazy though and she had many money making schemes. She did homework making kites, and packaging Christmas seals, and baby sitting children. As ambitious and hard working as mother was George was the opposite, being perhaps the laziest man I have ever met. He was a garbage man for the City of Toronto, and any time he had a few sick days piled up he would get sick, and from time to time if he had no sick time he would go on compensation with a sore back. When I first got to Toronto mother had a baby girl Anne who she said she had just had, and myself not knowing anything about how long it took baby's to develop never questioned that she was mothers. A couple years later though she gets a call from a friend of hers from the Cobourg area who says her daughter is pregnant and doesn't want to keep the child when it is born. Mother says the girl can come down and stay with us, and when the baby is due in a couple of weeks can check into the hospital using mothers named have the child, come out and leave it with mother and return home, which she does. I am thinking all the while there is something wrong here. At the same time I'm thinking what can I, or even should I do about it. The young woman has a child, who becomes Heather Jane Gray, who we will be calling our half sister even though she is not related at all. It took a while but at a later time, maybe a few years, I find out that this was exactly the way they got Anne as well. Many years later when Shirley told me of what mother had told her about the triplets, I began to wonder if this was her way of replacing the two children that had been taken from her, or that she had imagined had been taken from her, but that was a long time in coming. If mother got mad at us for one reason or another she would say, I'm calling the Lawyer tomorrow and having you removed from my will, as if that was to bring us back into line, and this was done on many occasions, but at 16 who is thinking of Wills. Mother is doing all of this home work and we are pressed into helping her with it, she is also baby sitting children for other people, and doing anything to make a buck to help pay for the house, which they bought for $7,500.00 and then largely because of the cockroaches they decide to try for a better house which they find a few blocks away on Tyndall Ave, number 13 right out side the Dufferin Gates of the CNE, Canadian National Exhibition grounds. This is going to really exacerbate her need for cash, as George is drinking his money as fast as he can. George is basically a week person who could be led by people at work who would only have to say, if he refused to go out with them, who wears the pants in your family. Mother and George were insurance poor, they had more money going out of the house on insurance than was really nessesary. One day after Rosemary and Max are married I decide to go to the Cabin at Pickerel River that I had bought, and mother was supposed to go to Port Hope to visit with her Mum and Dad and when I get home after the weekend George is acting very strange it seems to me, I ask mum what is the matter with George, and she says he blames you for telling on him. I say telling on him for what, and she tells me that she was in Port Hope and got a call, that George had another woman in the house, it seems he got drunk wound up on Jarvis St, where all the prostitutes hung out at the time, and brought one home. I said how could I for starters, there is not a phone at Pickerel River, and how would I even know, she just shrugs her shoulders. There was a newspaper, if it could be called that in Toronto at the time called " Flash" and it was a scandal sheet, and mother and George made it in there under the heading, "Woman takes taxi home from Port Hope" to find husband in bed with prostitute and even has a picture of the prostitute, and the stupid thing was she looked like an old bag lady probably in her 70s, any way George blamed me and things were never really the same again with me, not that they were ever really good. Anne and Heather were starting to grow up and were really getting spoiled by mum and George, but things in the house were not good. If I were going to the cabin I would take them from time to time just to get them away from the house, and all the tension associated with it. The CNR Canadian National Railways actually owned the land the cabin was on and after a few years of my going there sold it to John Warren the guy who owned the store up there, although I never knew that at the time. I decided to look into buying a piece of Crown Land which seemed to be always for sale at the Sportsman's Show in Toronto. I ask Max, George, who was on the wagon at the time, and Emile Rosemary's husband if they were interested in going in it with me. Emile and Rosemary had just bought a house on Brown's Line, Highway 27, and Max had just got married, and they were not interested as they had enough on their plate at the time, but George said he would go in on it with me. We bought the Crown Land and decided to move the cabin down to the lot and erect it temporarily until we decided what to do next whether to build one from scratch, or buy a prefab. That December Emile, myself and two other guys who were mums roomers went down the river with Everingham's barge cut the cottage in pieces with a hand saw and brought it back to the lot. It was pretty cold that night and we all slept in a tent on the lot, and the river partially froze, and we had to break the ice to tow the barge, but we managed it. We just loaded the cabin in a piled at the bottom of a hill which we would have to take it up next year. We left it there over the winter and the next year when we were getting ready to take it up the hill we decided to go fishing first and when we returned we would start the process of taking it up the hill. Gerry Parsons, another of mums roomers went with us to the cottage but decided he didn't want to go fishing, and stayed back. When we returned from fishing a few hours later we were ready for the hard work of getting the cabin from the bottom of the hill, but Gerry Parsons, a relatively small guy had done the whole thing himself. We couldn't believe it, but Gerry was a hard worker when there was work to be done. Gerry was a drunk, and a alcoholic, but if he was sober and there was work to be done, he couldn't be beaten, it was to bad because Gerry had many good jobs but he lost them, because of the drinking. If you could keep Gerry busy he was as hard a worker as you could possibly get, I always thought he should have been a slave, it would have been a healthier lifestyle. Gerry and I were alike in one area, and that was that we both loved the movies, and both thought that " The Third Man " was one of the best movies ever made. I often wonder what ever happened to Gerry he was such a good guy, and not even a bad drunk, when it got the better of him he would just curl up and go to sleep. Mother was a strict utilitarian and knew what everyone was good for and would use it to the fullest, and I often wondered why George, he seemed to have no redeeming values, and was as lazy as sin. We even got to thinking that George was Gay, and if he wasn't he was probably by-sexual, and perhaps that was why he was a tortured soul. George had a sister Mabel who had been married and had three kids, to a farmer whose family had a farm on the land that became the Tam-O-Shanter Golf course, so they were pretty well off, but she left him and became a pub crawler living with anyone that would keep her. Georges brother Robert was the only respectable member of the family as far as I could tell. Robert was married with two children and boy and a girl, and had been a Sheriff for the city of Toronto, until he was fired, but after taking the discharge to arbitration he got his job back, or the rights anyway, of which more I will relate under George Hamilton Gray. Mother always wanted to open and run a restaurant, which she did, in the Jarvis and Dundas area, she couldn't have picked a worse area, or actual restaurant, it was to big and unyielding, and needed to much work. We all pitched in to help clean the place up, but we also knew it would be to unwieldy for her. After a few weeks, or may a couple months it failed, but it was inevitable to us. Not to long after that mother had a stoke, and died, in March 1972. Rosemary, Max, Anne, Heather, or myself never expected anything from the will and we weren't surprised, as we thought that George would get it all anyway, but after George died and we got to see that actuall will we were surprised at when it was made and what was in it, or not in it.