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Rita Syroteuk has lived in the same corner of Hood Street in The Ward for 99 years.
In fact, the Guelph woman was born in the very same lot her house is on today, on April 9, 1925.
“I never moved from this spot,” she said of her home on Hood Street. Her father built the original house in the 1920s, where she and her two sisters were born, though it was rebuilt in the 1970s after catching fire.
Her parents immigrated to Guelph from Italy in the 1920s. Her dad was a bricklayer by trade, but struggled to find work once he came to Canada, eventually landing a job at Taylor-Forbes, a manufacturing facility on the former site of Allan’s Mill, along Wellington Street East.
Taylor-Forbes made push lawn mowers and general hardware. During the war, it was contracted to make shell and metal casting for military vehicles, but went bankrupt in 1955.
The family didn’t have a car, so he would bike to work, working eight to 10 hours a day, six days a week. But 60-hour work weeks didn't bring in enough money to support his wife and three daughters.
To make ends meet, the family sold celery they grew in their backyard – 25,000 stalks.
“That’s how we put food on our table,” she said. “We went around the streets with a wagon and sold celery.”
Along with the celery, they grew raspberries, tomatoes, carrots, cucumbers and more. They had plum trees her dad grew from slips he brought over from Italy (a twig from a tree that has grown roots in water), and a barn with chickens and cows.
The family would sell to National Grocers on Cardigan Street (now Guelph Medical Imaging), sometimes with the help of Fred E. Prior & Sons trucks – the 100-year-old landscaping supply business that still stands across the street.
The Prior family also happened to own a home across the street from her house.
When it was being built in the 1970s, they hit a gas line while digging, and Syroteuk’s own house caught fire while she was at work, and while it didn’t look so bad around the back of the house, the entire front was engulfed in flames.
They tore it down and rebuilt the home where she still lives today.
She wanted to stay in that spot because it’s the only place she’s ever known. It’s also very much a family spot:
Her father owned the empty plot next to the house and built a house for Syroteuk’s sister Catherine, and bought the house next to that for her sister Mary. Her aunt also lived across the street.
“The street was ours,” she said. “It’s only small, there’s only eight houses.”
“We had nothing but we had everything,” she said of growing up in the ward in the 20s, 30s and 40s. “That’s the way everybody grew up.”
While they weren’t wealthy – she said many Italian immigrants struggled to find work at the time – the neighbourhood offered a strong sense of community.
“Ferguson Street, that was a whole row of Italians. And down here on Bedford Street, that was another bunch of Italians in there. And we were right in the middle,” she said.
Her dad would visit one of the houses on Ferguson Street to play bocce ball every Sunday, and the family would go to Sacred Heart Church on Alice Street for mass.
“Sacred Heart was just all Italians,” she said. “Everybody that went to school at Sacred Heart (went to the church too). So everybody knew everybody.”
The church would fill up for four masses every Sunday.
“You’d have to get there early or you wouldn’t even get a seat,” she said. “Now we get one mass a Sunday and it’s half empty.”
Without a car, she and her family would walk from Hood Street to Alice Street every single Sunday, cutting through Tytler Public School and going up the hill on Wood Street.
And in heels, no less.
“High heels and all dressed up. Everybody dressed up back then,” she said.
When she was 15, she started working at Zephyr Looms, which later became Textile Industries, and stayed there for 43 years. During the war, the company made bags for the army.
The job paid $15 for five days a week, 10 hours a day. It was a lot at the time, so it was a gig she didn’t want to give up.
Since all the men were in the army, the factories were filled with women, and started a women’s baseball league with factory teams.
Syroteuk played centrefield.
“I was the best,” she said, only missing one ball in the five years she played.
“I could run from here to Timbuktu and catch,” she said. “I was a good runner.”
Syroteuk celebrated her birthday on April 9, surrounded by friends, family and old neighbours.
