Random Access

Even in the short drive from the funeral home to Streetsville United Church, where more than 300 people were waiting on Tuesday to honour his remarkable life, John Emerson's impact on Streetsville was visibly evident.
His body was taken past the gateway to the pioneer cemetery, a gateway that he designed with the intricate attention to detail that was his trademark.
The hearse turned near the brick wall at the Streetsville Memorial Park that celebrates the contributors to the Bread and Honey Festival, another structure that the 74-year-old, who died last Friday, created.
Out on Queen St. S., the procession passed by the heritage house that Emerson and his wife of 41 years, Sandra, had lovingly kept and filled with mementoes of bygone eras and with the art work that infused their lives together.
The new Business Improvement Area banners fluttering in the breeze have an image of the Credit Valley Railroad Station on one side. On the other side is a photograph taken from the front of the Timothy Street house. On the request of the BIA, Emerson had dug up the photo from the enormous archives of historic materials he could seem to put his fingers on at any moment.
In a life where many of us struggle to find one thing to be good at, John Emerson seemed to be good at just about everything to which he turned his gifted hand.
"We always thought of dad as a renaissance man," said eldest son Bruce as he and brothers Brian and Douglas gathered around their mother a few hours after the funeral and marvelled at the impact their father had made on so many lives.
He listed his father's potential job descriptions as teacher, mentor, artist, musician, engineer, architect, landscape designer, gardener, arborist, builder, historian, archaeologist, geographer, photographer and raconteur, to name a few.
"He probably had an influence on any piece of art produced in Canada in the last 30 years," said Bruce, referring to Emerson's 24-year career at the University of Toronto, where he was teacher, friend and mentor to several generations of new teachers. Many of them attended the ceremony, much to the delight of the family.
Sandra Emerson, who along with her husband was the lifeblood of the Streetsville Historical Society, conducted a tour through the heritage house that is filled with Emerson's tool collections, his sketches and the maps he loved, his piano and an eclectic collection of old light bulbs, canning bottles, soup cans etc.
In the backyard is the garage that Emerson designed. The "sketch" of the structure he did initially for the City of Mississauga's building department was so precise that it was accepted as the official architectural rendering required by the municipality.
The backyard also is home to a heritage fruit tree. The beautiful but bitter yellow fruit of the quince glisten in the sun and light up the backyard at this time of year.
A quirky tree whose selection demonstrates a lot of the qualities that defined John Emerson: a raging intellectual curiosity, a deep respect and understanding of the past and a telling eye for the artistic beauty and complexity that abounds in the natural world.