Random Access

Grant Clarkson is old enough to remember when there was no high school in Mississauga.
When he grew up in the village of Dixie, after you graduated from Dixie Public School (the original one located north of the Dundas), you went to Etobicoke Collegiate.
Port Credit High School on Forest Ave., now Mentor College, opened half-way through Clarkson’s high school career but he stayed at Etobicoke, where he played line on two championship football teams in 1932 and 1933. Future CFL quarterback Jerry Doucette was one of his team mates.
I’m willing to bet that Clarkson was a pretty tough guy on the football field. Throughout his political career which included stints as councillor, deputy reeve, reeve and acting mayor on Toronto Township council and councillor for the Town of Mississauga, Clarkson had this chronic habit of speaking his mind and taking on issues that others chose not to face head on.
He was a bit cantankerous, to be honest, especially when it came to matters of ripping up the natural environment or tearing down pieces of our collective heritage.
Maybe because his roots are so deep in the community and he grew up in a time when Mississauga truly was a collection of villages, Clarkson took the desecration of the local environment personally.
When the hunting lodge of Sir Beverly Robinson was sold to Erin Mills Development Corporation in the early 60s, Clarkson and local lawyer Jim Beattie believed the striking building, now the offices of the Heritage Foundation, should be saved for posterity. They convinced the municipality to buy it.
The developers also tried about the same time to make Mississauga Rd. four lanes through Port Credit to Streetsville. “I said no bloody way,” the 91-year-old recalls. “We said keep it the way it is and that’s how Erin Mills Parkway got built,” he told me this morning from his 17-acre property on the Credit River, where he has planted about a thousand trees over the years.
This afternoon, Clarkson received one of the very first Ontario Lieutenant-Governor’s Lifetime Heritage Awards from James Bartleman at Queen’s Park.
If there is any one story that shows Clarkson’s persistence and strong will, it is the story of the mural painted on the blinds of the old Meadowvale School House in 1906 by acclaimed Canadian artist Fred Stanley Haines.
A pastoral scene of the Mississaugas camping beside the Credit River in Meadowvale Village, the work, which was pasted onto the walls of the school house became a personal project for Clarkson.
He was president of the Peel County Historical Society and Chairman of Credit Valley Conservation in the mid-1970s, when he made the project a priority. The painting was painstakingly transferred by a team of experts from the blinds and taken to Ottawa, where it was restored to its original lustre by a team of experts.
Unfortunately, exposure to ultraviolet light while the mural was on display in a local hotel caused additional damage and it had to be restored again recently. Guess who spearheaded the work and again footed a substantial part of the bill?
Clarkson was on hand last year when the mural was placed in an appropriate place of honour outside the second-floor entrance to the council chambers at the Mississauga Civic Centre.
The painting is now wrapped in plexiglass and will be preserved for future generations.
It would not have happened without the vision, the commitment, and yes — the stubbornness — of one Grant Clarkson.
Asked if Mississauga might look a little different without his personal interest in heritage, Clarkson just chuckled this morning and said, “I’m not looking for any credit. I’m just happy that these things have happened.”