Lorraine Sinclair in her apartment in Hampton Court April 3, the day before her 95th birthday.
Hub Staff
"Unbelievable” was the word Lorraine Sinclair used to describe turning 95. “I never thought I’d be around this long,” she said with a chuckle.
Lorraine was born in the McCaw family home, on the Arran Elderslie townline. McCaw was Lorraine’s surname before she married Neil Sinclair on Thanksgiving weekend in 1946.
“My parents were farmers and they lived near a little corner called Vesta,” Lorraine said from her apartment in Hampton Court on April 3, just one day before her 95th birthday. Lorraine moved to Hampton Court from her home in Southampton in 2012.
As a girl, Lorraine attended a one room school in Arran Elderslie and from there attended high school in nearby Chesley. Following high school, Lorraine went to Teacher’s College in Stratford and returned to teach in the one room school she had attended as a girl.
“It’d be nearly two miles from my parents’ home to [the school] and I had a bicycle,” said Lorraine, adding that when winter would come and she could no longer ride her bicycle, she would board in a nearby house.
“I taught for two years in my old school,” she said. “There was a war on and the men were all joining the army.”
Lorraine said teaching school was fun but hard work. She had 20 students, “Grade 1 to Grade 7, a nice bunch of kids," she said, until one family moved away, bringing the student population down to 12. “So you could see the end coming, the bus must have come in right after that,” she said.
Lorraine credited her own childhood teacher, Vera Hogarth, for showing Lorraine how to fill that role. “If I hadn’t had a good teacher when I went there, I wouldn’t have known how to do it,” she said.
Lorraine never had a car of her own but recalled learning to drive in her dad’s 1928 Whippet. “It was all gear driving,” she said, remembering “one heck of a hill” on the townline where the Saugeen River crossed between Arran and Elderslie.
“It was a long hill and I can still remember me shaking when I was changing gears, trying to get up this hill,” Lorraine laughed, adding that it was her father who taught her to drive.
Following her time teaching, Lorraine worked as a telephone operator in Port Elgin, where she lived with an aunt and uncle. It was during this time that she met Neil. When I asked her where they first met, she said, “Guess.”
“A dance in Tara,” she said with a laugh. A friend who worked at a factory at the time “had her eye on a Tara boy so she took five girls over in her sister’s Roadster,” said Lorraine.
“Neil asked me to dance,” she recalled. “I’d be about 22.”
"We dated a whole year, then we were engaged a whole year," Lorraine said. "Everything went pretty smooth I guess because then we got married.”
Neil and Lorraine lived in Tara where they began Sinclair Electric, installing and later upgrading hydro in area homes. “They did a lot of work, right up the peninsula,” said Lorraine. “It was really tough farming before you got hydro,” she added.
“We had a grocery store at that time too,” she said. “We took over Tobey’s Store and it was groceries on one side and dried goods on the other.”
Neil and Lorraine had two children, Allan and Ian, and eventually Sinclair Electric became Square Deal Neil’s, a name “one of the travelers stuck on [Neil]," said Lorraine. “Travelers” was a word used by business owners for traveling salesmen. Then in the mid 1970s, the two moved themselves as well as the business to Southampton, where Ian, along with his wife Edith and their children, run the business today.
Neil passed away in 2012 and Lorraine, looking back on her life, said she recalls always having fun times with Neil. “We liked to dance, we were out to the Sauble Dance Hall quite a bit,” she said, adding that the two had also attended many New Year’s Eve parties in Tara. “Neil was always calm and collected, didn’t get excited about anything,” she said.
Today Lorraine has five grandchildren and four great grandchildren, with more on the way. She’s been a Cub Master, a Sunday School Teacher, raised two kids and had always been involved in the family business.
And above all, “I’ve been happy,” she said with a smile.
