If Olga and Roy Tomlinson can single out one thing that has kept them happily married over the past 63 years, they’ll agree it’s been sharing the same interests, and above all, their love of art.
The Sulphurous Lake couple was married June 16, 1950, and just celebrated six decades and three years of marriage.
Both are artists and met in 1947 as first-year students at Ontario College of Art, when it wasn’t unusual to see the likes of famous artists A.Y. Jackson and Frederick Varley on campus.
Olga actually had a chance meeting with Jackson one day while sketching in a park. He looked over her shoulder and commented on a better technique she could use, and then took her sketchbook and drew examples. To this day, Olga says she could kick herself for losing track of that book.
Varley also touched her life, mistaking her for someone whose portrait he’d painted, and inviting her to his studio to take any painting of her choice.
“I was shy and naive, so I declined,” she says, wishing she now had one of the valuable pieces of art.
Olga, who’d grown up in Toronto surrounded by culture, was very talented and her goal was to be an artist by profession. Roy, a farm boy from the village of Baldwin, near Lake Simcoe in Ontario, had been drawing all his life and was basically self-taught.
“I didn’t really have a goal. In those days, art was a non-way of making a living. It was a thing you did.”
His young life was immersed in working in his grandfather’s sawmill, shingle mill and market tulip and daffodil bulb patch.
Despite the different backgrounds, they clicked, and by third year college, they were married. Two weeks after fourth year graduation, their first son, Grant, was born.
Getting married while still in school resulted in a busy year, but the wedding ceremony was a quiet affair, performed in far-off Windsor. It was arranged by the couple’s best man and maid of honour who lived in that city, and they were the only ones who attended.
Just glad to have the arrangements made and avoid any potential family drama, Olga and Roy happily hopped a Greyhound bus from Toronto to Windsor in the early morning of their wedding day to make it in time.
The next day, the newlyweds boarded another bus to St. Catherines where Olga’s large Ukrainian family had arranged a lively reception, steeped in tradition.
One of those traditions was for guests to give cash as wedding gifts and for the groom to personally thank each one with a toast and a shot of whiskey. Roy – a non drinker – found himself fading fast, so cut it back to just a sip at a time so as to make it through the night.
It was a great party, with a lot of food, dancing and traditional songs heartily belted out by the old-timers, says Roy. It was fun while it lasted.
“It was unusual for me, coming from a Canadian family where after the wedding, you went on the honeymoon, and that was it. From there, it was just hard slugging.”
It was a working honeymoon, as the couple needed summer jobs to make money for school in September. They boarded the bus again, but this time for Calgary, Alta., where they hitch-hiked a ride for the remaining distance to Banff and, hopefully, employment.
They had no luck, so they turned to the Brewster bus tour company where Roy had worked previously, and were given jobs on the spot at a resort in Saskatchewan River Crossing.
Roy pumped gas and Olga cleaned cabins, but bears were as plentiful as mosquitoes and had to be chased away daily, sometimes with a good whack with a frying pan, says Roy.
It was a time when the Rocky Mountains were just developing as a tourist destination, with the road still gravel and lightly travelled.
Roy says native people could still be seen wearing their traditional dress at times and some had never met a white person.
He was awestruck seeing several natives ride out of the mountains bareback, making their way to the annual Banff Indian Days exhibition. Several headed out a week before the event, stopping at the resort, as they always did, to purchase treats and make pocket money sawing firewood with a cross-cut saw.
“We saw a little bit of how the west used to be and met some real characters.”
Throughout the summer, Roy says, there was a party in the lodge just about every night, which would often carry on after hours in a teepee outside.
After the summer, they were back in Toronto to finish school, taking up residence in Olga’s mom’s large, rambling house, where several of their school friends also boarded.
When schooling was done, the couple moved to Parry Sound where Roy worked for the railway, hitching train cars to steam engines, and they both painted and taught a few art classes. They bought a seven-acre property with a house, lakes and a waterfall where they stayed each summer, but moved to town each winter before their home became snowed in.
In 1957, the property was sold for cash and Olga and Roy packed their bags for British Columbia, where they bought a small home on one acre in Coquitlam.
Roy continued to work for the railway where he saw the conversion from steam to diesel engines.
“We piled 25 cars on a diesel just to see what it could haul. I was impressed. Diesel was the way to go.”
Roy renovated and enlarged the home to accommodate the family which now included another son, Craig.
Roy also began a building design business and used his artistic talent to visualize and draw plans that would show a client the finished result. He built the business up to include five employees, but let it go in 1974 to move the Cariboo, where the couple had purchased a lot on Sulphurous Lake.
Now, quite adept at building, Roy constructed a home on the lake property, complete with studio space where they developed a lithography business.
Roy had previous experience in commercial metal plate lithography, but he and Olga were interested in the old process which involved etching the image onto a stone tablet.
They realized making a living from selling single paintings was a pipe dream, but if they could produce an original, then make hand-printed copies using lithography, there was potential to generate a decent income.
Getting started was a real learning curve, but they accessed information on the process from every available source. Roy salvaged a number of precious Bavarian limestone tablets which had been discarded with images still on them, and it was just a matter of resurfacing them and applying their own images.
Hand-pulled lithographs were basically unheard of, so the couple had to do some hard-core marketing to create interest and generate buyers.
It was the dawn of the computer era, and at first, Olga saw its potential for creating their own advertising material, and later, for marketing on the Internet.
She taught herself computing and from there, it was learning how the Internet worked and teaching herself the intricacies of web design. It’s a skill she continues to hone, as the web master of their own site, and that of their sons who each are builders of Renaissance musical instruments.
Olga and Roy met with great success in their lithography business, creating 140 titles and processing thousands of prints. In 2004, Roy pulled his last print upon realizing he no longer had the physical strength for the heavy work involved.
Roy has switched his artistic interest to watercolour painting, while Olga keeps busy doing detailed decorative painting on Craig’s hand crafted harpsichords.
There’s also time set aside each day to solve a Sudoku puzzle or two and fresh bread is baked weekly.
“We’re both healthy in mind and body,” says Olga. “I attribute it to being busy from sunlight to sundown. It’s been a great life, and we’ve enjoyed each other’s company all along.”