A century of life

Ross Parks celebrates 100th birthday

Farming was the only thing that Ross Parks ever wanted to do in life. “I remember the day I started school. That morning I was on my father’s lap as he was discing with horses. I didn’t think you had to go to school to be a farmer. I was six years old, and at 8:30 I had to go in the house and get ready to go to school,” he says. That was in 1927 at the family’s original farm on Christian Road. Two years later, the family moved to their farm just east of Wellington, and it was a move that young Ross really didn’t like. “It was 1929, and then the Depression struck, and it was terrible those years. We had dry weather besides, just terribly dry and hot through the thirties, and then it was the war,” he says. “I was lucky that I didn’t have to go. I got called up twice, but I was turned down. When I was five years old I had an ear infection, and I had a temperature of 106.8 Fahrenheit, in the hospital. It was the highest temperature anybody ever had and lived, so I nearly died then, but I came through it. When they called me up to examine me, they found I had a perforated eardrum, but at the same time they wanted people to farm. I was helping my dad, so I didn’t have to go to war, and I was thankful for that, because I didn’t want to go. I had lots of friends who really wanted to go, to get into the air force or the army.”

Initially, Ross and his dad had a herd of grade cows, but when Ross was around 15 or 16, he convinced his dad to buy some purebred registered cows that would be better milk producers. “My whole life was breeding cows, and I was pretty lucky,” says Ross. “I bred five cows that graded excellent. I showed an animal at the Royal [Winter Fair], which was pretty good for a little guy like me, and it was fourth at the Royal, out of 10. I used to show at the Black and White Show in Picton. I won a lot of prizes with my cows there.” Ross was 18 when he made his first trip outside the County beyond Belleville. He had to take a herd of cows to northern Ontario by train, and it was then that he adopted the habit of keeping his cows scrupulously clean. “I looked after my cows well, brushed them every day so they were always clean.”

When Ross got married in 1946, he had just $5 in his pocket. He rented the farmland from his father, who also gave him a few cows and several young calves to get him started. “We didn’t have water in the house. We didn’t have a radio or a telephone. I’m so grateful for the way I ended up, and it isn’t what I’ve done, it’s just the times have gotten better.” In those early years, all of the milk Ross and other local farmers produced went to the County cheese factories. “My gosh, we only got $2 for a hundred pounds of milk back then. You would get more money for milk that people would drink, $4 for a hundred pounds. So a few of us got the guy that was drawing fluid milk interested to come down here. First we shipped in 10-gallon cans to Toronto, then after they got a few more in here, the bulk tanks came. I was one of the first ones to have a pipeline in my barn for the milk to go straight from the cows through a stainless steel pipe right into the cooler.”

Ross became very successful at breeding cows, and an animal that he bred ended up being sold at auction for $59,000. He was always on the lookout for good cows, and attended sales in Toronto. He had a little bit of a mischievous streak too—he once bid up on a heifer that he had no intention of buying just to raise the price because he knew that someone else really wanted the animal. In that case the auction hammer fell at $14,000. One of his cows took first prize at the prestigious New York Fair, and was nominated in the All American category. He sold purebred cows to England, Venezuela and even Cuba during the Castro regime.

Ross also had a good family life. He and his wife, Eleanor, had six children, and the family farm holdings expanded to around 1,000 acres. He did a lot of travelling to the United Kingdom, Europe, the Caribbean and South America. He was an avid hockey player in his younger days, and remembers the old Wellington arena being packed to the rafters for playoff games. Later in life he took up golf and even played a couple of rounds last year. After Eleanor died about 30 years ago, Ross taught himself how to make pies, selling them at a farmers’ market in Cherry Valley for a number of years. More recently he has put up a pie for auction at the annual Cattlemen’s Dinner. In 2019, he raised an astonishing $1,000 for his pie.

As Ross looked forward to celebrating his 100th birthday on January 19, he is grateful for a life well lived. “I’ve enjoyed every bit of it. It was a good life, but I’m lucky to have this place here. I had a good father and mother, and that means a lot. He was a good farmer, and he taught me how to work, how to do things right. I’m pretty lucky now that I’m old my children are good to me and they help me. Sitting here, I haven’t got a pain or anything. I walk around here, I get my own breakfast, I look after myself. I just have to be thankful that I’ve lived this long.”