Dalton, Joyce Alene (nee Abernethy) born March 31, 1929, died November 23, 2021, at 92 years of age in the tremendous care of the surgical unit doctors and nurses at Ross Memorial Hospital, Lindsay, Ontario. She had a fall which broke her hip and died post-surgery of pneumonia complications. Joyce is pre-deceased by husband Charles Ernest Dalton (December 23, 2018) and parents Hilda (nee Berry, Port Hope) and Herbert Sherman Abernethy (Campbellford). She was the loving mother of William, Cheryl, Gary, and James. Grandmother of 12, Great Grandmother of 9 and counting.
Joyce grew up in the Kingston and Victoria roads area of Scarborough where her WW I veteran father’s barbershop flourished. Her childhood summers were spent on her Berry grandparent’s farm near Port Hope. As a teen during WW II, she contributed labour as a Farmerette. She graduated from Malvern Collegiate Institute and worked as a manual telephone operator for Bell. She went west to Banff and worked at the iconic Banff Park Lodge for a summer, apparently to cool a high school boyfriend. In Banff she took to horseback trail riding, and on return to Toronto found the Circle M Ranch, at Kleinburg, to pursue that hobby. There she met her husband to be, Chas Dalton, his best friend Ken MacIntosh, and his soon to be bride Clair. The foursome stayed friends for life. The Circle M’s claim to fame was that it was also a westerns film studio and home base to the ‘The Forest Rangers’ TV series. With that expertise on site, they were prone to creating epics such as ‘Red Rider’ (not the Universal Pictures movie nor Red Ryder TV series) which the story goes involved a maypole dance.
When Joyce and Charlie married in 1951, they spent their honeymoon canoe tripping in Algonquin Park. That trip and others to follow with friends launched from Aunt Ruby and Uncle Howard Walker’s cottage on Cache Lake. Joyce was introduced to the parks, and canoes by them at an early age when getting to the park by train was the way to travel.
Joyce and Charlie raised their young family on Medford Street in the Warden and Danforth area of Scarborough. Later moving the brood to Syracuse Crescent in West Hill for bigger digs. Camping in the Provincial Parks across Southern Ontario was constant during the first 10 or 12 years raising their kids, giving them the experiences and sharing their love of the outdoors. This was followed by cottage rentals on Canal Lake at Bolsover, Ontario. They fell in love with the white pine forests in the community
and along the Canal. Area fields and the flooded lake itself are replete with stumps of white pine reminding of the logging history of the community. In 1974 they acquired a lot on the Talbot River section of the Trent Canal just west of Canal Lake. They designed and built their dream home there in 1975. When the leased lot in Algonquin had to be given up, the buildings were salvaged and the wood and even the straight nails were used to build the barn style garage on Stanley “Beach” Road not long after the house was completed.
Joyce was not a homebody while raising her family and worked temp jobs with Office Overload to contribute to the home purse. No coincidence, her mother Hilda was an Executive with the same. Temp evolved into permanent with Offset Print and Litho whose plant and offices overlooked the Don Valley. There her duties morphed from reception to bookkeeper as she pursued night courses to make it possible. During her employ, she used the latest available computers, operating systems, and software; and was part of the transition from mainframe card deck inputs to keyboards, to personal computers. She carried those competencies into the many roles in clubs and stayed current with desktop publishing for newsletters and with bookkeeping software.
If it was new tech, Joyce had it. The sailboat was at the keen edge of navigation and communication devices. The den at the house was filled with desktops, laptops, and wi-fi printing. Her camera equipment was constantly upgraded through trade-ins at Henry’s in Toronto. Her kitchen too always had the latest fad developments. Between the radios and GPS, computers, cameras, and appliances her youngest son dubbed her “gadget girl”. You could get Charlie’s goat and earn a frown by mentioning new products that might have been overlooked.
Boats were a theme throughout; first houseboats to tour the Trent – Severn waterways and Georgian Bay (never pontoon boats, the full hulled 33-foot Georgian steel was big water capable). Then, a progression of sailboats (Hughes 22, Tanzer 26, and Catalina 30). The latter two both making it to the Bahamas for very memorable and fulfilling trips.
Home base for sailing was the Lagoon City Yacht Club and Joyce dedicated herself to various executive duties on the administrative side where her skill sets did not get rusty. Their berth was a lively place when in port, but an equal portion was spent doing what sailboats were made for.
When the family moved to Bolsover Joyce left her office position behind and started the Talbot River Pottery. She had been preparing for years, taking advantage of night schooling. The pottery featured stoneware pieces and she experimented with its limits. While many pieces performed normal functions from cookie jars and planting pots to coffee mugs, no two were identical, and many whimsical things emerged from that imagination. Her talents were showcased at various vetted venues, and wares sold locally in markets. Those talents and products extended to macramé plant and wall hangings. She shared her talent with others in demonstration days at fairs and by teaching crafts from her basement studio on Stanley Beach Road.
Hobbies in Bolsover included memberships at the local 9-hole Western Trent golf Club, and the weekly winter dart club at the Bolsover Community Centre (the former one room schoolhouse). She was an avid snowmobiler and when a grocery store in nearby Beaverton held a draw for an Arctic Cat, she stuffed the entry box to ensure she would win and did. And on that note, we who loved and knew her will always remember her spirit, her delicious Christmas, Easter, and Thanksgiving feasts, and the evenings any time of year playing backgammon, cribbage, and Yahtzee.
Joyce’s wishes included cremation and internment at the plot they cherished in the community of Bolsover under the massive white pines in St. Andrews Presbyterian Cemetery. A graveside service at St. Andrew's Presbyterian Cemetery (54 Bolsover Rd. Bolsover) is scheduled for Saturday July 2, 2022 at 11 A.M. Reception to follow at Bolsover Community Centre (16 Bolsover Rd. Bolsover). At her request, memorial donations to the Diabetic Association, Canadian Cancer Society, or the Salvation Army would be appreciated