John Hawley Kerry died today. His son, Glenn (executor and long-time business associate), telephoned earlier to give us the news. According to my records John’s date of birth was August 5, 1929. So he achieved his 93rd year. Reportedly he had cancer. When I saw him last (shortly before his birthday) he looked well and professionally attired as always.
John was unquestionably my preferred client throughout my entire practice of law. We had a lot in common. Each of us was driven by a strict business sense devoted primarily to service and quality for those whom we represented. Equally significant is the fortuitous alliance each of us had with Raymond Algernon Jamieson QC who reportedly took John under his wings when John first arrived in Almonte many, many years ago. It was a generosity which John subsequently extended to me upon my own arrival in town. In short both John and I were familiar with the antique law office of R. A. Jamieson QC at 74 Mill Street.
For over thirty years (until my open heart surgery dissuaded me from a daily breakfast diet of bacon and eggs), every day of the business week, John, I and four other “regulars” (among them Nick Magus, W. Ross Taggart OLS, Joe Sensenstein and occasionally Mr. Justice C. J. Newton QC) foregathered each morning at the Superior Restaurant on Mill Street to put on the nose bag and for coffee and a chat. In spite of our business (or golf) attire we often resembled school boys, recalling the corny jokes and nonsense stories. John was however always the picture of propriety. If any one of us engaged in diminishing remarks about another person, John would invariably stay out of the fray. If however he were pressed for comment it was likely as saccharine as, “Well, he had his good faults!”
I am indebted to John not only for the frequency and regularity of his business retainers but also for their singularity. Given the distinguishable and broad scope of his commericial ventures (Including in particular the ultimate dissolution of the funeral business) I was afforded the opportunity to expand my own realm of professional experiences.
But the most important feature of my relationship with John Hawley Kerry was that I unhesitatingly call him my friend and I believe he considered me likewise. We had that facility and readiness of communication which brightens a close acquaintance. After carrying on with one another over such a prolonged period of time we frequently spoke in cryptic terms to one another or perhaps they were mere comic allusions which enthralled us. It was this frolicking which I esteemed in particular because otherwise I knew John to be a stern and controlled man. Indeed the circumstance of our first meeting (involving the perpetual care fund of the Auld Kirk Cemetery and the Government of Ontario) persuaded me that John Hawley Kerry was not a man with whom one engages without deference and a degree of caution. In that particular case he succeeded to dilute what otherwise would have been a costly bureaucratic prescription.
As I wrote to John’s family a moment ago, their father’s death unquestionably marks the end of an era. So many of the historic ghosts of Almonte’s Mill Street (its main seat of affairs) and business enterprises stretching to the Town of Carleton Place have been in an instant swallowed up by John’s death.