Doc sets up office at Sovereign hotel
With prayers for the residents displaced from the warmth and dignity of their homes, the business lost and owners of the historic building due to the recent tragedy of fire, I write about a small segment of time connecting life-changing events in the village.
by John R. Graham
Dr. J.R.H. Graham, and his wife, Marjorie Winnifred Graham, arrived in Creemore on October 30, 1926. My brother, Robert, was born in 1927. I am John Graham, born in 1934. I am the last family connection with Creemore. Since my retirement in 2019, I have been living with my family in Huntington Beach, California. I have a heart filled with gratitude for my life.
Rolly Graham and Marjorie Graham purchased the Sovereign Hotel building at Mill and Caroline Streets in 1944. They drew up plans for a medical office and four apartments on the two upper floors. The initial project was the medical space for two doctors, including a large treatment room with one hospital bed and emergency equipment, a large dispensary with three walls of medicines (liquid, pill, and ointments), a bathroom, and an extra workspace to double as a lunchroom.
The Creemore Star, dated Feb. 15, 1945, reported, “Dr. Graham now located in front rooms of the former Sovereign Hotel.”
Entering from Mill Street, there was a small rectangular room for shaking off snow and mud, then pushing through a second door that buffered the weather, a space with four doors for the four directions. On the right was a half door by the front desk receptionist in the dispensary; straight ahead, a door to the private office spaces; and on the left, a framed opening into a large waiting room. Matching wooden armchairs against four walls, under pleasing paintings, with a table in the middle, gave 24 people space to discuss the weather, springtime ruts in Nottawasaga Township, current events, and family. “And will your daughter Evelyn be coming home for the holiday?” Gossip seemed out of place in the quiet haven of the Doctor’s Waiting Room because it was sacred ground for the distressed.
Russell F. Boettger, MD, a young medical doctor who returned from medical service with the Royal Canadian Army Corps, joined my father in medical practice in February 1946 and established his family in Creemore. It was an understandable loss but a sadness to the village when the family moved back to their home community of Waterloo, close to their grandparents, in the summer of 1951.
The most interesting person arriving at the old Sovereign Hotel was a former Colonel in the White Russian Army, a Georgian from Tbilisi. Marjorie and Rolly Graham, in 1944, hired Mr. Kirill Paholkin. With his wife, Claire, a nurse and former officer inthe White Russian Army, the couple escaped the Red Army takeover of Russia in 1917. However, their beloved home country of Georgia was to become the Soviet Socialist Republic of Georgia. So Kirill and Claire walked out of their native Georgia to Armenia and Turkey. Years later, after many midway points, including Toronto, they settled on a small farm near Randwick. Kirill walked to Creemore Sunday evening or early Monday morning and walked home on Friday late afternoon/evening to be a husband, father, and farmer. Kirill and Claire had one son, Bob. Claire ran the weekday farm and looked after their son as Bob grew into a man and took over tasks through the years.
One day during the threshing of their small wheat crop, the threshing machine stopped. The owner tried to get it restarted. Nothing worked. On a Friday afternoon, Kirill walked off the road and asked if he could help. Bob, speaking unaccented English, explained his father was a genius. Kirill took about one hour to fix the machine so the man could finish their grain. When talking about the threshing machine, Rolly asked, “How can you do such a thing? In your life, you’ve never worked on a machine like that before.”
Kirill described his life secret: “You take off the cover and put the screws on the cover. Then the next screws you see, you take them out and place them on the ground beside the cover. You keep going inside the machine until you find what is broken, fix that piece, and then work backward,just putting things back the way before, together, in reverse order. Then put the cover on last. Then Kirill smiled and watched Rolly: “Is that like work you do at your hospital?” Rolly respected him fully and laughed every time he told the story. He was delighted with Kirill. Marjorie could not have done without him, completing task after task in the Sovereign renovation.
Kirill did amazing things with his hands, using tools, strength, graphic skills, drawing plans, and a creative mind: repairing things, plumbing, tin work, electricity, carpentry was a particular skill, and painting while humming opera melodies mindlessly. Marjorie wanted to write him up for the popular Reader’s Digest series as “The Most Interesting Person I Ever Met.” He was not lighthearted and could descend into tearful sadness. Yet he could dance, the male athletic counterpart of the most graceful Georgian female dancers gliding ‘round the room, a wild spirit, on his haunches, foreleg kicking out right and left, as he moved around with a broad honest smile.
The renovation of the Sovereign offices would not have been done without Kirill Paholkin. Nor would the former Barroom, with the original bar with foot rail, mirrors, and bottle shelves, have been transformed into a recreation room. Rolly loved the newly decorated space for entertaining and relaxing. Yet every Tuesday at 4:15 p.m., for three years, 1945-1948, a former Barroom was transformed into a magical world of toadstools and elves sprinkled with fairy dust. Marjorie Graham was instrumental in establishing the Canadian Girl Guide movement in Creemore, later becoming a District Director, and started a Brownie pack for girls aged 7-11 aspiring to become Girl Guides. Marjorie and Kirill took on renovating and remodeling the second and third floors after opening the medical office at the Sovereign and finishing the ground floor spaces. The north side door on the ground floor invited entry to the “Brownies place,” walking straight ahead and with access to the downstairs bathroom. The stairway to the midpoint of the second floor ended in a foyer, with three apartments carved out of the former hotel spaces on that level. Arthur May and his wife, Jeanne, made their home there in 1945. Mrs. Ovens and her son Bill started living there in 1946 when she sold her home on King Street. The Graham family lived in the rear apartment. When Mrs. Claire Paholkin came to Creemore, the couple had the guestroom for long periods in the apartment. When Kirill was alone, he created a living space in the work area in the back part of the ground floor. From the second-floor foyer at the midpoint, a central staircase climbed to one cozy apartment on the top floor overlooking Mill Street.
The garage and unheated sunporch room on the second floor, off the east side of the building, were erected in the summer of 1945.
One of my father’s significant decisions took effect on September 10, 1942, when he employed Winnifred Joy White, a registered nurse. Joy followed her older sister, “Louie,” also a nurse, and both graduated from the prestigious Royal Victoria Hospital program in London, Ontario. These young professional women were the daughters of Fred and Cora White, who farmed north of Cashtown Corners as you turn up toward Stayner.
Joy White became the face of kindness and compassion in assisting and initiating care for distressed patients. Louie connected back to Creemore when Mr. Victor and Mrs. Louie Beacom established a small hospital in Creemore at 221 Mill Street, adjacent to the former medical office of Doctor Graham on Nelson Street. The hospital was housed on the home’s second floor, later owned by Jack and Winona Heslip.
Following the divorce of Marjorie and Rolly Graham in 1949, my father later married his dedicated nurse, Winnifred Joy White. Dr. J.R.H. Graham died in 1955. Robert J. Graham drowned in a 1952 accident. Marjorie Graham died in Kingston, in 1985. JoyWhite Graham died in Parry Sound, in 2003.
May these memories be for a blessing to keep goodness alive. A film/video on CD in the Creemore Library titled Only Thirty Years Behind the Times presented to the village in 2004, may interest you.
John R. Graham is a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Canada and a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, recently retired from academic life. He now lives in Los Angeles.
