Rosie DiManno: How the Fresh Air Fund has been sending kids to summer camp for over 120 years
Not the answer I was expecting from this five-year-old, who lives in a sunless Brampton basement apartment.Her age clearly has much to do with the incomprehension. So, I explain all the fun stuff she’d get to enjoy — swimming and canoeing, games and crafts. Interest stirs. But when I add that she’d be away from mom and dad for a while, with other children, well, that’s a deal-breaker. “Uh-uh.”
What I know is what I’ve read over the decades of the charitable campaign initiated in 1902 — after one of the worst heat waves on record for Toronto, the thermometer topping 38 C — by this paper’s publisher Joseph E. Atkinson, unflagging champion for social justice and progressive ideals. It was the sight of bedraggled children playing in mud-baked streets that pulled at the heart of a man who was raised in grinding poverty himself, with a widowed mother and seven siblings.
From July 22, 1902, and one of the first batches of youngsters sent off to distant, sylvan surroundings — actually Cooksville, otherwise known today as Mississauga. “Wan faces, smiling, anxious mothers making frequent enquiries … it was a party of the children of the Toronto Fresh Air Fund leaving for their fortnight’s outing on the homesteads.”
July 6, 1906, when the big, local news story was over a move to ban trolleys on Sunday in the Junction. At that time, the Fund was also arranging outings for exhausted poor mothers and their babies. “Many of the women have shiftless, perhaps dissipated, and brutal husbands,” the Daily Star snipped disapprovingly, “which means that they support themselves and their babies doing the work of charwomen, and their lives are mainly hard drudgery, unrelieved by a ray of sunshine.
Sept. 23, 1909 — building lots on Dovercourt Road are going for $7 per square foot — the Star reports the Fresh Air Fund has dispersed $2,054.26 on 10,422 day outings for underprivileged kids.
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