Ken Setterington
Description
An interview with storyteller and librarian, Ken Setterington, for the Lillian H. Smith Story Project.
Creator
Setterington, Ken
Contributor
Wong, Christina
Format
MP3
Date Created
August 5, 2015
Spatial Coverage
Downtown (Toronto, Ont.)
Kensington-Chinatown (Toronto, Ont.)
University (Toronto, Ont.)
Rights Holder
Wong, Christina
Interviewer
Wong, Christina
Interviewee
Setterington, Ken
Location
Lillian H. Smith Branch
Transcription
00:00 Speaker 1: I was a librarian, and certainly was the children and youth advocate for library services for the Toronto Public Library, a job that was actually created for me.
00:09 Speaker 2: Oh okay. Do you still work for TPL?
00:11 S1: I do not work at TPL, I retired five years ago, and so I have a history with TPL. I also was a prof at UFT, and taught a number of courses and [00:25] ____. So yes, no, I've got a history, and certainly with this library it's a very unique history. I'm also a storyteller, and have been involved in the storytelling community for quite a long time. And one of the storytellers that I was good friends with was Joan Bodger. And so Joan Bodger was a dear friend, and we would lead tours, she started them, but she asked me to join her and we would lead tours in England telling the stories of King Arthur in all of their settings, their original settings. So that was great fun, and Joan and I became very close, very dear friends. And Joan was a tough old...
01:14 S1: She called herself the "Crone of Church Street", and she was a major story teller. I also taught a storytelling course with Joan, and we were good friends, very good friends. It's just that Joan had the ashes of her husband, Alan, never met Alan, didn't know anything about Alan, but I knew Joan. And on a very cold day one winter, probably I guess it would be '90... No, maybe it was 1993, or four, I couldn't tell you which it was, but she... It was Shrove Tuesday, and she decided she wanted pancakes. And so she walked from Church Street to a pancake place up at Bore and St. George, and she slipped in the washroom and fell and broke her shoulder. She smashed her front teeth in, she did a lot of damage to herself.
02:15 S1: And at that point she realized that she still had her husband's ashes in the locker in her apartment building. And she had always planned on putting him underneath the opera house when it was built in Toronto, but the then government had cancelled the opera house, so there was no place to put these ashes. So she called me, because I had a cute little red car, and she said, "Okay, neighbourhood drums, whatever, have told me that the hole is ready for the new library." At that point I don't even think they named the library, but she decided "Okay, it's time to dump these ashes." And the library was the perfect place, because she had met Alan in front of the then Westbury Hotel, and she was reading "Stewart Little". And he was totally surprised that she was making any editorial, because she was gonna be reading it out loud and she didn't have that much time. So they had met and it was over a children's book, so she decided that indeed the new library was a perfect place to put Alan's ashes. But of course she has got her arm in a sling, and is an old lady, and so she called me and said, "Will you help me?" Well, I never said no to Joan, ever. Well, maybe a few times, but I didn't say no to Joan. And so, that was on a Friday night, and we decided we would do this on Sunday.
04:04 S1: So I knew that there would probably be hoarding up around the building site, and then I thought, "Is there gonna be security? Is there gonna be a dog? I'm not a big lover of dogs." And I'm thinking, "Oh, this is great." And I can just imagine one of us climbing...
04:21 S2: All the worst case scenarios.
[chuckle]
04:21 S1: All the worst case scenarios. If there's gonna be anyone climbing the fence, it's gonna be me.
04:27 S2: Yeah.
[chuckle]
04:28 S1: And so we parked the car, got out and she was carrying this box wrapped in paper. And it said, "These are the remains of Alan Nelson Mercer."
04:38 S2: Oh my God.
04:41 S1: And so we started to walk around the building and she said, "No, no, no, we can't go widdershins, we have to go with the sun." So we walked around the other way and we found the perfect spot. Now, Joan embellished when she told this story, and certainly said I risked life and limb, I don't know that that's quite true, but I will say I did have to climb up.
[chuckle]
05:05 S2: Oh my God.
05:06 S1: And she... And it was a bag with the ashes, and I had never dealt with ashes before. But there was a lot more heft to those ashes, and chunky bits, that I wasn't anticipating. But anyway, I was the one who threw them into the building site.
05:29 S2: Like in the hole?
05:30 S1: In the... Well, the whole place was a hole, but there was a certainly a spot that had a little more activity. So there looked like there was a mixer and stuff, thankfully there was no security and there were no dogs.
05:43 S2: And no cameras.
05:45 S1: And no cameras. We did that, and... Or I did that.
05:49 S2: And you didn't tell anybody?
05:51 S1: Didn't tell anybody.
05:52 S2: Okay.
05:52 S1: So the funny thing was, I didn't work for Toronto Public Library at that point, I worked for the Scarborough Public Library. It was pre amalgamation. So I worked for Scarborough and it was very kinda sobering 'cause no matter what there was something hilariously funny about this, but at the same time something really sad because I knew how much Joan loved her husband. So as we're walking away, Joan's got the box, she's got the paper that says, "the remains of Alan Nelson Mercer," and a plastic bag, and she says, "What am I gonna do with this?" And I said, "Oh, Joan, don't worry about it. I'll take care of it." I was thinking, what am I gonna do with it? I don't know, but she doesn't have to worry about that. But Joan said, "No, it all goes together," so she stepped back and then just heaved it over the warden. So it all went together. And she said, "No, this is perfect because what it means is, his ashes are gonna be on the workman's boots and they are going to go through the entire building site and by the time they've discovered the piece of paper that says "the remains of Alan Nelson Mercer" it's gonna be too late." So I'm thinking, okay, fine.
07:11 S1: We then went out and had lunch, and we went to a restaurant just around the corner and I think we went to Cafe La Gaffe and Joan never drank but she had a drink, and that was fine. And I actually had to go home to study because the next day I was going to be on TV Ontario's show, Imprint, and I don't remember what the topic was but I do remember I think Mordecai, or not Mordecai, Daniel Richler was the host and the other two guests were the owner of the Children's Bookstore, [07:53] ____, and the head of the Osborne Collection, Margaret Maloney. And so the whole time I'm doing this live television interview, I'm thinking about his ashes and thinking about the fact that Margaret Maloney doesn't know that underneath her new... The site for her collection is going to be Joan Bodger's husband's ashes. Well, she may have known. But anyway, because she was good friends with Joan Bodger as well. So then I thought it was too good a story so I wrote my story of it and it got published in a book called "When I Went to the Library." It's a Grandwood book for kids and my story was called Rose's Wish, and I changed a lot of things in it but it was very definite and it was the first thing I published so I was kind of pleased with that.
08:48 S1: And then Joan wrote her story and her story was published in the Saturday Night Magazine. The difficulty with that was by the time it got published I was working for the Toronto Public Library. So on a Friday I got a call from Saturday Night Magazine fact checking to make sure that everything was true and she had written the story years before and they had never published it. And so suddenly they just decided that it was the perfect story for that issue, which was then being distributed by The Globe and Mail. And so I knew that the story was going to make it into the Saturday Globe. So I was working in TPL and I'm reporting to the CEO and so I thought, "nobody likes surprises so I better warn her." So I went into her office at probably quarter to 5 on a Friday and I just said, "You just need to know that there's gonna be a story in the paper on the weekend and it's true, and I did help Joan scatter her husband's ashes in the building site for the library."
10:03 S1: I don't know what the real reaction was. I don't think it was one of pleasure to be honest. I think it was kind of like, "Ugh, how are we gonna deal with this 'cause it's a national paper?" A lot of people read it. But the funny thing was the then Chair read the story over the weekend and he thought it was an amazing wonderful love story and so, all was good. All was good. And indeed when the library opened I went to the opening of the library with Joan Bodger and I'd say some of the people at the opening knew and a whole lot of people didn't. It always makes me smile when I come into this building and I usually like to sign the guest book because it's on the stand, a little stand that Joan donated to the library. And so if you sign the guest book in the Osborne Collection, there's a little brass plaque and it says, "Alan Nelson Mercer. He could write a good sentence." And that was what Joan donated to the library to commemorate Alan. And all of Joan's archives are in the Osborne Collection and including a pretty major portrait of her.
11:31 S2: I didn't know she had such a strong connection here.
11:33 S1: Oh, yeah, yeah. No question. Joan was a pretty major player in the storytelling community. She was a force, there was no question. And when you saw her walking, she always had a 6-foot hazel walking stick and she always let you know that she was around. And so Joan and I, we did a lot of things together so... And I can remember 'cause I was president of the Canadian Children's book center. We had an AGM here and it was going really badly, down in the basement. And the whole time I was thinking yeah but I've got other friends here.
[laughter]
12:14 S1: I've got a spirit that still lives on in this building. And it kind of got me through a really rough meeting. Coming in here and... So that's why I will give my archival stuff for my story about Joan or about these ashes to go into the Osborne collection as well.
12:38 S2: Oh wow.
12:41 S1: It's an interesting story.
12:43 S2: It's a great story.
12:45 S1: I don't know that there are that many other libraries that have ashes underneath...
12:51 S2: Quite the history.
[laughter]
12:52 S1: Quite the history. And the nice thing is, in Joan's book, when she was writing, she didn't know she was dying at the time. But she wrote her memoirs called "The Crack in the Teacup".
13:06 S2: Okay.
13:07 S1: So her memoirs and the story is included in that.
13:09 S2: That's so interesting. I should look it up.
13:10 S1: So you should get a copy of 'The Crack in the Teacup', by Joan Bodger. But she had a very tough life. She... I knew Joan as just this tough old broad. And I don't think she'd have any difficulty with me saying that. But I didn't realize that her life had been difficult, her first husband... She also wrote a book that's really quite remarkable called "How the Heather Looks", which is the stories of a young family... Or a family going to Britain to look at the sites of British Children's Literature. So they go to Beatrix Potter's farm and Arthur Ransom and it's all of that. But while she was writing that, her daughter, who she talks about in the story as Lucy, she died of a brain tumour. And then her husband became schizophrenic and her son became schizophrenic.
14:10 S2: Oh my God.
14:11 S2: And so her whole family kind of collapsed. So the story of meeting this man Alan, it was kind of a whole new beginning and a whole new life. So when he died it was sad too. So, Joan is a remarkable figure. And it's nice that all of her stuff...
14:31 S2: Is here.
14:31 S1: Including the walking stick. So that's me and... What I would only say is going to the opening of this library.
14:38 S2: You must have felt...
[laughter]
14:39 S1: I had a smirk that was... It was just fun. Now I just have to deal with Joan's ashes...
00:09 Speaker 2: Oh okay. Do you still work for TPL?
00:11 S1: I do not work at TPL, I retired five years ago, and so I have a history with TPL. I also was a prof at UFT, and taught a number of courses and [00:25] ____. So yes, no, I've got a history, and certainly with this library it's a very unique history. I'm also a storyteller, and have been involved in the storytelling community for quite a long time. And one of the storytellers that I was good friends with was Joan Bodger. And so Joan Bodger was a dear friend, and we would lead tours, she started them, but she asked me to join her and we would lead tours in England telling the stories of King Arthur in all of their settings, their original settings. So that was great fun, and Joan and I became very close, very dear friends. And Joan was a tough old...
01:14 S1: She called herself the "Crone of Church Street", and she was a major story teller. I also taught a storytelling course with Joan, and we were good friends, very good friends. It's just that Joan had the ashes of her husband, Alan, never met Alan, didn't know anything about Alan, but I knew Joan. And on a very cold day one winter, probably I guess it would be '90... No, maybe it was 1993, or four, I couldn't tell you which it was, but she... It was Shrove Tuesday, and she decided she wanted pancakes. And so she walked from Church Street to a pancake place up at Bore and St. George, and she slipped in the washroom and fell and broke her shoulder. She smashed her front teeth in, she did a lot of damage to herself.
02:15 S1: And at that point she realized that she still had her husband's ashes in the locker in her apartment building. And she had always planned on putting him underneath the opera house when it was built in Toronto, but the then government had cancelled the opera house, so there was no place to put these ashes. So she called me, because I had a cute little red car, and she said, "Okay, neighbourhood drums, whatever, have told me that the hole is ready for the new library." At that point I don't even think they named the library, but she decided "Okay, it's time to dump these ashes." And the library was the perfect place, because she had met Alan in front of the then Westbury Hotel, and she was reading "Stewart Little". And he was totally surprised that she was making any editorial, because she was gonna be reading it out loud and she didn't have that much time. So they had met and it was over a children's book, so she decided that indeed the new library was a perfect place to put Alan's ashes. But of course she has got her arm in a sling, and is an old lady, and so she called me and said, "Will you help me?" Well, I never said no to Joan, ever. Well, maybe a few times, but I didn't say no to Joan. And so, that was on a Friday night, and we decided we would do this on Sunday.
04:04 S1: So I knew that there would probably be hoarding up around the building site, and then I thought, "Is there gonna be security? Is there gonna be a dog? I'm not a big lover of dogs." And I'm thinking, "Oh, this is great." And I can just imagine one of us climbing...
04:21 S2: All the worst case scenarios.
[chuckle]
04:21 S1: All the worst case scenarios. If there's gonna be anyone climbing the fence, it's gonna be me.
04:27 S2: Yeah.
[chuckle]
04:28 S1: And so we parked the car, got out and she was carrying this box wrapped in paper. And it said, "These are the remains of Alan Nelson Mercer."
04:38 S2: Oh my God.
04:41 S1: And so we started to walk around the building and she said, "No, no, no, we can't go widdershins, we have to go with the sun." So we walked around the other way and we found the perfect spot. Now, Joan embellished when she told this story, and certainly said I risked life and limb, I don't know that that's quite true, but I will say I did have to climb up.
[chuckle]
05:05 S2: Oh my God.
05:06 S1: And she... And it was a bag with the ashes, and I had never dealt with ashes before. But there was a lot more heft to those ashes, and chunky bits, that I wasn't anticipating. But anyway, I was the one who threw them into the building site.
05:29 S2: Like in the hole?
05:30 S1: In the... Well, the whole place was a hole, but there was a certainly a spot that had a little more activity. So there looked like there was a mixer and stuff, thankfully there was no security and there were no dogs.
05:43 S2: And no cameras.
05:45 S1: And no cameras. We did that, and... Or I did that.
05:49 S2: And you didn't tell anybody?
05:51 S1: Didn't tell anybody.
05:52 S2: Okay.
05:52 S1: So the funny thing was, I didn't work for Toronto Public Library at that point, I worked for the Scarborough Public Library. It was pre amalgamation. So I worked for Scarborough and it was very kinda sobering 'cause no matter what there was something hilariously funny about this, but at the same time something really sad because I knew how much Joan loved her husband. So as we're walking away, Joan's got the box, she's got the paper that says, "the remains of Alan Nelson Mercer," and a plastic bag, and she says, "What am I gonna do with this?" And I said, "Oh, Joan, don't worry about it. I'll take care of it." I was thinking, what am I gonna do with it? I don't know, but she doesn't have to worry about that. But Joan said, "No, it all goes together," so she stepped back and then just heaved it over the warden. So it all went together. And she said, "No, this is perfect because what it means is, his ashes are gonna be on the workman's boots and they are going to go through the entire building site and by the time they've discovered the piece of paper that says "the remains of Alan Nelson Mercer" it's gonna be too late." So I'm thinking, okay, fine.
07:11 S1: We then went out and had lunch, and we went to a restaurant just around the corner and I think we went to Cafe La Gaffe and Joan never drank but she had a drink, and that was fine. And I actually had to go home to study because the next day I was going to be on TV Ontario's show, Imprint, and I don't remember what the topic was but I do remember I think Mordecai, or not Mordecai, Daniel Richler was the host and the other two guests were the owner of the Children's Bookstore, [07:53] ____, and the head of the Osborne Collection, Margaret Maloney. And so the whole time I'm doing this live television interview, I'm thinking about his ashes and thinking about the fact that Margaret Maloney doesn't know that underneath her new... The site for her collection is going to be Joan Bodger's husband's ashes. Well, she may have known. But anyway, because she was good friends with Joan Bodger as well. So then I thought it was too good a story so I wrote my story of it and it got published in a book called "When I Went to the Library." It's a Grandwood book for kids and my story was called Rose's Wish, and I changed a lot of things in it but it was very definite and it was the first thing I published so I was kind of pleased with that.
08:48 S1: And then Joan wrote her story and her story was published in the Saturday Night Magazine. The difficulty with that was by the time it got published I was working for the Toronto Public Library. So on a Friday I got a call from Saturday Night Magazine fact checking to make sure that everything was true and she had written the story years before and they had never published it. And so suddenly they just decided that it was the perfect story for that issue, which was then being distributed by The Globe and Mail. And so I knew that the story was going to make it into the Saturday Globe. So I was working in TPL and I'm reporting to the CEO and so I thought, "nobody likes surprises so I better warn her." So I went into her office at probably quarter to 5 on a Friday and I just said, "You just need to know that there's gonna be a story in the paper on the weekend and it's true, and I did help Joan scatter her husband's ashes in the building site for the library."
10:03 S1: I don't know what the real reaction was. I don't think it was one of pleasure to be honest. I think it was kind of like, "Ugh, how are we gonna deal with this 'cause it's a national paper?" A lot of people read it. But the funny thing was the then Chair read the story over the weekend and he thought it was an amazing wonderful love story and so, all was good. All was good. And indeed when the library opened I went to the opening of the library with Joan Bodger and I'd say some of the people at the opening knew and a whole lot of people didn't. It always makes me smile when I come into this building and I usually like to sign the guest book because it's on the stand, a little stand that Joan donated to the library. And so if you sign the guest book in the Osborne Collection, there's a little brass plaque and it says, "Alan Nelson Mercer. He could write a good sentence." And that was what Joan donated to the library to commemorate Alan. And all of Joan's archives are in the Osborne Collection and including a pretty major portrait of her.
11:31 S2: I didn't know she had such a strong connection here.
11:33 S1: Oh, yeah, yeah. No question. Joan was a pretty major player in the storytelling community. She was a force, there was no question. And when you saw her walking, she always had a 6-foot hazel walking stick and she always let you know that she was around. And so Joan and I, we did a lot of things together so... And I can remember 'cause I was president of the Canadian Children's book center. We had an AGM here and it was going really badly, down in the basement. And the whole time I was thinking yeah but I've got other friends here.
[laughter]
12:14 S1: I've got a spirit that still lives on in this building. And it kind of got me through a really rough meeting. Coming in here and... So that's why I will give my archival stuff for my story about Joan or about these ashes to go into the Osborne collection as well.
12:38 S2: Oh wow.
12:41 S1: It's an interesting story.
12:43 S2: It's a great story.
12:45 S1: I don't know that there are that many other libraries that have ashes underneath...
12:51 S2: Quite the history.
[laughter]
12:52 S1: Quite the history. And the nice thing is, in Joan's book, when she was writing, she didn't know she was dying at the time. But she wrote her memoirs called "The Crack in the Teacup".
13:06 S2: Okay.
13:07 S1: So her memoirs and the story is included in that.
13:09 S2: That's so interesting. I should look it up.
13:10 S1: So you should get a copy of 'The Crack in the Teacup', by Joan Bodger. But she had a very tough life. She... I knew Joan as just this tough old broad. And I don't think she'd have any difficulty with me saying that. But I didn't realize that her life had been difficult, her first husband... She also wrote a book that's really quite remarkable called "How the Heather Looks", which is the stories of a young family... Or a family going to Britain to look at the sites of British Children's Literature. So they go to Beatrix Potter's farm and Arthur Ransom and it's all of that. But while she was writing that, her daughter, who she talks about in the story as Lucy, she died of a brain tumour. And then her husband became schizophrenic and her son became schizophrenic.
14:10 S2: Oh my God.
14:11 S2: And so her whole family kind of collapsed. So the story of meeting this man Alan, it was kind of a whole new beginning and a whole new life. So when he died it was sad too. So, Joan is a remarkable figure. And it's nice that all of her stuff...
14:31 S2: Is here.
14:31 S1: Including the walking stick. So that's me and... What I would only say is going to the opening of this library.
14:38 S2: You must have felt...
[laughter]
14:39 S1: I had a smirk that was... It was just fun. Now I just have to deal with Joan's ashes...
Files
Collection
Citation
Setterington, Ken, “Ken Setterington,” TPL Virtual Exhibits, accessed April 28, 2024, http://omeka.tplcs.ca/virtual-exhibits/items/show/1787.