“I was cook for about 50 years, on ships. Six million, six hundred and some thousand meals.”
But that’s only 50 years’ worth Aubrey Ingraham’s 102 years. The Middleton man – seaman, Merchant Navy veteran, volunteer, husband and father – turned 102 August 5. He has not simply lived a full life; he has lived life to the fullest.
Born in the small town of Burgeo, Newfoundland, in 1921, Ingraham says times were hard, but he remembers making the most of what they had.
“We had rubber boots: that’s all we had to wear on our feet. And, every Christmas, the boys would get rubber boots up to their knees. The first thing you did, you walked to the pond and got in the water and said, ‘I can walk further than you,’ and you said, ‘Oh no, you can’t!’ and we’d both have our boots full of water!”
While Ingraham was a spirited lad, he worked hard to help his family. His father was lost at sea when he was very young, and his mother kept boarders to help make ends meet. Ingraham quit school to work different jobs in town, even helping build Burgeo’s first hospital. He fished and hunted, and helped his mother in the kitchen – where he learned how to cook.
As a child, he would take a rowboat out to fish. Once, he was about four miles out on a calm day, waiting for the fish to bite, when a whale surfaced beside his dory.
“This whale blew. I don’t know if you ever heard a whale blow: it’s a big noise. Well, that line came in so fast! I didn’t stop, I put the oars out and I was going for home! I thought the devil had me! A kid, eight years old out there – never heard that noise before!”
The scare didn’t keep Ingraham from the sea. In 1938, he left home to find work in Nova Scotia: no easy feat. Newfoundland was still a British colony. To get to Halifax, Ingraham boarded a passenger ship to Port-aux-Basques, followed by a steam ship to Sydney, where he passed through immigration. Afterwards, he embarked on a train to Halifax where his sister, Hattie, awaited him.
Ingraham started his sailing career aboard the Ruth Marie, a schooner the size of the Bluenose with a crew of four, sailing from Sydney to carry coal to Newfoundland ports. In 1939, with the outbreak of the Second World War, he joined the Merchant Navy, initially as a deckhand aboard the SS Evelyn B of the Dominion Coal and Steel Company out of Sydney.
“Probably a month after I went on the ship, they fired the cook. I’d go back in the galley and cook my own breakfast, or dish up my own soup, and this chief steward, he said, ‘You seem quite handy around a stove. Why don’t you take the cook job?’ I said, ‘Well, I never did any cooking before, I only helped my mother sometimes.’ He said, ‘Well, just pretend you’re helping your mother and go cookin’!’”
Cooking for a crew of 35 with no running water and a coal stove had its challenges. Ingraham had to travel back and forth from the engine room to shovel enough coal to fuel the galley stove, and the crew worked under blackout conditions – not even risking a candle unless the doors were shut, for fear they may be discovered by an enemy ship: “out there, you could see it for miles.”
Once the war ended, Ingraham worked aboard the CS Lord Kelvin for 10 years, a Trans Atlantic Cable Repair ship belonging to the Anglo-American Telegraph Company. The 85-person crew sailed across the Atlantic.
“We laid the first Flexible Telephone Repeater between Key West, Florida, and Havana, Cuba. It took us three months to do that.”
In 1957, Ingraham ended up at the British American Transportation Company, stationed out of Bay Street in Toronto. He applied for a cook’s position on their coastal oil tanker, the BA Peerless.
“I wrote a resume to them, and I got hired right on the spot. When I went on the ship, I said to the chief steward, ‘try me for six months and, if you’re not happy, let me know and I’ll be on my way.’ Twenty-seven years later, I left.”
The Peerless was Ingraham’s favorite ship.
“I had a beautiful cabin all to myself, with a toilet in the cabin, and a settee and a lovely, lovely bed. She was a beautiful ship – mahogany furniture and all that, and you can imagine that it was pretty nice.”
The first few years with the BA Peerless were spent in the Great Lakes, Ingraham’s favourite location due to the calm waters.
“It’s a nice smooth trip, there are no big waves – except on Lake Superior. I got seasick almost every time I went to sea, but I never, ever gave up work, and I never ever took anything for it – no Gravol, nothing. Well, I’m stubborn, I guess, and I never missed a meal. Not one in my lifetime!”
During the winters when the ship was tied at the docks, Ingraham returned to his family in Nova Scotia. During that time, he found a position as a cook at the officer’s mess at 14 Wing Greenwood.
“I was going there in the morning at three o’clock. I’d make dozens of pies and stuff, and then I’d come home at three in the afternoon. I did that for two or three winters.”
Once the St. Lawrence seaway was completed in 1959, the Peerless moved to Halifax to accept larger contracts on the Atlantic Ocean. At night, his wife and three children would come visit as he was on watch.
During his career, Ingraham sailed the Atlantic Ocean, from South America to Europe to the Beaufort Sea. He visited zinc and lead mines among the polar bears on Little Cornwallis Island and served a Christmas feast of roast suckling pig on a trip to Venezuela. He managed rental properties in Halifax and owned a store in his hometown, which he later gave to his mother. From all his travels, the Annapolis Valley is where Ingraham decided to put down roots.
“I once had the little store in Burgeo, and I ordered a barrel of apples from whoever the wholesale was in Halifax and, when I got these apples, they looked so nice, you know? The only apple I’d seen in my life was one at Christmas time. I saw these apples and I said, ‘I’d love to go see where these apples grow.’”
Retirement has been no time to rest: Ingraham has provided hundreds of lunches to school-aged children through the Solomon’s Lunch program and cooking fundraising suppers, including a delicious roast beef dinner for the Middleton Scouting group in 2010, which earned him his own Scouts volunteering badge. In 1993, Ingraham was Annapolis County’s “Exceptional Volunteer” during Provincial Volunteer Week. In 1995, he became an honorary member of the Emmanuel Congregational Christian Church’s women’s ways and means committee and, in 1999, he was CTV’s Maritimer of the Week, alongside his dear wife, Verna. He spent 40 years with Friendly Neighbors, cooking for volunteers. In the last several years, he has continued volunteering in the kitchen of the Heart of the Valley Long Term Care Centre for its monthly supper club.
Last November, Middleton Royal Canadian Legion Branch #1 honored Ingraham as its first veteran in its new Remembrance Day banner campaign, and Ingraham was touched. On volunteering, in a recent interview, he said, “it makes me feel better than the people that I do it for. I really enjoy helping people. I did that most of my life.”
From his days as a youngster in Burgeo, when he would deliver cakes and soup to seniors and other locals in need in the community, Ingraham went on to collect and deliver goods, food and toys to children in Venezuela when his ship would travel there. He even stepped into Santa Claus’ boots for 20 years.
With a full career, a life of work, adventure and experiences; volunteering and a never-ending set of wonderful stories, Ingraham offers these words of wisdom: “Don’t quit.”
