James Stuart Edgar

1943 - 2022

James Stuart Edgar (1943-2022)

It is with deep sadness we announce the death of James Stuart Edgar. His sudden and unexpected passing took place at his home in Edmonton, Alberta on the morning of September 28, 2022. He was 79 years old.

Jim, as most people called him, was born March 4, 1943 in Sherbrooke, Québec to Charles Stuart Edgar (1913-2001) and Helen Edith Edgar (née Reed) (1913-2007).

Jim’s father, called Stuart throughout his life, was born in Wainwright, Alberta but moved to the province of Québec with his parents and younger sister when he was five years old. They first lived in Christieville, then Montréal, before settling in North Hatley by the time Stuart was in the ninth grade. Jim’s mother, Helen, was born and raised in North Hatley. Helen and Stuart attended the same school and knew each other socially but didn’t begin dating until years later.

Stuart’s father, Walter, was a sickly man most of his adult life after having been diagnosed with tuberculosis as a teenager. As a result he struggled to find and maintain employment, working odd jobs here and there, so young Stuart often had to help his parents out, including helping his dad deliver the mail in North Hatley while Stuart was still a teenager. When Walter died in 1935, at the age of 47, Stuart withdrew from the business school he was attending to return to the family farm and take care of his mother, Rita, who became a nursing assistant after her husband’s death. The following year Stuart began working as a draftsperson for the tool and die manufacturer, Butterfield’s, which had a large factory straddling the border between Rock Island, Québec and Derby Line, Vermont. This unique location allowed Butterfield’s to employ workers from both sides of the border, with upwards of 800 employees at its peak. Eventually Stuart became the chief engineer of both the Canadian and American sides of the factory.

Jim’s mother, Helen, moved away from the family home in North Hatley as a young woman to attend teacher’s college and then returned to the area to begin her career as a grade school teacher, first in Oliver Corner, then Hatley and Ayer’s Cliff. After numerous years of courting, Helen and Stuart married in the summer of 1939. At the end of the next school year, pregnant with their first child, Helen quit teaching in 1940. Jim’s older brother, Gordon, was born that fall and two and a half years later, in spring 1943, Jim was born. Roughly fifteen years after quitting teaching to become a mother and raise two children, Helen would return to teaching full-time, now at Sunnyside, the school down the street from the family home.

Jamie, as elder family and his oldest friends called him, grew up in southeastern Québec, first in the small border village, Beebe, before the family moved in 1957 to the nearby village, Rock Island. Both Beebe and Rock Island have since merged into the neighbouring town of Stanstead. The family now lived in a small bungalow which Stuart designed and drafted, with significant help from Helen. By all accounts it was a traditional and happy home, and Jamie grew up with a large extended family of grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins throughout the Eastern Townships, surrounding area and beyond.

Jamie began school in 1948 at Beebe Elementary School, followed by three years at Sunnyside Elementary School for junior high, before moving across the street to the private school, Stanstead College, for tenth and eleventh grade because Sunnyside did not offer high school at that time. He was intelligent and inquisitive but only achieved moderate scholastic success, relying on natural ability more than effort. Concerned with the quality of education Jamie had received in private school, where his grades had been less than spectacular, and in consideration of his young age, Jamie’s parents had him repeat eleventh grade at the newly expanded and renamed Sunnyside High School in 1959, where he excelled academically for the first time.

Throughout school and beyond Jamie preferred athletics, music and other social pursuits to attending lectures in dusty school rooms or listening to even dustier professors. Growing up he played as much football, hockey and baseball as possible but enjoyed all sports suited to his comparatively larger frame; a lithe distance runner, he was not.

In 1960, at seventeen years old, Jamie flew the family nest after completing high school. He followed in the footsteps of his older brother and enrolled at the University of Waterloo. Because his matriculation from high school was considered junior, Jamie first had to complete one year of pre-engineering courses before entering the electrical engineering program. Possessing an aptitude for mathematics, Jamie developed an interest in the field of computing during the era of handwritten code and punch cards; this interest would develop from personal to professional and continue throughout his life. As part of his program’s coop requirements, he found himself spending semesters and summers working for companies such as IBM and RCA in the Toronto area during the early-to-mid 1960s. While he had many wonderful memories of his time working and studying in southern Ontario, it also was during this period when the loathsome Toronto Maple Leafs were regularly humiliating his beloved Montréal Canadiens. He got over it eventually.

Jim received his engineer’s ring in 1966 although he never technically graduated from the University of Waterloo. He passed all required courses, even returning for an extra semester to complete some remaining coursework, but he declined to submit his undergraduate thesis. Decades later Jim still would find his incomplete result in university inexplicable, although he would readily admit his penchant for going out dancing, hearing live music, playing sports and drinking beer had played their part. Indeed, despite growing up in a household with parents who only drank alcohol socially on occasion, in university Jim developed such fondness for social libations he was a member of a competitive beer drinking team. Few of the team’s activities were remembered, or perhaps few memories even were formed.

After university, Jim decided to put off beginning his career in favour of joining a friend on a trek through Europe. They made the Atlantic crossing by sea, and Jim picked up a brand new BMW motorcycle in Hamburg before working briefly on a farm in Germany. His backpacking excursion across much of Western Europe was extended after he parted ways with his first friend, joined up with new friends and continued traveling, eventually heading south into North Africa and the Middle East. After a year overseas, contemporary events disrupted his initial plans to travel throughout the Middle East when the Six-Day War began. It was around this time and place when Jim was detained by local police and had his camera and the film from his trip confiscated. Ever adaptable, he shrugged this off, jumped back on his bike and visited the countries his passport allowed him before eventually returning to Canada in late 1967.

Jim arrived back home in Rock Island, Québec on a motorcycle, wearing a big, long beard and a guitar strapped to his back, but he was absent money, a job or any prospects. Jim’s parents were less than thrilled. After a brief period of living in his parents’ basement, enduring repeated questions about his future and polite promptings from his mom and dad to get it together, Jim found his way to Montréal, where he began his career.

His first job after returning to Canada was as a computer operator with Royal Bank of Canada and it was here where he met his coworker and future wife, Helene, in January 1968. Jim and Helene socialized together with colleagues and friends but wouldn’t begin dating for nearly a year. Helene’s father died in October 1968 so she quit her job with Royal Bank; after going to Vancouver for the funeral she travelled most of the next year in East Asia before returning to Canada at the end of 1969. It was then Jim and Helene began dating; they even spent that Christmas with Jim’s parents in Rock Island. The young couple soon found themselves facing an unexpected fork in the road and ultimately decided to marry. Their first child, Kevin, was born in the late summer of 1970. Just a couple months later, during the October Crisis, the newlywed parents saw soldiers with machine guns march and tanks roll down Rue Sainte-Catherine, just around the corner from their apartment in Westmount.

After Royal Bank, Jim began working for RCA in Montréal thanks to connections he had made while working for the company as a student during summer breaks. In the spring of 1972 their second child, Stephanie, was born. While Helene stayed at home to raise two young children, Jim continued to work and provide for their family. In January 1976, through the Canadian International Development Agency, Jim began a two-year contract with Touche Ross (now part of Deloitte) to build modern computer systems for the Jamaican government. This took him, Helene and their two kids to Jamaica. Unfortunately this period of Caribbean living for the family was brief.

While Helene’s sister, Karen, her husband, Bill, and their two young children were visiting Jim and Helene in Jamaica, the family was held up at gunpoint in the driveway of their home. This was an isolated incident for the family but gun violence was becoming increasingly common-place across the country. It was election season and politicians were popular targets for shootings and killings; this included an election candidate who lived and was murdered very close to where Jim and the family lived. Feeling this environment was not safe enough to raise their children in, Helene returned to Canada with the kids in February 1977.

Because they had anticipated living in Jamaica for two years (or more if Jim’s contract had been extended, which was likely), Jim and Helene had rented their Montréal townhouse for two years. Having no place to live in Canada and having no other family, Helene and the kids settled in Edmonton, where her sister lived. Jim tied up loose ends in Jamaica and then drove the family car, an eggplant coloured Datsun station wagon, from Florida to rejoin the family about a month later.

After spending a few months living in the Glenora neighbourhood of Edmonton—first with Helene’s sister and her family, then briefly renting a house nearby, Jim, Helene and their two kids moved in June 1977 to Sherwood Park. Their third child, Darren, was born near the end of the year and their last child, Cameron, was born in the spring of 1979. As a husband and a father, Jim felt complete. He enjoyed his career and his work relationships but he felt a profoundly deeper satisfaction providing for the family and helping in his way to raise the children. Which is why what occurred later was so devastating for him.

Upon arriving in Edmonton, Jim began working for the City as a manager in their Computer Department; however, he felt managing staff was not his strongest suit so he took a job working for the Province of Alberta, in the Computer Department of Alberta Housing. He was admired and appreciated by his colleagues for his technical skills and experience. Never one for self-aggrandizement, Jim had little patience for it in others nor did he have much interest in navigating the egos, personalities and pitfalls of office politics so he soon began to dream of self-employment.

In the early 1980s Jim began JSE Consulting, offering contract services related to computer programming and project management. Initial success enabled him to pay off the mortgage on the family home in 1982 but a global recession, felt particularly sharply in Alberta, brought things to a halt almost overnight. The oil crisis of the 1970s was followed by an oil glut in the 1980s, inflation was rising, prime interest rates were skyrocketing (soon to reach 21%), layoffs, mortgage defaults and bankruptcies were commonplace. Like many people, Jim’s timing was unfortunate, and before his consulting career even had a chance to blossom it was all but over. He was only able to find occasional contract work over the next few years while Alberta slowly recovered from the recession.

In November 1984, after years of growing tension between them, Jim and Helene’s marriage ended in divorce. Each of them wished to stay in the family home to raise the kids and hoped the other would agree to move out, into the nearby townhouse they had purchased as a rental property. There was no agreement between Jim and Helene on these points—they were at an impasse—but ultimately Jim begrudgingly moved out in order to avoid the children being caught in the middle of an ugly and contested divorce. For the rest of his life Jim considered this acquiescence his greatest regret.

Jim felt betrayed and like a failure. His marriage had dissolved, his company seemed only to exist on paper because he wasn’t working at this time, he only lived for about six months in the townhouse before it was foreclosed, and time spent with his children was now infrequent and diminished. Jim had spiralled into a depression so pervasive he began to seriously consider suicide. Thankfully, he reached out to a crisis hotline multiple times during this period. After this he continued scraping the bottom of the barrel for some time, selling off furniture and his possessions to keep a roof over his head, and taking any odd job he could find to make ends meet. He worked telemarketing and telephone sales, he made deliveries, he did whatever he could at the time to keep from collapsing entirely. This period in his life marked a profound transition for Jim, from social and happy-go-lucky to more insular and somewhat embittered. Unfortunately, he never fully recovered.

Later, Jim was living in a small apartment on the north side of Edmonton, working as its superintendent, and had begun working at a Boston Pizza franchise. It started as a job just to make ends meet, like many others before it, but became the bulk of his working life. He worked in various locations, for various management groups, even in various cities, and he worked nearly every position within the restaurant at one time or another—delivery, kitchen, front of house, management and administration. He never anticipated working in the restaurant industry but as ever necessity is the mother of invention and, in the end, it was the people he worked with over nearly 35 years at Boston Pizza who filled out his social circle and became like a second family. It was even here his only significant romantic relationship after the divorce began, when he and another coworker dated for a few years. Jim continued working well into his seventies, only retiring after the global COVID-19 pandemic began.

As he was buffeted by the trials and tribulations of life Jim would consider his options and question his decisions, he would ponder the future and reassess the past, but all along his moral compass never seemed to waiver. Honesty and sincerity were his core principles and the traits he valued most in others. What you saw was what you got with Jim, and he always would give it to you straight. Across the various jobs he worked over the years and the relationships he developed through them, Jim earned a reputation for being fair and honest with others no matter who they were. He loved sharing his wisdom and experience with others and would go to great lengths to help out however he could, even if at times it was to his own personal detriment. But Jim never cared much for possessions or status, holding greater value in being a good person. Perhaps this will be his legacy.

Jim’s lack of interest and success in academics belied his intelligence and analytical mind. He was an avid reader and a lifelong learner. He would read anything which interested him or he thought might be useful and he loved talking for hours about nearly everything under the sun, including history, philosophy, politics, economics, psychology and music. And if these long meandering conversations were taking place over a few beer, so much the better. Surely anybody who has known Jim well has enjoyed, perhaps at times endured, one or more of these long conversations.

In his later years, Jim’s physical health declined significantly. As time marched on he developed significant hearing loss, diabetes, and COPD, among other health complications. No doubt these were a result from some combination of nearly fifty years of smoking cigarettes, a less than healthy diet, an increasingly inactive lifestyle and general aging. To Jim’s credit, however, after previous attempts he successfully quit smoking cold turkey in 2015. Though his physical capacity was diminished, he maintained a sharp mind and continued to love spending time on his computer, reading books, listening to music and gathering with family to socialize and play board or card games. He enjoyed life, in his way, until the end.

Jim Edgar is survived by his children, Kevin (Jill), Stephanie, Darren (Rick), and Cameron (Maja); his grandchildren, Kimberley, Jennifer, Marcus, Alexandra, Olivia and Leyla; his former wife, Helene (Ray); his brother, Gordon; as well as nieces and nephews, cousins, in-laws and many more relations.

A memorial social was held in Edmonton, Alberta on November 5, 2022 and a small private ceremony will take place to inter Jim’s ashes alongside his parents, Helen and Stuart, in Reedsville Cemetery in Hatley, Québec. Friends and family are encouraged to share remembrances of Jim in the comments section below.

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