Leaside. Jane Pitfield

      The Corning plant at Brentcliffe and Eglinton, 1967. Leaside Camera Club, courtesy Herb Horwood.

      The firm blended and packaged high quality lubricants and rust preventatives for distribution throughout all of Canada. During both World Wars, the company donated the Valvoline Victory Award Flags. These flags went to the three competitors representing the country which accumulated the greatest number of points at the International Band show.

      In the late 1970s, they moved to Royal Windsor and Winston Churchill in Mississauga. They are still located there. Valvoline produces car products such as Pyroil and Eagle One. With 86 employees in Canada today, the company supports the Molson Indy.¹²

      REO MOTOR COMPANY OF CANADA LIMITED

      At the end of the war (WWII), Canadian truck and bus operators needed new vehicles by the thousands, to replace worn out equipment long, long overdue for scrapyards. Of course, this was also the case the world over—a demand that would take years to satisfy. In 1946, this was an opportunity for the Reo Motor Company of Canada Ltd. to launch an extensive assembly and plant operation at Leaside’s Vanderhoof Avenue. The company would produce some of the needed vehicles.¹³

      The location selected was a large and modern plant which had been part of the wartime Research Enterprises complex at Laird and Eglinton. With the war over, the property was offered for peacetime development through the War Assets Corporation, as, in fact, were other wartime plants which were attractive to automotive companies. Studebaker acquired one such plant in Hamilton for Canadian production, and several other plants were disposed of in much the same way.

      Reo had been active in Leaside since 1931, initially with Dominion Motors and then later in buildings acquired from Dominion when that firm closed during 1933 and 1934. Reo stayed on in its ex-Dominion premises on Commercial Road until just after the war, when it moved a little northwards to its new and spacious stand on Vanderhoof. While shutting down on Commercial Road, Reo opened a new sales and service depot in downtown Toronto, seen at the time as more convenient for the city’s truck owners.

      The operation on Vanderhoof Avenue was on a substantial scale and far exceeded anything Reo had achieved with Dominion Motors while on Commercial. Some 250 workers were employed at peak production times, in addition to personnel in the company’s general offices, sales and export departments. These offices were also located right in the plant.

      Ideal for assembly lines, the property offered 60,000 sq. ft. of production area, space that was ample for three lines: one for trucks; another for buses and coaches; and a third for the Canadian assembly of Kaiser and Frazer cars. The latter had just come on the market and was a new name in the automotive industry. Both cars sold reasonably well initially when their sponsors managed to get them into a market clamouring for new cars, before many of their rivals had reconverted from military production to automobiles. For a time, at least, most of the taxicabs in Toronto were Frazers, many presumably from the Leaside plant.

      Reo had no interest in the marketing of these cars, the assembly program was simply a contract the company had with the Canadian Kaiser-Frazer organization for the supply of completed vehicles to be sold and distributed by the latter. The plan was one that Reo had entered into with Dominion Motors back in 1931. Dominion Motors would assemble Reo cars and trucks under contract for sale by Reo, however the Depression did not allow this to happen.