is no record of a reply. For many years an LL.B. to put after his name was to become a consuming passion. Later Sam would pull many strings in his quest to be awarded an LL.D., but to no avail.
In August of 1922, Sam registered with the University of Chicago for eight departmental examinations, all approved for those whose practice would be in Ontario. However he never enrolled. More than likely he found the load he was bearing at Ivey and Ivey too time and energy consuming to do justice to eight subjects of study. His object was to enrol in Law School in Chicago or to acquire an A.B. He would have been given one year of credit for “Home Study,” but the remaining three years would have had to be spent on campus in Chicago, a dream that had to be put on hold for lack of money and which was never fulfilled. He had hoped to be given all four years in “Home Study,” but that was impossible.
In the early twenties the firm became known as Ivey, Elliott and Ivey and later Ivey, Elliott, Weir & Gillanders. By 1923, the firm name was listed as Ivey & Co., in 1924 as Jeffery & Co. By 1925 it had reverted to Ivey & Co, in 1926 Jeffery & Co once more. In 1927, the practice was listed as Jeffery, Gelber, A.O. McElheran & E.G. Moorhouse. Ten years later in 1937, Sam was in business for himself.
In the early years of his practice, Sam would be involved in a bankruptcy suit brought by London Life Insurance Co. against Lang Shirt of London. A complicated series of actions began after the president of the company was found to have borrowed on his own life insurance policies from Aetna Life Insurance Co. in order to benefit Lang Shirt. When the bankruptcy of the shirt manufacturer loomed, the president took his own life. Sam helped to prepare briefs on the case which lasted over a period of years.
As soon as Sam started out as a young lawyer with Ivey and Ivey, he began to buy bonds and stocks with whatever bits of money he could spare. With memories of his father’s ineptitude in the management of money, taxes in arrears, the sale of property for realty taxes and bought back later with a penalty, in arrears again, then having to move, Sam was determined that his goal was to be solvent and debt free.
At some time in 1920 or possibly 1921, an entirely unplanned encounter did a great deal to change Sam’s life. An itinerant picture salesman called on him at his office, showed him Dame Laura Knight’s watercolour Ballet Girls and Sam fell under its spell. Forty five years later in a letter to L.A. Dowsett of Leger Galleries in Bond Street, Sam wrote:
“I was got into the art collecting by Laura Knight. A man named Carroll who used to travel pictures through Canada and the United States landed a watercolour on me which had been done by Laura Knight for reproduction in a magazine. It was of ballet girls.”
This uncharacteristic purchase marked a real change for him from the usual stocks and bonds. Acquiring something which appealed to him aesthetically and which was just to be hung on a wall to be admired gave him enormous pleasure. He was fascinated and, as time went on, collecting paintings and objects of distinction and beauty which caught his fancy and gave him delight competed with his compulsion to amass a fortune through an investment portfolio.
Samuel Edward Weir of London, Ontario, at the outset of his career in the early 1920s.
An early client, E.V. Harmon, who lived in the East Twenties, the Gramercy Park area of New York City, was landlord to over thirty properties in London. Sam looked after Harmon’s holdings, an example to him early in his career of the advantage in handling other’s finances as well as the advantages of being a landlord himself. On behalf of another client, Ben Baldwin, the young Sam travelled to Holyoke, Massachusetts more than once in order to effect the sale of a service station. A business and personal friendship began with Baldwin senior and his two sons, Bill and Bentley, that lasted for many years. Sam also acted for the W.R. Kent estate which was comprised of an impressive number of real estate properties stretching from Montreal to Manitoba and which was not wound up finally until 1937. Payments to Sam for handling these properties seemed rather sporadic, but eventually he was paid handsomely for his ministrations and he began to appreciate the possibilities of an international practice. Such early experiences whetted his appetite and expanded his horizons far beyond London, Ontario.
Ruth, now retired from the American Red Cross, and Wilbur Howell lived in Lower Manhattan on Washington Square with a kitten, Nicu, an offspring of Sarah’s cat. In one of the many letters to Sarah, Ruth recommends romaine and Simpson lettuces as well as asparagus, common enough perhaps in New York shops of the time but rare and pricey for the Weirs. Martha Amanda, now widowed for the third time, divided her days between her two daughters, Sarah and Eva, both living in Ontario. Her visits to Sarah’s household were rather dreaded if inevitable events.
In the summer of 1921, Sarah wrote to Ruth that a cow has freshened and that she is so very weary. “Why house clean?” asked Ruth in reply, “Let it go,” — not advice to be followed easily by a woman of Sarah’s pride. Sarah apparently had complained of eczema and Ruth commented that she doubted that diet had much to do with it. Sarah wrote that Martha’s hand pained so she bound live fish worms around it. The source of this bit of medical advice is not divulged and neither is the opinion of George M.D. nor of Ruth R.N.
About this time Paul was packed off to visit his sister briefly and Ruth accompanied him back to London. In the early years of her marriage Ruth spent a part of the summers in her old London home. A little weakness from her bout of malaria in Rumania still remained and, now having been diagnosed as having high blood pressure, London was a welcome respite from the heat of New York City. Ruth’s letters to Wilbur give a picture of Sam busily tending to his delphiniums and watering the lawn, Paul doing odd jobs for the neighbours, and Ruth and Paul incessantly playing ‘the banana song.’ Yes, We Have No Bananas was a popular foxtrot of the early twenties, a song which Sam and Martha apparently considered beneath contempt. Eventually it was played only in their absence. Ruth was an avid antiquer and wrote to Wilbur of her finds in anticipation of his coming to join her in London and their doing some antique hunting together.
The following year Sam was still working in the office of Ivey, Elliott and Ivey and took on his first big case, acting for Mr. Tomer, plaintiff, in a case of wrongful dismissal, against Crowle, defendant. Although the suit dragged on for several years through appeals, the plaintiff was finally awarded in excess of $5,000.00 dollars, a very large settlement for 1929.
Sam’s credibility as a lawyer specializing in insurance received recognition in Toronto, when in 1922, he acted as solicitor for the Paramount Insurance Co. Founded some twenty years prior with a head office in Toronto, the company was now in the process of obtaining letters of patent. Sam’s application was successful under the provisions of the Ontario Insurance Act. He was not listed as one of the five directors, but he was considered to be a brilliant and promising young man at twenty-four years of age. Sam turned his expertise in real estate to mortgage his father’s property, taking out two mortgages in his own name for $2500.00 and $600.00. At that time, a large furnace, ‘Good Cheer,’ was installed at 139 Oxford Street West to the comfort and peace of mind of the entire family. No more constantly piling wood onto fireplaces to keep some warmth in their bones, nor waking up in a freezing cold house. The furnace was well named.
Perhaps it was Ben Baldwin’s business concerning the service station that brought Sam to Boston in 1923, ostensibly as a tourist, but also with an introduction to Horace Morison, counsel-at-law at 92 State Street. Morison took Sam and a ‘distinguished surgeon’ to dinner at the Harvard Club. Sam wrote to Morison some thirty years later, recalling that he had been very impressed and remembered the occasion with great pleasure. It would seem that Sam still had his eye on an international practice.
In 1923, he left Ivey, Elliott and Ivey, now Ivey, Elliott, Weir and Gillanders, and returned briefly to Meredith and Meredith, the largest litigation firm in Western Ontario.
