Looking back at 1st Canadian Tire in Paris LOCAL HISTORY

Who doesn’t have a fond memory of Canadian Tire in Paris? Your first bicycle perhaps? Maybe it was your first pair of ice skates? As a purveyor of nostalgia, Canadian Tire is one of my favourites and it’s because unlike so many memorable places, we still have a Canadian Tire Store in Paris just like we did in 1957 when the first associate dealer opened the doors of the former J H Patterson’s Grocery Store on Dundas Street Prior to this, Parisians would have ordered their CT merchandise from a catalogue. Few businesses have grown and evolved with our town quite as perfectly as Canadian Tire, but where did it all begin? Well in 1922 the brothers John William (J.W.) and Alfred Jackson (A.J.)

Billes purchased “Hamilton Tire & Rubber”, an automotive business located on the corner of Gerrard and

Hamilton Streets in Riverdale, in east Toronto Unfortunately, the Gerrard Street Bridge over the Don River was closed that year for extensive repairs and the brothers’ business was cut off from the normally heavy traffic flow of customers. The brothers worked other jobs to get by and eventually they moved the business to a better location at Young and Isabella. It was here that they began to sell an array of Chevrolet & Ford replacement parts as well as batteries, toolboxes, radios, and A J even mixed his own brand of antifreeze in the basement But tires were their main staple, in those days Toronto had 40,000 drivers and they very seldom made a round trip to the country without blowing a tire! In 1922 paved roads were scarce and tires were flimsy, often over inflated and very expensive to replace.

Continued page 13