'Big Walt" Simmons 1910-1997

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Posted with permission from the Hamilton Spectator
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A gentle giant and a true scout

The Hamilton Spectator
James Elliott
Dec 18, 1997

'Big Walt" Simmons was a charter member of the Hamilton Beach Rescue Unit, a dedicated scout leader and a renowned handyman.

During a volunteer career that spanned nearly 60 years, Simmons was a Beach Strip fixture, fighting fires, rescuing boaters, teaching youngsters how to sail and assembling a workshop full of random spare parts.

Simmons died of pneumonia Nov. 30 at Versa Care Health Centre on Main Street East. He was 87.

Walter Samuel Edward Simmons, the third and last child of Walter and Elizabeth Simmons, was born in 1910, the year his father started work with the newly formed Steel Company of Canada.

When his mother died, Simmons and his older brother and sister were placed in public homes until their father remarried four years later.

Simmons graduated from Bennetto School in the North End, left technical school to learn metal plating and landed a job at Westinghouse.

The Depression, however, cut hours in half and when a job opened up at Stelco, the newly married Simmons jumped at the chance.

Wrapped in burlap as insulation against the heat, Simmons worked the open hearth furnace where his size and strength -- 6-foot-3 and 220 pounds -- won him the nickname Big Walt. He would put in 37 years on the hearth.

In 1939, with wartime housing short, Simmons moved with his bride to the Beach Strip where summer cottages where being converted to year-round use.

For $1,900 ($300 down), they bought a small bungalow on property backing onto the bay.

Flat feet and an official policy of discouraging steelworkers from enlisting kept him out of the war, so Simmons, like thousands of other civilians across Canada, joined the local Air Raid Protection (ARP) unit.

On the Beach Strip, which was run by its own commission, the ARP not only kept an eye out for potential saboteurs but also handled firefighting.

Equipment consisted of a trailer-mounted pump stored in the commission's old wagon barn. Crews wore round miners' helmets and their own rubber boots.

Peacetime ended the ARP, but the volunteer fire department endured. The trailer was replaced by a home-made pumper cobbled together around a Reo milk truck and the barn replaced by a clubhouse -- all work done by volunteers.

When a fire was spotted, the call went to the chief, who controlled the siren button. At the sound of the siren, volunteers would converge on the barn and head for the blaze.

Beach Strip water pressure was notoriously unreliable and the chief often had to call the waterworks to boost pressure. Failing that, the volunteers would pump directly from the lake.

The department was also responsible for lake rescue and part of its equipment included a 12-foot wooden dinghy and accessories stored on top of the pumper.

Crews rolling out hose would occasionally find themselves dodging oars and life jackets.

In the late '40s, Simmons was part of a crew that ventured into a fall storm on the lake to save three people from a swamped sailboat. The boat was smashed, but he managed to salvage the auxiliary engine.

By the late 1950s, Hamilton had taken over fire protection for the Beach Strip and the volunteers were restricted to beach rescue, a role they continue to this day.

At the same time, Simmons became involved in scouting and led his own group of Rover Sea Scouts, running training sessions on a sailboat he would beach at the foot of his property.

Don Young, a former rescue unit chief, says Simmons was outwardly slow and easygoing, but "if you gave the job to Walt, it would get done, that's for sure.

"I never saw Walt get mad, but if a fight broke out, I'd want him on my side."

Leo Griffen, also a charter member of Beach Rescue, remembers "a great fellow" who kept one of everything in his basement.

"If you needed to replace anything in your house, Walt had it. He had an amazing cellar, he could put his finger on anything."

When he was in his late 70s, Simmons finally gave up his regular shift on the summer lake patrols, but continued as an auxiliary officer with the rescue unit right to the end of his life.

Long after members of his Rover unit had grown up, they continued to hold annual reunions and Simmons attended the most recent one, held last spring.

Jack Dougherty, one of those original Rovers, says Big Walt was "what Baden-Powell intended a scout to be. He lived the scout laws every day of his life.

"I don't remember ever hearing Walt say a cross word to anybody. He was huge, but he was gentle."

He is survived by his wife, Audrey; four sons, John, Jerry, Ed and Rick; and one daughter, Janet.


Photos- Walt's Rescue Unit photos from 1974 and 1984
 
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