Grant MacIntyre is a man with a passion: baking.
For nearly all of his adult life, MacIntyre got up at 5 a.m., six days a week, to start his work in MacIntyre’s Bakery at 263 Josephine St. in Wingham.
In the early years, the first task of the day was mixing bread dough in a horizontal mixer. Next, he would dump it into a trow and let it rise. After a first punching down, the dough would sit another 15 minutes, then it would be put in suitable size pieces into the brick oven.
Later on, Grant got an 80-quart vertical mixer that could do enough to make 100 loaves. The punching-down of the dough was very physically demanding, and MacIntyre attributes some shoulder problems now to his years of doing that every day.
Name it, he’s baked it
White bread, brown bread (later 100 per cent whole wheat and oat bran bread, too), pies, cakes, cupcakes, brownies, lemon-bar cakes, mincemeat and other kinds of tarts, gingerbread cookies and houses, three-layer cakes, Ninja Turtle cookies, and jelly rolls – MacIntyre has made them all. Asked what his favourites were, MacIntyre said that he enjoyed making everything, but liked eating the hot cross buns the most.
You might think that doing all that baking would be enough to keep any person busy, but MacIntyre also cooked all the turkeys, about 45 each year (over 1,000 pounds) for the Belgrave Fowl Supper each Wednesday before Thanksgiving. This continued for another 20 years after his retirement.
In addition, the Regional Silver Stick Committee used MacIntyre’s oven to cook rolled brisket for beef-on-a-bun. John Green did the slicing for that.
MacIntyre has many photos of very large cakes made to celebrate wedding anniversaries, birthdays, sports team victories, Wescast recognitions of hours with no accidents, Wingham Public School graduations, and many other events. Many of these cakes had elaborate icing designs that took several hours to complete. Many of the people who worked for him, like Julie Hallahan, had a real talent in doing the decorating. Some cakes were so big that he had to finish icing them in his garage!
Grant MacIntyre, left, and a helper putting the finishing touches on a massive cake for Wescast. (Photo courtesy of the Wingham and Area Historical Society)
MacIntyre had a number of apprentices who would work for two years, and then take a 30-week course. They mostly would leave for better-paying jobs in the cities when they were finished their courses.
At one point, MacIntyre experimented with making cheesebread in crimp crust pans. Kids at a Presbyterian Church camp liked the cheesebread so much that sales took off when they returned home and told their parents how good it was.
On Wednesday and Saturday, MacIntyre made doughnuts. When Donut Delight came to Wingham, his sales fell by half, as it was open every day. Of course, when Tim Hortons came to Wingham, Donut Delight couldn’t compete and went under.
My son, Christopher, remembers trips to the bakery, especially the doughnut holes.
“I remember when Mom used to send us to the bakery to get two loaves of bread. Mrs. MacIntyre was so nice; she’d always give us each a free doughnut hole, so me and Marcus [younger brother] used to go in and get one loaf and then go back a few minutes later to get the other loaf, so we could get more doughnut holes,” recalls Christopher.
Making 12 inch pizza crusts was another specialty.
MacIntyre had wholesale customers, too. One of them was the K-store in Wingham. He had to get started at midnight when he had a delivery there the next day, as they wanted the baking first thing in the morning. MacIntyre’s wife, Marie, had to get there before the milk truck came so she could go to their daughter Marilyn’s for breakfast, and then take the grandkids to school. In the early 1980s, MacIntyre also started supplying Dempsters with various products.
Yet another customer was the Frosty Queen owned by John Freiberger; MacIntyre sold lots of hamburger, hot dog and foot-long buns to Freiberger and also encouraged him to stay open year-round.
The brick oven
The brick oven at McIntyre’s was built about 1927, but there may have been a different one there before. It was coal-fired and kept going day and night, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The coal to fire it came by train to McLeans in Wingham, then from Mathers’ in Bluevale, Dobson’s in Palmerston, Montgomery’s in Blyth, and finally from Edwards Fuels in Goderich. Coal was very dirty and MacIntyre was glad to eventually make a switch, first to propane, and then to natural gas.
The exterior of MacIntyre’s Bakery, located at 263 Joesphine Street in Wingham. (Photo courtesy of the Wingham and Area Historical Society)
History of the bakery
The bakery had previously been owned by people named Nicol, then Gibson, then Gordon & Myrtle Leggat (right after the Second World War), then MacIntyre’s uncle, Athol Purdon (who had previously owned a bakery in Lucknow near the old post office), then Grant’s father, Jack MacIntyre. Zik Cowan was the baker for his uncle and, when Zik died, Grant’s uncle asked him to come back from Sarnia, where he had had a job for a short time at Walker’s Bakery, to take over the baking.
MacIntyre’s Uncle Athol and Aunt Mabel financed the bakery for Grant and Marie.
Grant’s early life had its adventures too. He was born in Wingham, the son of Jack and Florence (Purdon) MacIntyre, but lived in his early years in Whitechurch and then Dungannon.
He remembers the crash of an Anson airplane in a field near there (English men were being trained during the war as pilots at the nearby Port Albert airfield). He recalls that after the war, some energetic youths burned an effigy of Hitler at Dungannon.
After the war, his father, a building contractor, bought the administration building at the Port Albert air field, tore it down, and brought the salvaged lumber to build a house in Wingham on the corner of Victoria and Catherine Streets.
As a young man, MacIntyre had a few short-lived jobs in construction, one of them being lugging cement blocks for the foundation of the new Wingham Public School on John Street at Frances Street. A similar one was building the foundation wall for a front porch on the grist mill, next to what is now the Dollar Store on Josephine Street.
“I knew I wasn’t cut out for that,” says MacIntyre.
In 1959 he heard the call, “Go west, young man,” and went in his ‘54 Ford to Alberta to see the scenery. He ended up staying for a few months, after getting a job in Edmonton at a Dominion Store bakery.
“When I worked for my Dad in Wingham at the bakery, I got $42 week for 48 hours of work. At Dominion, I got $72 per week for 42 hours! Plus, I got lots of good experience there,” recalls MacIntyre.
He married Marie McEwen from Sarnia in 1960. She had come to Wingham to train as an RNA at the hospital. Together they made a life at the bakery, living above it upstairs. She handled the front counter work meeting the customers and also made many deliveries.
Problem solving
Problems? Not many, but in the early years, the town dump was right down the street, where the ESSO car wash is now. Rats would wander along the street into any open door, and so MacIntyre kept a cat to take care of them.
“One time a health inspector said I should be using Warfarin instead of a cat. But that didn’t work because after eating the warfarin, a dying rat would crawl under the wooden floor, and you can imagine the smell,” recalls MacIntyre. “So we went back to the cat! And soon after, I poured a concrete floor so that the rats couldn’t get in. That solved the rat problem.”
Grant MacIntyre and Don Murray mixing the dough for the last loaves of bread in July 2000. (Photo courtesy of the Wingham and Area Historical Society)
And his worst day on the job?
“It was the time Marie and I got stranded by a snow storm in Sarnia for three days when we went there for her father’s birthday,” says MacIntyre. “Our bakery was always open six days a week and people were counting on us. Eventually, we zigzagged home on back roads and followed a snow plow. Someone had kept our oven fired up with coal while we were gone; it would have been quite a chore to get it going again if it went out.”
MacIntyre’s last day was in July 2000.
“That was when my assistant, Tom Murphy, and I baked our last loaves of bread. Marie was having some serious health problems and I needed to be there for her,” says MacIntyre.
However, Grant didn’t retire to a rocking chair. Even after a heart attack, he worked for 2 1/2 years for his former employee, Brad Campbell, at Brad’s bakery in Harriston. However, with so much standing on hard floors, his knees started to bother him and, after Brad was killed in a car accident, Grant retired again.
“I really enjoyed working for Brad, just doing what I liked – baking, without having to worry about the business end of it,” he says.
As we sit in the upstairs apartment right above the oven that Grant used for so many years, he proudly shows photo albums of the many delectable creations from over the years and also photos on the wall of his children: Marilyn, Bruce, and Doug, as well as grandchildren and great grandchildren. He notes that Bruce, now CEO of the milling division of Parrish & Heimbecker, used to tell those he delivered to when he started out, that he learned everything he knew working with his father at MacIntyre Bakery.
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The Wingham and Area Historical Society is encouraging seniors of Wingham and area to record their memories, so that their stories will be preserved for future generations. To learn more about the Wingham and Area Historical Society, follow them on Facebook.
