Ida May Munro Bursary in Education
Ida May Carpenter was born on May 5, 1900 in Cornwall, Ontario to Norman and Annie Carpenter, the youngest of three children. May was adventurous for her time. She played the position of goalie with the Cornwall Women’s Hockey team and she was a legal secretary following her graduation from high school. She married Ralph Munro, a young handsome serviceman, newly returned from serving in World War I, and who raced about on his motorcycle. With her curly red hair, bright mind and demure demeanour, May settled down in circumstances far from her protected city life.
May lived with Ralph on a fifty-acre farm near Oxford Mills, Ontario with no electricity and no running water. She worked hard and was tireless in supporting the successes of her ten children throughout their lives. Always a “lady”, May was an avid reader, an excellent baker using her old wood stove, and a wonderful role model for her children and those around her.
Life was not easy. She endured the sudden death of a seven year old daughter, who was stricken with tetanus in 1939. During World War II, May and the younger children struggled with work on the farm while her husband and two eldest sons were in the military. Particularly difficult at this time came the information that one son was wounded in action in Holland, than then another became a prisoner of war for 18 months after his Halifax bomber was shot down during a raid on Berlin. In 1976, another daughter succumbed to cancer. May lovingly cared for her dying and often difficult husband in his last years before his death in 1977, and died herself in January, 1979, having performed her duty to those she loved.
She once wrote the following advice in her eight-year-old daughter’s ‘Autograph book’, and in retrospect, she lived accordingly: "Look for the flowers on the side of the road, Laugh and love and be strong. Try to lighten another’s load. Each day as you go along."
She was a remarkable woman.