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www.oakvillebeaver.com The Oakville Beaver, Wednesday January 24, 2007 - 3 Mellish leaves $1.7 million to OTMH By Angela Blackburn OAKVILLE BEAVER STAFF The Oakville-Trafalgar Memorial Hospital (OTMH) has received the largest bequest in its history -- nearly $1.7 million. It's from the late Oakville resident Eleanor Mellish, a woman who spent much of her life doing volunteer work, saving her money, saving her allowances, but never working at paid employment. The Eleanor Mellish Endowment Fund has been set up with the donation of more than $1.69 million from the estate of the late Eleanor Mellish who passed away at age 82 last February. She had no children, but did have a personal commitment to helping others and a high regard for OTMH. The fund will disburse five per cent of the principal annually to OTMH in perpetuity. The funds will purchase the most urgently needed hospital equipment, for which government funding cannot provide. "It's stunning," said Allen Wightman, executive director of the Oakville Hospital Foundation. "When I speak of Eleanor I often tend to put a halo around her head," said her husband, 86-year-old Craig Mellish who has worked with Wightman since his wife's death to carry out her wishes. "Eleanor was a very down-to-earth person. Eleanor's whole life was shaped by two things," Mellish told The Oakville Beaver recently. When she was three years old, the Toronto native, born in 1923 who grew up in Milton and whose dad operated Day's Hardware, was stricken with polio. "She spent months at Sick Children's Hospital, followed by months if not years in bed at home," said Mellish. It left her with a badly disfigured back, one leg shorter than the other and a malformed foot that was several sizes smaller than her other foot. "In all the years, I never once heard her complain," said Mellish. "The Eleanor Mellish Endowment Fund is a tremendous legacy for the health of our community," said Dick Freeborough, Chair of the Oakville Hospital Foundation Board of Directors. "The quiet generosity of the late Mrs. Mellish will make an ongoing difference to the community year after year and will benefit each and every resident in Oakville either directly or through the care their friends or family receive at OTMH. This is truly an outstanding example of caring for the community and recognizing the needs of the hospital," said Freeborough. According to Mellish, the second life-shaping experience for his late wife was the fact that she grew up through the Great Depression. "No one who didn't live through it could realize what it was really like." Having watched as the local farmers had no money and usually paid for supplies from the hardware store with a few pecks of potatoes, a bushel of apples or a dozen eggs. "Eleanor had a deep appreciation for the value of money," said Mellish who said "frugal" would be too harsh a description for his wife who would buy the best products available, and then take care of them. It was upon Eleanor's arrival as a first-year student at the University of Western Ontario that she attended an open house at the university's new observatory and that's where Mellish, a graduating year business administration student spotted her among the thousands attending. "I think I decided right on the spot I was going to marry her. I don't think she made up her mind quite that quickly," said Mellish. "I thought she was the most beautiful, most intelligent woman with the greatest sense of humour that I had ever met," he recalled. That was 1941 and two years later, in 1943, when he had three days leave before he was to head overseas thanks to the Second World War, Mellish married Eleanor on July 29. Having gone through her personal papers since her death last year, after cancer had left her bedridden and a mere waif of 60 lbs., Mellish said he believes his wife had saved every letter he had ever written her. While Mellish didn't end up going overseas, he was stationed at a military headquarters in Kingston and Eleanor and he lived in a room nearby. After the war, Mellish worked for Bell Canada from 1945 until his retirement in 1979. He worked in personnel and line/staff operations, but never at a high profile executive job that one would assume would lead to such a bequest to the local hospital. The couple settled in Toronto after the war where Eleanor began volunteering with the Red Cross Lodge doing everything from baking pies and being a short order cook, to playing cribbage with veterans and operating wheelchairs. "She could never understand how someone could do nothing when so BELIEVED IN HOSPITAL: Eleanor Mellish bequeathed nearly $1.7 million to Oakville-Trafalgar Memorial Hospital. much needed to be done," said Mellish who noted despite his late wife's physical challenges, she also canvassed door to door for various charities. When the couple relocated to the Montreal area, Eleanor volunteered at the local library and again did doorto-door canvassing. To spice up the work, Eleanor took the job of canvassing in the Frenchspeaking sections though, according to Mellish, she knew "a pitiful few words from high school French." "She had a marvelous time going around the French sections to the hilarious reception of the houses she called at. She would be invited to as many as three tea parties in one afternoon," said Mellish. Among the happiest days the couple spent were their trips to England. Though they had no relatives there, Eleanor fell in love with travelling on the inland canals, and Mellish said, explaining his wife's people skills, that people gathered on a boat awaiting transport would all be sitting there awkwardly -- until Eleanor arrived and within minutes she would have them transformed in to a group of chattering friends. When the couple moved back to Ontario, they settled in Oakville and it was in 1967, a few weeks after arriving, that Eleanor began volunteering at OTMH. She was with what was then known as the Women's Auxiliary. "She still had her pink smock," said Mellish of the uniform worn by the volunteers to identify them as such and which became recognizable to all familiar with the hospital. Some time later, an aging Eleanor, for whom her physical challenges were becoming more problematic, gave up her volunteer work. When faced with wheeling a hefty man downstairs for x-rays, it was too much and Eleanor "retired." Afterwards, she went through two hip replacement surgeries and during those hospital stays resurrected the camaraderie she once had through volunteering with patients, with the nurses caring for her. "She was such a happy person. You couldn't help feeling happy after just a few minutes with her," said Mellish. "She was very proud of the Oakville hospital," said Mellish, noting while his wife visited other hospitals, "She really felt the Oakville hospital was superior to any of the others." "She expressed the same sentiment to me," said Wightman, who agreed Eleanor had an infectiously positive personality. It was around 2000, when Eleanor gave what Wightman called a "significant" gift, in the order of $150,000 to the hospital, that he approached her to personally thank her. The contact however didn't end as the two became friends. "She was so, so positive. You would come and have tea with her and go away with a smile on your face, she was always so positive," said Wightman. It was in the fall of 2005 that Eleanor had begun losing quite a lot of weight and doctors began looking at abdominal cancer. Mellish said his wife wanted to live out her days at home and did so. "She was very clear, she wanted to die in her own house, in her own room, in her own bed," said Mellish. Equally as clear was that she wanted to leave her money to the hospital, said Mellish who admitted his wife worked for a year during one point of her life and he provided her with a regular amount of personal money. "She felt a deep affection for the Oakville hospital and felt that heaving her money to the hospital would do the most good," he said. Wightman said Eleanor had indicated to him she would likely leave money to the hospital, but he said he had no idea how much it would be. Eleanor's gift to the hospital is the largest ever in Wightman's memory. Mellish said his wife, having lived through the Depression had a real feeling for the worth of money and the necessity of it. "She wanted to have enough, she wanted to have enough for her old age, which she never reached," said Mellish. A great fan of investing, Mellish said he invested money for his wife, as well as his own and said at a certain point money has a way of multiplying. Eleanor was an only child, and was predeceased by her parents Etna and Lena Day. Mellish had a brother who lived in Oakville, but he has passed away and he, also, had no children. "Eleanor admired the hospital greatly because of her experience with it," said Mellish. Wightman said the endowment that will provide for equipment will benefit every aspect of the hospital, across all disciplines, and because it has been set up as an endowment fund it means Eleanor's bequest "literally is a gift that will go on forever." "I am proud of her. I think she would be happy to know how useful the money she saved would be," said Mellish. 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