Clarence Brazier was too busy working on the farm to learn to read. Then his wife died. He was 93.

There was no one else to turn to and he ended up spending hours on the front stoop reading junk mail and memorizing the letters for words such as "pizza," "hamburger" and "fries."

Brazier turned 101 on August 28 and now reads at a Grade Six level. Farmers Forum sent him a free subscription for his birthday.

The long-time Timmins resident never learned to read as a kid because he quit school in Grade One to run the family farm near the village of Magnetawan, between Huntsville and North Bay. When he was five-years-old, his father, George, was blinded by an explosion gone wrong that was meant to destroy a tree stump.
Even though he was the third eldest of six children, he proved to be the most capable of taking care of the cattle and horses. The mixed farm included sheep, vegetables and a woodlot . With no government help for his blinded father and a family heavily in debt for the farm, Brazier had no choice but to quit school and tend to the 100-acre plot. His responsibilities included keeping his father alive in the woods.

"I had his life in my hands," Brazier told The Timmons Daily Press. "I was seven years old, but I had to know exactly how that tree would fall so it wouldn’t hit him."
For more than 85 years, Brazier avoided jobs that required him to read or write. He worked as a hunting guide, a travelling brush salesman and a miner in Timmins’ McIntyre gold mine, among others, and Sudbury’s nickel mines.

At 28, he married 16-year-old Angela Boudreau. They met three years earlier when her family moved to Ontario from New Brunswick. Brazier delivered wood to their house on a regular basis.

Although she grew up speaking only French and had quit school in Grade Six, she would later become fluent in English and earn a college diploma. His "Angel" took care of all the paperwork, paying the bills and anything that required literary skill. They lived in Timmins for more than 64 years and raised four daughters.
Then, eight years ago, Angela died, leaving 93-year-old Brazier to fend for himself.

"I learned to read," Brazier said. "All because I lost my wife."

Angela had also done all the shopping for the family, so Brazier decided he would have to learn to read to survive. "It’s difficult for me to stress how hard and tedious and frustrating those hours were," he said.
Brazier had lived alone for two-and-a-half years when his daughter Doris Villemaire invited him to live with her and husband Jim near Sprucedale, Ont., in the Muskoka area.

Although Brazier was still capable of taking care of himself - he had just bought a new ATV - the 95-year-old accepted, but on one condition. He wanted to work and earn his keep.

"He agreed to live with me because I was the only daughter with a country place," Villemaire said.
Now, "he reads mostly the recent history of the bush and mining and even a few novels, but he doesn’t like them as much," his daughter said. She says he did enjoy a novel about The Great Depression called "The Hungry Year" by Connie Brummel Crook.
Brazier kept up his habit of cutting and splitting 100 cords of wood every winter at his new home, but Villemaire said he has had to slow down recently. He has scaled back his large garden this year to a successful raspberry patch and retired his chainsaws. "We decided he shouldn’t be using a chainsaw anymore," Villemaire said.

Brazier has instead kept busy telling the story of how he learned to read in his 90s. Story telling is what he grew up on. There was no television, radio or telephone when Brazier was a boy. When his father was blinded, the family maid ran to the next house with the call for a doctor. That neighbour ran to the next house with the message.

Last year, at the age of 100, Brazier won the Canada Post National Literacy Award, which put his public-speaking skills in demand at local schools. "When he won that award, he was in tears," Villemaire said.