On October 16, 1956, The Globe and Mail newspaper reported that a bailey bridge, spanning the Queen Elizabeth Highway at Applewood Acres, would be sought from the highways department.
“Toronto Township Council decided today that the new Gordon Graydon Memorial High School on the south side of the four-lane highway has made the oft-proposed bridge a necessity.
Police Chief Garnet McGill told councillors he had talked last week with department officials and that they were “receptive” to the idea.
Students and other pedestrians, to cross the highway from Applewood Acres, must now walk either more than a mile to the Dixie Rd. lights or take their chances with four lanes of traffic.”
It was the concern for a safe crossing of the Queen Elizabeth Highway that produced what may be described as Gordon Graydon Secondary School’s first student involvement in political issues. Mary Jane Miller, the first President of the Student Council, contacted the area M.P.P., requesting that a bridge be built from Ogden Avenue over the highway. A number of accidents resulted in delegations from the school going to Queen’s Park. Graydon’s first political venture was a success. The students received more than they asked for. They petitioned for a bailey bridge; the government gave them a permanent one.
Mary Jane Miller only lived in Applewood Acres for five years but her contribution to the community has had a lasting affect. Mary Jane, who went on to become a Professor of Dramatic Literature at Brock University, now lives in St. Catharines with her husband, Jack. Mary Jane contributed the following story about the bridge over the highway.
By Mary Jane Miller (Miller who married a Miller)
It began with a high school made up of students drawn from two rival schools – Port Credit and Thomas L. Kennedy – as the war baby boom rolled through. It also began with a bad piece of suburban planning which put the newer part of Applewood Acres on one side of the Queen Elizabeth and Gordon Graydon Memorial Secondary School on the other. Applewood Acres north had nowhere to expand in the 50s, surrounded as it was by industries and the railroad. It was not likely that a high school would ever be built on that side of the highway.
Students for GGMSS, therefore, had to be bussed up and over the highway. Although the high school actually included grades seven and eight when the junior high school was built next door, the number of students to be bussed would rise again and the new Cawthra overpass, when it was built to the East, would make no difference. But the real problem was that the QEW was inadequately fenced with ordinary farm fencing and wooden posts. Students quickly learned to cut holes in the wire then dash across the four lane highway – inconceivable now, of course, and dangerous even then since the highway had 33,000 cars a day passing that point (I can still remember the numbers). But what finally brought the issue to a head was the fact that a young child was killed wandering out on to the highway through a large hole in the fence. The phrase we used in our arguments was “legal murder” and it did not overstate the case.