For a guy who’s had more thrills than most can imagine, Ron VanHart sure does seem to get a kick out of selling tomatoes.
“The market in Newmarket is my baby … there’s only four of us old-timers left and we’re going to ride it out as long as we can. And we love it because the people love us,” beams VanHart on a warm fall day on the deck of his Holland Marsh farmhouse, recalling how he was lucky enough to have two careers simultaneously.
But just maybe, the thrill for the retired fall guy is just as much about enjoying the moment, any moment, as the adventure itself.
Or maybe it’s about squeezing what he can out of every day after experiencing what may have been a life-affirming moment nearly 20 years ago. After all the leaps out of helicopters, hitting g-force speeds while rolling cars and flying through bedroom windows, it was more of a non-event that sent him to hospital, which was followed by a solid two years of dedicated recovery to allow him to return to everyday tasks.
“I was working in the greenhouse. I had two flats of tomatoes in my hands and I hit the ground” unable to move on one side, he recalls.
He was taken to Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre where he was found to have two breaks in his back. X-rays showed a dozen of older cracks that had occurred over the years but were never treated. He was told the two breaks came perilously close to damaging his spinal cord.
He fought back to regain his health and strength and attributes his current good health to a diet of protein, steroid free, and healthy food, including of the organic variety that his family started farming in 1984.
For VanHart, everything about his life turns on the family farm that was established by his immigrant parents in 1949.
It was there that he began experimenting with taking cars airborne. The farm, he recalls, offered all sorts of opportunities for the adventurous, and being the 1960s and '70s, free of today’s constraints over safety concerns. Television, of course, offered all sorts of inspiration for the farm kid who took to the wheel early.
“We would use the loading docks as car jumps,” says VanHart, figuring he was probably around 14 at the time. “Then we went to stock cars.
“Then I started doing demolition derbies.”
And then he started winning them, all of them.
Back at the farm, he was also welding together roll cages on cars he picked up for $50 and learned how to roll them at 80 miles or 130 kilometres per hour, developing and perfecting his jumping style. All this while learning and working on the farm.
Then Toronto began developing as Hollywood North, becoming a hotbed for filmmaking.
Armed with an agent, and after having undergone acting training, VanHart began stunt driving for commercials, proving his worth with his deft work behind the wheel and high-speed drive-bys.
“I was in the union by 1984… then things took off” spending the first 12 years doing small gags and the last 12 doing the big stunts, he recalls, “right up to death defying…. That was always my favourite, the stuff that would kill me if I made a mistake.”
There were plenty of movies and shows, of course. VanHart boasts an exhaustive list of credits on the Internet Movie Database from 1986 to 2010. If it was filmed in Toronto and stunts were involved, VanHart rarely said no, even if it meant going from shift to shift to shift. As a stunt co-ordinator, he also developed his own company, Precision Driving Team.
He served as the stunt double for some of Hollywood’s biggest names including John Travolta, Tom Selleck, Keith and David Carradine, Burt Reynolds, Robert York, Robert Stack and Sylvester Stallone — anyone who came north to film.
He also became a divemaster working on reef conservation in Florida and logging 1,500 dives.
And throughout, there was the farm, which is where he discovered how much he had beaten up his body over all the years. If the films provided him with the adrenaline rush he so sought, the farm offered the passion and connection with the community, which he continues with the help of his family.
His wife, Loretta VanHart nee Dale (sister of well-known Canadian actresses Cynthia and Jennifer) continues to be involved on the farm. She, too, has had her own career in the movie industry as an executive accountant. The VanHarts’ daughter and grandson are also active helping bring the vegetables to the Newmarket Farmers' Market every week.
The VanHarts grow six varieties of both lettuce and tomatoes, along with about 20 vegetables including peppers and cauliflower, corn and cucumbers.
“Newmarket really wants their heirlooms, so I’m going to be growing special heirlooms for them next year,” VanHart promises. “The Holland Marsh has nice soil so when you get soil like this you can produce fancy organic stuff, let me tell you. It’s just unbelievable.
“I’ve grown over 300 varieties of tomatoes organically.”
VanHart credits his positive attitude and diet to his good health that has sustained him through his recovery and ,as he pushes through his late 60s, he looks forward to the next market day and all the people he enjoys meeting every week.
