Edna Staebler

Edna Louise Cress was born in Berlin (Kitchener) in 1906. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Toronto in 1929 and the Ontario College of Education in 1931.

From 1966 to 1995, Staebler authored twenty-one best selling books including Sauerkraut and Enterprise, Food that Really Schmecks, Cape Breton Harbour, More Food that Really Schmecks, Whatever Happened to Maggie, Schmecks Appeal, Schmecks Appeal Series, Haven’t any News, Ruby’s Letters, The Electrohome Story and Places I’ve Been and People I’ve Known.

She earned distinction as a pioneering woman journalist writing for Maclean’s, Chatelaine, Saturday Night, Readers’ Digest and Star Weekly while chronicling lifestyles of Canadians. She lived on Old Order Mennonite and Amish farms, on a Hutterite Colony, in the Nova Scotia African-Canadian community, on an Iroquois Reservation, in a miner’s home in Wawa, in Newfoundland, and in a swordfisherman’s home in Cape Breton.

Staebler received many awards and honours including the Order of Canada in 1996, Province of Ontario Senior Achievement Award 1989; Canadian National Magazine Award 1989, a 1989 KW Arts Award and the 1998 KW Arts Award for Lifetime Achievement, KW Woman of the Year in 1980, and the 1996 Lifetime Achievement Award of Cuisine Canada to be called “The Edna” in perpetuity.

As a philanthropist, Staebler was the donor of the Edna Staebler Annual Awards for creative non-fiction at Wilfrid Laurier University; she endowed the Writer-in-Residence Program at the Kitchener Public Library; and she was the donor of the Edna Staebler Fellowship at the Joseph Schneider Haus Museum.

Photograph Courtesy the Kitchener-Waterloo Record Photographic Negative Collection.