Ivy Thomas
The First Female Certified General Accountant
Page 4
 Ivy Thomas, FCGA: A Happy Ending
“Ivy was a business minded person as you know,” Kenneth Cox summarized for us, “she had no time for any serious commitments, until she met Bill, at Frankling’s.”
When they married in 1950, Ivy Thomas was 39 years old. Bill Thomas was 25. The couple had no children, but they would stay together for more than forty years, when Ivy died, in 1991, just 20 days short of her 80th birthday.
T.H. Frankling—Ivy’s mentor in her pioneer days—died in 1955, while visiting his daughter in Newfoundland. He lived long enough to see the wedding of his protégé, but not long enough to see the Toronto Branch of the General Accountants’ Association incorporate in 1957 to become CGA Ontario. With his death came the eventual closing of T.H. Frankling & Company, but Ivy and Bill Thomas continued their successful careers as practitioners. For her dedication and a lifetime of contributions to the Association, Ivy was awarded CGA Canada Fellowship in 1988.
Three years later, CGA Ontario announced the Ivy Thomas Award, named in honour of the first woman in Canada to earn the CGA designation and earn admission into membership in the Association. The prestigious award is bestowed upon a CGA who has achieved provincial recognition for outstanding public service or charitable involvement, including humanitarian acts. Only one Ivy Thomas Award is bestowed in any given year, and the criteria is demanding: the award is not necessarily bestowed on an annual basis. Past winners have included CGA Ontario Ruby Howard, FCGA and Vern Krishna, FCGA.
In 2006, fully 15 years after her death, CGA Ontario began a search for effects related to Ivy—in order to celebrate the 50th anniversary of incorporation and A Half Century of Leadership. An obituary from a 1991 edition of the Toronto Star led us to Ivy’s nephew, Kenneth Cox, whose donations to the Association archives have proved invaluable.
Incredibly, our search also led us to the Mississauga home of Bill and Ivy Thomas, where the family that now occupies that home had saved a box of mementoes found upon first moving in. “We didn’t know what they were,” said the father of the family, “but they looked important, so we put them away in the attic.” Those mementoes included photographs of Ivy at Association events, an inspiration keepsake entitled “What is Success,” and the framed certified public accountant certificate of T.H. Frankling, dated 1927.
Most miraculous, however, was the original, framed CGA certificate of one Ivy A. Cox, dated June 1932. In the traditional phrase “entitling him to the degree of Certified General Accountant,” the word “him” is painted over to read “her.”
Continued...
|