Leslie Frost - Retirement

Retirement

Upon retirement from politics, Frost served on the Board of Governors of the University of Toronto. As well, he was a member of the Board of Directors of the Bank of Montreal, KVP, Canada Life, and Trans Canada Air. He served as Chancellor of Trent University from 1967 to 1973. In retirement, he continued his interest in the outdoors. Near the end of his life, he undertook for the government of Ontario an exhaustive investigation of the state and potential of Algonquin Provincial Park. In the last interview he gave, just before he died, to the Toronto Star, he declared: "I am an environmentalist."

Frost was an excellent amateur historian. His book Fighting Men covered the history of the 35th Regiment of Simcoe Foresters from Orillia, Ontario in the context of the First World War. Within that he connects the Canadian home front to the war front in France, and connects the events within the regiment to the bigger picture of the war and Canada's subsequent role in world affairs. His Forgotten Pathways of the Trent (published just after he died) challenged historians' previous conclusions about Indian trade and warfare routes in southern Ontario. He was an avid U.S. Civil War buff and kept on the mantelpiece in his large library a piece of wood that was supposed to have come from Abraham Lincoln's original log cabin.