38 More Lore from Bing
39 Our Nutty Dentists
40 Green Nile Compost
41 Dr. Hartman Scuttles History
42 Werstine and Herbert
43 The Raid Next Door
44 Alfie Lee
45 History of Our Morale Decline — It Started in Hespeler
46 The Ballet African
47 The Foxy Lady
48 Preston Hastens the Decline
49 Sin on the Golden Mile
50 Liberated Breasts
51 The Good Guys Gangbuster Pickett
52 The Royal Hespeler Constabulary
53 Heartbreaking Arrest
54 Safety Joe McCabe
55 Len Gaudette — Another Good Guy
56 The Piano Marathon
57 The Wooden-Legged Goaltender
58 Incidental Disasters — Hazel
59 Punished for Rejecting Billy Graham
60 The Discount Fire
61 The Fireproof Inferno
62 The Liberal Disaster
63 The Indestructible Unsafe Bridge
64 A Disaster for the Orange Lodge
65 Great Moments in Medicine
66 The Viagra Moment
67 The G Spot Unleashed
68 The Prostate — Piece of Cake
69 Damn!
70 The Geezer Squeezer
71 Tiddly Anyone?
72 Worst of All — M.S.UR.ATION
73 Almost As Bad — M.DIC.T.ON
74 Alternative Medicine’s Effect on World War II
75 Maturity It’s Called
76 The Devil’s Therapy
77 Alternative Therapy — The Bass Drum
78 The Beat Goes On
79 Amazing Grace
80 Super Seniors Pass the Torch
81 The Inspiration of Art Wilson
82 Ben Graham — Poet at Heart
83 Historic Toilet Seat
84 Victor’s Out the Window
85 An Old Shaggy Drunk
86 A Visit with Pratt
87 Too Busy to Grow Old Quietly
88 Janet of Swamp Angel Street
89 Cliffhanging with IMAX
90 Consider a Miracle
91 Fearful Reverie
Much gratitude to Robert Kerr and Graeme Ferguson, who dragged a neglected manuscript from my closet to be published for fun, glory, and mischief, and who knew where to take it. And thanks, too, to Anna Porter for liking the manuscript and giving advice and direction.
I would also like to thank Jane Burnside for typing the revisions again and again; Don Burnside for keeping the computer going; Bill Taylor, my landlord, for the hickory firewood that warmed my trailer; Iris Mitten for food, shelter, and laughs when I broke my ankle; and Rose Orth for wisdom and stability.
The preface — this thing — is the toughest part of a book to write because it has to account for what follows: the selection of personal experiences and the experiences of acquaintances, narrated without moral or political purpose, recalling, for fun more than anything else, the humorous side of solemn or outrageous events in the legends of small towns.
I’ve used the real names of all persons involved which, I trust, will lend the stories some historical credence.
Digressions, I must admit, became a problem. While trying to focus on local events, I wound up recounting the extraction of a beer glass from a man’s rectum in the emergency ward of a Toronto hospital, and the flight of a Salvation Army bass drum through the show window of a gay bar in San Francisco. However, digressions of this sort are unavoidable when one considers what mathematicians tell us — that all people and the events they are involved in are at most only six degrees removed.
It’s the small-world effect. We are all connected, and I assume that the stories related here, if pursued further, would connect us to similar events and people in every small town and city in North America.
Bob Green
Cambridge, Ontario
April 2006
One August night in 1935 my mother said to me as she was putting me to bed, “I’ll wake you early in the morning and get you dressed —” something she did for the next twenty years “— and we’ll go outside for a big surprise.”
Needless to say, she didn’t have to wake me in the morning. I lay listening to the robins chirp at the sunrise. I heard Pop drive off to work at Scott Shoe before seven. Mom didn’t give me a clue while we ate breakfast, but she kept looking out the window at the sky.
“A lot of little airplanes circling up there,” she said. “They must be waiting for it.”
It!
I was soon outside with Mom and sister Shirley looking up at the little planes, standing with all our neighbours in the middle of Lowrey Avenue in Galt, Ontario. Someone hollered, “Here it comes!” The buzz of little airplanes faded beneath the drum of heavier engines. Everyone turned towards the treetops to the west and gasped. An enormous silver airship the size of an ocean liner slid directly overhead. It was the Graf Zeppelin.
The famous German dirigible had been touring the United States, and this morning its flight from the Chicago World’s Fair to Toronto’s Canadian National Exhibition carried it right over our town. Sunlight glinted off its upper ridge and flickered off the long propeller blades of diesel engines slung below. A long gondola snug against the underside near the nose conveyed seventy notables of the Third Reich who peered down at us. I didn’t know this at the time but read it years later.
When you are five, you totter in circles while staring up at the sky and tend to fall down. I remember doing this while holding on to my sister’s hand. The zeppelin’s huge tail fins stay in my mind. They were bright red and centred by white circles framing strange black hooked crosses. Swastikas. I didn’t want the airship to pass. I couldn’t see enough of it. But in two minutes it was gone, followed by the little airplanes. Then all was quiet and we stood and gazed at the empty sky for a long time.