Later that morning he went for gas at Mil’s Service Station at the foot of Blenheim Road. The attendant at the pumps told Percy he had seen something that morning that he hadn’t seen in thirty years at the service station. A little pickup truck limped in with four flat tires. Yes, it was carrying a load of wood. Percy took the spiked plank away. The wood was never stolen again.
Soper Park was the favourite summer haunt of developing boys because we could swim under the murky water of Mill Creek and grope the girls. It was also the site of the world’s largest peony plot, confirmed by Earl Werstine in his Galt Reporter column several times each spring. Horticulturists came in buses to visit the peony plot. I always intended to visit it myself but never did. Just below the world’s largest peony plot a merry-go-round serenaded the big kids frolicking in the upper-creek bathing pool. The big kids ranged in age from thirteen to thirty-seven if you counted Tink Clark.
We used to hide behind the spirea bushes and watch the big boys play. Everything they did led up to throwing the big girls into the creek. The girls were always in the way, preening themselves on blankets right where the boys wanted to wrestle. Constable Steele, patrolling on his bicycle, would watch the big kids from behind the spirea, too. He smiled.
Inspired by the big kids, we would run down to the lower pool by the Dundas Street tunnel where the little kids swam. The little kids ranged in age from five to thirty-six if you counted Tink Clark’s brother, Da Da. The lower pool was a great place to play crocodile. The object of the game was to slide through the water with just our eyes showing, like crocodiles, and grab the girls … some of whom were visibly developing … and pull them under. The girls pretended to hate this and called out to their mothers.
I recounted these good times recently with Janet Elliott of St. George. “I always knew you were a crocodile,” she said. “Wes Lillie was another. And that Grenfell Davenport. My mother wanted to kill you.” In those days boys were always in danger of being killed by someone’s mother, sometimes their own. Janet said she got water up her nose and that her sinuses hadn’t been right since. “You pinched, too,” she said, getting shrill, “and you haven’t changed.”
When I was a boy, the chance of seeing a National Hockey League team at training camp was remote. So when Wes Lillie said, “Let’s go down to the arena and watch the Toronto Maple Leafs work out,” I thought he was kidding. But he said it had to be true because his father, Frank, had heard it from Abby Kilgour, the Galt arena rink supervisor.
So down we went on a Saturday morning: Wes, his sister, Lois, and half a dozen boys from Lowrey Avenue. No trouble getting in. No security, no passes. Wes just spoke to Abby, and he said sure, but not to be pests and no autographs. We seemed to be the only spectators, and for our exclusive viewing, spread out before us like the players on one of those tabletop hockey games, were the Leafs, including Syl Apps, Dit Clapper, Gordie Drillon, Red Horner, and Turk Broda — names that Foster Hewitt hollered at us all winter.
We crouched like field mice behind the glass at the southeast corner of the rink, just below the gondola where, twenty-two years down the road, Wes Lillie, like Foster Hewitt, would call the play-by-play radio account of the Galt Hornets chasing the Allan Cup. During a skirmish, one of the Leafs’ players broke a stick and kicked it to the boards. Immediately, a youth leaped from a gate, skated madly down the rink, picked up the stick, and streaked back, stopping in a great spray of ice chips like Rocket Richard.
“That,” said Wes, “is Tink Clark.”
His real name was Ernie, but everyone called him Tink. He didn’t belong to the Leafs. He was one of Abby Kilgour’s “rink rats.” As such, he helped Abby water the ice (the Zamboni machine had yet to be invented), clean up the aisles and washrooms, and lead with a baton the Grand March on roller-skating nights.
A lot of kids made fun of Tink because he wasn’t what you would call a Rhodes Scholar. He just wasn’t cut out for school. Tink was born to tend that rink and did so superbly for more than thirty years, long after the Leafs there that day had retired.
The following Saturday we crept in to see the whole Maple Leafs team sitting on the boards watching what appeared to be a power-skating demonstration. It was Tink Clark clearing the ice with his wooden scraper. He was really flying and grinning from ear to ear. It had to be his finest moment, clearing that ice surface faster than any man alive while all the Leafs watched and marvelled. When he finished, one of the Leafs’ players took the scraper and had a try pushing it. He shook his head. The Leafs didn’t know it, but they had just had a preview of Eddie Shack.
During the Depression of the 1930s, a lot of guys hung out at Tate’s Smoke Shop near the delta on Water Street. There wasn’t much else to do. Tate liked company and set two benches outside and two inside for the men to sit. The outside men handled the gas pump, took in the cash, and carried out the change. Tate considered it beneath his dignity to do this. He was a respected businessman. A bookie, in fact.
Bing McCauley recalls riding his tricycle to Tate’s to play his harmonica for treats. “Little Brown Jug” was good for an ice-cream cone, and “Melancholy Baby” might bring a chocolate bar. Sometimes one of the men would join him on the spoons. Another might sing or do a little jig.
Bing says Tate always wore a fedora on the back of his head, though he never stepped outside. And he called everybody “suh.”
“Yes, suh. Thank you, suh.” That was about the limit of his conversation except when he talked about the horses. When a woman not familiar with the shop was addressed as “suh,” she would look around to see if he was talking to a man behind her. Then she would hurry out the door. “Thank you, suh,” Tate would holler after her.
Bing, who developed into an accomplished jazz piano player, credits Tate’s Smoke Shop with launching his musical career.
9 What Winters We Had — Heroics on the Hills
Today’s young drivers are thrilled and bored by accounts of heroic battles with snow during the greatly exaggerated and legendary winters of sixty years ago, but here goes, anyway. Weather forecasts then were much more hopeless than they are today, and blizzards struck without warning at peak traffic hours. It seemed that the storms always began at 4:00 p.m. so that every able-bodied boy and flirtatious girl in Central School could run to the foot of the hill there to watch the cars slide out of control. Roads weren’t salted then, and trucks with sand never arrived until after the emergency crews at the Board of Works had finished supper. So the five o’clock rush guaranteed bedlam on every hill in Galt. Central School Hill was the worst because of its sharp ascending curves.
Most cars in those days sported sets of chains on their rear-drive wheels to dig traction out of the ice. All police cars and fire trucks did. But there were always enough cars without chains to cause gridlock. Wheel chains were outlawed with the advent of snow tires and the realization that the chains were shredding the asphalt.
Anyway, the jams on the hills enabled schoolboys to demonstrate their new-found strength and chivalry. They would take hold of a car spinning its wheels and sliding sideways and, with pubescent roars, shoulder it up the hill. Whenever a boy lost his footing and fell face down in the slush, another would leap in to grab the fender. Girls would squeal. Boys in grades seven and eight, like the Mills brothers, Donald and Ray, and Billy Schultz performed feats of strength that risked landing them in the army. Tink Clark, just thirty-seven in grade eight, appeared to lift the