One day Auntie Annie phoned him from the apartment in her New York hotel and said, “902 died. She had a gorgeous couch. I’m sending it to you.” That’s how he inherited his favourite piece of living room furniture, the one on which he habitually meditates.
The Pachter house at 84 Chudleigh Ave was near the “reeveen” (as kids called it), which they had to cross to get to John Ross Robertson Junior Public School, where Charles spent Grades 1 to 4. The ravine was magical. During forays through forbidden pastures, Charles found strangely shaped wild pumpkins growing there in the fall, and he believed he alone knew where they were. His love of the ravine may well have nurtured his adult attachment to a farm in Oro-Medonte, a waterfront studio on Lake Simcoe, and a large studio retreat in a quiet laneway in downtown Orillia.
Lake Simcoe has always played a major role in Charles’s life. In the summers, when he was very young, his parents rented an old musty cottage on the south shore of the lake. The view west over the lake from the cottage was superb, allowing everyone to witness great sunsets and windswept waves.
Though it now seems like just another suburban area north of Toronto, in the 1950s the south shore of Lake Simcoe — Willow Beach, Filey Beach, Jackson’s Point — was, to Charles anyway, far-away cottage country. The wind coming off the lake was powerful, and when it was wavy and stormy, it felt more like an ocean. Fishing in that lake with his dad combined adventure and responsibility. There was so much to keep them busy — attending to worms, leeches, and hooks; unknotting fishing line; putting down and pulling up the anchor; stringing perch and bass; bailing out the wooden boat and pull-starting the motor, a Johnson 10-horse with a sinister-looking cowl. They almost never came home without a good catch, which his dad cleaned expertly as everyone sat around making faces. His mother would coat the fish fillets with egg and flour, fry them in butter, and serve them with fresh summer radishes and tomatoes.
Several times a day, the kids slid from the cottage lawn down a bum-worn, grassy hill to a sandy beach that had the cleanest, clearest water imaginable. Jumping in and out of the lake, they dared each other to see who could swim to the big rock — only ten yards out and where the water was not quite over their heads. Once in a while Charles would discover a chartreuse-green leech the size of a kitchen knife, or a pinkish-beige crayfish with wiggling antennae, or a huge bullfrog looking like it was blowing bubbles, or a beautiful empty mother-of-pearl clamshell. Sometimes a sinister-looking, half-decayed monster fish as long as his whole body washed up on shore, covered in frenzied flies and insects.
“A muskie, maybe a sturgeon,” said his dad.
Down the road were more cottages of rich people, built in the middle of long, landscaped, strip lots divided by high cedar hedges. There was Myn and Morris Sugar’s place, called Mynmor Gardens, with a rococo fountain you could see from the road, and there were the Applebaums with lots of Cadillacs parked in front. Almost everyone had a cottage with a name. When he asked what their cottage’s name was, his father replied “Kosta Lotta,” or “Machakada Sahapa,” which was the first syllable of the name of everyone in the family (i.e., MAida, CHArles, KAren, DAvid, SAra, HArry, PAchter). Often Har drove the family into Jackson’s Point where they walked around splitting and spitting out “shemeshkehs,” or sunflower seeds. There were also pumpkin seeds and pistachio nuts, whose red-dyed shells stained everyone’s lips.
Close by was the Tides Hotel, where some of their friends rented cabins and performed in hastily prepared summer skits. Dibbles would blacken her teeth with chocolate wrappers and put her hair up in pin curls to go out to one of these zany performances as a member of the Mafoofsky choir, made up of a group of friends who sang racy songs in pidgin English-Yiddish. For example: A boy in khaki ... a girl in khaki, underneath a khaki moo-o-oon. (“Kak kim oon” in Yiddish means “shit on that.”)
In later years they moved to another cottage, farther west along the lake near the government dock at Willow Beach, a few doors from Sedore’s general store, where kids hung out at the pinball machines while sucking on halves of strawberry, lime, or banana popsicles, the other halves stowed in shorts pockets. Charles didn’t like this cottage as much as the first cottage. It had slanted floors, dank bedrooms, and green beaverboard walls and mice and bats. And you had to cross the road, dodging cars, to get to the lake, which had hairy green algae attached to the rocks, and a stony bottom. It lacked the wilderness feel of the first cottage. Charles found out the next summer that the first cottage had been towed out onto the lake during the previous winter, and was sunk through a hole in the ice.
The second cottage was closer to Roches Point, where the very rich people lived on huge lakeside estates that bore names like “Windarra” and “South Wind,” with servants’ cottages behind manicured stone walls.
One family, the Cowans, had their own movie theatre, to which Charles once was invited for a birthday party. The rich FOOFs (Fine Old Ontario Families) — the Matthews, Oslers, Laidlaws — were unknown to the young parvenus. It wasn’t until some fifty years later that Charles was invited to a cocktail party at one of these summer palaces, where he was greeted by a neighbour who introduced him as “the artist who painted the queen on a moose.” It was then that he remembered wandering as a kid along the cedar-hedged roadway outside the forbidding gates, slapping mosquitoes, and wondering who on earth was lucky enough to live there.
By 1950 the house on Chudleigh Avenue had become too small for the family of six. Wanting Maida and Charles to be closer to the Holy Blossom Temple religious school they were attending, Dibbles and Har bought a larger, mock-Tudor brick and stucco house at 83 Ava Road, across from the “Holy B,” as it was called. The neighbouring kids on Peveril Hill and Ava Road were quite different from the proper little Anglicans he had known on Chudleigh Avenue. These new kids were mostly Jewish, with names like Hushy (Harold), Moishy (Marvin), Gutman (Goody), and Gedalya (Gary), a far cry from the Jeannies, Johnnies, and Betties he’d known north of Eglinton.
The new house had diamond-paned leaded glass windows, a garage door that opened and closed automatically, and an unused attic that Charles transformed into a working studio where he spent the next two years painting. One day his sister Karen begged him to let her see the attic. He finally agreed and helped her up a ladder and through the trap door in the ceiling of his bedroom closet. Once she was up in the attic, he took the ladder away. She screamed, but eventually he brought the ladder back and let her down.
Alone in the attic he drew trees, still lifes, imaginary Middle Eastern cityscapes, and sketches of Centre Island.
If fine art was not a major focus in Charles’s family home, his parents still felt that the children should be exposed to the arts. His sisters had taken ballet and piano lessons, but his younger brother showed no particular interest in things cultural. Whatever their own interests, his siblings all felt that Charles got special treatment. At dinner, whenever Dibbles put a larger portion in front of him, they would point accusing fingers at the food and scream in unison, “FAVOURITE!” Everyone would then dissolve in laughter as his mother tried to defend herself by adding extra morsels to their skimpier allotments. This was a hilarious ritual, but underneath it there was a considerable amount of jealousy.
“The trouble with you,” Dibbles told Charles, “is that you think too much and you’re too smart for your own good.” When he told her he wanted to be an artist, she replied, “You want to paint? Paint the bridge chairs!”
Four Pachter children — Maida (rear), Karen, David, and Charles.
His widowed immigrant grandmother, Eva, who called him “Charl” because she thought Charles was plural, told him, “Go foist to university. After dat you’ll know if you still want to be an artist, but a doctor is better.” When he received an honorary doctorate from Brock University in 1996, he was able to tell an interviewer, “Now my mother can call me doctor.”[1]
Charles was also discovering that he enjoyed playing