Chapter ten
As we drove up the hill the maple trees met over our heads, creating a long tunnel. Then the playing fields suddenly opened on our left and the school buildings were arranged around it. Trinity House with all the administrative offices was the first building you came to on the south side of the large campus. Next to it was Bethune House and Brent House which bracketed the south-east corner. The chapel and dining hall were next on the east side then the classroom block and the skating rinks halfway up the east side. The Junior School was on the north side of the campus, quite a distance away from the Senior School.
I was in Bethune House, in the “New Boy” dormitory on the third floor. In the dorm were six small cubicles with two beds and a double desk in each. We each had a stall for clothing and personal effects in the anteroom next to the entrance. The large bathroom was on the other end. I met the Reverend Mr. Bagley, the school chaplain and Bethune House Master. His first name was Eric but all the boys called him ‘Butch’ but of course not to his face. There was something else I had to learn – versions of the truth depended who you were talking to. I met some of the other new boys in the dorm. My cubicle-mate was Don Gilley. Across the corridor was Charles Bronfman, the son of Sam Bronfman, head of Seagram’s Distillery in Montreal.
My parents left for home after I got settled in. It was about 100 miles from Aldershot to Port Hope which took a good three hours to drive. My trunk had been delivered from the station and we wrestled it up to the third floor. After it was unpacked, all trunks were consigned to a trunk room in the basement. About a third of the boys were from Montreal, a third from Toronto and the other third from all over Canada and the World. There was a large contingent from Bermuda, and I got to know many of them.
The new boys had arrived a couple of days early to receive an introduction to the school. We met all the masters and had a tour. We received schedules and class lists and it all seemed like a great adventure. On the second day, we were told that we would meet the Head Prefects in the classroom block. It seemed like a bit of a lark but it sure wasn’t. After we were all seated, the two prefects, Hubie Sinclair and Ernie Howard strode in. Silence!!
Sinclair barked out: “On your feet, New Boys!” We all stood to attention. We were then informed by one or other of them in turn how the new boy fagging system worked. We were on call to seniors and prefects at any time outside of classes or organized sports. We would attend at our senior’s room at set times after class. We would wear a white shirt and tie with tie-clip, and our jackets would have all buttons buttoned. Our shoes would be polished and inspected daily. If we did not perform up to expectations, we could expect to be running laps around the campus – a distance of over half a mile. Or worse, for serious infractions, we could get the paddle.
The fagging system applied only to New Boys. It was run by the Prefects who were older boys in their final year at the school. There were also Seniors who had fags as well, and House Officers who had minor disciplining duties such as enforcing “lights out”. The prefects and seniors were careful not to conflict with the Headmaster and the other masters who dealt with all the boys and were responsible for more serious problems and infractions.
As I think back on this sunny afternoon in mid-September 1945, that is when my childhood ended and my real life began. For years after this, I thought back to the idyllic summer days around Two Acres and it seemed like another life or something one had seen in a movie sometime. Suddenly this was real. My home and parents were far away and I was on my own facing the world. It was a bit scary and I wasn’t sure I was going to like it. But I had no choice. My father had shown me that I was not a quitter and that carried me through though sometimes I felt like a quitter.
But as an only child with a funny name, who was raised in the country with little experience with city life, I was a sitting duck for the pranks of boarding school kids. I didn’t understand the teasing and I guess at first, I didn’t take it very well. I got all manner of nicknames such as “corpse-head” which I learned to tolerate. I realized that up until now I had lived in a world of adults with a few good friends like Murray and Peter. But now I was in a different, more competitive world and it didn’t feel too comfortable.
School life settled into a routine. Our day was controlled by electric bells. We had a getting up bell at 7 o’clock, breakfast at 7:30 in the dining hall, three 40 minute class periods in the classroom block between 8:30 and 10:30, three more between 10:50 and 12:50 with a break between, lunch at 1 pm and two more classes from 2 o’clock to 3:20. Organized sports between 3:40 and 5:30 and then clean up and off to a brief chapel service at 5:45. Dinner was at 6, and a study period was from 7:30 to 9:30. Junior boys (2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th Forms – Grades 9, 10, 11, 12) had to study in a large study hall and were in bed by 10:20. Senior boys could study in their rooms and could stay up until later – nominally 10:45 but they were not checked up on so much, they just had to be quiet in their rooms.
There were five-minute warning bells and two minutes between classes. The bells were in every corridor and lots of other places. Attendance was kept at everything, including chapel and meals. Various masters and prefects were assigned to check off your name on a slate as you entered. Whenever Mr. Charles Scott was on the door at breakfast, we could expect a hard time. His nickname was “Chinny” because his slightly protruding jaw wagged menacingly when you were in trouble. As soon as the final bell went for a meal, Chinny’s arm would shoot out across the door opening and the kids who piled up behind it would be marked ‘late.’ The usual penalty for lateness was to run once around the campus.
A lot of people seemed to be late for breakfast in the morning; some kids didn’t get up until about 10 minutes before 7:30 and had trouble washing and dressing and getting down the hall. To get people moving, they would toll the chapel bell two minutes before. If you weren’t already running down the hall by then, you weren’t going to make it. Regularly I saw boys running down the hall with their jacket over their arm as they completed tying their ties and tucking in their shirts. I’m sure I did this more than once. One morning I saw one guy with his pants over his arm. He managed to get into them as he was running between Bethune and Brent Houses and he just made it for breakfast. Chinny wasn’t on that day or he surely would have been caught for something.
Weekends were different. On Saturdays we had classes till 10:30 then we could have town leave until lunch at 1 o’clock. After lunch we had free time until chapel before dinner. Junior boys could only go to town on Saturday mornings; senior boys could go to town anytime they were free. On Sunday we had to attend chapel at either 8 o’clock or at 10:30. Evensong service at 5 o’clock was mandatory for everyone. The rest of the day was free time. You could get a box lunch from the kitchen if you asked ahead.
We often took hikes into the surrounding countryside. One time we rode our bikes up Highway 28 past Bewdley and on our way to Peterborough. We were tired on the way back but fortunately it was more downhill that way. Sunday night we had to write a letter home. The House Officers would check to see that we had a letter ready to mail. My mother saved my letters for years but I have no idea where they are now.
I played soccer that first fall term. A lot of the boys turned out for football which was more popular. All the teams were named usually by the size of the boys in them. There was Littleside, Middleside and Bigside. Bigside football was the one that played the other boarding schools in what they called the “Little Big Four”1. In my first year I just got to see the home games, but in later years I travelled to the other schools sometimes. I played Littleside soccer that first fall and we didn’t play any other schools. I can remember all the running which got me out of breath sometimes but it set me up for long running races. I wasn’t too fast on the 100-yard dash, but I could do alright on the mile and cross-country races.
The fall term seemed interminable. It seemed forever until the mid-term break at the end of October. I had never been so anxious to see home in my life. It was a long weekend – we left on a bus for Toronto on Friday morning and I remember my parents meeting me and after supper at home, we went to see “The Song of Bernadette” at the Westdale Theatre in Hamilton. I don’t remember much else except visiting the Kappeles and lounging around at home. I returned Tuesday on the train, getting in to Port Hope about 4 in the afternoon.
The rest of the year gradually got better. I had one incident in which my senior thought that I was not present for fagging one day and a dorm-mate didn’t back me up that I was there. I wound up doing rounds of the track and I felt unjustly dealt with. I guess when my senior accused me of not being there, my mind somehow went blank and I didn’t say anything for a moment. I guess life just ain’t fair. But I learned that I had to be more assertive and argue my case more strongly.
By December, the days were getting shorter so they switched the two classes after lunch to just before dinner and moved sports afternoons earlier. We started basketball in the gym but hockey couldn’t start until after Christmas when the rinks were frozen. Then there were the Christmas events and shows to prepare for because Christmas holidays were coming up soon. Our vacations always ran from Wednesday to Wednesday. We got three weeks at Christmas and two weeks at Easter. This was better than high school.
Because Christmas fell on a Tuesday that year, we got holidays from the 19th of December until the 9th of January. This was a whole week longer than my friends at BHS had. But the gang invited me to some of their parties and my parents had a traditional Christmas at home and the time went quite fast. The extra week dragged a bit though but Theresa put me to work around the house.
Winter and Spring of ’46
In January, we were into hockey. I was a good skater but not so good in the rough and tumble of hockey so I got a reputation as a ‘sissy skater’. Because I wasn’t very good at basketball either, I wound up doing gymnastics. I learned the pommel horse and vaulting the big horse and tried the parallel bars. But I was not a star at gym either. There were squash courts too, but I got discouraged when one of my friends got me running after the ball until I was all out of breath and I realized he was standing in the middle of the court, lobbing the ball first to one side and then to the other and his feet hardly moved.
We soon discovered that we couldn’t listen to our radios after ‘lights-out’ because the masters turned the power off to the dorm. Some of the second-year guys had figured out an all-night power system by running a cord up from the basement through the ivy on the outside wall. They decided to run a line up for us and my little radio was appropriated for the purpose. We had earphones run around the cubicle so that we didn’t have to have the speaker on, which could have been heard by prowling house officers. I almost spilled the beans one night when a house officer shone his flashlight on me in bed and I hadn’t concealed the earphone well enough. Somehow, I convinced him that the earphone was not connected to anything.
During the cold weather, my mother insisted that I wear long flannel underwear and sweaters. She had provided me with an ample supply for school. But the classrooms were steam-heated and so was the dorm so I would get very hot and sweaty inside and then go outside and get chilled. By the end of January, I was down with bronchitis and transferred to the Infirmary which was just behind Trinity House. The ski hill was just behind the Infirmary and I watched enviously as my classmates zipped down the hill, but Dr. McDermott and the nurse in charge would not let me out to join them.
I was there for four weeks because I still had wheezing sounds after I felt all better. I remember becoming a whiz at solitaire and shuffling cards. I was also pretty good at the mechanical hockey game in the sun room. Also, I found out that our all-night power system had been discovered and all our equipment was confiscated. Butch Bagley took compassion on me and returned my radio to me in the infirmary so I had something to listen to. It was the end of February by the time I got back to the dorm.
The fagging system had definitely eased up as the year rolled on. The days were getting longer and we started to think about spring. We had the usual two weeks at Easter – again from a Wednesday to a Wednesday. When I returned to the school I discovered that Don Gilley and I had been moved to the second-year dorm on the second floor. This was a definite move up and I didn’t feel so much like a new boy any more. The only thing I clearly remember of that period was the time the toilet flooded the bathroom and backed right out into the corridor of the dorm. The plumber was called who soon came into the dorm with a bedraggled half-grapefruit rind. He exclaimed: “Who put this down the toilet?” I heard one of the boys, a guy from Argentina, mutter under his voice: “That’s funny; the last one went down all right.”
In the spring term, the sport was cricket. We also did track and field but no baseball. It was referred to as “rounders” and was not a recognized sport. Most of us played pick-up games of baseball on Saturday or Sunday afternoons. I tried my hand at Littleside cricket. I had to learn the lingo which included bowls on the pitches, wickets and wicket-keepers, centuries, overs, pig-tails and silly leg off. After a bit this actually made sense to me. I learned several very important things. One was that you don’t stop a grounder ball with your shins. The cricket ball is hard, much harder than a baseball and it can pack a wallop. The other thing that I learned was that a batter can’t stop the ball by blocking it with arm or body. You are promptly called “Out, LBW!” (Leg before wicket). It doesn’t have to be your leg; any part of the body will do.)
The Air Cadet Corps had a Church Parade and inspection sometime in May. After the big parade each year, they had a panoramic picture. The local photographer would pose the whole Cadet Corps in three ranks in a semi-circle which had been carefully measured on the ground. The camera was set in the centre on a stand that mechanically panned it around the semi-circle while simultaneously moving the film inside the camera so that a clear image formed on a long piece of film. When you got the print, it was about 8 inches high and 3 feet long and laid out flat it looked like everyone was in a straight line. Since the camera took about 15 or 20 seconds to pan from one end to the other, there were always a couple of wags who posed at one end at the start, then as the camera moved on, ran like mad to the other end, thus appearing in the picture twice. One year, Chinny Scott stood behind the cadets and tried to intercept the runners. In the resulting fracas we all turned around to look and in the finished picture you could see all the cadets in the middle were looking behind.
Because I missed a month of school in February, I did not do all that well on the exams in June, but I did get through. Speech Day was always on the Saturday closest to the middle of June. In 1946 it was on the 15th. My parents were there along with a lot of other parents. I got to meet Sam and Sadie Bronfman, but I guess I wasn’t as impressed by this as I would be later. Charles was sad because they didn’t bring the Rolls. There were speeches and prizes and all kinds of other things. It was a beautiful warm June day and everyone was out on the lawn near the Cenotaph. And then we drove home in my dad’s new Dodge.
Trip to Washington with Cousin Mary
My cousin Mary had been demobbed2 from the Nursing Sisters and returned from England during the fall. She was still feeling very sad because her husband had been lost in the last few months of the War. My parents were always close to Mary and they believed that a trip would cheer her up. My dad was going to a pathology convention in Washington D. C. so we went along. We made Harrisburg Pennsylvania the first night. The next day we visited the famous battleground from the American Civil War at Gettysburg and toured the battlefield. Our tour guide was surprised that I knew very little about the Civil War.
My mother had been to Washington before and while dad was in meetings, she showed us around the city. I spent a whole day in the Smithsonian Institute. I remembered that they had a great Foucault’s pendulum set up in an open stairwell. The pendulum changed direction with the rotation of the earth. There were marks on the floor to show the time of day. My mother trotted out her favourite story about one time in Washington when she referred to the Library of Congress as the ‘Transgressional’ Library. Everybody laughed even though we had heard this story many times before.
After my dad’s meetings were over, we took a day and drove down to Colonial Williamsburg. I have some 16 mm movies that I took there. They still look good even though they are badly faded now. I wanted to go to everything so I persuaded my father to buy the full package of tickets for the four of us. I guess it must have cost plenty and of course we couldn’t get to see more than about half of the sites before it was time to go. On the way back to Washington mother drove and I sat in the front seat with the movie camera. I remember my father in the back seat with Mary pulling out a roll of unused tickets and muttering “There’s another five dollars!” as he threw them out. We got a little tired of this by the time we got back to Washington. But I felt bad because I had persuaded him to buy them all.
The other thing I remember about the trip was that my dad allowed me to pay bills, tip the waiters and buy gas for the car. I remember we went to the Allies Restaurant in Washington and didn’t order the lobster because it was $2.50 – a very high price for a meal in those days. Coffee was 5¢ but some restaurants were charging 10¢. It was very good for me to see exactly what things cost.
Before we knew it, it was time to go home. The first day we went to Harrisburg then we cut across from Harrisburg to Pittsburgh on the Pennsylvania Turnpike which had just been finished in 1945. It was a true limited access highway unlike the Queen Elizabeth Way which had numerous level intersections and even a few driveways opening onto it. There were tunnels under ridges in the Allegheny Mountains; this was cool because we didn’t have anything like that in Ontario.
We stayed in Pittsburgh overnight and I was aware of all the smog that filtered down like fine silt everywhere. We had to keep the windows closed in the hotel because otherwise, everything would be coated the next morning. When it rained, the water in the gutters had a distinctly brown caste. There was an old joke about one time when the steelworkers were on strike and the steel mills closed down. The local denizens panicked because there was this bright glowing orb in the sky that they had not seen before. It was the sun. Even the east end of Hamilton was not that bad.
The Summer of ’46
I got a summer job at the Dominion Foundries and Steel Company (Dofasco) in July and August. I was a drill boy in the analysis lab. We were in a small building next to the main foundry and my job was to collect a small sample of steel from each melt, bring it back to the lab and on an old bench drill, cut some chips which could be analysed for the proper amounts of carbon, magnesium, chromium and other ingredients of specialized steelmaking. The job paid 72½¢ an hour for a 48-hour week. I worked day and afternoon shifts, sometimes a graveyard shift. It was hot and dirty, but I felt like a real working man at the tender age of 15. I was driven in and out by my dad who went in to the Lab at the General Hospital every day and picked me up on the way home. Since I got off shift by about 4 o’clock, I would sometimes catch a bus to the hospital and wait for him to be finished.
There had been a nasty strike at the Steel Company of Canada (Stelco) just the year before in which the United Steelworkers of America had held out for 6 months for a 7 or 8¢ raise. I remember the shouted accusations of “scab” and “strike-breaker” near the gates of the plant all that previous summer. There were a number of houses in the east end of Hamilton which had ‘SCAB’ painted across the front in letters about two feet high. It got pretty violent a few times and we just stayed away from the area.
The Dominion Foundries had successfully kept the union out by always paying a few cents more than the union shop at Stelco. That is why even drill boys were paid $34.80 a week. My friend Peter Kapelle was working as a lineman’s assistant at Bell Telephone for $25.00 for a 44-hour week and thought he was doing well. Every so often there would be organizers from the States handing out leaflets at the gates as we went off shift. But we all knew that the money and the working conditions were better at Dofasco so we just threw them away.
I had other duties as well. I had to sharpen my drills and mix reagents and sweep the lab out with wet sawdust twice a day. When we weren’t busy, we sat out beside the yard full of scrap iron beside the foundry. There was an overhead crane on tracks with a big electro-magnet that could snap up bits of iron from about three feet away. You could tell when the crane operator turned on the magnet because all the lights in the lab would dim slightly. He would load scrap into a bin on wheels and this would be wheeled into one of the furnaces and dumped in.
One time as we were sitting out in the sun, the crane operator was trying to pick up steel scraps just around the door opening but just out of reach of the electro-magnet. He lowered it on its cables until it was just a foot off the ground and then got it swinging into the doorway. As it swung through the opening he would snap the power on and all kinds of bits would jump up to the great magnet. One time, when the magnet swung out it had snaffled four metal lunch pails, followed by some angry steel-workers.
In those days you could get a beginners’ driver’s licence if you were 15. It allowed you to drive anywhere as long as there was a regular licenced driver in the front seat with you. I could drive on quiet roads but dad didn’t want me on the highway until I had more experience. Sometimes my mother let me drive the Willys. She insisted that I not use high gear so I was roaring along in second gear all the time. One time I misjudged the turn in the driveway and rammed the side of the garage door opening.
Another time I was driving the new Dodge on a gravel road, caught a wheel in the ridge of gravel and skidded down into the ditch. We had to get the tow truck to pull us out. But my father persevered in letting me drive and when I turned 16, I passed my driving test. I have always been very conscious of the handling limits of any car I drive. And I never skidded into the ditch again.
The Fall of ’46 – Back to TCS
I was now a second-year boy and I was looking forward to getting back to school without the strictures of the New-Boy system to impede me. I was going into 5th form (Grade 12) this year which was much more senior. I was put into a four-man room on the third floor of Bethune House with three other guys from the new-boy dorm of last year, Don Gilley, Richard Hogarth and Charles Bronfman. It was bad from the start, but only got worse as the fall term progressed. Even as I arrived, the room had two single beds and a double bunk. Don Gilley and Charles Bronfman had parked their things on the two single beds so I grabbed the lower part of the double bunk. When Dick Hogarth arrived, he clearly didn’t want the upper bunk and a great debate started. I found myself arguing against the three of them.
The final saw-off was that I would have the lower bunk for half a year and Dick would have it for the other half. Somehow, it was also agreed that he would have it first, and I would have it after Christmas. At no time was there any discussion of rotating the single beds. Further, after I had reluctantly moved to the upper bunk, there was no further discussion about switching around at Christmas. It was quite clear that I should not even raise the subject. When I did, I was told that I was quite wrong, they had never agreed to that. Further, Dick took great pleasure in lying on the lower bunk and kicking me from below, whenever the idea entered his head. If I objected, it got worse. By October, the bedsprings under my mattress were beginning to part company and part of my mattress hung through. Dick refused to take any responsibility for this and suggested that I had wrecked the bed myself.
That was only the start. My things were hidden or hung on the railing outside; I was not allowed to join in any conversations; I was shut out of my room more than once and everything I did was a big joke to the other three. If I got mad about it, I was obviously a bad sport. This was worse than being a new boy. At least there, there was some fairness and the right of appeal. Here, there was none of it – if I complained, it only seemed to make things worse.
The nick-names began in earnest and took on a vicious turn. Not only was I called “deadhead” and “corpse-head” but I was greeted on entering my room with “Duhhh- Hi ya!” and the trio took delight in making out that I was mentally deficient or worse.3 By mid-term break, I was so much into this horrible surreal world, I felt that everyone in the world must hate me for some reason that I couldn’t understand and they would not tell me. I felt like I must have the plague, or “B.O.”4 or something. I seriously thought of quitting and going back to Burlington HS.
At half-term break, I actually was surprised to find that my old friend Peter Kappele seemed to like me and treated me as a normal person. Suddenly, the whole experience at TCS came into perspective. I talked to my dad about it and he said: “John, I will take you out if you want but I want you to at least finish the year. You should not be a quitter.” He also said that sometimes all you can do is try to ignore it and find friends somewhere else; otherwise you are fighting all the time. He also said that he would speak to Mr. Bagley about it but, filled with new resolve, I told him that I wanted to fight my own battles. Butch Bagley did speak to me and offered to move me to another room but I said that I would stick it out. I became aware that I was not the only boy in the school who was teased or was not considered “one-of-the-boys.” I began to make friends with Noel Burland, William Herridge, Frank (Phebe) Cooper, Dwight (Fiume) Fulford, among others, and I was able to ignore the taunts and jokes back in my room.
The rest of the year was not much better, but I did find some other friends and managed to live by being in my room only to sleep and change my clothes. The rest of the time, I would be in the study hall, or in the room of a friend. I also started taking long walks through the country in which I turned over all these things in my mind and tried to make sense of them. I remember that I decided to invite Marg-Ann Robertson to the Spring Formal dance which was always held at the end of the Easter vacation. Because Port Hope was so far away, the girls had to stay overnight and they were accommodated in the Junior School. It was quite a do.
When my erstwhile room-mates discovered that this “duh—hi ya” not only knew a girl to take out but was actually bringing her to the dance, they talked among themselves and finally, Dick Hogarth announced that he was coming to the dance as well. I was convinced that he was doing that to spy on me. I was right. After we got back for the final term, my amorous endeavours and the feminine qualities of my date were dissected in detail. This only strengthened my determination to avoid these guys even more.
I developed a perspective that people who treated others the way I was treated were in general very unhappy people themselves, and they could only feel good by putting others down. I rationalized that they must feel awful inside and that I could rise above this misery if I tried. Many years later, when I read “The Bronfman Dynasty” by Peter Newman, I was fascinated to read that Charles felt that his years at TCS were a horrible experience, and that he wanted to have nothing to do with it after that. I ran into Don Gilley at a reunion a few years later, and he had not kept in touch with the school very much. I never saw Dick Hogarth again. His father was a well-known financier on Bay Street in Toronto, but it seemed that after TCS, Dick dropped out of sight. I guess my theory wasn’t so far off after all.
As I look back on my life, this experience was another defining moment. I realize that I have accomplished much more in my life than either Don or Dick; Charles did great things, including starting the Montreal Expos, but he had a rich father which gave him a head start. Further, he was another one who felt bullied at TCS, so in a funny sense, we were more kindred spirits than we knew at the time. It is too bad that we were both so buried in our own problems that we never connected. I found that I could not stand bullies. I learned that if you stood up to them and did not let yourself be put on the defensive, they often lost their courage and didn’t bother you after that. This gave me confidence in the future in some very difficult situations. I can remember thinking at several critical points in my life – I got through that second year at TCS, I can get through this.
It was a funny year. My father got me on a Hamilton high-school trip to New York at Easter. I can remember that on the way down, the bus broke down near Painted Post NY in the middle of the night. I was sitting with a girl whom I got to know and as it got dark she leaned her head on my shoulder and we tried to sleep. This was another experience that stuck with me. We didn’t get into New York until noon the next day and we were so tired that I actually fell asleep during the Easter service at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine – this was the first time I remember being so sleepy that I could fall asleep during the day.
I also remember being warned not to go into Central Park after dark. I didn’t know any of the kids but I had a good time anyway. I remember we were approached by a guy with a long trench coat. At first we thought he was a flasher I was learning some new terminology) but it turned out that he was selling fine watches – probably stolen. One guy said he would offer 25. Another said 50. The third guy said: “Don’t be a piker. Give him the whole dollar.” Things got a little rough after that so we left the Park in a hurry.
I can’t remember much else about that year at TCS. I played Littleside Football because I didn’t make the Middleside team. Our one away game was against Lakefield College and I made a tackle which helped us win. Other things were going better too. I was now a corporal, then a sergeant in the cadet corps, and by the end of the year, I was more respected than perhaps I realized. I continued to think of myself as somehow not quite as good as the others.
The Summer of 1947
Somehow, I didn’t get a job that summer. I undertook to paint the house for my father. It was not a success. I found it very boring and I did not put the paint on evenly enough so it looked patchy. We had colonial style windows so painting around all the mullions was a chore. Peter Kappele tells the story about my aunt Christine on the inside pointing out to me on the outside all the paint I got on the glass. He says that in frustration, I just painted right over the glass, thereby blocking my aunt’s view of what I was doing. My position is that I don’t remember that.
I also sent produce from our garden up to my father’s classmate in Timmins, Dr. Smith. We went to visit him over the summer and he took me down the Hollanger Mine, one of the richest gold mines in the world. We also visited the Beatons in Noranda, just over the Quebec border from Kirkland Lake because Mr. Beaton had taken a job there. It was a warm summer. I went swimming and visited the cottage in Port Dover, but after the war, the wonderful summer resort town that I had remembered fondly as a child had gone downhill and the next year my mother decided to sell the cottage. This was another reminder that my childhood had ended.
I remember that summer how pleased most of the Port Dover townspeople seemed to be when the shad flies disappeared. As a young child I could remember a few days in June every year when the shad flies would swarm around the street lights and the next day there were rotting piles of them on the sidewalks. For a few years in the mid ’40s, there had been very few and then about ’47 or ’48 there were none. Then they realized that this meant that Lake Erie was dying and the fishing industry was dying too. Sometime in the 1980s, after long efforts to clean up the lake, the shad flies came back. It was probably the first time that something was celebrated when it went away and celebrated again when it returned. Reminds me now of parents’ reactions on sending children off to school.
We didn’t go to the cottage much after that. It seemed to have changed. The fishing industry was almost dead – they still had perch but my dad was disgusted that they were bringing in whitefish from Lake Superior to sell on the dock, as if it were locally caught. And we saw more and more bikers riding up and down the street. Port Dover had been a big smuggling centre during Prohibition in the 1930s. One had an increasing feeling that the underworld was moving back in.
Building Radios
After the war, radios, radar and telecommunications had come into their own. Peter Kappele and I had built crystal sets during the war but we could never get them to work very well. When Uncle Eric’s old radio had quit and my father found that the radio tubes for it were impossible to get during the war, we were allowed to play with it. We basically took it apart and used the tubes and other parts for our experiments. I found some circuits in my Grade 12 physics book but they were very basic and Peter had found a book which showed how to build several radios in a step-by-step way. I learned how to solder and how to calculate the values of resistors using Ohm’s Law.
We subscribed to Popular Science and Popular Mechanics and they often had circuits and plans. By 1947, I was building a portable radio which used enormous batteries, and I approached Chinny Scott to see if I could build a wooden case for it in the school’s woodworking shop. It turned into an elaborate project covered with leatherette and with a brushed aluminum grill on the front. I really think that Mr. Scott was impressed because when I proposed building an end table which would contain a high-fidelity phonograph I was planning to build for our living room at home, he got some pine and ordinary plywood from the lumber rack. Later when I had it almost finished, he commented that if he had seen what I was going to do, he would have got some better wood, like mahogany for me to use.
Peter and I always seemed to have a radio project on the go. I got quite good at cutting out aluminum chassis, mounting tube sockets and plugs on them and soldering the other parts. I also got the General Electric Radiotron (tube) Manual and studied it. Soon we were designing our own radios and high-fidelity amplifiers. We got parts wholesale through parts distributors and learned the lingo. The resistances seemed quite high for radios. A common value would be 1 million ohms (1 meg-ohm) at probably ¼ watt. One day Peter went into East Hamilton Radio and (mistakenly) asked for four ¼ ohm 1 megawatt resistors. The surprised clerk exclaimed: “What are you going to do? Heat your house?”
My Third Year at TCS, 1947-8
After the second year, I went back to Trinity in the fall of ’47 with some misgivings. But it was my 6th Form year, so if I did well on my Upper School examinations, I could enter university next year. I would only be 17 when most first-year students were 18, but this was still very tempting. My father had been pushing me to enter medicine but I knew that because of the veterans flooding into universities, courses like medicine would be very difficult to get into. It was with some uncertainty that I approached this year.
It turned out much better than I believed possible. My roommate was Stuart Morgan, the grand-nephew of Henry Morgan who had founded a large department store in Montreal. Both of us approached each other rather warily but soon realized that we shared many similar views on things. Stuart was heading for McGill the next year and we both were going to have some fun but also work hard for good marks. We shared a double room on the third floor, just down the hall from the 4-man room of last year. After Christmas we were moved to the first floor where all the senior boys lived.
The year was a pleasant blur. I was feeling much more confident. I made Middleside football and was a sergeant in the cadet corps fall church parade. I got my name on the squash ladder, but every time I began to move up, I would be challenged by a better player and knocked down to the bottom again. I joined the chapel choir and tried out for the annual school play (unsuccessfully). I listened to classical music in the great hall and got some other friends who also liked good music. And, I acquired a better nickname.
I was called “Happy John” which was soon shortened to “Hap” or even “Hip”. The common notion was that it was because I was always laughing and singing, but the real origin was from yet another radio program called “Fibber McGee and Molly”. It had a character called “Digger the friendly undertaker.” Digger was always referring to his profession as “it is good and I’m soooo happy!” Curiously enough, this just preceded Jack Kerouac’s pilgrimage across the USA and his book ‘The Beat Generation’. It also was just in the early days of “Be-bop” and Dizzy Gillespie. ‘Hip’ people would ‘dig’ the beat generation who soon came to be known as “hippies”. Somehow it all fit. The people who came up with the name probably didn’t think about all this, but it may account for why the name stuck.
I found that I was able to elect skiing as my winter sport. I persuaded my father that I had to have skis with steel edges and I got some for Christmas that year. About once a week, we went to the nearby Northumberland Ski Club for an afternoon of skiing. My previous ski outings had been to the Cedar Springs Golf Club with Mr. Todd our scoutmaster. We had learned herringbone and side-step for getting up the hill and snowplough turns to get down. At the Northumberland club they had a rope tow to get up the hill and slopes with various degrees of difficulty, all ending up back at the small Quonset hut which served as a club house.
The rope tow was ingenious. A war surplus Bren gun carrier with the tracks removed was set up on blocks beside the towpath. The drive wheel was replaced with a truck wheel without the tire and the tow rope ran around this to another truck wheel pulley attached to a large tree at the top of the hill. There was a trigger rope across the trail which ran down the hill to a knife switch on the Bren gun carrier. If someone got tangled in the rope at the top and couldn’t let go, they would hit the trigger rope which shut off the engine before they were dragged through the top pulley on the tree. Simple, primitive perhaps, but ingenious – and it worked.
We also skied on the hill behind the infirmary and sometimes went up to the school farm up in the hills near Rice Lake. There I learned parallel skiing. The parallel turns were called Christiana turns or “Christies” in those days, but when you can do them properly you are an alpine skier. Stu Morgan was a very good skier as were many of the guys from Montreal. During the winter term he got a pair of Austrian skis with strange harnesses and steel edges which were moulded right into the skis, unlike mine which were flat metal strips screwed to the wood with tiny screws.
I have one other recollection which seemed unimportant at the time but turned out to be important later. I was standing at the door of the library one day with some friends when I borrowed Reed Scowen’s glasses and looked through them. I discovered that I could see the clock down the hall quite clearly but it was somewhat blurry without them. I also realized that I could read things which were within a few inches of my eyes which the other guys couldn’t do. At the Easter break, dad sent me to see Dr. Percy McFarland in the Medical Arts building in Hamilton. He was an EENT specialist and a friend of my father. He decided that I was slightly myopic and prescribed glasses to help me see better at long distances. All of a sudden, I could read street signs easily and see lots of other things at a distance. I wore them for another year, but then my eyes seem to have improved and by university, I was not wearing them anymore.
The rest of the year was equally good. In the warm weather we sunbathed out on the lawn and tried to study. Some guys discovered that if they put a heavy paste of laundry detergent with optical brightness in their hair and allowed it to bake in the sun, their hair turned a vivid orange. This became a new fad. I remember that the Upper School Departmental Exams were in the last three weeks of June so they extended after Speech day. When I got my exam results I discovered that I did not get all first-class honours which would have been necessary to get into medicine. I also discovered that I had failed Latin Authors which I had taken because I didn’t like French very much. This decided me to take another year at TCS to improve my marks.
My father was very upset because I had won the Science Prize in my form for two years running. He urged me to appeal this mark and I was granted a pass in Latin. Apparently, I had an almost perfect paper in Physics (I only lost one mark) and a very high mark in Chemistry as well as high marks in my mathematics courses so it was decided that I should not be held back because of Latin.
The Summer of ’48
The more popular exams were early in the three-week schedule so I finished my exams in time to go with mom and dad to Boston for a convention he was attending. I had my full drivers licence by then and the only thing I remember was trying to get into Boston and every time I saw a fingerboard for Boston, I was still about 30 miles away. Finally, I pulled into a service station to ask directions and was told that we were on the ring road that skirted around the city. I remember being annoyed, slamming the car into reverse and backing into the sign stanchion with a loud clang. No damage done and we did get into Boston before long. On the way down and back we went through the Green and White Mountains and visited Cape Cod and Provincetown.
My dad introduced me to the general manager of Cardy Hotels the new owner of the Royal Connaught Hotel in Hamilton. They had just bought Bigwin Inn on Lake-of-Bays. I promptly went in to meet him and got a summer student job as a caddy on the Bigwin Inn golf course. This was exciting because there would be all kinds of kids there, many from university. The golf course got fairly busy in July but it was a bit slower in August. We were posted to the Caddy Camp which was much like an army camp a long way from the hotel on the north side of Bigwin Island. The waitresses in the main dining room had a residence near the hotel complex and it seemed that there was always a party going on there. We also went over to Glenmount on the south shore of Lake of Bays because there was a dance in the dance hall almost every night.
For a sheltered boy in a boys’ school, with limited experience with girls, this was an eye opener. I learned about necking and various other things. I also had a girl-friend who was a year or so older and refined my amorous skills some more. At one party, a guy hardly older than me was passing around a bottle of rum. Wine and sherry I had had at home, but the hard stuff was new to me. Even one Dixie cup full gave me a bit of a buzz. There were dances at Bigwin Inn most nights with an orchestra. Staff could attend these too, as long as they were properly dressed. Oklahoma was very popular and I learned most of the songs from it just listening to the orchestra.
I made friends with a guy from Kitchener, Harry Erb. In August, the golf course seemed to slow down and it was decided that they didn’t need all the caddies because none of us were making much money. We drew lots to see who would be sent home and Harry drew one of the ‘home’ slips. He was most upset because he knew he could not get another job in early August. Several other guys who were also given a pink slip were given permission to set up a staff canteen and Harry joined them. It was a happy choice because this was a better place to hang out than the caddy camp and hotel staff were not always welcome in public areas of the hotel.
I have one other recollection. I had done some dinghy sailing with Mr. Todd. But the hotel had a fleet of Ackroyds which were not used all that often by the guests. An Ackroyd is a class which seemed to be peculiar to Muskoka. It was a 16’ gaff-rigged single sail boat with a fixed keel and a large cockpit. They were heavy as sin. They were slow and stable and easy to sail but not too exciting for young bucks like us. They would hold four or five but one person could sail them.
One day we had an Ackroyd out in a stiff breeze. We had everything let out on a run when a gust hit us and suddenly the short mast broke off at the mast-step and the sail, gaff, boom and a tangle of ropes fell in the water in front of the boat. We were helpless in the strong wind but managed to use the wreckage of the sail as a sea anchor so that we wouldn’t broach to. Finally, someone in a motor launch, seeing our plight, gave us a tow back to the hotel. Not to be deterred, I was out another day and close-hauled in a strong breeze, the sail split from side to side. We tied a rope to the flapping ripped edge and used it as a jury rig to get back home. That is when I learned the value of the lesson that you beat up-wind first before you run down-wind. If we had been down-wind when it happened we could never have got home.
This was the best summer in my life so far. By the time I got home after the Labour Day weekend, I was fired up for my return to school. Unlike the public-school system, TCS started the week after Labour Day so I was busy getting everything ready. Some of my Burlington friends were starting university – Fred Ross was off to Royal Military College and Dick Gillies had been accepted in Queens Medicine.
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However, Peter Kappele was a couple of years behind me and was attending Westdale Collegiate in Hamilton. After Central Collegiate was destroyed by fire in 1946, both Westdale and Delta had accepted the additional students and were running double shifts. Westdale had set up portables in the football field and had the dubious distinction of being the largest secondary school in the British Commonwealth with over 5000 students.
My Final Year at TCS, 1948-9
I was at least moderately happy to be returning to school. I had been made a House Officer in May so I was now moving up the ladder. My roommate was Bill Carroll, the son of Leo G. Carroll, a well-known character actor in Hollywood at the time. We got along very well and I learned something about life in California which made me eager to visit the Golden State. Bill was very mature for his age and had an American outlook on life which challenged the parochialism of many of my classmates.
The new tuck shop had opened on the other side of the football field and we enjoyed going over there for chocolate bars, ice cream or sticky buns. I was back on Middleside football in the fall and after Christmas I continued skiing but also tried my hand at hockey. Because of my figure skating as a child I could skate better than many others but I wasn’t aggressive enough in the corners and I couldn’t hit an open net from the blue line. I wound up in the house league, affectionately known as the Rabbit League. There were about five teams but we often moved around if one team or another was short.
We were not sure if we were happy or insulted when they announced that we would be playing a girls’ team from Bishop Strachan School. The game was going fairly well for us. In the third period we were ahead 3 to 1. Then some strange looking girls joined the BSS team. We soon recognized them as TCS guys from the Bigside team wearing blonde wigs and things stuffed in the front of their sweaters to resemble a bosom. The tide quickly turned in BSS’s favour. In about five minutes the score had changed to 7 to 3 for them. At that point the whole thing turned into a free-for-all and we all rushed on the ice. Then we had lunch with the girls and everything ended very pleasantly.
The year moved along fairly quickly. Bill and I would lie in bed after lights-out talking about things and philosophizing on the state of the world. We often wound up in Fiume Fulford’s room with several others of a similar bent. ‘Phoebe’ Cooper talked about the occult and introduced us to Gilbran’s ‘The Prophet’. We all read books on extra-sensory perception which was a new topic at that time. Some of the poetry which I had read in Grade 8 came back to me, such as ‘The Lady in the Lake’.
Later in the year, Phoebe became convinced that there was a ghost in the old chapel (which had burned down in 1928.) The chancel end was partially saved and was incorporated into the new chapel/great hall when the school was rebuilt. We all agreed to sneak over there at about 3 a.m. when Phoebe was sure the ghost would be about. I remember that someone tapped on our door and we joined the furtive band off to the great hall. We arranged ourselves at 3-foot intervals down the back stairs.
It was pitch black and even though we could feel people close to us we couldn’t see anything. Presently we heard Phoebe at the foot of the stairs give a shushing sound. I could hear others next to him giving a deep breath. The feeling of excitement seemed to be coming up the stairs and soon the boys next to me were breathing heavily and trembling. Then we trouped back to Fiume’s room to talk about it. Phoebe was ecstatic. He described in dramatic terms feeling a presence and seeing a faint glow moving up the stairs. Others began to chime in that they had felt something or seen something. I was disappointed that I hadn’t heard or felt a thing. I guess I wasn’t perceptive or psychic or something. I must say that I have been sceptical about the occult ever since.
I was now part of the private school crowd so I had met Fran Hendrie at various parties in Hamilton and Burlington. Fran went to Havergal College in Toronto. The Hendries were a very prominent family in Hamilton with a big house on the North Shore Boulevard in Burlington. During the Christmas holidays she invited me to a big bash at their place and I arrived to discover that everyone was in formal dress. Fortunately, my father had outfitted me with a dinner jacket, tails and one pair of pants to go with both. I rushed home and changed into more appropriate gear. The party was great and I arrived home on cloud nine and said to my dad who was still up “Gee dad, thanks for the neat duds. How do I look?” My father observed: “You look fine, but you don’t wear white socks with a formal suit.”
I invited Fran Hendrie to the Spring Formal Dance that year. We had kept up a correspondence throughout the winter term and there was a bit of a romance going. It is hard for people in private non-co-ed schools to have a real romance because it was all done by mail. However, she accepted my invitation gladly and at the end of the Easter Holidays, we were driven down to the school by my mother. The dance was great but seemed to end too soon. We escorted our dates back to the Junior School but a bunch of us arranged to sneak out at about 2 or 3 a.m. to meet our dates and have some fun. The plot was discovered and we were all ushered back to our respective rooms in sheepish silence. I remember Butch Bagley saying to me afterwards how disappointed he was in me because he thought that I was too mature for that. I never forgot that.
That spring I had applied for Medicine at the University of Toronto, but it was quite clear that my marks would probably not be good enough. The demand was so high that nothing less than nine high first class honours would do. So, I also applied to the Honour Science course. It was in the Faculty of Arts and in the second year one could select Physiology and Biochemistry which gave all the prerequisites for the Pre-Medicine course. If I was successful, I would be able to enter Medicine directly without taking the two-year pre-med course. Even though most boys were going to Trinity College at U. of T., I applied at University College which was my father’s college. And Physiology and Biochemistry was the updated equivalent of the course which my father had taken before he went into medicine. I became familiar with the term “following in his father’s footsteps.”
Speech Day was good but we were in the midst of studying for our “Departmentals” so it seemed a bit of a blur. After that, classes had ended and all the other boys had gone home, so we were a select group. We seemed to spend a lot of time studying on the terrace getting a tan and lots of grass stains. Then as each boy had written his allotted exams, he would leave for home, so the numbers were shrinking each day. After my near-debacle in Latin last year, I had taken French this year but only managed third class honours in French. So, in fact, my marks were not a lot better than last year, although I now had 12 Upper School credits with 6 ‘Firsts’ and only 9 credits were required for entry to university. I was quite pleased that I had got firsts in both my English exams as well as 4 in maths and science. The spirit of Mrs. Gray lived on.
Cars
Our ’46 Dodge was already showing signs of age. It was only three years old but my father had put 70,000 miles on it by that time and had not maintained it particularly well. In 1949 there were very few foreign cars around but Hitler’s “people’s car” the Volkswagen was beginning to appear. Of the new English Cars Austins, Morrises, Hillmans and Anglias were popular, but dad went for a Vauxhall Velox partly because he was an Anglophile but also because it had a six-cylinder engine and was backed by General Motors. It had leather seats and a very nice interior. I remember that dad brought it to TCS after Easter and I took Bill Carroll out for a ride around Port Hope.
Driving after the war was more of a challenge than it is today. When gas rationing ended in 1945, everybody got their cars out and went for a drive. Roads were narrow and congested. They had not been well maintained during the war and were often in sad shape. Traffic jams were common. In downtown Hamilton, they allowed parking on both sides of the narrow streets with just enough room for two cars to pass in opposite directions between them. They had a single four-way traffic signal with only green and red – helpfully marked “go’ and ‘stop’ – hanging over the middle of some intersections. There were collisions and people running lights unintentionally because there was no amber ‘caution’ light. Toronto had long since gone over to signals with three lights and placed them on the street corners. With the narrow streets and poor signals, there was more congestion than in Toronto which had more volume of traffic. At the corner of King and James, near Gore Park – literally the centre of Hamilton – they had a policeman on point duty directing traffic because of the frequent traffic jams.
Dad had decided to keep the Dodge, at least for a while and I remember cleaning it up so it looked pretty good. Peter and I were becoming pretty good car mechanics as well and I remember trying to fix up the old 1936 Willys, which was really on its last legs. Finally, dad gave it to Ron Poustie who was married to Theresa’s daughter Helen. He managed to fix it up and drive it for a few more years.
I had learned to drive on the Willys. It had its peculiarities, such as the mechanical brakes which would pull you to one side or the other, depending on the weather and a number of other variables which I gradually learned to master. I also had undertaken to teach Theresa Jr. how to drive and we had a couple of scary episodes on the back roads when she miscalculated the brakes or the somewhat loose steering. On another occasion, I was driving along when I heard a peculiar scraping sound under the car. I stopped and looked underneath. The battery, which was located under the front seat, had broken its rusty retaining straps and was dragging along on the road by the cables. My fix was literally baling wire and string. We had not heard of duct tape in those days.
The transmission was so worn that often the gear would slip into neutral when you took your foot off the gas. The clutch slipped so that after you let it in, the car would not move right away, but as you applied the gas, it would move off majestically and gradually build up speed. What that did to the clutch was another story. This gave rise to my claim that this car had “fluid drive”5. I would put the car into second gear, let the clutch in and the car did not move. Then as I applied the gas, the car would move off. When we were moving fast enough, I would take my foot off the gas and the gear lever would fall down into high with a chunk. Applying the gas again and we took off in high – all without touching the clutch pedal6.
Gas mileage was lower than today, but then, as people now say, we had cheap gas so who worries. When I thought about it, I am not so sure. After gas rationing came off in 1945 gas was about 35¢ an imperial gallon.7 I remember a special, “3 gallons for a buck” at a time when people still would drive into a filling station and ask for a dollar’s worth. When I owned my first car in 1953, it was still about 40¢ a gallon. The price remained at about 40 to 45¢ until 1973 when the first of the ‘oil shocks’ began. Assuming that the cost of living in Canada has increased about 10 times since 1953, then a corresponding price today would be about $4 a gallon or about 89¢ a litre. And that’s what it was until about 2007, ignoring the short-term price jump to about $1.30 in the summer of 2006. I say that in 2010, gas was still cheap but Saudi Arabia and other OPEC countries began pushing it up more recently.
The Summer of ‘49
I had not managed to get a summer job again, although I had a couple of short-term jobs in Burlington and did some work to help my uncle on the farm. There was lots of time to hang around the soda fountain in Burlington, and to go to the drive-in theatre and the Stoney Creek Dairy Bar for ice cream cones.
For several years I had visited my friend Ron Robertson in the summer. This year, I prevailed on my father to let me take the Vauxhall up to Southampton to have a visit. Ron was always getting me into mischief. We tried washing the car in Lake Huron at Sauble Beach and had to get a tow truck to get it out, because the wave action caused the tires to sink into the sandy bottom. With the 6-cylinder engine cranking out 59 horsepower in a car that weighed justfa over a ton, this car would do 0-50 in about 9 seconds, which made it quite competitive against the other family cars of its day. I also found that it got respectable gas mileage, about 28 mpg on the highway. Most family cars got about 20-24 miles to the gallon.
In late August, Peter Kappele and I and a few of our friends organized a week at a summer resort ifan Dwight, on Lake of Bays. Dad loaned us the old Dodge for the trip. We swam and sat on the porch on the front of the lodge. We also explored all around the lake. I have two memories. We went over to the portage between Peninsula Lake and Lake of Bays and raced the little narrow-gauge train down from North Portage to South Portage. It wasn’t hard because the train wasn’t very fast. On the way home, we discovered that we had broken a back spring on the Dodge. We limped home very slowly as the back corner of the car was very close to the road and the guys in the back seat felt every bump.
It was then time to think about going to University. I remember going over to register in Arts and to pay for my residence fees. My father got the money in cash which included several one hundred-dollar bills. I remember thinking that I had never seen them before. I also enrolled in the Freshman Fun Week which started the second week in September. My friend Blandford Kay was also enrolled in Arts so we planned to go together. My life was entering yet another phase.
Notes:
1 The Little Big Four was a takeoff on the Big Four Canadian teams in the Eastern Conference of what was later known as the Canadian Football League. The four private schools were: Bishop Ridley College, St. Andrew’s College, Trinity College School and Upper Canada College.
2 A contraction of demobilized. I’m not sure why this term was used for people leaving the military.
3 A popular radio program was Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. Bergen was a ventriloquist and Charlie and Mortimer Snerd were his dummies. Snerd was portrayed as mentally deficient and always answered Bergen’s greeting with “Duhhhh—Hi ya!!” it was interesting that it was not boys who were clearly mentally subnormal who got the epithet but the ones who were more studious and less involved in the rough and tumble of school life. Nowadays they would be referred to as “Nerds”. I often wondered if nerd was a contraction of Snerd.
4 B.O. (body odor) was the big advertising jingle for Lifebuoy soap. It showed a person being shunned by others because he had not washed with Lifebuoy. BO was an inexcusable social transgression at the time.
5 There were two types of automatic transmission after the war. “Hydromatic” by General Motors was a true automatic. You put the lever in ‘drive’ and the car would then work through the gears up to highway speed. Fluid Drive was used by Chrysler Corporation and used a modification of the “Preselective Gearing” introduced by the British Daimler Company in 1932. It required a clutch to select a gear—any gear—but then the driver could start up from stop without using the clutch because of the fluid flywheel.
6 This was a standard 3-speed transmision plus reverse. It had a simple H quadrant with reverse up-left, low, down-left, intermediate, up-right and high, down-right. The floor mounted gear lever was long and had enough weight that it could fall from intermediate gear (the up-right position) straight down into high gear.
7 A wine (U.S.) gallon is about 5/6th of an imperial gallon.