Chapter Eleven
Starting university was the next significant change in my life. I thought myself quite adult at this time although I could not deny the continuing surge of adolescence. Most of my TCS friends from the Toronto area were going to Trinity College at the University of Toronto but I followed my father’s course and enrolled at University College. In 1949, there were many Second World War veterans at university and it was almost impossible to get into Medicine directly. I went to the University of Toronto in the fall of 1949 enrolled in Physiology and Biochemistry, which was a course that gave advanced standing into Medicine.1
In those days everything was on the main campus in downtown Toronto. It extended from Bloor Street in the north to College Street and from east of Queen’s Park Circle to St. George Street and beyond. In the Fall of 1949 the Engineering School, temporarily located in Ajax for several years after the Second World War had just moved back into the old red brick ‘School of Practical Science’ building across from Convocation Hall on the main campus. University College was the first and the largest of the federated colleges on the north side of the front campus circle. It was the seat of the chair of the Faculty of Arts – much as it had been when my father started his university career at UC some 42 years before. But the university had grown. There were about 13,000 full time students on the campus in 1949, more than double the number in my father’s day.
A couple of my friends from Burlington were also going to University College so I did not feel alone. I signed up for the Freshman Week at Holwood Hall in the second week of September, just before the regular term began and found that my old friend Blandford “Burf” Kay was also going. Mom and dad drove us over and we joined about 30 other freshmen for what had been billed as a “Fun Week.” After my experience of fagging as a New Boy I was sceptical at first, but soon realized that things were different at the university level. There was lots of silly stuff, like unrolling a roll of toilet paper down the middle of Avenue Road with your nose. There were also receptions with UC freshwomen and a dance with women from Wymalwood, the Victoria College women’s residence next door. For sure this was nothing like TCS.
First Year, 1949-50 Honour Science
By 1949 most other universities had begun to separate pure arts courses from the science courses. The University of Toronto persisted in the old tradition of separating the various professional training schools from the purely academic educational functions which were lumped together under the Faculty of Arts. Science programs were part of the Faculty of Arts but were housed in various departments and faculties around the campus. This led to the usual bantering between UC and the other colleges that had arts and divinity and were more in the Cambridge-Oxford tradition of pure arts colleges. For this reason, UC was called the Godless college. It attracted all the Jewish students and others who had no particular religious affiliation.
At my father’s urging, I enrolled in Physiology and Biochemistry, the modern equivalent of the Biology and Physics course that he had taken. The first year was a general science course called, appropriately enough, Honour Science. We shared this year with students enrolled in other mathematics and science courses who all branched out into their various specialties in second year.
There were three men’s residences at UC; two were old mansions, both former presidents’ homes and a third, smaller house was on Madison Ave nearby. The UC women’s residence, Whitney Hall, was on the corner of St. George Street and Hoskin Avenue. Burf was assigned to Holwood Hall2 on the corner of Avenue Road and Queen’s Park Circle, and I was assigned to 73 St. George Street3 just down from Whitney Hall. Considering the numbers of men students at UC, it was very meagre accommodation, so most out of town students had to find digs off campus.
At the end of Fun Week, I moved over to 73 St. George Street into a room on the third floor at the front which I shared with Colin Douglas Miner, a sophomore in Commerce and Finance. I got to know several other people there who were also in Honour Science. Classes began the next day. We wandered all over the campus looking for the rooms where we enrolled for each of our courses. In Honour Science, there was not a lot of choice. We had Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics (which was mostly calculus), Botany and Zoology as honour subjects and a couple of pass subjects which offered some selection. I took English and German. Unlike many of the other students who had about three lectures a week in each of five subjects for a total of 15 hours, I also had labs which meant that I had more than 30 hours of classes a week.
Those first weeks were a blur. I found out that we had to buy text books – all very expensive. The university press had a used bookstore and book exchange but they were still expensive. There were parties and social events on every Friday, Saturday and sometimes Sunday nights. I learned how to take lecture notes and realized that no attendance was taken at most of them so we had to make sure that if we missed a lecture, we could pick up the work from a classmate. As the year wore on and things became more competitive classmates sometimes refused to share their notes unless they knew you were sick or something.
Football Season
Fall was football time. The Varsity Blues were a strong team and we got special seasons’ tickets to the home games at Varsity Stadium on Bloor Street. There were only four teams in the University Eastern Conference in those days, McGill, Queens, U. of T. and Western. Other universities had teams but were in a different league. The games were very exciting and much more professional-looking than the Little Big Four. The players were all strictly amateurs of course, although the question of “University Scholarships” was already a big issue in the US, but all the Canadian teams staunchly denied that there were any in Canada.
There were still quite a few veterans from the Second World War at school at that time. They had created some new issues to university life and introduced a note of maturity which was sometimes surprising. The concept of “married students” was almost unheard of before the war but now had become a big issue. The lack of married quarters for students on campus was being raised for the first time. I first became aware of this when I noticed families with young children in the student section at the football games.
The games were usually on Saturday afternoons and for students it was ‘first come, first served.’ We would all pack around the entrance to the stadium near Philosopher’s Walk and when the gates opened the pushing started. I remember once the pushing squeezed us together so hard that I was able to lift my feet off the ground without sliding down. That was scary. I remember students panicking and screaming and there was a fear that someone would be trampled underfoot.
One time I ran into Jane Kappele at a Queens’s game and we had a small reunion. She told me the latest football crowd joke.
Overheard from the row behind: “Daddy, I want a Coke.” “No.”
(louder) “Daddy, I want a Coke.” “I said No.”
“Daddy, I want a Coke.” “Oh, shut up and drink your beer!”
… I thought it was funny at the time.
I got to know Burf Kay much better. He always prided himself on being different. He also had been considered a “brain” in high school, getting 9 ‘firsts’ in Senior Matriculation. He was also a beautiful pianist who would perform at the drop of a hat. While I was repeating my senior year at TCS he took a year with a tutor in advanced music and piano. At the end of this, he concluded that he had “hit the wall” and would never make it as a professional, so he was with me in first year Arts4. But he had taken four languages but no sciences. I discovered that he depended largely on memory work and some of the courses at University could not be easily memorized. As a result, I found that my marks were almost as good as his, although we were in quite different courses so perhaps it was not a fair comparison.
University Naval Training Division
It was only four years after the war so officer training courses were offered by all three armed services. My father wanted me to go into the army and the Canadian Officer Training Corps (COTC). But I had been partial to the navy ever since I had read ‘Swallows and Amazons’ so many years before. So, I decided to join the University Naval Training Division (UNTD) which had parades at HMCS York every Tuesd3y night during the year. I even persuaded Burf to join me so we both found our way down to ‘York’ on a Tuesday night in September and were duly enrolled. This continued throughout the next three years. (See Chapter 9, Part I.)
Homecoming at Western
Burf had continued to meet a girl from Wymalwood and encouraged me to go out with a girl that I had met at the fun week activities. Her name was Gerry Marsh and she was from Grimsby. Soon we were going ‘steady’ – an experience which I had never had before. We began to go out as a foursome. On one of our dates, Burf urged us to go on the Homecoming Weekend at the University of Western Ontario which was coming up in early October. I managed to borrow one of the family Vauxhalls.5 The girls found some friends to stay with on the Saturday night. Burf had a friend in London who found beds for us. This was a new experience for me – I had never taken a girl on an overnight jaunt before (Spring Formals at TCS don’t count because they were closely chaperoned,) and especially a girl whom I hardly knew. But everyone else was taking this in a matter-of-fact way so I did too.
I picked up the car on Friday night and drove it back to Toronto. First thing on Saturday morning, I picked up Burf at Holwood Hall and the girls who were next door at Wymalwood. In 1949, Highway 401 had not even been thought of, so we took Highway 2 all the way. By the time we got there, we had a bite of lunch somewhere and then went over to the Mustangs Stadium. I had never been on the Western campus before so this was confusing and exciting. I don’t remember much of the game except that the Blues lost and there was a lot of confusion and fun after the game as we tried to get back to the car. There was a big dance that night and I remember on the way back to our respective digs, I was demonstrating how manoeuvrable the Vauxhall was by driving it up onto the sidewalk for about a block, honking at some surprised pedestrians and going back to the street at a convenient driveway. Everybody thought this was fun. How times have changed.
Sunday morning, we picked up the girls and began the drive home. After we got to Paris, we took the Governor’s Road into Dundas. I have a picture of Burf astride the statue of a cow on the side of the road near Brantford. We were back in Toronto before supper. Lectures and labs again tomorrow.
Back at the Ranch
Things were busy on the home front. Mom and dad were very much involved in the social life of Hamilton and Toronto. Mom was a district commissioner in Niagara for the Canadian Girl Guides and volunteered in many organizations. Dad was very much involved in training programs for laboratory technologists. He and his chief technician, Frank Elliot had just set up the Canadian Society for Laboratory Technology which later became the Canadian Society for Medical Laboratory Science. And the Advertising and Sales Club had just elected him as Citizen of the Year for 1949. Special ceremonies in January were held at City Hall where dad received the medal from Mayor Lloyd Jackson.
Father reached the age of 65 in January 1950. This was mandatory retirement in the city. The workload at the lab was heavy and they had just hired Dr. Lynch from England as his assistant with the idea that he might take over when dad retired. However, the service was so busy that they decided that they would need another pathologist and father was arguing that he would need specific training in forensic pathology that Lynch did not have.
The salary had risen to $12,000 but this was well behind the salaries for pathologists in other cities even when the substantial medical legal work was added in. The hospital began advertising for a replacement and found that there were no takers at anywhere near the salary they were offering. So, they approached dad to carry on for a year more. He said he would do so as long as they paid him the salary being offered to prospective candidates as well as granting him his pension. Hamilton was a strong union town and this so-called double dipping caused a stir. But they had no choice. To paraphrase Pierre Trudeau a later prime minister, they had to ‘hold their noses and sign’.
A new city pathologist was not hired until 1955. By that time his salary, including the pension had risen to $21,000.
Campus Life
Life at ‘73’ continued apace. There was a Christmas concert and I was part of a house choir that practiced regularly throughout the fall. My special friend was Jim Neelin from Port Arthur who was in Honour Science and had a room at the back of the house. He roomed with Gord Sillers who was from Geraldton. I got to know a lot of other people too and university life was really coming together for me. The courses were interesting and I found that I could take notes quite well and understand the subjects as I went along. I took Botany and Zoology which were not even offered at TCS. Our Zoology professor had a Triumph car which was often parked outside the Zoology building as we went to lectures. I was fascinated by it and one day he saw me admiring it. He showed me how the lid on the rumble seat had glass in it and acted as a windscreen for the back-seat passengers when it was opened up6.
I also took Chemistry and Physics at a level of sophistication that made the high school courses pale. We studied vectors and mechanics of materials and effects of extremes of temperature. Professor Satterley was famous for his flamboyant demonstrations of physical principles. His liquid air lecture was especially popular so that the lecture hall in the old McLennan Physics building was filled to overflowing. He immersed a square container of water into liquid nitrogen and stuck a handle in it. When it was frozen, it was so hard he was able to use the improvised hammer to drive a large nail into a block of wood. He froze goldfish so quickly that sometimes, when they melted, they were still alive.7
Another time, when he was demonstrating catenary curves, we entered the lecture room to find he had a jet of water arching over the class into a large container behind us. After he had showed us the shape of the curve and its mathematical formula, he then slowly turned the water off. As the weakening stream arched down through the center of the class, with kids and lecture boards clattering in all directions, he observed dryly that the shape of the curve did not change as the arc decreased.
That was the year that father was citizen of the year in Hamilton. I must confess that I was so absorbed in campus life that I hardly noticed at the time but realized it was an important event sometime later.
The rest of the year progressed and soon it was spring and exams were upon us. Years later I remember wondering why I disliked spring. Maybe it was because everything turned to mud with dog turds and rubbish emerging through the melting snow. Or maybe the real reason was that for 15 years in my life, spring had meant exams. While everyone else was outside enjoying the warm weather, I was in a dingy room batting the books. And this year, as soon as the exams were over I was getting ready for my first summer in Halifax with the navy.
Summer 1950, Cottage in Haliburton
My summer’s naval training was very interesting. It is recorded in the next chapter. (See Chapter 11, Part I.) I left in late May and returned home just after Labour Day, in time to enroll for classes. While I was at HMCS Stadacona my father sent me a letter saying that they had bought a cottage on Lake Kashagawigamog in Haliburton.
My mother had been pushing to get another cottage ever since she had sold her mother’s cottage in Port Dover a few years before. As described in Chapter Eight, things had deteriorated so badly that most other people were moving out. She sold it to a couple and put the money in an account because she loved cottage life and wanted to buy another one.
Dad and mom liked Haliburton. They had been visiting Uncle Milton and Aunt Etta for a few days at the Matabanick Inn and were driving back through Minden when mother suggested going into the local real estate agency to see what was available. It was less well developed than Muskoka and hence less expensive. But it was farther away from Hamilton. In those days, you had to count on a couple of stops and five hours to get there. They wound up spending the rest of the day – and the rest of their lives there.
As mother told the story later – the agent went over the available properties with them. My dad insisted on two things. He wanted hydro and to drive to the door. The agent had a couple of island properties which my mother loved but were immediately ruled out by father. When nothing else seemed to suit, the agent showed them some crown land on Raven Lake. They parked by the road and walked in on a long trail through the woods to the lake. When they got there, dad was nowhere to be seen. On the way back, they saw dad sitting on a stump not too far from the car. It was clear that that didn’t work for him either. It was with great reluctance that the agent showed them the Kashagawigamog property. It was very primitive with an outhouse and water by bucket from the lake. But it had hydro and you could drive to within 75 feet of the door. That settled it. They bought it for $3000. That was a good price for cottages in those days.
When I got home in early September we went up to see it. It was built in the 1930s from a standard plan – the early equivalent of a prefabricated house. Halliday’s Lumber in Burlington was one of the first companies to offer a kit of lumber, nails, doors, windows and shingles which could be delivered anywhere in Southern Ontario on the back of a flatbed truck. We referred to these prefab cottages as “Halliday’s specials.”
Mother was disappointed because she had seen several places she liked much better. But my dad already had great plans for it. He sketched in two large wings which would more than double the size of the cottage. It was to have indoor plumbing and a driveway right to the door. Over the next ten years he did all of it too. By the time I got home, mother was as enthusiastic about the plans as my father was and there was not another word said.
We planned our first big Thanksgiving weekend at the cottage. I remember that I took Jim Neelin and Peter Kappele. Mom and dad also took a lot of stuff up so we took both Vauxhalls. Two identical green English cars in convoy in 1950 did turn a few heads. The cottage had hydro, but not much else. The stove was an old coal oil stove with two burners and a tin box sitting on top of a burner to serve as an oven. Thanksgiving dinner was a challenge. My mother had got Theresa to cook the turkey in advance, so we had cold turkey with hot gravy. We tried to cook the pumpkin pies in the funny little oven but they were burned in the centre and raw around the edges. The turnip was lumpy but that didn’t matter. It was a wonderful dinner. I can remember the three boys stuffed themselves and then lay moaning on one of the beds after dinner. It was a great weekend.
Second Year, 1950-51 – Physiology and Biochemistry
When I got back in the fall, things quickly moved into high gear. The course work was heavy. We had a Microscopic Anatomy (Histology) lecture and lab starting at 8 o’clock four days a week. It was the same course taken by first year Meds. Other courses were heavy as well. There was a physical chemistry course in which our lecturer had an artificial arm and talked at staccato speed for 50 minutes meanwhile drawing complex curves and diagrams on the blackboard. My hand was sore from trying to write it all down.
In physics, we had electricity and fluid mechanics. The electricity lab was fun because I had done most of it before. I remember we were in teams of two or three and had to set up experiments and measure them and submit our results by the end of the lab. The next day our results were read out in front of the class and some of the weird results were hilarious. One experiment involved immersing a resistance in a tank of water at 39º Fahrenheit (4º Celsius) for a set period and measuring the voltage, amperage, mean temperature rise of the water and assorted other things to calculate the amount of power needed to raise the temperature of one pound of water one degree Fahrenheit (a British Thermal Unit). We also had to wire up the resistance with an ammeter, voltmeter and a switch which we could close while starting the stop-watch.
My partner was very slow in figuring out the wiring and we were late starting which meant we may not be able to finish all the steps in the time allotted. He finally finished, plugged it in and closed the switch. There was a loud ‘skutch’ and all the lights went out in the lab. He had wired the on-off switch directly across the mains, creating a dead short. This meant that everybody had to start over and repeat the experiment. We were not popular.
’73 and Hart House
I was in the same room at ‘73’ but my roommate from first year had decided to move into his fraternity house and I had a new roommate. Because I had a busy schedule and had to leave early for lectures four days a week, we seemed to pass like ships in the night. Often, I would get up at 7:30, wash quickly and have a bowl of cereal in the room and head off for my 8:00 lecture without even waking him up. There were no meals served in the residence so most of us ate at the Great Hall in Hart House. In the first year, lunch was 45¢ and dinner was 55¢. I made breakfast in the room.
Hart House was a great U of T tradition. When I was there, it was a male bastion but it became co-ed in the 1960s. It was built by the Massey family to honour their son, Hart Massey who had died in the First World War. There was a dining hall and snack bar, a library, a complete sports complex and a theatre on the lower level in what was originally planned to be a rifle range for training soldiers for WWII. Attached to it was the Memorial Tower with a large carillon and the memorial wall for all those lost in the two world wars. Even as a child, I remember going with my father who was in full uniform, to attend the services at 11 o’clock each November 11th. The ’73 residence was just where we slept. We lived at Hart House.
I have a few other recollections of that year at ’73. I sang in the house choir that had a concert during the Christmas season. I remember some of the guys planning a ski trip in February. One of the guys had an old Ford coupe and when they got the beer and the other essentials loaded, there was no room for the skis so they left them behind. I also remember the residence housekeeper – an older, rather portly man with a strong English accent who arrived each morning in a morning coat and spats. He would take off the morning coat and put on coveralls while he cleaned the rooms. He would then open his leather briefcase which contained his lunch. We all speculated what he told his family and his neighbours. He probably said that he worked at the university, leaving it to their imagination what academic position he held.
Fraternity Row
It was only a few weeks after the start of term that I was invited over to have lunch at ???, which was Doug Minor’s fraternity. It was also an old house at 126 St. George St., just about a block from ‘73. I didn’t know much about rushing in those days because fraternities were not recognized by the university and were therefore considered “off-campus”. I became a pledge and attended pledge classes on Monday nights. Finally, there were a total of 12 pledges. I was number 7. With naval training at York on Tuesday nights, dates with Gerry on Friday and Saturday, my week was filling up. And the course work was piling up too.
We learned all about the fraternity and its history. Our chapter was ??, named after the local fraternity which became the first Canadian Beta chapter in 1906. We learned about the “Toronto Chapter Fund”. Canada was in the First World War for three years before the USA. During that time, most of the young men in the chapter signed up and went overseas, leaving only three active members in the house. Money flowed in from every US chapter to keep the chapter open until 1919 when the active members increased again.
And then it was “Hell Week” at the fraternity. It started on a Tuesday afternoon. All the pledges arrived in the front hall of the house to find the regular members lining the stair rail and the upstairs landing. We were told that we were neophytes and were henceforth called “Neos” in an angry and insulting tone. Members who had been our friends suddenly wouldn’t speak to us. We slept on the floor in a third-floor room and were lined up and yelled at whenever the whim hit one of the members. I remember Walt Ure had a particularly snarly and vicious tone.
We had been told to bring a board and a knife and were told to set to work carving a paddle to be used on Friday night to punish misdemeanours. Every time one of us did something wrong, real or imagined, some active member would shout: “That’ll be 2 paddles, neo!” Sometimes it was 4, even 8. By Friday some of the neos had been assigned 20 or 30 paddles. One had 42. I had a paddling at TCS and four paddles was a lot. Eight was the maximum allowed. I was beginning to be suspicious that all was not as it seemed.
On Friday night, after the usual nonsense of cleaning the floor or something, we were all marched into the living room and the number of paddles for each of us was read out. Our active member stood behind with the paddle we had carved and we were told to “Assume the position” and “Lift high the family jewels.” Then it was “One, two, three….” All the paddles were hit on the floor and suddenly it was all over. Our actives, who had been our tyrannical taskmasters a moment before were now our best friends – handing us a beer and drawing us into the group. We were part of the group and it was a warm feeling. The formal initiation the next day was very formal. We wore tails to this and to the formal dance that followed.
My girlfriend Gerry was not happy at all that I had joined a fraternity. Apparently at Vic, such things were discouraged. We continued to go out for the rest of the year but the bloom was off the rose and finally in the spring, I said that I was planning to go on into medicine and that this could last up to another nine years if I specialized. That did it. My first great love affair ended as T. S. Eliot described:
“This is the way the world ends,
This is the way the world ends,
This is the way the world ends,
Not with a bang but a whimper.”8
In January, I was appointed Beta Songmaster for 1950 and I took on this post quite enthusiastically. The fraternity was known internationally for its singing and I loved singing. I had led the Beta singers on more than one occasion quite spontaneously because no-one else had stepped forward. We collected the best singers into a choir and put on performances for our weekly parties. Those who had not made the cut were of course making remarks about the elite choir in the house and John Hemphill gathered some others together to do a parody of our choir. John stood up at the next party and announced: “…and now a performance by the ‘B’ choir….” They always reminded me of Anna Russell performing Gilbert and Sullivan. She had become quite popular after her performance in “Spring Thaw” in 1949.
Final Exams
As exams approached, I began to realize just how much work I had to do. I buckled down but found that I was spending too much time on study schedules and not enough time on actual study. I had done well throughout the year in physical chemistry so I left that one to the end and concentrated on others that I was more concerned about. That was a mistake. I wound up studying long into the night before the physical chemistry exam. I was tired and blew the exam, getting only 59 when I needed 65 to continue with the honour subject. I had a choice. I could repeat the year but this could mean not getting the total marks I needed for advanced standing in Medicine. Or I could switch to the General course and make sure that I took all the prerequisites and got good marks in them all. That is what I decided to do.
Third Year, 1951-52 – Four Year General Course
When I got back from my summer at HMCS Stadacona, I had decided to move into the Beta House. The only room available was on the third floor and it had suffered at the hands of some of the summer residents who were not fraternity brothers. In fact, I spent much of my first month repairing the damage to the window and getting the room painted and up to scratch. There was only one base plug in the room and no ceiling light so I rewired the room, putting in indirect ceiling lights of my own design and a couple more base plugs. I had to go up into the attic to do this and found the old knob and tube wiring was in poor condition. However, I spliced my wires in as best I could and it worked fine. My roommate was Don Donaldson, a recent alumnus who was having his own problems and offered me no help at all.
The General course was basically like an honour course but without all the requirements and the schedule was much more flexible. In addition to my prerequisites for advanced standing in Medicine, I took honour courses in Anthropology, English, Philosophy and Political Science. The anthropology course was by Edmund Carpenter who was a bit of a maverick, even in his own profession. The English course was given by Claude Bissell, the UC dean of men and later president of the university. It was based on the famous writings of the 18th and 19th centuries. The philosophy course by Marcus Long was intended to challenge one’s basic beliefs about the rightness of society and the world around us.
Political Science was taught by Professor Morgan in the old McMaster building on Bloor Street. “Poly Sci.” dealt with political systems in major countries and we learned a lot about Fascism, Communism, and Capitalism which were big topics in those days. According to our lecturer, there was not a lot of difference between them and maybe that is why they had to exaggerate and fight about the differences so much. It was all part of the greening of young impressionable students like me. It was a long hike to my next lecture, Organic Chemistry in the Walberg Building on College Street. This was much less interesting but was one of the prerequisites for advanced standing.
This was the beginning of the Cold War with the USSR and in the USA. Senator Joseph McCarthy was in full flight.9 Several of my professors were very circumspect in how they talked about the anti-Communist rhetoric in both the US and Canada, but they did not hide their feelings very well. Edmund Carpenter talked about the RCMP officers who investigated his library, largely ignoring a prominent volume “Das Kapital” by Karl Marx and Engels but becoming very interested in Russian-sounding names like Malinovsky who wrote boring treatises on the anthropology of the Trobriand Islanders in the South Pacific.
Professor Morgan made a clear distinction between Capitalism and Western Democracy which he claimed were almost incompatible on a philosophical and sometimes a practical level. To him, Fascism was the political extension of Capitalism and moderate Socialism was politically closer to Democracy. Communism started out alright, but when taken to extremes, as it had been by Lenin and Stalin, was oppressive and not too different from any other kind of extremism. These ideas were very exciting to us but would have been considered seditious by many Americans and Canadians. They would have been criminally investigated by the ‘McCarthy’ Commissions.
Social Life
After my romance with Gerry had faded, I began going out with Jean McPhail, a third-year student at U.C. and Whitney Hall. Jean was from St. Catherines. She always maintained that she was descended from Agnes McPhail, one of the bold Canadian women who fought for women’s right to equality in the early 20th century. She was also involved in campus politics and it encouraged me to get involved. I was so busy in fact that I missed a couple of important deadlines, such as obtaining a theatre booking for the U.C. operetta, which upset Jean greatly because she was the business manager for this group. I also was late for the tryouts for the Hart House Glee Club and all the members had been selected by the time I got there.
That year I became good friends with Robin Scott, a member of my pledge class. Robert Alan Scott was from Windsor and had taken on the name Robin because at the Walkerville High School that he had attended there were two other Robert Scotts. He had played on the high school football team and remarked that his nickname had been ‘sheer speed’. This became a joke in the Beta House. Another Winsorite, Hugh Geddes was one year behind us in the house and he wryly remarked “pure s–t was more like it.”
In January I was appointed Lord High Keeper of the Beta Paradise Club, the place where we kept the beer. It was an interesting experience to buy large quantities of beer from the Brewers’ Retail store when I was not quite at the legal drinking age of 21. I set up a system for tracking how much beer was used and when I had to reorder. I also had to get a Banquet licence for our Spring Formal and other big parties at the house. Members were supposed to sign a chit when they took a beer but often didn’t do so. My record keeping was able to tell members exactly how many beers were unaccounted for and to tighten up the system. One of the brothers asked me if I kept track of the bottle caps.
My Start in Politics
I became much more involved in campus politics. The men at U.C. were represented by the University College Literary and Athletic Society, known by everyone as the “Lit.” The women were represented by the University College Women’s Undergraduate Association, known as the W.U.A. Several members of the fraternity were involved with the Lit and I was too. Both Robin and I decided to run for positions on the executive. He ran for Social and Publicity and I ran for 4th Year President. We were both elected and went to one meeting of the old and new Executives before the imminence of exams eclipsed all other activities. I had completed all my prerequisites for medicine so I could take some other interesting stuff next year.
This was a very exciting year for me. Up until that time, I had considered myself a budding scientist and had not considered the many other things that were out there. I had yet another time in my life when the world seemed to be opening up in unexpected directions. It was like my first experience with Cinerama, the wide-screen movies of the time where the scene opened with a conventional movie screen size and then dramatically opened up to more than three times the size. That is what my life felt like in that year.
Summer 1952 – Dominion Foundries
I had decided against another summer in the Navy. I had my prerequisites for my commission and I was moving in other directions. I got a summer student job at the Dominion Foundries working in the rolling mill where Cousin Harry had been a supervisor before going to Mexico. I was being trained to replace the steel plate inspectors who would be on vacation during July and August. In June, the university contacted me and encouraged me to consider a summer seminar at the Institute of World Affairs in Twin Lakes, Connecticut.
I had never heard of this organization but found out that it had been founded in the 1930s by the Haddens, an American couple who began inviting foreign students studying in the US to meet with American students and discuss political issues on the world scene. This had developed into a formal six-week summer seminar at the property of the Haddens near Twin Lakes. Informal seminars with professors from Ivy League universities culminated in a series of reports on the current world of political philosophy. I applied and was accepted.
My father was a bit wary at first and checked with several people to see if it was legit. This was at the height of the McCarthy witch-hunts and suspicions were everywhere. There were many Communist front student organizations around and going to the States to such a meeting could result in serious consequences such as arrest and expulsion from the US. He checked with a Rotary Club associate who was connected to the US Legation in Toronto. He obtained a letter that declared that the Institute was not a Communist front organization.
When I told the people at the Dominion Foundries that I was leaving in the second week of July, they were very annoyed and begged me to stay on. When I gave my resignation, they shifted me over to the yard gang for my last few weeks there. This was a dirty, heavy job with some of the most shiftless characters I had encountered. I guess it was the job you got if you were unsuccessful at anything else. Another object lesson for impressionable youth.
I spent most of my time tearing down open-hearth furnaces. Open hearths were the older style of steel melting furnaces which were lined with firebrick. After about five or six weeks the bricks were partially melted and breaking down and needed replacing. Because they didn’t want the furnace to be out of commission any longer than necessary, we were sent in to remove the brick while it was still red hot. We had heavy asbestos suits and were only allowed in the furnace for about 20 minutes at a time. We drank lots of water and sour lemonade because the heat was terrible and you quickly became dehydrated. But it made me appreciate my forthcoming seminar all the more.
The Institute of World Affairs
My parents drove me to the Institute.10 Twin Lakes is in the extreme north-west corner of Connecticut. We drove across the Hudson River and through the Berkshires to get there. Yale University is in New Haven which is only about 70 miles away. We lived in several old houses scattered around the north side of the lake. Mrs. Maud M. Hadden had lost her husband several years before but continued to sponsor the summer seminars and was very much a force but no longer took an active part in the proceedings. I remember she had us all over for tea a couple of times during the six weeks. When my parents came to pick me up in late August at the end of the seminar, she had us drop in.
I have several recollections of that summer. One was the work on the various commissions. I was on the European Commission and we had to present briefs of our work on Fridays. This was the days of Underwood office typewriters that were enormous and heavy. You got strong muscles just typing with the old mechanical type bars. Since I had taken touch typing in Grade 10, I got the job of typing up our reports. The Institute had an ancient Gestetner duplicating machine that we all said had come over on the Mayflower. It was turned with a hand crank and used special stencil sheets that I learned how to fit into the typewriter. It spewed printer’s ink when we really got it going. I became quite expert at it after a while but I had to explain to my mother and Theresa why there were black spots on my clothes that would not come out in the wash.
I also remember the old Ford “woody” station wagon that we used for all trips and excursions into town. It creaked and squeaked and rattled and the wooden enclosure seemed to be going in all directions at once. Also, I took my father’s movie camera and shot some scenes that I still have. I also remember that I was cutting the last of my wisdom teeth and had one that became very painful. I went to the local dentist in Salisbury who described my problem as an operculum and cut away some of the gum to relieve the pressure. That solved the problem nicely.
I have some of the material we worked on and a list of all the students who attended. Besides some Americans largely from the New York area, there were students from many countries in Europe and the Middle East. I remember a student from Korea who explained something about the Korean language and alphabet. She said that the symbol for an argument was two women symbols under a roof symbol. A calamity was three women under one roof. What would the modern feminists say? We had excellent lectures from senior faculty from Yale and Harvard as well as visitors who dropped in from time to time. This was a beautiful part of New England with the lakes and hills and interesting rural villages. We went into Canaan and Salisbury to do our shopping. We had a trip to Tanglewood and sat on the grass to hear the Boston Symphony in their summer digs. It was a great experience. My parents drove down to pick me up. It is a wonderful drive back through the Berkshires and into the Green mountains in southern Vermont.
Back at the Ranch Again
In the spring, father had a bout of some vaguely defined illness that started with a scaly rash on his hands and feet. He would scratch this until it bled. Finally, he got sicker and mother persuaded him to go to the doctor. Then he got a chronic chest infection and was admitted to hospital. He had been a heavy smoker – a chain smoker – ever since he was in the First World War, but now he seemed to have lost his taste for it. He was quite sick for a couple of weeks and when he recovered, he decided that he would quit smoking.
He loved to tell the story about his next Rotary Club luncheon after he had been away for over a month. Everyone greeted him warmly. One member was the president of the Tuckett Tobacco Company that made Buckingham Cigarettes, a very popular brand in Hamilton. When he approached my dad, offering him a cigarette dad held up his hand and said: “No thank you, I’ve quit.” The member replied: “You’ve quit! That explains it. We had to shut down one of our machines.”
This was the summer that a lake freighter collided with the old bascule bridge across the canal into Burlington Bay. One half of the bridge was partly raised and collapsed into one side of the canal. The other side of the canal was still open for shipping, but the bridge was part of the Queen Elizabeth Way, the main highway between Niagara and most of Southern Ontario, including Toronto. This meant that all traffic had to be re-routed through downtown Hamilton.
The traffic chaos in the busiest tourist season was impossible to describe. It can scarcely be imagined. Trying to get from our home in Aldershot to see Jean, my girlfriend in St. Catherines took more than two hours on a good day – a trip that would be about 45 minutes across the beach strip before. I found the best route involved going well south of Hamilton and then taking Mud Street and Fly Road along the top of the Escarpment to Vineland before heading down to Highway #8 into St. Catherines. The vicissitudes of life can teach us a lot about local geography and quaint street names.
Fourth Year, 1952-53 – Graduation from Arts
After a brief sojourn at the cottage I was back to school. I moved back into the same room on the third floor of the Beta House. My roommate this year was Hugh Geddes. We had long talks about what we would do when we got our Arts degree. I was planning to apply for advanced standing in medicine so my side of the discussion was whether I wanted to go through with that or to take some other course. Hugh was quite undecided. He was seriously considering law but had the same kind of wanderlust that I had. He kept talking about a year or two at the London School of Economics but never could make up his mind. We began to refer to our meandering discussions as “Londonizing”.
This was a very busy year. I selected a variety of arts subjects largely on the basis that I would not encounter them again if I got into medicine. I took anthropology again with Edmund Carpenter but he didn’t have much to say that I had not heard before. I took a philosophy course on ethics in the Age of Enlightenment. I took higher mathematics, which was a mistake. It was far above my level and I gained a pass only through the good graces of the professor who realized my plight and gave me some extra coaching. I took an organic chemistry course which meant that I had more than enough credits for advanced standing. I was now praying that there would be enough spaces open in the medical class to accept me.
Middlemarch
I took a course on 19th and 20th century English novels with very intensive tutorials three times a week. My friend Burf Kay was in the English Language and Literature honours program and he was in this course, rather surprised to see me. We each had to critique two novels assigned from a list. I was fairly far down the table and the choice was not great when it came to me. I selected Middlemarch a 19th century novel by George Elliot. It was a heavy read and I didn’t enjoy it. When I presented my book review, I was very hard on the style, the stilted pace and the turgid prose. After I was finished, the tutor looked at me and said: “I never thought that I would have to defend George Elliot’s writing.” It turned out that the tutor didn’t like George Elliot either but she was highly regarded in her time and he thought my critique far too harsh. Even though he demolished my report in favour of a more balanced view, he still gave me a good grade. My second book report was better. I got A- on the course. My faith in the English language was restored.
Social Life – Continued
I had a new girlfriend. Jan Hutchison was a student at Whitney Hall that I had come to know through my work with the Literary and Athletic Society. As in most women’s residences at that time, there was an elaborate protocol for a gentleman to take out a lady resident. He would call at the front desk and wait for her to come down. There were strict curfews and a night entrance where the girls would be checked in when they returned from their date. It was a common sight to see necking couples standing around the night entrance on Hoskin Avenue saying an elaborate goodnight until curfew time. In February it could be very cold standing around in the dark and the dean of women was heard to observe that she could not understand why the girls would stand around in the cold when they would be much more comfortable upstairs in bed. Of course, this hit the front page of the campus newspaper, The Varsity, the next day, much to the dean’s embarrassment.
Jan also knew Hugh Geddes quite well and we sometimes went out on double dates with his girlfriend from Windsor, Joan Storey who was in the P&OT program at Toronto. On evening during exam time, I called up Jan to go out for coffee. Hugh was coming with us so when we were walking over to Whitney Hall, he mischievously suggested that we go in and ask for her separately. I went in first, acknowledged the lady on the desk whom I had come to know and she called Jan to come down. I then wandered off into a far corner of the waiting room and seemed absorbed in a magazine. Soon Hugh came in and asked for Jan, not even acknowledging my presence. There was much scurrying and talking behind the scenes and the lady on the desk seemed to disappear for the longest time. I then wandered out and said to Hugh: “Hi, Hugh, fancy meeting you here.” At this point, Jan came down and said with a twinkle in her eye: “What are you two doing? Do you realize you caused panic stations on the front desk? Don’t do that again or I am in trouble.”
The Literary and Athletic Society
I was now president of the graduating class at U.C. My position on the Executive of the ‘Lit’ took a lot of time. I started early in the year organizing the graduation banquet in collaboration with Jeanne McEachern who was my opposite number on the WUA. Getting a banquet room was relatively easy. Two phone calls to the Royal York did it. Getting a speaker for the graduation address was a little harder. The other guys on the executive had lots of ideas. Several mentioned Adelai Stevenson, the American politician who was the Democratic candidate for president in the fall of 1952. I wrote to him and received a very nice letter in reply, declining of course but generating considerable interest around the university. I then approached Robertson Davies who had just become editor of the Peterborough Examiner and had published his first novel. He accepted. It wasn’t until the Graduation Banquet in April that he reminded me that U.C. had invited him to be graduation speaker only a few years before.
I was involved in all manner of things. My friend Robin Scott was Publicity Director and that led us into some crazy exploits. U.C. had a somewhat stodgy reputation on campus, so there was a general feeling that we needed to change our image. Robin had already planned a big float for the float parade on Homecoming Weekend. We had designed a float with the UC tower in the middle. Then when we got it built on the back of a large flatbed truck, we discovered that it was higher than the minimum clearance under hydro wires on the route. The night before the parade, Robin and I redesigned and rebuilt it to fold down so we could clear obstructions. It worked well with one of the guys posted up in the tower to raise and lower it.
The U. C. Follies
The Follies had a long tradition at U.C. Wayne and Shuster got their start there. I remember seeing them briefly in my first year. Every after that, I tried to get a part in the show that was held in November. But in my final year, I was 4th Year President and Robin Scott was Publicity Director.
To advertise the UC Follies the University College campus show, Robin proposed letting a greased pig loose at an upcoming football game. The proposal was to get a small pig, put an ad for the Follies on the sides and let it go at a Queens-Toronto football game. Obviously, there was great secrecy and a lot of good luck required to pull this off. Robin arranged for the pig to be delivered to the Beta House on the morning of the game. We had a friend’s pickup truck ready to carry it over to the stadium. But when we tried to get the pig out of its crate to put on the UC Follies sign, it began to squeal in a piercing cry that someone described as ‘murdering babies’. I’m sure some of the neighbours thought so too because we were concerned that someone would call the Humane Society and our whole plan would be aborted.
We soon discovered that the signs wouldn’t work, so we greased the pig and Robin painted “UC Follies” on its sides through the slats in the box as it was squealing and squirming. As soon as we covered the box with a black shroud, the squealing stopped and we were underway. Robin painted “Queens” on the side of the shroud in an effort to make it look like a coffin. As trucks were entering the stadium for the half-time show, our driver boldly drove the truck in and we unloaded the ‘coffin’ under the stands.
Before half-time, Robin and another guy carried the box onto the field and just as soon as the next play started, released the pig. It ran right into the play and caused immediate consternation. Robin’s painted label had largely smeared off, but it was still possible to decipher the letters “UC” on one side. We all had gone into the stands and mingled with the crowd hoping that no one would notice us. The next day in the morning paper there was a big article about some engineering students who had “released a greased pig insultingly labelled ‘UC’ onto the field” As an ad for the Follies, it was a total flop but it did create attention. We decided that discretion being the better part of valour that we would not attempt to correct the misleading impression that we had created.
Graduation in Arts and the Summer of ’53
This was my graduation year and the rest of it went in a kind of blur. In the winter, I went skiing a few times with Jan and other friends. The graduation banquet went off without a hitch and we all got to know Robertson Davies, who was just beginning his meteoric career in Canadian literature. By this time, we were studying for exams and trying to determine where we were going next. I had already been accepted for advanced standing in Medicine and Robin was accepted into the Bar Admission course at Osgoode Hall.
This was a signal year. I was the president of the graduating class and dad was the president of the UC Alumni Federation. We were both involved in many functions around these events. My graduating class at U.C. had about 300 students in it, not to mention all the other colleges and faculties at U. of T. So, graduation exercises stretched out over at least two weeks. My parents were very proud and brought along many friends. Dad then took us to dinner at the University Club and several of my classmates were invited. Dad did special programs for several dinners that were based on an old program that he had done for a party on Lake Joseph with Dan Kappele on the early ‘20s. This was during prohibition in Canada and only physicians could order alcohol as a tonic for their patients. The order on the script was Oleum Ricini. So there was lots to drink at the party. This menu was repeated at Peter Kappele’s 21st birthday party.
Dad also gave me the 1950 Vauxhall Velox that was my only request for a graduation present. I think it was my friend Hugh Geddes who first called it ‘Betsy’, a name that stuck. All of this completely lifted me out of the humdrum of working at the Westinghouse, but only for a few days.
Cars, Betsy
My graduation gift was the 1950 Vauxhall Velox, the second Vauxhall that my father bought from Hamilton Motor Products, the big General Motors dealer in town. Foreign cars had been rare in Canada until after the war, but there were now increasing numbers of Austins, Morrises,6 Hillmans, Volkswagens and MGs. They were much smaller and lighter than the big American cars but they got better gas mileage and they handled on the road so much better that they soon had an enthusiastic following.
I had encountered a pre-war Triumph while taking botany and found it very interesting. And my previous scoutmaster, Bob Todd had one of the first MG TCs to come to Canada. I had learned to drive on a 1937 Willys and on a 1946 Dodge and both of them were designed in the American style with soft springs and heavy flat-head engines that had to be very large to generate enough horsepower to move these sluggish vehicles. The Vauxhall was a GM product but designed for the British market and it was a revelation to drive on narrow twisty roads such as Highway 35 on the way to the cottage. I was soon able to take the curves much faster than the American cars around me and my only frustration was that I did not have enough power to pass the Buicks and Oldsmobiles in the few straight stretches along these roads.
When I got Betsy, it had almost 40,000 miles on it which was a lot for cars in those days. European cars were more highly tuned than domestic cars which meant that they got very good performance from a small engine but the downside was that they required regular tuning and maintenance that most North American drivers were not prepared to give them. Also, in those days the highly tuned engines burned valves and required a valve grind every 25-30,000 miles. Betsy had just had a valve and ring job and a new clutch as part of dad’s gift to me.
But it needed other things as well. I decided that I would do the jobs myself. I got the service manual for the car and a lot of tools at Canadian Tire – I was a very regular customer there most of the summer. I put the car up on blocks with the wheels and the hood off and worked on it when I could. There it sat in the garage for most of the summer. Periodically my father would ask: “When are you going to put the wheels back on?” To him this symbolized that the car was road-worthy.
Summer Job
My father had introduced me to an executive at the Westinghouse plant in Hamilton and I applied for a summer job. When they heard that my hobby was building radios and that I could solder and wire up circuits, they hired me to work in the Prototypes Lab on the top floor of the main office on Longwood Road. It seemed like I was all set for the future. I have a few recollections of that summer. I started work in mid-May at the Westinghouse and was assigned to work on a wiring harness for a prototype for the navy. The engineers had built a model for testing but when we finished putting it together, it worked so well that they had to make modifications not anticipated in the original design. During that time, my graduation took me away for a day. Some of the guys asked me what B.A. stood for. I think that someone muttered “bugger all” but I just ignored that. After we finished working on the prototypes, I had several other short projects but in the last month I was assigned as a helper to a team of electricians who did repairs around the plant. I learned industrial wiring which is a cut above the domestic wiring that I had done up to that time.
Cottage and Stuff
When I got Betsy back on the road, I spent time at the cottage and discovered that Betsy could get 28 miles to the gallon on the highway and that I could make it from home to the cottage in 3 ½ hours if I just stopped once for coffee on the way. My best time was 3 hours and 20 minutes. I frequently went up for weekends, leaving Friday night after work and coming back late on Sunday night. I visited Jan who was a counsellor at a girls’ camp on Lake Bernard north of Huntsville. I also met her parents and I remember driving their Oldsmobile 98, a big heavy car that swooped and wallowed on the hills and corners. I was happy to drive Betsy on the way home. It confirmed my opinion that small cars were better.
Mother’s birthday was August 13th. My father had a surprise for her. The next-door property was a small log cabin that was owned by Mr. Barley, a clergyman from Niagara Falls. They were finding it increasingly difficult to get there and maintain it. Mother had admired it from our cottage and had said she would love to have a log cabin someday. and father discovered that Mr. Barley was planning to sell it. Father bought the cabin for $2700 as I recall. That’s what cottages were going for, especially run-down places like this old cabin.
Dad came up to the cottage that weekend with a twinkle in his eye. He had a birthday card with a musical theme and the cabin key with a tag that said “Key of C”. It didn’t take long for mother to figure that out. She was thrilled and we went to the cabin to inspect. It was a long low building with a very small porch on the front and a lean-to on the back that was the kitchen. The main part had a small living room in the centre with a small bedroom on each end. Because it had no foundation and the large rocks in the center had settled, the floor sloped down in the middle. But mother was thrilled to have it so we were too.
My Uncle Cecil died that summer. He was the father of Jane, my first cousin. Uncle Cec had been in the army during the Second World War and continued in the army of occupation in Europe after the war. Jane and her mother had been in England and then in Germany for much of that period and had only been back home for a year or so. He had a massive heart attack while driving. Fortunately, he was stopped at a traffic light when it happened because he died before anyone could get to him. The funeral was a sad affair and attracted family and friends from all over. This meant that Jane and Aunt Madeline became an even closer part of our lives.
The rest of the summer seemed to go very quickly and soon it was time to start my first year in Medicine. But I didn’t have the sense of a new phase to my life as I had when starting TCS and University.
I completed my Arts degree in 1953 and started my first year of medicine that fall. My best friends, Robin Scott and Hugh Geddes were both ‘Betas’11 and in Osgoode Hall Law School and I had roomed with them at the fraternity house in the years before that. However in the fall of 1955 when I first met Fran, Robin was articling back home in Windsor, and Hugh felt he had been living with the “kids” at the Beta house too long, so he had found a small apartment off campus. I was living at the Beta house with another friend Ray Koski that year. But the next year when Robin was back at Osgoode Hall we determined that we would find a place in the city.
Notes:
1 The normal medical program of four years could not be entered directly from high school. Students were required to take a two year “Pre-Meds” program which gave the undergraduate credits necessary to start the medicine program. If you gained the necessary credits in another university undergraduate course, you could request ‘advanced standing’ and if this was approved, the Pre-Med course was not required.
2 This was later renamed Falconer Hall in honour of a former President who had lived there. After it was no longer a residence, it housed the Department of History.
3 The old house had been the president’s residence when my father was at university forty-two years before. When the new men’s residence was built on the same site in the 1970s, it was also called simply “73 St. George Street.”
4 The Faculty of Arts and Science at U. of T. was the largest faculty on campus, taking in the four Arts colleges, St. Mikes, Trinity, Vic and UC. Although science was probably the major component, everybody just called it “Arts”.
5 Dad who some said was more British than the British, had just bought a ’49 Vauxhall at the time. The next year he decided to buy another one, same model, both green. Subsequently I was given the second one as a graduation present and drove it until I got married. There were two models, the 4-cylinder Wyvern and the 6-cylinder Velox. The Velox had a 6-cylinder overhead valve engine that looked like a miniature version of the popular Chevrolet 6. I learned later that General Motors had bought Vauxhall in the late 1920s to get the patents on their overhead valve engines.
6 This Triumph would be the immediate pre-war model. The same model was made after the war but it was not until about 1948 or ‘49 that a completely new model came out called the TR II.
7 This is what someone claimed. I did not personally witness that.
8 The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
9 In the early years of the Cold War, Senator Joseph McCarthy went on a campaign to root out Communists and fellow travelers (Socialists) in American society. His vicious harangues and brow-beating tactics destroyed several prominent political careers. He became very influential in the early 1950s when he chaired the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations and later the Subcommittee on Investigations. His name was associated with the House Un-American Activities Committee. In 1954, he made charges against the US Army that in the subsequent inquiry were proved totally unfounded. His influence began to wane and he was censured by the US Senate in 1956. He died in 1957.
10 My father was more politically astute than I was. This was still in the time of Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee. Dad had checked with the American Consulate in Hamilton and was advised not to mention the Institute at the border. Instead I was instructed to say that we were on vacation.
11 Beta Theta Pi Fraternity at 126 St. George St. I was a member from 1950, my second year in Arts. Although I was considered an alumnus after graduating from Arts in 1953, I continued to live there because it was so convenient to the campus.