we should keep track of her because she was the only girl we knew who would kiss anybody. She was ten years old.
So we recruited Kenny Lee and Jim Bastin at the East Street dump, where they had been picking over odds and ends, and headed for the crescent on the west side. We found her house by asking where the new girl with the skinny legs lived. She was really pleased to see us and suggested we visit the animal pens in Victoria Park. There she introduced us to two girls who would soon be her classmates at Dickson School.
The sound of a steam train whistle prompted Grenfell to suggest we pop up to Barrie’s Cut to visit the spring where the hobos camped. He claimed to have sat by their fire at night and drunk beer with them. So up we went along the trail through the hawthorns (all subdivisions now) and down to the spring. It is still there beside the tracks just south of Simpson’s sawmill. There we splashed around until we were pretty well soaked and one of Janet’s new friends started to cry.
“Don’t worry,” Grenfell said. “We can all dry off on the bridge.”
Close to the spring a high wooden bridge carried the lane to Linton’s farm over the tracks in the cut. It was a favourite thrill of boys to stand on this old bridge and brace the exhaust of a train blasting up the grade. Now we could hear a train rumbling over the Grand River bridge and heading our way. We told the girls we were really in luck, that we could stand on the bridge while the train passed under and dry our clothes really fast.
The girls, except for Janet, didn’t like the idea, but Grenfell told them they hadn’t lived until they had had steam up their skirts. Janet, who was precocious, said it would at least be safer than sex. So we dared each other onto the bridge and watched the roaring black smoke approach. The wooden bridge planks had two-inch-wide cracks between them, and we positioned the girls over them for their maximum pleasure. Actually, we wanted to see if their light summer skirts would blow up. They couldn’t hold them down with their fingers in their ears.
The freight, westbound on the heavy grade, had two locomotives blasting with every pound of steam they could muster. The advancing tornado raised the hair on our necks, and we stuck our fingers in our ears and closed our eyes tight. The lead engine’s exhaust shook the bridge and exploded up through the cracks, firing sparks up trousers and skirts. To top it off, the engineer, spotting us, blew his whistle. The power of a steam whistle six feet beneath you is enough to shake the fillings out of your teeth.
We were reeling so much from the first engine that the second, the most powerful, caused the girls to scream. After it passed and the bridge settled down, we stood shaking our heads and patting bituminous gases back down our pant legs. I pried cinders from my eyes.
“My skirt blew up,” Janet said. “Did you peek, Grenfell?”
“How could I see with cinders in my eyes?” he asked.
“You wouldn’t get cinders in your eyes if you hadn’t peeked,” she said. “I’m telling my mother.”
The only boy who didn’t peek was Jim Bastin, who went to the Gospel Hall and could be trusted. Grenfell, Kenny Lee, and I all went to First United and couldn’t be trusted. What’s more, Kenny, because he wore glasses, didn’t get cinders in his eyes and gave us such graphic descriptions of the girls’ underwear that we wondered about the state of decency on the west side of town. Jim Bastin even said he wished he had opened his eyes.
We talked about that time on the bridge for weeks afterwards while we picked over odds and ends at the East Street dump. Of course, more sensational things have happened in the years since, but not much more.
Professor Thiele was the first charismatic person I ever saw. I was with my parents on Water Street trying to see a parade through the legs of a crowd.
Parades in the 1930s were one of the few forms of entertainment people could afford, mainly because they cost nothing. Several bands had gone by, huffing and puffing, and all I saw were flashes of braid and brass. Then someone said, “Here comes Professor Thiele,” and the whole crowd rose on tiptoe. His band, the Waterloo Music Society Band, exceptionally precise and powerful, towered above every band that had passed.
I managed to pop my head out from under a fat lady’s arm and — pow! There he was, Professor Thiele, the legend, baton in hand, his white uniform gleaming, marching before a wall of trombones. That the band was dressed in dark blue made him gleam in white all the more.
John Mellor, in his biography of Thiele, Music in the Park, says the professor and his family, before they immigrated to Canada, were virtually an institution in the United States. Thiele had played with John Philip Sousa and Edwin Goldman and had toured with his own family concert troupe. His wife, Louise, was a cornet virtuoso; was accomplished on the piano, marimbaphone, and clarinet; and was a spellbinder with her dramatic readings. Dramatic readings in those days were the mark of a superior band concert.
So how on earth did they get to Waterloo?
When the United States entered the war against Germany in l917, anti-German hysteria left Thiele and his family unemployed, even though both he and his wife had been born in America. Broke and desperate, Thiele answered an advertisement in the magazine Billboard for a bandmaster in a place called Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, and came up for an interview. As he boarded a train in New York City, he told his wife to buy a French dictionary in case he got the job. “Everybody up there speaks French,” he said. A week later, when he returned jubilant with the job, he said, “Throw out that French dictionary, Louise. Believe it or not, up there they all speak German.”
So they moved to Waterloo and turned it into the brass band Mecca of North America. The professor organized tattoos that attracted as many as seventy bands and 50,000 spectators to Waterloo Park at a time when the town’s population was pushing 5,000. He founded Waterloo Music Company, which manufactured band instruments, many of which he gave to bandsmen who couldn’t afford them. Thiele gave free music lessons, too, hence the title “Professor.” He also bought land on which he built a summer camp for fledgling musicians, calling it Bandburg. Later Thiele was acclaimed as the father of Canadian brass band music.
Thirty years and countless accomplishments later, the Professor was awarded a day in his honour and paraded in an open convertible behind his band to Waterloo Park where thousands gathered to cheer. The driver of the convertible, Charlie Schneider, a close friend of Thiele’s, told me about the event many years later.
“The Professor,” Charlie said, “was sitting on top of the rear seat, waving to the crowd as we followed the band into Waterloo Park. When the band began to countermarch on the grass, I swung the car around them and headed towards the throng lining the field. I drove under some spruce trees without a thought as to how high the Professor was sitting. The crowd suddenly went quiet. I turned to see what the Professor might be doing and … he wasn’t there. A spruce bough had swept him off. Right away a voice beside me hollered, ‘Charlie, let me in!’ It was the Professor, running beside the car. He was holding his hat in his hand. The back of his jacket was covered with grass stains. I stopped and opened the door, and in no time he was back on top of the rear seat, waving. The crowd went crazy. He always surprised them.”
20 No Steroids for the Terriers
Unfortunately, today’s role models in professional baseball sustain their energy at manic levels by ingesting steroids, cocaine, Sudafed, and even Alka-Seltzer. These are called “performance-enhancing drugs.” George Brown finds this disgusting and quite unnecessary.
