28 The Palace and Jane Russell
29 The Great School Concerts
30 My Flying Father
31 Largo for Little Theatre
32 Father’s Obsession
33 The Air Raid Patrol
34 Victory
35 How Roger Ruined the War
36 More About Roger
37 Lucky Eddie Martin
38 More Lore from Bing
39 Our Nutty Dentists
40 Green Nile Compost
41 Dr. Hartman Scuttles History
42 Werstine and Herbert
43 The Raid Next Door
44 Alfie Lee
45 History of Our Morale Decline — It Started in Hespeler
46 The Ballet African
47 The Foxy Lady
48 Preston Hastens the Decline
49 Sin on the Golden Mile
50 Liberated Breasts
51 The Good Guys Gangbuster Pickett
52 The Royal Hespeler Constabulary
53 Heartbreaking Arrest
54 Safety Joe McCabe
55 Len Gaudette — Another Good Guy
56 The Piano Marathon
57 The Wooden-Legged Goaltender
58 Incidental Disasters — Hazel
59 Punished for Rejecting Billy Graham
60 The Discount Fire
61 The Fireproof Inferno
62 The Liberal Disaster
63 The Indestructible Unsafe Bridge
64 A Disaster for the Orange Lodge
65 Great Moments in Medicine
66 The Viagra Moment
67 The G Spot Unleashed
68 The Prostate — Piece of Cake
69 Damn!
70 The Geezer Squeezer
71 Tiddly Anyone?
72 Worst of All — M.S.UR.ATION
73 Almost As Bad — M.DIC.T.ON
74 Alternative Medicine’s Effect on World War II
75 Maturity It’s Called
76 The Devil’s Therapy
77 Alternative Therapy — The Bass Drum
78 The Beat Goes On
79 Amazing Grace
80 Super Seniors Pass the Torch
81 The Inspiration of Art Wilson
82 Ben Graham — Poet at Heart
83 Historic Toilet Seat
84 Victor’s Out the Window
85 An Old Shaggy Drunk
86 A Visit with Pratt
87 Too Busy to Grow Old Quietly
88 Janet of Swamp Angel Street
89 Cliffhanging with IMAX
90 Consider a Miracle
91 Fearful Reverie
Much gratitude to Robert Kerr and Graeme Ferguson, who dragged a neglected manuscript from my closet to be published for fun, glory, and mischief, and who knew where to take it. And thanks, too, to Anna Porter for liking the manuscript and giving advice and direction.
I would also like to thank Jane Burnside for typing the revisions again and again; Don Burnside for keeping the computer going; Bill Taylor, my landlord, for the hickory firewood that warmed my trailer; Iris Mitten for food, shelter, and laughs when I broke my ankle; and Rose Orth for wisdom and stability.
The preface — this thing — is the toughest part of a book to write because it has to account for what follows: the selection of personal experiences and the experiences of acquaintances, narrated without moral or political purpose, recalling, for fun more than anything else, the humorous side of solemn or outrageous events in the legends of small towns.
I’ve used the real names of all persons involved which, I trust, will lend the stories some historical credence.
Digressions, I must admit, became a problem. While trying to focus on local events, I wound up recounting the extraction of a beer glass from a man’s rectum in the emergency ward of a Toronto hospital, and the flight of a Salvation Army bass drum through the show window of a gay bar in San Francisco. However, digressions of this sort are unavoidable when one considers what mathematicians tell us — that all people and the events they are involved in are at most only six degrees removed.
It’s the small-world effect. We are all connected, and I assume that the stories related here, if pursued further, would connect us to similar events and people in every small town and city in North America.
Bob Green
Cambridge, Ontario
April 2006
