the dark, fell down, and limped home, holding their heads. We knew better than to laugh.
Weekend nights and a later curfew led us across town to Victoria Park and on to the spring beside the Canadian Pacific Railway tracks in Barrie’s Cut. There was a campsite there, where during the Depression men in search of work dropped from freight trains to rest for a night and share a can of beans. We reached the campsite by following a scrub-lined path that led from the top of Victoria Park to the tracks. As soon as we saw the firelight through the brambles, we dropped to our hands and knees and, like Indians, stalked the campsite until we heard the voices and smelled cigarette smoke. There was laughter and singing and sometimes a harmonica. All the men at the campsite were off westbound freights upgrade. The eastbound freights were too fast to get on or off.
Invariably, while we lurked in the grass, a westbound freight would come blasting up the grade, double-headed by steam engines with different-size drive wheels and nervous out-of-synch exhausts. After the long, doleful whistle at Blenheim Road, the cannonading exhausts blotted out all other sounds. One of us, startled by a rabbit bounding by and sensing heavier steps, would leap up and run, touching off a general panic that sent everyone racing back down the trail, shrieking and leaping over the fallen until, back in the park, we slumped gasping to the ground close to the deer enclosure where everything seemed safe.
Grenfell Davenport would say, “That was a close one. Anyone missing?”
The deer enclosure was Percy Hill’s pet. He was superintendent of the Galt Parks Board in the 1940s. The enclosure extended hundreds of feet into the hardwoods from the duck pond and allowed visitors to watch deer run in close to natural surroundings. The duck pond hosted a variety of tamed birds that shrieked, squawked, and honked everyone out of their beds within earshot at dawn each day. There were also platoons of multi-coloured rabbits that took leave to visit gardens for blocks around. Percy loved animals and nature.
Most Saturday mornings he sat in the Morris chair in my parents’ kitchen and discussed begonias and peat moss with my dad who had a little greenhouse leaning on the garage. Pop sold him geranium slippings.
Percy was tall, slim, soft-spoken, and gentle and gave much thought to the ways of the universe, but God help anyone who crossed him up. One morning he sat in the Morris chair with our cat purring in his lap and recounted with relish the fate of people who stole firewood.
He and the men who tended Victoria Park trimmed dead wood and burnt it in their own fireplaces. They stacked the wood at the end of the service lane behind the deer pens and took it home at their leisure. Every time they got a nice pile together, however, someone stole it. Percy, figuring the thieves came in the dead of night, rigged a trap for them. He drove four-inch spikes through a plank and laid it across the lane in front of the woodpile, spikes down during the day, but up at night. For weeks nothing happened. Then one morning Percy went in to find the wood stolen again. The spikes were up, but the wood was gone.
Later that morning he went for gas at Mil’s Service Station at the foot of Blenheim Road. The attendant at the pumps told Percy he had seen something that morning that he hadn’t seen in thirty years at the service station. A little pickup truck limped in with four flat tires. Yes, it was carrying a load of wood. Percy took the spiked plank away. The wood was never stolen again.
Soper Park was the favourite summer haunt of developing boys because we could swim under the murky water of Mill Creek and grope the girls. It was also the site of the world’s largest peony plot, confirmed by Earl Werstine in his Galt Reporter column several times each spring. Horticulturists came in buses to visit the peony plot. I always intended to visit it myself but never did. Just below the world’s largest peony plot a merry-go-round serenaded the big kids frolicking in the upper-creek bathing pool. The big kids ranged in age from thirteen to thirty-seven if you counted Tink Clark.
We used to hide behind the spirea bushes and watch the big boys play. Everything they did led up to throwing the big girls into the creek. The girls were always in the way, preening themselves on blankets right where the boys wanted to wrestle. Constable Steele, patrolling on his bicycle, would watch the big kids from behind the spirea, too. He smiled.
Inspired by the big kids, we would run down to the lower pool by the Dundas Street tunnel where the little kids swam. The little kids ranged in age from five to thirty-six if you counted Tink Clark’s brother, Da Da. The lower pool was a great place to play crocodile. The object of the game was to slide through the water with just our eyes showing, like crocodiles, and grab the girls … some of whom were visibly developing … and pull them under. The girls pretended to hate this and called out to their mothers.
I recounted these good times recently with Janet Elliott of St. George. “I always knew you were a crocodile,” she said. “Wes Lillie was another. And that Grenfell Davenport. My mother wanted to kill you.” In those days boys were always in danger of being killed by someone’s mother, sometimes their own. Janet said she got water up her nose and that her sinuses hadn’t been right since. “You pinched, too,” she said, getting shrill, “and you haven’t changed.”
When I was a boy, the chance of seeing a National Hockey League team at training camp was remote. So when Wes Lillie said, “Let’s go down to the arena and watch the Toronto Maple Leafs work out,” I thought he was kidding. But he said it had to be true because his father, Frank, had heard it from Abby Kilgour, the Galt arena rink supervisor.
So down we went on a Saturday morning: Wes, his sister, Lois, and half a dozen boys from Lowrey Avenue. No trouble getting in. No security, no passes. Wes just spoke to Abby, and he said sure, but not to be pests and no autographs. We seemed to be the only spectators, and for our exclusive viewing, spread out before us like the players on one of those tabletop hockey games, were the Leafs, including Syl Apps, Dit Clapper, Gordie Drillon, Red Horner, and Turk Broda — names that Foster Hewitt hollered at us all winter.
We crouched like field mice behind the glass at the southeast corner of the rink, just below the gondola where, twenty-two years down the road, Wes Lillie, like Foster Hewitt, would call the play-by-play radio account of the Galt Hornets chasing the Allan Cup. During a skirmish, one of the Leafs’ players broke a stick and kicked it to the boards. Immediately, a youth leaped from a gate, skated madly down the rink, picked up the stick, and streaked back, stopping in a great spray of ice chips like Rocket Richard.
“That,” said Wes, “is Tink Clark.”
His real name was Ernie, but everyone called him Tink. He didn’t belong to the Leafs. He was one of Abby Kilgour’s “rink rats.” As such, he helped Abby water the ice (the Zamboni machine had yet to be invented), clean up the aisles and washrooms, and lead with a baton the Grand March on roller-skating nights.
A lot of kids made fun of Tink because he wasn’t what you would call a Rhodes Scholar. He just wasn’t cut out for school. Tink was born to tend that rink and did so superbly for more than thirty years, long after the Leafs there that day had retired.
The following Saturday we crept in to see the whole Maple Leafs team sitting on the boards watching what appeared to be a power-skating demonstration. It was Tink Clark clearing the ice with his wooden scraper. He was really flying and grinning from ear to ear. It had to be his finest moment, clearing that ice surface faster than any man alive while all the Leafs watched and marvelled. When
