it. He shook his head. The Leafs didn’t know it, but they had just had a preview of Eddie Shack.
During the Depression of the 1930s, a lot of guys hung out at Tate’s Smoke Shop near the delta on Water Street. There wasn’t much else to do. Tate liked company and set two benches outside and two inside for the men to sit. The outside men handled the gas pump, took in the cash, and carried out the change. Tate considered it beneath his dignity to do this. He was a respected businessman. A bookie, in fact.
Bing McCauley recalls riding his tricycle to Tate’s to play his harmonica for treats. “Little Brown Jug” was good for an ice-cream cone, and “Melancholy Baby” might bring a chocolate bar. Sometimes one of the men would join him on the spoons. Another might sing or do a little jig.
Bing says Tate always wore a fedora on the back of his head, though he never stepped outside. And he called everybody “suh.”
“Yes, suh. Thank you, suh.” That was about the limit of his conversation except when he talked about the horses. When a woman not familiar with the shop was addressed as “suh,” she would look around to see if he was talking to a man behind her. Then she would hurry out the door. “Thank you, suh,” Tate would holler after her.
Bing, who developed into an accomplished jazz piano player, credits Tate’s Smoke Shop with launching his musical career.
9 What Winters We Had — Heroics on the Hills
Today’s young drivers are thrilled and bored by accounts of heroic battles with snow during the greatly exaggerated and legendary winters of sixty years ago, but here goes, anyway. Weather forecasts then were much more hopeless than they are today, and blizzards struck without warning at peak traffic hours. It seemed that the storms always began at 4:00 p.m. so that every able-bodied boy and flirtatious girl in Central School could run to the foot of the hill there to watch the cars slide out of control. Roads weren’t salted then, and trucks with sand never arrived until after the emergency crews at the Board of Works had finished supper. So the five o’clock rush guaranteed bedlam on every hill in Galt. Central School Hill was the worst because of its sharp ascending curves.
Most cars in those days sported sets of chains on their rear-drive wheels to dig traction out of the ice. All police cars and fire trucks did. But there were always enough cars without chains to cause gridlock. Wheel chains were outlawed with the advent of snow tires and the realization that the chains were shredding the asphalt.
Anyway, the jams on the hills enabled schoolboys to demonstrate their new-found strength and chivalry. They would take hold of a car spinning its wheels and sliding sideways and, with pubescent roars, shoulder it up the hill. Whenever a boy lost his footing and fell face down in the slush, another would leap in to grab the fender. Girls would squeal. Boys in grades seven and eight, like the Mills brothers, Donald and Ray, and Billy Schultz performed feats of strength that risked landing them in the army. Tink Clark, just thirty-seven in grade eight, appeared to lift the rear ends of cars right off the ground.
Not many women drove cars then, but whenever one of them tackled the hill the boys would abandon the men they were pushing and rush to the lady’s aid, knocking one another down in their hurry to get there, Vart Vartanian leading the pack. After five the guys drifting home from the beer parlours joined and you would swear that some of them were actually pushing cars down the hill.
Reports from other hills, Concession Street and St. Andrews were favourites, arrived by runner. The mess there it seemed was always worse than on our hill. Fire trucks were colliding with police cars and ambulances.
One snowy afternoon there actually was a fire at the top of Central School Hill, and the firemen couldn’t get up through the jam. The fire was just over the fence from the schoolyard, on Bruce Street, in a little shed where a man with bulging eyes, a sort of hermit, fixed radios. The firemen didn’t have wireless communication in their trucks so there was a lot of shouting back and forth as to who was to do what and go where. Boys ran up and down the hill hollering contradictory rumours. There was an explosion. People were jumping out of windows.
At last Grenfell Davenport, running like a deer, ended the confusion. The fire was out, he hollered. He and a pack of boys had put it out with snowballs.
10 A Child’s Christmas on Havill Street
When Grandma and Grandpa Spring were still with us, we had Christmas dinner at their house on Havill Street in Galt. Before dinner we exchanged gifts in the parlour. Only one person at a time was allowed to open a gift and everyone would say “Ooh!” and “Ah!” as if they were at a fireworks display. After dinner the adults retired to the kitchen, leaving the children to play with their new toys or eavesdrop through the closed kitchen door. My mother and all my aunts had the gift of hysterical laughter, and when we heard that through the door we knew our uncles were telling jokes.
That done there was a hush while Aunt Sisley Alsop told stories of mystery and imagination. She was a spiritualist preacher in California and came every Christmas with a bag of messages from the dead. Gasps came through the door. Next came squeals when she read palms. It wasn’t what you would call an orthodox Christmas.
While my aunts did the dinner dishes and recounted difficult births, and before the poker game started, the uncles and larger nephews charged out to the street in a cloud of cigar smoke for a snowball fight. Strange now to recall Uncle John, the decrepit old man I sat watching hockey games with years later, running down Havill Street to snowball the fedora off Uncle Ted.
Every other Christmas, instead of playing poker after dinner and the snowball fight, the adults would indulge in a few games of bingo. This was in lieu of prayer and carol singing, which gives you some idea of where we stood on the social scale.
Uncle Fred Linder, in spite of stammering worse than anyone I have ever heard, insisted on calling the bingo. It was a challenge that everyone conceded. Anyway, he owned all the bingo paraphernalia (cards, a revolving cage that released the numbered Ping-Pong balls, et cetera). One year he forgot to bring the bingo equipment, and my father drove him home to pick it up in our 1929 Chevrolet.
On the return trip Uncle Fred, possibly because of my father’s flatulence, chose to ride outside on the running board. My father cornered onto Havill Street too fast for Uncle Fred to hang on, and he flew off and torpedoed through the slush headfirst into the snow banked along the curb. They slogged into the house, howling with laughter. Uncle Fred’s fedora was caked with slush and squished down around his ears. We all howled at the sight of him.
When Uncle Fred recounted what had happened, our mouths dropped and we fell silent. Not because of his near-death experience, but because he had stopped stammering. For half an hour he talked just like us. My mother, who believed that Uncle Fred stammered because he ran a machine gun during World War I, told my sister, Shirley, and me that this was our father’s first miracle.
Sadly, it didn’t last. The stammering, worse if anything, returned as soon as Uncle Fred began to call the bingo. My mother said this was the Lord’s way of telling us we were desecrating his birthday.
After Grandma and Grandpa Spring died, Christmas moved to Auntie Bea’s house just around the corner on Concession Street. Auntie Bea married late in life and met her husband at a bingo. She never won at bingo, my mother said, but the man she met became another Uncle Bill.
Theirs
