Bill, sexually frustrated, continually tested their love by threatening to die. It was his good fortune to develop a minor heart condition that required popping a nitroglycerine pill before and after every exertion when Auntie Bea was around. “I’m taking out the garbage, darling,” he would holler as he popped a nitro into his mouth with a flourish. “If I’m not back in five minutes, you’ll know that I’ve dropped.” Sometimes in a pique she would dare him to go ahead and drop and he would say, “You’d like that, wouldn’t you, sweetheart? Well, I might just be around for years.”
They tormented each other through Thanksgiving dinner, and we all braced ourselves for the crash, possibly headfirst into the potato salad. But at Christmas they always managed a truce, like the one on the Western Front in France in 1914.
Ours wasn’t a drinking family except for two uncles, one great-uncle, and three cousins, so Christmas never got out of control. Auntie Bea, however, after one sip of wine, would do a little dance by herself until she got dizzy and fell onto the sofa.
A Salvation Army major lived next door, and Auntie Bea took great pains to hide from him the fact that any alcohol entered her house. One year, a couple of days before Christmas, she was nursing a large bottle of wine from the bus stop when she came upon the major shovelling the snow off her front walk. She hid the bottle under her coat and stopped to thank him. They talked of charity and sobriety for several minutes before she lost her grip and the bottle smashed at his feet. She told my mother she couldn’t think of a single thing to say while the major helped her pick up the broken glass. My mother said she should have told him her husband had made her buy it, but Auntie Bea lacked the guile.
Over Christmas and New Year’s the Galt Canadian Pacific Railway station is now the bleakest place in town. Even the freight trains take a holiday. The depot sits dark and silent. What a contrast to the days of passenger trains and steam engines in the 1940s and 1950s when the station was the liveliest place in town.
Hundreds of people went there just to watch passengers coming and going, especially on weekends. Orville Rumble, who wore sunglasses day and night, summer and winter, went there to scout new ladies coming to town. Fish in wooden crates arrived, too, from Port Dover, and Lake Erie and Northern electric cars made it up to the station on a spur line. On holiday weekends sightseers parked their cars on Rose Street and walked to the station. Taxis crowded the parking space close to the platform. Galt Cab, Fraser’s Taxi, De Luxe Cab, and Preston Taxi flocked to the station at train time like gulls to a fish boat.
Holiday trains came in two sections fifteen minutes apart. The first section, made up of old wooden coaches, carried college students. There was a lot of singing on board, and on occasion someone would blow a bugle out the door. The second section, comprised of steel coaches, carried the establishment: businessmen wearing mohair coats, ladies sporting fur hats, magnates in club cars full of cigar smoke, and sometimes in the last two coaches, the Toronto Maple Leafs or Detroit Red Wings hockey teams.
On a Saturday night in winter, back when the late-edition Toronto Star arrived by train, paperboys and girls ran circles around cars as they heaved snowballs. The station had a general waiting room and a separate ladies’ waiting room, presumably a sanctuary for spinsters and nuns and other custodians of virginity. The beer parlours downtown were similarly divided.
“Here she comes!” someone would shout at the first sign of the headlight rising in the east, and everyone in the waiting rooms would rise as if for a hymn, lift their luggage, and jam through the doors to the platform. The awesome steam engines rolled in, bells clanging, brakes screeching, drive rods scissoring over six-foot drive wheels, their weight rattling the station windows.
Westbound trains were usually double-headed, and the smoke from the two engines often made the station disappear in a swirl of sulphurous gas and steam sweetly garnished with superheated valve oil. Little boys and their fathers gathered by the locomotives to bask in the heat and watch the engineer, a celebrity at every stop, oil the drive-rod knuckles and tap the pumps and shafts with a heavy steel mallet here and there like a doctor sounding a patient’s chest.
The conductor hollered “All aboard” and tugged on a cord to sound a peanut whistle in the locomotive cab to tell the engineer to activate the bell and release the brakes. What a thrill to hear those great engines bark and blast their volcanic exhausts skyward, a sight that today would drive environmentalists crazy. Coach after coach slid by faster and faster as did the heads of passengers peering out until suddenly all was quiet and a ghost of steam and red markers faded off across the Grand River bridge.
I remember, as a boy, lying in bed at night listening to freights rumble across the bridge and charge with staccato exhausts up the steep grade to Orr’s Lake. The whistle at Blenheim Road crossing let you know when the engines were about to pass the spring where the hobos camped as the trains battled the toughest stretch of the grade through Barrie’s Cut. The exhausts would slow and sometimes one of the engines would lose its grip and spin its wheels and exhaust like a machine gun until the engineer throttled back and fed more sand to the rails. Sometimes the grade won. The exhausts slowed until the next seemed as if it had to be the last. But there was always one more, and then another. When at last the train gave up, there would be two toots on the whistle and the growing rumble as the engines backed their load down the hill and into the Galt yards for another run.
Frendy Graham, who handled baggage and express for years at the Galt station, said he remembered at least two occasions when engines took off up the grade without their trains, the engineers not realizing it until they reached Orr’s Lake siding. With two engines it was sometimes hard to know which one was doing all the pulling.
It is difficult to realize that two generations of people have never seen a steam train. Those of us lucky enough to have witnessed them and ridden on them can never forget. With a little imagination, as I nod off at night, I can still hear them.
Frendy Graham’s favourite train passengers were the Nova Scotia lobsters that passed through Galt en route to the Palmer House Hotel in Chicago. He didn’t have to check them through, but he ate quite a lot of them. An express handler on the train carrying the lobsters, Frank “Slippery” Morrison, always plucked a couple of live ones from their crushed ice crate and passed them to Frendy in a paper bag. Rod MacLeod, the station operator, plopped them into a pot of boiling water, and the two dined on them after the train pulled out.
“Boy, were they ever good!” Frendy said. “Whenever I met people going to Chicago, I would tell them to be sure to get the lobster at the Palmer House. Slippery, or Slip as we called him, was a wiry little Irishman who loved people. He had a degree from the University of Dublin but preferred working on the trains. Sometimes he got off and did an Irish jig on the platform. He also sold light bulbs on the side.”
One night after Slip handed Frendy his bag of lobsters, CPR London division superintendent Art Tees stepped down from the train for a chat. While the chat went on the lobsters were trying to claw their way out of the bag. To avoid the embarrassment of having a lobster grab Tees by the thumb, Frendy excused himself to move a couple of suitcases and tossed the bag into the flowerbed surrounding the illuminated Galt sign.
After Tees departed on the train, all Frendy could find in the flowerbed was an empty bag. He searched frantically in the dark until he caught the lobsters crawling down the lawn in the general direction of the New Albion Hotel.
Frendy suspected that he and MacLeod weren’t the only station crew Slip treated to lobster. He probably gave some to the guys at Guelph Junction, too. And Woodstock
