a pot boiling in the baggage car. Who knows, maybe he even shared a few with Art Tees? Whatever, the kitchen staff at the Palmer House must have wondered why they kept getting crates of nothing but crushed ice from Nova Scotia.
If, when you hopped from a passenger train in those steamy days of yesterday, you hailed a Deluxe Cab, your driver might have been Willis Toles who, if he had jazz on the radio, would sit in the driver’s seat, stomping his foot, and leave you to open the door yourself. “Heave your suitcase in the trunk,” he would holler, “and slam the lid because the lock sticks.”
If you hailed a Galt cab, your driver might have been George Goshgarian, a slim, soft-spoken philosopher who, if it was a nice day and you weren’t burdened with suitcases, would try to talk you into walking home. He would turn in the driver’s seat, fix you with dark Armenian eyes, and say, “People should walk more,” as if he had just carried the message down from Mount Ararat. “Are you sure you want this ride?”
If you insisted, he would start the engine, but it was a philosophy lesson all the way home. “I don’t mind driving farmers home,” he would say, “because I know they are going to be pitching hay. But city people are getting too fat. Look at that big slob standing on the corner. How many years do you think he has left?”
As a young adult commuting to Toronto, I always looked for George when I got off the train. One beautiful Saturday morning I lugged a large suitcase over to his cab. He hopped out, opened the rear door, and put the suitcase on the seat. “Ride to 16 Lowrey, eh!” he said, giving the blue sky an appreciative glance. “That’s about two miles. When I was in the army, we’d consider it a treat to march only two miles on a sunny day.” He had been a corporal in the Royal Engineers in World War II. His brother, James, died as an air gunner with the Royal Canadian Air Force. “Why don’t I drop your suitcase off on your front porch while you walk it? I won’t charge the fare.”
I told him I wanted to get home right away to walk a dog who was waiting for me. He smiled so that I knew he didn’t believe me and opened the other door.
George always smoked when he was driving, but blew it out the draftless vent so that it didn’t bother you. “I’d offer you a cigarette,” he’d say, “but people smoke too much for their own good.”
One morning I got off the 10:20 from Toronto and shared George’s cab with three dapper businessmen carrying briefcases and assorted luggage. It was customary to share cabs even when you were jammed in. Nowhere was far to go, and the fare was a straight 50 cents a head. The businessmen wanted to check into the Iroquois Hotel. I merely wanted a ride downtown. They asked George to wait outside the hotel while they checked in their luggage and then drive them to the Gore Insurance office on Dundas Street.
“Shame you’ve got that luggage,” George said. “It’s such a nice day to walk.” And then he turned those hypnotic dark eyes on them. “But you could walk from the hotel to the Gore. If you did that, you could stop in at my sister’s restaurant on Shade Street for a bite to eat. It’s called Palvetzian’s. She might even whip you up an Armenian dish. And after that you could walk past our arena gardens, home of the Allan Cup champion Galt Terriers, and see Soper Park, which is full of children playing baseball. Lovely walk.”
We piled out at the Iroquois. George winked at me to indicate that I didn’t have to pay, then helped the men carry in their bags. I waited to see what would happen when they came out. I couldn’t hear what was said as they conferred beside the cab, but apparently George won out. He pointed across the Canadian National Railways tracks towards Shade Street and waved the three goodbye as they set off, smiling, on foot.
I always imagined that George, with his stress-free approach to life, would be with us promoting fitness into his nineties. But he was buried on his seventieth birthday. According to his niece, Nevi Palvetzian, his chain-smoking did him in. That and a lack of exercise. Stuck in his cab all day he didn’t walk enough.
Just for the archives: is there a person alive who has actually seen a radio inspector? This isn’t a question for anyone born after World War II. Before the war, radios were considered luxuries to be taxed. I believe it was $2 a year, and it was hated as much as today’s GST.
Everyone but the Mennonites had a radio, so you had to cough up for at least one licence. It was the fees for the second and third radios that people tried to avoid.
Our one declared radio stood like a little veneer cathedral in the living room. The unlicensed ones were in my parents’ bedroom, the bathroom, and Pop’s dilapidated greenhouse. I remember Pop telling Mom with alarm in his voice, “Alec Rouse just called to say the radio licence inspector has been spotted on Lincoln Avenue.” One block away!
Alec Rouse had a radio repair business in Rouse’s Music Store, which he shared with his brother, Gordon, who repaired washing machines and later became mayor of Galt. On Saturday night when the Salvation Army Band played right outside their front door, customers in the store had to shout.
Alec lived just three doors north of us on Lowrey Avenue and took upon himself the responsibility of warning the whole block of the radio inspector’s approach. My dad reacted to the alert the way people in Germany were reacting to the Gestapo. “Hide the bedroom radio in the hall closet!” he would holler to Mom. “And stick the bathroom radio under the straw in the fruit cellar!” Then he would run out and hide the greenhouse radio under some fish flats in a coldframe.
The alert touched off quite a flurry of housecleaning on the block. Everybody seemed to have a carton of trash for the garage. The telephone operators, who listened in all the time and knew everything, passed the alert to the whole town. In some houses disconnected aerial and ground wires dangled in every room. After a couple of days, Alec Rouse, mysteriously informed, would sound the all-clear and the radios would come out of hiding.
Oddly enough, no one ever saw a radio licence inspector. A boy might say that his aunt had talked to one on Pollock Avenue and that he was knocking on doors, but by the time we ran over there the street was empty. I asked my dad how a person could recognize a radio inspector, and he said they looked like bailiffs and walked through the Legion Hall without taking their hats off.
Passing Central School in Galt and seeing the children playing with their lawyers at recess takes me down Memory Lane to when we had playground justice without litigation or emergency meetings of the Home and School Association. It was quick, decisive, illegal, and effective.
Central School discipline, like discipline in all the schools in those golden days, would serve now as an on-site demonstration of every possible parent-teacher-pupil and accessory legal action for articling lawyers’ enrichment days. Safety, another of today’s legal minefields, was an aberration practised by girls. Boys, especially in the presence of girls, flouted safety.
We didn’t have condom machines in the schools sixty years ago, so there was little to do at recess but defy death. In winter the steep hill that Central School sits on became one huge slide. We slid, bumping our heads on iron posts, down the concrete walk leading from the upper to the lower yard. And we slid down the ash heap that Mr. Campbell, the school janitor, dumped out of the furnace room tunnel.
The most life-threatening slide was the concrete drain trough running from the upper walkway straight down
