you sixty feet in five seconds. The only way down the chute without ripping your pants to shreds and endangering your ability to procreate was to squat on one heel and stick your free leg out in front of you in a manner most likely to break it. Only the bravest boys and wildest girls risked the plunge. The only girl I remember doing it regularly was Janet Winter, later Ms. Elliott of St. George, where she did even more dangerous things.
Teachers on yard duty blew whistles to stop the sliding on the chute long enough to clear away piles of children at the bottom. The chief enforcer for a couple of years was a grade four teacher named Mr. Pleasant (I am not making this up), a virtuoso with the strap. If he caught you loading a snowball with a rock, he would strap you thrice on each hand — hard. He strapped boys in lines of four and five with a foot-long length of rubber brake lining laced with asbestos fibres. A lawsuit today involving a schoolboy strapped with asbestos fibres would fill page one of the Toronto Sun for a week. One day word went around that Grenfell Davenport had pulled his hand back so that Mr. Pleasant hit his own knee. That was one of the times Grenfell hid for a couple of days in McBain’s barn.
One thing you didn’t do for sure, though it is commonly done today even by lawyers, was throw a snowball at a girl. When Boyd Shewan, the principal, caught a boy tossing a snowball at a girl, he stuck two fingers in his mouth and sounded a whistle that stiffened even Mr. Pleasant. All playground activity ceased, and the guilty boy was led to face the wooden schoolyard fence. Mr. Shewan, hand raised and eye on his watch, would shout “Fire!” and 200 crazed boys would paste the condemned to the fence with a withering barrage of snowballs — the firing squad. He stopped the barrage after precisely two minutes with another piercing whistle. On a good packing day the wet snowballs hit the fence like horses’ hoofs. Imagine in this day of law and order trying to get a jury to a schoolyard on a good packing day.
That we survived such primitive and lawless times explains why seniors today are so tough and never complain about anything. And where were the lawyers when we needed them? Probably throwing snowballs at the boy pinned to the fence. One thing about those golden days, though, was that we kids never had to pass through metal detectors.
In l928, when Al Capone was shooting up Chicago with machine guns, a gang of twelve-year-old boys roamed our neighbouring town of Hespeler, shooting out streetlights with slingshots. The slingshot (ask Goliath) is a lethal weapon, and today boys would be forced to register them.
One sunny day Odele Gehiere, his brother, Arsiene, Cecil Proud, Billy Black, Ernie Lee, and Archie Scott armed at the gravel pit behind Hillcrest School and swaggered down Queen Street with pockets full of stones as round and smooth as robins’ eggs. They were sly enough not to shoot at anything in broad daylight, but Arsiene Gehiere, testing the feel of a stone in his sling, lost his grip and accidentally fired the round through the front window of a house owned by a man notorious for his hatred of little boys.
The man charged into the street in a frothing rage, ordered the boys to stand where they were, and ran back into his house to call the police. The police at that time consisted of Chief Tom Wilson. The chief had a jail but no patrol car and had to call George Woods’s taxi service to deliver him to the sites of crime. Failing to get a coherent explanation for the broken window at the site, the chief made the boys march ahead of the taxi the few blocks to the police station in the town hall.
There he drew a confession from Arsiene Gehiere and demanded to know how such an “accident” could happen. Gehiere loaded his slingshot with a choice stone and stretched the rubber. “It just slipped from my fingers,” he said, “like this.” And the stone shot across the room straight through the frosted glass on the door that said Chief of Police. The chief, adjusting his face, marched the six boys into a jail cell and held them there for one hour.
Archie Scott said the boys’ parents had to pay for both windows but couldn’t remember how much they cost. The brief jail term seemed to straighten out the boys. Archie told me this story just a few years back, and he was still law-abiding. Indeed none of the boys involved embarked on a life of crime except Ernie Lee who, I am told, joined the Tory Party.
George Woods, the taxi driver, told me he drove Chief Wilson to crime sites, usually the local beer parlours, and to the jail for years, even helping him carry drunks to the cells, and never once billed the town for his services. That was the way things were done then. After George served as deputy for nearly two years, the chief said to him, “George, some day when you can spare the time it wouldn’t be a bad idea to drive down to Galt and get your driver’s licence.”
Coutts and Son Funeral Directors in Galt used to be owned and operated by Harold Gray, and during the 1930s and 1940s it was the prestigious way out. Mr. Gray made every effort to sustain the tone of his service — dignified, elegant, and serene, goals he met until he brought his son, Bud, into the business.
Bud, like his father, was rotund and tall, an imposing figure. Bursting with youth, he had the self-discipline of a circus bear cub. He had a friend just as large and even more uncontrollable, who he talked his father into hiring as an assistant. The friend’s name was Willis Toles, an accomplished jazz trombone player who could double ably on bass, piano, and guitar; was a veteran cab driver; and was a crack shot with a revolver and consistently beat out the local policemen in marksman competitions.
Business was good, so Mr. Gray had no need for a revolver marksman, but Toles’s experience as a cab driver made him a natural to drive the ambulance, a service then in the hands of funeral directors. Bud was assigned to drive the hearse. It wasn’t surprising to see the hearse clear St. Andrews Street at sixty miles per hour chased by the ambulance with the siren on. Occasionally, the two would run out for coffee in the ambulance with the siren on. It must have occurred to Mr. Gray that his funeral parlour had been taken over by the Marx Brothers.
When the solemnity of a service was rent by shouting in the yard and hoots of laughter coming from the ambulance garage, Mr. Gray would run out of the chapel, wave his arms wildly, pretend to strangle himself, and run back inside. One day, after Bud banged up a front fender on the hearse, Harold sent Toles down to Bennett City Garage Body Shop to pick it up. He wouldn’t trust Bud. Toles brought it back intact, but while nursing it into the garage scraped it from end to end.
Mr. Gray, when he wasn’t pretending to strangle himself, was noted for his composure. He finally lost it at a funeral in Sheffield. The service was in an old country church, and Mr. Gray sent Bud and Toles into the basement to keep out of trouble. However, Toles found a piano in the Sunday school room and began to pound out “C Jam Blues.” Bud joined in by pounding jam tins with chair rungs. Mourners seated upstairs weren’t amused. Neither was Mr. Gray who, really strangling himself, raced downstairs. He couldn’t fire his own son, but Toles had to go.
Toles went to work for the opposition, Jimmy Little, when his funeral home was on Grand Avenue. Because Toles lived in a double house on Barrie Street, he wasn’t allowed to practise his trombone or bass fiddle at home, so he rehearsed in the embalming room at Little’s. On his way to his band job at Leisure Lodge, he would drop into Little’s and pick up his bass. One time a passerby, seeing Toles carrying out the casket-size instrument in the dark, thought it was someone stealing bodies and called the police. The officers searched high and low until Jimmy Little assured them the body count was okay.
One summer day in l940, Grenfell Davenport said we should visit Janet Winter who had just moved from a house on east Main Street to a big home
