Sara looked at her husband and said, “Harry, say something!”
Feeling they should help their kids discover their Jewish identity, Harry and Sara decided to enrol five-year-old Charles and his older sister Maida in religious school at the Holy Blossom Temple because, as his father later admitted, theirs was the cheapest membership fee of the new synagogues being built in the then-suburbs around Eglinton and Bathurst. After being “consecrated,” Charles came home with drawings he had done of Jonah and the whale and Elijah riding a flaming chariot.
In fact, Charles’s artistic inclinations were evident from the time he was a baby. One night when his parents returned home from a movie, they found his distraught babysitter cleaning the wall beside his crib. Charles had gleefully used the contents of his diaper to create his first mural.
At age four he made a papier mâché duck from newspaper strips and flour paste, and he placed it beside the furnace to dry. When he awoke the next morning, he was traumatized to find that it had disappeared. Thinking it was a piece of trash, his mother had thrown it out. Charles was inconsolable and cried his eyes out, despite Sara telling him, “You can always make another one.”
The remarkable event that shaped his later life, and made him into a celebrity at age four, happened in the summer of 1947. His father’s sister, Aunt Ruth, heard on the radio that the National Film Board was looking for a kid to play a lost boy in Johnny at the Fair, a film about the Canadian National Exhibition. After six years of being used as a military supply base during World War II, the “Ex” was now being groomed to reopen. Ruth told Sara that the NFB was auditioning kids that very afternoon in a last-minute effort to find the right “Johnny.” Charles was soon on a streetcar with his mom, heading down to the CBC for a three-minute interview with the director, Jack Olsen. A precocious, fearless little kid, Charles picked his nose and did somersaults while the director sat behind a desk watching. Afterward, mother and son took a cab home.
Back at the house they found reporters and cameramen already on their front lawn, flashbulbs popping, and his mother was being asked for interviews by the media. A few days later the papers were full of stories with headlines like: “Boy Born Since CNE Closed Chosen For Role In ‘Ex’ Film” and “Impressionable Extrovert Wins Sonny Movie Role.” For the next two weeks Charles was awakened early each day, dressed in the same striped T-shirt and brown shorts, and driven down to the Ex in a Chrysler woodie wagon convertible. Let loose to roam the midway and the Exhibition buildings, he jumped on the rides, took a flight on a helicopter, ate taffy apples, tasted candy floss, and chewed gum while the director, camera crew, and press followed his every step.
It all seemed glamorous, a topsy-turvy world of clowns, bagpipers, tattoo artists, and bathing beauties vaunting the “World of Tomorrow,” and “Chemical Wonderland,” all accompanied by brassy 1940s band music. Overwhelmed at first, Charles soon began to take it in stride. He received a kiss from world champion skater Barbara Ann Scott, sat on the lap of heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis, and was told to climb the steps of the Bandshell to shake the hand of Prime Minister Mackenzie King. He also watched Elsie the Cow get milked, spoke to the French ambassador to Canada, laughed at comedian Stepin Fetchit, and met Quebecois woodsman Joe LaFlamme, who let Charles pet his tame moose, a moment later commemorated in Charles’s paintings.
Charles and his mother in a publicity photo for Johnny at the Fair, Toronto Telegram, August 1947.
Charles remembers a scene in the film in which he is led by a police officer to the lost children’s compound, locked up behind a high chicken-wire fence, while his parents and the film crew watch in the background.
The script required Charles to cry, so without warning Sara went over and swooshed a hunk of mud across his face. He burst into tears as the cameras rolled. A few moments later, she rushed back and swept him up in her arms, to his delight. The resulting scene in the film, of a tired, cranky, lost child being reunited with his anxious parents, is a triumph of illusion. His two magical weeks ended when the Ex finished its run, and he was sent back to mundane real life.
The following spring, Charles was awakened one evening by his very excited mother, who dressed him in a bow tie, a sweater knit by his Aunt Ruth, and itchy wool britches. He remembers vomiting from nerves before being whisked out into the night. When they arrived at the giant Shea’s Theatre, where Toronto’s City Hall now stands, he was interviewed in front of radio microphones shaped like fans, while Klieg lights blinded his eyes. Charles stood before a darkened audience for the “praymeere” (as he heard it pronounced) of a “Canada Carries On” presentation of Johnny at the Fair.
Charles shakes hands with Prime Minister Mackenzie King at the CNE, August 1947.
As Johnny, he was told to sign his name, which he had just learned to print, in people’s autograph books, both at the theatre and later at B’nai Brith Lodge meetings. Lorne Greene, who narrated the film, suggested to him that he enrol in his acting school. Charles was five by then and had the illusory impression that “Canadian” meant glamorous. His parents were delighted to receive a cheque for $101.75 from the National Film Board for services rendered. This classic bit of Canadian kitsch played as a short in theatres all over North America for several years thereafter, and it is currently viewable on YouTube. This was Charles’s first and only starring role, and one that left an indelible impression on the little boy.
Charles may have had a unique connection to the big screen, but he and his family had a relationship with the TV in their house that was typical of a 1950s family. Every Sunday night, the family gathered in front of their black and white TV to watch their favourite program, Lassie. The Pachters got a dog, too, which Charles named Leslie — that was what his grandmother called Lassie.
In one episode, a mean old lady named “Sara Dibbles” kidnapped Lassie, after which Charles decided to call his mom Dibbles. Finding she liked it, Sara started signing her letters with that name, and from that moment on she became Dibbles to friends and family.
At age 12, Charles sketched his dog Leslie, 1954.
Dibbles was indefatigable: she raised four kids, worked full-time as a travel agent and tour leader, and in her spare time was wardrobe mistress for shows with the Holy Blossom Temple Players, ironing the costumes backstage while Harry performed various roles in the plays. She was a firecracker, a cut-up, and a self-absorbed beauty. As travel agent for Fisher-Fremont Travel, she led tours to Israel a record-setting 166 times, in addition to thirty trips to China, Thailand, and Japan, and ten to Russia, every trip being “the best trip I ever took.”
In her office she told an older woman who was struggling to negotiate a stairway, “If you can’t get up these stairs, you’re not coming to Israel.” In Japan, a lady on the tour was still in mourning for her recently deceased husband, and didn’t want to get off the bus to visit a shrine. “You shouldn’t be on this tour. You’re going back to Toronto,” Dibbles told her, and she was promptly put on the next flight back.
When he was nine, Charles told her, “Mom, your problem is that you’re … uh … domineering.”
“I’M DOMINEERING?” she shouted. “I’ll give you such a DOMINEERING!”
Despite everything, Charles and Dibbles were close. He inherited his mother’s energy, and her sense of fun and adventure.
Charles’s father, Harry, who he always referred to as “Har,” tried his hand at many different businesses
