obtained his first scooter, he then became a travelling salesman for a dress manufacturer, and later worked as a “customer’s man” at numerous stock brokerage offices. He ended up in a little office on Eglinton Avenue selling Israel bonds.
Harry had many pals with whom he played poker and went to hockey and baseball games. As president of B’nai Brith Eastern Canadian Council, he attended many conventions in the Catskills in Upstate New York with Dibbles. Har had a wonderful gift for telling jokes and stories, and was in great demand as an after-dinner speaker. He was also a Mason. Charles can remember watching his father and a fellow Mason one day in an elevator. Spotting Mason pins on each other’s lapels, Harry and the stranger immediately launched into an elaborate series of variations on a secret handshake that thoroughly mystified Charles.
Harry, who was an avid 8mm movie camera buff, recorded many highlights of his children’s lives in jerky reels. During the 1950s and 1960s, scene after scene showed the family walking out the front door of their home, the women dressed for the High Holidays in outlandish outfits such as fur stoles with animal snouts, to go to the Holy Blossom Temple across the street. Later, the family gathered, sharing screaming fits of laughter while reviewing the footage. There were rounds of birthday parties, candle-blowing, gooey cake with nickels wrapped in waxed paper; panning shots of little faces under paper hats peering out around the table, munching crustless chopped-egg sandwiches on brown bread; close-ups of Halloween loot being spread out on the living room floor, Dibbles nursing and bathing younger brother and sister, aunts and uncles jitterbugging on the front lawn, and four-year-olds playing in sand boxes, wrestling or smacking each other. Like father, like son, Charlie records a lot of what he does. On his computer he kept a diary of everything he did and everyone he met between May 1, 1989, and December 31, 1999. He also keeps copies of materials he has received, much of which can be found in the archives of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto.
The most dynamic personality among Charles’s relatives was his Auntie Annie, his mother’s petite, adventurous younger sister, who had gone down to Birmingham, Alabama, in the 1930s with a girlfriend, and had gotten married in a shotgun wedding to a sleazy character who was involved with drugs. Annie ended up being rescued by her grandmother and her older brother, who drove down to Alabama in an old Model T Ford, had the marriage annulled, and brought her home. Resembling Lana Turner, Annie was a classy dresser whose hair, whenever she visited the Pachters, always had a different colour. When she married boring Uncle Louie and gave him a daughter, the three of them moved to Las Vegas, where he became a croupier in a casino while she opened a Hudson automobile franchise.
She later divorced Louie, moved to New York, and managed the Park Royal Hotel on the Upper West Side near Central Park. As a teenager, Charles visited her several times and was taken to Broadway shows like The Pajama Game, Li’l Abner, Oklahoma, and Carousel. He later saw Ethel Merman in his favourite musical, Gypsy, at the O’Keefe Centre (now the Sony Centre) in Toronto in 1960. That show, based on the memoirs of Gypsy Rose Lee, left Charles with an enduring fascination with Ethel Merman, the brassy performer who reminded him of Dibbles, and whom he often imitates. He also knows all the songs by heart, which you will quickly discover if you ever visit him.
Annie also introduced him to the art galleries of Soho during the pop art era, took him to the Guggenheim and MOMA, and allowed him to see, for the first time, Matisse’s Dance and Picasso’s Guernica. This was probably the best time to be in New York, with jazz clubs on every corner, the Yankees regularly winning the World Series, and abstract expressionists like de Kooning, Pollock, and Rothko showing in the art galleries.
One day Auntie Annie phoned him from the apartment in her New York hotel and said, “902 died. She had a gorgeous couch. I’m sending it to you.” That’s how he inherited his favourite piece of living room furniture, the one on which he habitually meditates.
The Pachter house at 84 Chudleigh Ave was near the “reeveen” (as kids called it), which they had to cross to get to John Ross Robertson Junior Public School, where Charles spent Grades 1 to 4. The ravine was magical. During forays through forbidden pastures, Charles found strangely shaped wild pumpkins growing there in the fall, and he believed he alone knew where they were. His love of the ravine may well have nurtured his adult attachment to a farm in Oro-Medonte, a waterfront studio on Lake Simcoe, and a large studio retreat in a quiet laneway in downtown Orillia.
Lake Simcoe has always played a major role in Charles’s life. In the summers, when he was very young, his parents rented an old musty cottage on the south shore of the lake. The view west over the lake from the cottage was superb, allowing everyone to witness great sunsets and windswept waves.
Though it now seems like just another suburban area north of Toronto, in the 1950s the south shore of Lake Simcoe — Willow Beach, Filey Beach, Jackson’s Point — was, to Charles anyway, far-away cottage country. The wind coming off the lake was powerful, and when it was wavy and stormy, it felt more like an ocean. Fishing in that lake with his dad combined adventure and responsibility. There was so much to keep them busy — attending to worms, leeches, and hooks; unknotting fishing line; putting down and pulling up the anchor; stringing perch and bass; bailing out the wooden boat and pull-starting the motor, a Johnson 10-horse with a sinister-looking cowl. They almost never came home without a good catch, which his dad cleaned expertly as everyone sat around making faces. His mother would coat the fish fillets with egg and flour, fry them in butter, and serve them with fresh summer radishes and tomatoes.
Several times a day, the kids slid from the cottage lawn down a bum-worn, grassy hill to a sandy beach that had the cleanest, clearest water imaginable. Jumping in and out of the lake, they dared each other to see who could swim to the big rock — only ten yards out and where the water was not quite over their heads. Once in a while Charles would discover a chartreuse-green leech the size of a kitchen knife, or a pinkish-beige crayfish with wiggling antennae, or a huge bullfrog looking like it was blowing bubbles, or a beautiful empty mother-of-pearl clamshell. Sometimes a sinister-looking, half-decayed monster fish as long as his whole body washed up on shore, covered in frenzied flies and insects.
“A muskie, maybe a sturgeon,” said his dad.
Down the road were more cottages of rich people, built in the middle of long, landscaped, strip lots divided by high cedar hedges. There was Myn and Morris Sugar’s place, called Mynmor Gardens, with a rococo fountain you could see from the road, and there were the Applebaums with lots of Cadillacs parked in front. Almost everyone had a cottage with a name. When he asked what their cottage’s name was, his father replied “Kosta Lotta,” or “Machakada Sahapa,” which was the first syllable of the name of everyone in the family (i.e., MAida, CHArles, KAren, DAvid, SAra, HArry, PAchter). Often Har drove the family into Jackson’s Point where they walked around splitting and spitting out “shemeshkehs,” or sunflower seeds. There were also pumpkin seeds and pistachio nuts, whose red-dyed shells stained everyone’s lips.
Close by was the Tides Hotel, where some of their friends rented cabins and performed in hastily prepared summer skits. Dibbles would blacken her teeth with chocolate wrappers and put her hair up in pin curls to go out to one of these zany performances as a member of the Mafoofsky choir, made up of a group of friends who sang racy songs in pidgin English-Yiddish. For example: A boy in khaki ... a girl in khaki, underneath a khaki moo-o-oon. (“Kak kim oon” in Yiddish means “shit on that.”)
In later years they moved to another cottage, farther west along the lake near the government dock at Willow Beach, a few doors from Sedore’s general store, where kids hung out at the pinball machines while sucking on halves of strawberry, lime, or banana popsicles, the other halves stowed in shorts pockets. Charles didn’t like this cottage as much as the first cottage. It had slanted floors, dank bedrooms, and green beaverboard walls and mice and bats. And you had to cross the road, dodging cars, to get to the lake, which had hairy green algae attached to the rocks, and a stony bottom. It lacked the wilderness feel of the first cottage. Charles found out the next summer that the first cottage had
