Being a Kid!
Oh, that it could last forever!
I just renewed my passport. Feeling optimistic I paid for a ten year renewal. At 84 you never know.
Steve, the very helpful and friendly agent I dealt with, put to rest any concern I might have in dealing with Canada’s public service bureaucracy, at least for the moment. I slapped the ‘excellent’ label on Steve very quickly. Beyond excellent. He was a human being.
“In my twelve years I have never seen an application with Port Credit as the birth place,” he said, scanning my information.
“Probably because there was no hospital in Port Credit in 1941,” I replied. “I was born on the kitchen table according to my Mom. I would not wait, so she could not get to a hospital.”
He chuckled.
“Well, that’s a first. As long as it says ‘Port Credit’ on your birth certificate we are good to go.”
We lived on Oakwood Avenue South and the house is still there. I drive by it once in awhile and the memories return.
One of my first memories is going to the butcher store with war tokens to buy meat. It was an important mission. The tokens were tiny and you needed four to get a pound of meat. There is an excellent write-up on the tokens from the Sam Waller Museum here. I think I would have been about six at the time.
The shop was at the top of Oakwood Avenue across Lakeshore Drive. I remember the trip vividly. Up Oakwood Ave., cross Lakeshore Drive and walk a block to the butcher. He didn’t seem surprised to see a young lad in shorts and a blue blazer order a pound of meat. It was what we did in those days. Buy meat without adult supervision. And, it was how we ‘dressed’ to go shopping.
It was probably the same year I had my operation.
How does a six year old boy get a hernia? I have no idea.
I went to the Shouldice Surgery which had just opened in Toronto. It is called the Shouldice Hernia Hospital now and is world famous for treating hernias. It was established in 1945 by Doctor Edward Earle Shouldice (1890-1965), inventor of the Shouldice Repair.
I went there in 1947 and was told at the time that I was the first child operated on. I remember the nurses insisting on me getting up and walking right after the surgery and they did not seem to worry about me damaging myself. They had a long wooden pole with a forked end and they would come up behind me and gently push the heel of my foot down, in my case my left foot. Part of Shouldice’s ‘Repair’ was to get up and about as quickly as possible.
I was at the Surgery for three days and being six, healed quickly. I was out playing road hockey the first day home much to the chagrin of my mother who could visualize my abdomen popping the silver coloured clamps off my incision.
If Shouldice ever wants a positive comment on the “Shouldice Repair’ I am here. Seventy eight years on and no problems.
My best friends were Mike Hollett and Lee Farrell. They were memorable as you can tell because I remember them still. Lee was memorable because his dad operated the local movie theater, The Vogue. We got in free any time we wanted.
Mike was memorable because his dad was Flash Hollett. Flash, although I never called him that, was born in Sydney, Nova Scotia and played thirteen years in the National Hocket League for the Toronto Maple Leafs, the Ottawa Senators, the Boston Bruins and the Detroit Red Wings. He was one of the top offensive defencemen to play the game until Bobby Orr came along. He was a star defenceman on the Stanley Cup winning Bruin team in 1939 and 1941. In 1942 he set the goal scoring record for defenceman potting 19.
In 1945 he scored 20 goals, another record for NHL defencemen, which lasted until Bobby Orr broke it twenty five years later. His numbers declined with the return of players after the war and he retired from the NHL in 1946 rather than accept a trade to the New York Rangers.
To me he was Mike’s dad and my most vivid memory of him was seeing him half way up a tree in his backyard pruning the branches. He was shirtless and leaning away from the tree yelling at me to get off his property and never return. My transgression had been to call Mike, ‘Hollett’, not ‘Mike’. The one thing Flash could not abide. Before the tree incident I had taken full advantage of my friendship to spend special times at Maple Leaf Gardens, the historical home of the Toronto Maple Leafs.
Joe Primeau was coach of the Toronto St. Michaels hockey team and they played their games at the Gardens on Sunday afternoon. He and Flash were best friends.
Flash would bundle Mike and I in the car and head downtown for the game. We would sit in seats at the end of the bench and get to hang out in the dressing room after the game. I can still conjure up the smell of post game hockey players and their equipment. Not something I do often.
There was a rink in the park at the end of our street. It had boards and was fully maintained by some mysterious good Samaritan we never saw or thought about. It was just there and we used it. Twenty or more of us would show up on a Saturday morning, throw our sticks in a pile and the two best players would choose his team by selecting sticks one at a time. They seldom knew who owned which stick so I seldom had to go through the public shaming of being picked last no matter how much each selector might want to avoid me.
Today, young hockey players’ parents go to a sports store and pay over $200 for a composite stick. Our parents did not have the money for anything but a wooden stick and then only about once a year usually as a Christmas gift. Our sticks would get worn down from use and some players showed up with a stick blade looking more like a toothpick.
At noon we went home for lunch and then back to the rink for the afternoon game.
Movies were a must. There was no TV or video games. Evenings were spent sitting around the radio listening to the Green Hornet, Hopalong Cassidy or the Lone Ranger,
One of my all time greats?
“Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows.”
Check it out here.
You are probably asking yourself what this is all about. What does sitting around a radio as a family in 1950 have to do with anything in 2025? What does this trip down memory lane have to do with surviving in the 21st century?
If you lived in the 50’s and your memory is still with you it is an escape. An escape to a gentler time. An escape to a time when family was the most important thing in our lives, when schools taught reading, writing and arithmetic, when boys could be boys and girls could be girls. It was a time when I do not recall talking back to my parents the way kids do today. Oh, we thought things. Sure we did. But, talk back and get that swat on the side of the head? No thanks.
It you lived in the 50’s you knew what it was like to not have the government control every aspect of your life.
The 60’s and 70’s were when it all started to change. Canada got free healthcare. We got the Canada Pension Plan. Old Age Security had come in the 50’s for people over 70. Bet you did not know it was not meant for people over 65, did you?
We all thought it was wonderful. It was only as the decades passed that we realized we had become slaves to the government, dependent on the government, wards of the government. Laws, rules, regulations exploded, controlling all aspects of our lives.
With every law, regulation and rule our bureaucracy grew, our government grew and our freedoms dissipated.
Today, in some circles, I am not allowed to mention the name ‘Trump’, not allowed to mention the reality I saw during his first term, not allowed to mention how the media had distorted things he has said and done. It has not changed this term.
The Abraham Accords? Creating the chance for peace in the Middle East? Attacking government waste and corruption? Deporting illegal aliens who are living free off the US taxpayer? Demanding that the Constitution and the laws form the basis for judges and justices to adjudicate court cases? Using law enforcement to enforce laws?
Do not mention him in polite company lest you get branded a bigot, a racist, a Nazi.
Do I think Trump is God’s gift to the world? Not on your life. But, as with most things in life, there is good and bad.
Which brings me to Global Warming, climate change or whatever we are calling it now. CO2 is a pollutant? How come the plants and trees need it for life? Try pointing out that increased CO2 has had beneficial effects on the growing season in areas of the world that need it. See how far that gets you.
We have billion dollar programs to capture carbon out of the air. Who pays for that? Is it feasible? How is it going to change the planet?
I have seen the solar panel fields in Florida. Miles and miles of them. Ever see that field after a hurricane goes through? Not a pretty sight.
I have read the negatives on wind turbines and know what they do to birds. Talk about that? Nope. Better not.
And, do not get me going on EV’s. No infrastructure, batteries a horror show for fire fighters, not to mention operating on roads and bridges which are not stressed for the weight.
What do I really think?
I think if we want to get away from fossil fuels the answer is nuclear and hydro. We have tested and evolved nuclear power safety over the last 70 years in our nuclear submarines. When I developed Transport Canada’s system safety program back in the 90’s, one of the leaders in industry we turned to was the nuclear industry. They were light years ahead of aviation in terms of hazard identification, risk management and mitigation.
I like the Rolls Royce SMR’s (Small Nuclear Reactors). Check them out here.
And, I like hydro dams a lot better than endless fields of solar panels and unsightly windmills which, if you research them, are themselves a threat to the environment.
On politics I like people with open minds. people who will calmly discuss the issues. I am liberal in many areas and conservative in others. I am not ‘left’ or ‘right’ in the common way we tend to categorise people today. Tell me what you think and why. I will do the same. And, we will walk away friends.
On the Covid vaccine, Gail and I stayed in Florida to get a free injection from Ron DeSantis when the vaccine was not available in Canada. While I was waiting for the shots to show up at the corner drug store I decided to learn what I could about the new technology I was going to let them shoot into my body.
I could not stand the bias of the main news networks by that point and decided I could handle only one hour a day. I chose Laura Ingraham on Fox News. This, of course, immediately makes me suspect in some people’s eyes. But, I had my reasons. Laura treats her guests politely and seems to have a good rapport even with those with whom she disagrees. More importantly, she had a ‘medicine cabinet’ on every night.
Usually the cabinet was three or four strong. One, Doctor Smith from New York state, was actively treating Covid patients. I thought first hand knowledge and experience would be beneficial in trying to understand a new disease. Smith, for that really was his name, was treating patients therapeutically with Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine with pretty good results as was a respected doctor in France who had produced a paper on his successes. Of course, this was the early days before the use of both therapeutics was banned.
Jay Bhattacharya was there quite a bit until his career was trashed by those who disagreed with his participation in the Great Barrington Declaration. Being a Professor of Health Policy at Stanford University could not save him. By the way, he is now the Director of the National Health Institute in the USA.
Paying attention to voices outside the main stream and countering the official party line puts me into the ranks of an anti-vaxxer, although I waited months in Florida to get vaccinated, and a conspiracy theorist, although a lot of the conspiracies have turned into reality. Amazing how that happens.
Most of the concerns expressed over the weeks I watched the medicine cabinet have now been confirmed in one way or another.
So, all of this by way of saying that writing a substack has not been easy. More importantly, it has not achieved what I had hoped. It has exposed a malaise, an apathy I did not know existed. Maybe I knew it existed but was hoping it did not. It has been very difficult to pick subjects and to present them in a way that would not further offend or divide.
I want to thank the few people, very few, who took time to comment on my posts. Your likes and comments were encouraging as much as the lack of response by the vast majority was discouraging.
I am now off to write a book and produce a podcast with one of my two favorite daughters. God willing, I will have time to finish both.
The book will enlighten, not offend those who read it with an open mind.
The podcast will investigate the life and times of my favorite mother-in-law. Perhaps looking in the past will be more enjoyable and satisfying than dealing with the sharp divisions of the present.
My very best wishes to all.
Keep an open mind. Seek the objective truth not the relative truth. Put friendship before ideology and love your neighbor as yourself.
That’s my advice which may be worth nothing more than what you paid for it.
Aggie Nana Tales on the horizon.
Love this, Dad. So proud to be your daughter.