DE BIG-SHOT TRAIN: A Northern Love Affair with Algoma Central Country
A Rough and Ribald Story of a Lifetime in the Bush ~ Robert Cuerrier
Chapter 16 Kids
KIDS BY THE TRACK
We weren’t bad kids, wild kids or neglected kids. But we were sure as shootin’ free-range kids back in the old neighbourhood. And that was the whole situation.
There were lots of us, packed two and three to a bedroom in most houses. This was the early fifties, the baby boom and the St. Andrew’s Terrace neighbourhood was growing fast in 1953. The Burn’s family had thirteen kids, the Leclair’s a passel and our family, the Cuerrier’s a modest six. So many of us that when you called on a pal you’d sing out his or her name at the door to cut the right kids out of the herd without disrupting the rest of the family. Kids then often had nicknames like Plug, Stretch and Hedgehog.
Mothers were still homemakers and considered themselves surrogates to all of us. Neighbourhoods were still safe. There was no parental paranoia. Kids had the numbers, freedom and a hell of a time.
There was Firecracker Day –that’s what we called it. I had no idea that it was a celebration of the Queen’s birthday ‘til much later. Any kid with a quarter could get a sack of fireworks and all of us did. If you wanted to spend ten cents on just one, the kindly clerk at the candy store would hand over a big guy, even to a six-year-old – a blockbuster, the equivalent of a stick of dynamite –with a smile and wishes for a good day.
We blew things up, threw them at one another and accidentally started a few fires here and there. Burned ourselves too, in a game where you’d let a small one off holding it between your finger tips and then challenged your friends to do the same. This amusement naturally escalated into hanging onto bigger loads till someone got hurt pretty good.
Within a few blocks of our house there were five outdoor ice rinks and that’s where we wintered. Almost every day after school we’d head for the rink, skate until suppertime, come back in the evening, skate until nine and then play hockey ‘til closing time. Weekends were the same with just an extended schedule. Sometimes you’d deliberately stay out ‘til your feet froze, then you’d be OK for a long time. My, how you’d howl and step dance around in that shack when you finally came in to thaw out. If you wanted to expand your social circle or skate hand in hand with different girls you just changed your rink.
Each rink had an attendant, usually a recent immigrant with no or very limited English. Many were good-natured and very hard working with snow to shovel and ice to make. Some would work overtime for nothing, just to keep the place open late at night when there was a lively hockey game going on and they could see everyone was having fun. If the guy was crabby and some were, well, we’d find ways to torment him and make his existence a devil’s dream.
We all helped to clear the ice with scrapers and this was hard going in heavy snows. It was also our power-skating workout before the notion became vogue and went formal.
The shacks were hovels, quick builds of rough lumber, patched and repaired with any material that came to hand. They all had a little Quebec heater seated on a piece of tin nailed to floor and were fueled by wood and coal. Looking back I’m surprised there weren’t more fires. There was a red-hot stove and kids as young as three gathered and stumbled around it to warm up without anyone cremating themselves.
Everyone packing a jackknife carved their name into the carcass of that shack and it wasn’t ever thought of as vandalism. And the water pail was there, with a communal dipper that everybody used ‘til by the time you were scooping from the bottom of the pail there seemed to be a bit of a scum on the water’s surface. Can you imagine the fun that the fire department, health unit and litigious, disputatious parents would have with all that today?
Most rink shacks didn’t have outhouses and the boys used to sneak around behind the shack to pee. Girls, being a little more demure, went home early. Shacks were divided into girls and boys sections by a thin wall, which we would poke a little hole through to spy on the gals. The guys didn’t seem to realize that the girls heard every word we said and were judging us along the spectrum of our rough language. Lots of kids, even little ones, smoked cigarettes in the shack. It was accepted. To us these shacks were a source of warmth, afforded us recreation, were a social centre and were a crucible of life for all.
In those days there were back lanes cut through the middle of the city blocks. The laneways were dumps for furnace ashes, prunings, constructions debris, worn out appliances and any disposable you had. The city had a once-a-year pickup. There was always a little pathway winding through the junk and lots of kids on the trail. The lane was our resource centre. In it we could find branches for bows and arrows or slingshots, perhaps an old fridge to play in or a place for war games among the rubble. Best of all there were all sorts of old boards with lots of nails in them that we would clean up and then use for the shacks and forts we littered the neighbourhood with.
Some of these forts were quite elaborate and built along the CPR line, a neutral ground where our parents often suggested we go to play and innocently meant it. It was here that creative play had no restraint. The Clement/Pino gang on the other side of the tracks put up a prospector’s tent dug into a complex set of fortifications and trenches on the crest of the rail bed and then declared war. We built a soddy as a defense. Both sides robbed gardens late at night for sacks full of potatoes as the agreed upon ammunition. Our side, the good guys, took a pounding since we were on the low ground and often had to cower in our fort. After a few battles we couldn’t take it anymore and disengaged to work on a new strategy. We waited and waited until they left and, of course, then we burnt them out and collapsed their trench system with shovels.
If we were flush, and on Saturday mornings we usually were when our mothers gave us a quarter, we’d head off to the Princess Theatre. Fifteen cents got you in for two movies and you still had a dime for a box of popcorn. Of the shows one was sure to be a duster in those days, then a short which was usually a serial, three cartoons, previews which today are called trailers and the Movietone News. We could hardly believe that we could see scenes from the Korean War that were just as recent as a week or so.
Kids came in at random, missed the first part of a movie and just stayed over to watch the beginning in the next showing. There wasn’t an empty seat and many stood until they could get one. We all sat with our respective gangs in a defensive posture. There was an army of ushers, constables they were, trying to keep the lid down. There were admonishments over the PA not to throw things, but after each movie the air would be filled with flying, flattened popcorn boxes and accompanied by loud, screeching, frightening war whoops.
We preferred colour movies, as many of the westerns by this time were, but many of our favourites –the ‘B’ comedies like The Bowery Boys, Abbot and Costello and Ma and Pa Kettle –were still in black and white.
Any matinee was especially good if you had a special little girl to hold hands with.
It was thought that leaning back on theatre seats spread the ringworm epidemic that was running through town. Kids who had it had their heads shaved and had to wear embarrassing little white skull caps. By 1956 the treatment had changed and that’s the time I caught it. They nuked my head with radiation –nuclear was popular in the fifties you see. All my hair fell out, and God knows what else happened to my head. My family believes that that explains and sometimes excuses me.
Television was the first harbinger of modern times. Every store that sold them had sets turned on in the show windows and crowds of kids and adults would gather two and three deep to watch. To tantalize us they turned the sound down and we would frustrate ourselves trying to lip-read.
In a strange juxtaposition there was chick days at June’s Lunch where they also served food and for a week or so sold day old chicks that were showcased by the hundreds in their front window. Ten cents apiece and for another nickel you got a little bag of starter feed. I was always the farmer and would over extend myself in their purchase. My flock would cost me more and more as they grew and used more grain. To feed them I’d have to sell papers on the street for the Sault Star until they were old enough to harvest.
There were local businesses we patronized: Haircuts at Red’s, usually brush cuts and where you knew you were growing up when he no longer put a board across the seat to elevate you. We bought good Canadian made clothing at Lash’s where my family had a running account and my mother stopped in every payday to make a two-dollar payment. Holmes’ Drugs had popsicles, soft drinks and comic books as highlights among the strange smelling pharmaceutical nostrums. Oy’s Lunch had the greatest french fries.
We did other things; played ball; road hockey; hopscotch; biked everywhere; hung around the Locks; and fished at the first trestle where the Garson family graciously tolerated us.
We had a great childhood, made our own fun and unlike today, our pastimes didn’t involve our parents’ driving time and supervision. Little was formalized or organized and life was joyfully spontaneous. Most of us turned out all right.
