Burlington, Hockey Arenas and A Good Story
As I got older, I wanted to spend more time at the arena. My parents had registered me for minor hockey, and I probably played for several seasons, starting as a tyke or novice. It was the beginning of a lengthy jag as a rink rat, which I carried on in Bracebridge, the home of Maple Leaf great, Irvin "Ace" Bailey, and of course, Detroit Red Wing All Star, Roger Crozier. I worked with Roger's Foundation in later years, and as an eventual curator of the Bracebridge Sports Hall of Fame exhibit. Not bad for a former rink rat. Now in case you don't know what a rink rat is, well, it means I hung around the rink until they told me to go home. In Bracebridge, a rink rat was not only a kid who had no better place to go, but who worked around the rink, shoveling the ice and cleaning, in return for snack bar rations. I was too young in Burlington to work at anything, so I was just a hanger-on. As with many activities in my youth, my side-kick Ray Green was with me for most of this arena time. One memory stands out, during this period of hockey discovery. We had heard that Detroit Red Wing star, Gordie Howe, was going to make an appearance at a special all-day (Saturday) tournament that was going on at the Burlington Arena. I told my mother I wanted to meet Mr. Howe, no matter how long the wait. She gave me some money to buy a hot dog and pop, which was very generous considering our financial limitations then, and Ray and I settled in for the long haul. By lunch, we both had two or three "sliver" and otherwise broken sticks, that had been thrown over the boards during the tournament games. A sliver stick by the way, has about an inch deep length of blade left on the bottom, which was perfect for shinny but dangerous as hell, if you got hit with it, as a high stick. We'd always have a couple of pucks in our pockets, we had chased down, when they were deflected over the end barriers. And we smelled like "Thrill" gum, which was some sort of grape concoction, that was more like cologne, but was trendy amongst the hockey players we admired.
We waited at that rink for about six hours, and no Gordie Howe. People were still talking about it, and that he had been delayed, but that the visitation was still a "go." My dad came to the arena at one point, to see if Ray and I were okay. Late in the afternoon, I remember a mob of kids running to a rear exit, and Ray and I thought there must be a fight going on……because it was in a dark corner of the arena. Ray and I might have wrestled with each other, but we were not fighters. Not even on a dare. So we just kept an eye on the apparent donnybrook, from a safe distance. We were told, once the mob had dispersed, that Gordie Howe had been ushered in through a back door, but the kids rushed him, ripping his jacket nearly in half, and he had fled the building fearing for his safety. Gordie Howe…..the one and only, had graced our arena with his presence, only to be attacked by souvenir hunters, who apparently wanted a piece of him……and may have got portions of his Red Wings' jacket. Now I lived with this memory for most of my life. I've come to the conclusion that it must have been an urban legend, that this is what happened. First of all, I don't think, with the tough players Howe was used to elbowing face-first into the boards, he would have been intimidated by a small group of enthusiastic autograph seekers. I think this was the story used to get us to go home, after a long day, which may have been perpetuated, in part, by the arena staff. I never saw a swath of red fabric, or tuft of his hair, so I think now, it didn't happen the way Ray and I thought it had, on that long, long day, waiting to get our sliver sticks signed by the famous, legendary "Number 9."
There was one significant rule in our apartment, that my dear mother imposed, based on all the other crap I had, with or without knowing it, got into over the first few years of my life. Like the time I downed most of a bottle of children's aspirin, because not only did they taste good, but I assessed that I would never be sick again, if I sucked back every tablet. I don't think there were a lot of tablets left in the bottle, and to the best of my knowledge, I didn't make a trip to the hospital because of this event of self medication. On another occasion, I fell off the kitchen counter backwards, but somehow I did so without injury. With my aching back today, and my noticeable limp, cripes, maybe it all dates back to the fall I concealed from Merle and Ed. I was a little Dickens, that's for sure. But the last straw for my mother, was if she believed I had crossed beneath the busy Lakeshore, in the Ramble Creek tunnel. Once past this point, I was really at the lake shore. Then we were involved in some seriously deep water, and I couldn't swim.
Merle was a sucker for a good story. The story teller that I am today, began back then, when I had to convince Merle nothing was wrong, out of the ordinary, or involved my misdemeanor. I played it like a good Euchre player, and I held back enough trump cards to "fix up" almost every situation, I found myself embroiled. She was right to fear that I might drown. I had a lot of close calls, even on a school trip once, when we overturned a canoe in deep water. I never told her this one either. But the Lake Ontario had a fishy smell, and she had the capability of "smelling where I had been," an hour or more before coming home for lunch or dinner. I don't know how many kids got the "sniff test," arriving home from play, but Merle could tell how close I'd been, on that day, to the tunnel. The closer I got, the more my sweaters absorbed the aroma of dead fish. Truth is, Ray and I managed to sneak through the tunnel about a thousand times, and she only caught me on a hundred of those occasions. The water was deep under the road, and yes, we both could have perished long before hitting the actual rock shoreline of the lake. There were two-foot-wide ledges, one on either side, to walk along to the other side of the road, so unless we really screwed up, or were racing across, we covered all the safety bases to stay out of the water. For Ray and I, the thrill wasn't making it to the lake. We just wanted to pass back and forth in the tunnel, and that was the real extent of our civil disobedience. We were quite happy in the relative seclusion of the Ramble Creek ravine. I never once admitted to my mother that I had gone through that tunnel. Even when it crossed my mind, in the days before her death, I decided to let well enough alone, and let her think until the end, she had foiled some of my greatest stunts…….because it just wasn't so. Like when I climbed up the open-sided, under construction, Torrance Terrace, where the wind blasting through the floors nearly swept me off the edge. "You're driving your father and I nuts," she'd yell, while banging the cupboard doors in our apartment kitchen. She liked doing that, and it's where we also made up, and I promised to never, ever, do that (whatever it was) again.
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