Christmas in Muskoka That Old Gang of Mine

CHRISTMAS IN MUSKOKA

THAT OLD GANG OF MINE AND THE CHRISTMASES OF OLD

     I began writing about my childhood, growing up on Bracebridge's Hunts Hill, because no one else thought it was interesting. Gosh, I couldn't live with the idea that those days of the late 1960's, and early 1970's, were going to be missed entirely, simply because they lacked significant historical qualities and quantities. Simply stated, these were run-of-the-mill neighborhood stories just about everyone in town had in their recollections, (with minor variations) all a tad weak when it came to out-ranking the more serious histories, local scribes were putting to paper with the idea of capturing what needed to be captured as far as a town record. I've always been a rogue in this regard, and I determined early-on in my childhood experiences, still getting in trouble almost daily, that I would make it important, by the way the stories were re-told in published form. I would put my spin on them and hopefully, if I was any good at it, others would find that mine, much as theirs', wasn't an ordinary childhood. Well it was ordinary, no doubt about it, but I found aspects and curiosities, with that host of odd-duck mates, to make it a tad comic-like without the art. But others in town, who had spent their childhoods much as I had, found I had represented some of their memories at the same time as highlighting my own. We all witnessed a pretty neat hometown as youngsters, finding out its mysteries, and inside-stories, adults tried to keep us from knowing. We knew a lot we weren't supposed to, and it helped us get an early foothold, to get a more secure base of understanding, about what the town's character was like, before the make-up was put on for the sake of public presentation.

     I began writing a column entitled "Sketches of Historic Bracebridge," back in the early 1990's, published weekly in a paper known as The Muskoka Advance, which arrived in driveways on Sunday mornings. I began the series, offering more serious profiles of local heritage, but before long I had morphed it into a more contemporary, liberal column, that highlighted some of our more outlandish larks up on that high to the east known as Hunt's Hill, and mostly on Alice Street, where I lived in the Weber Apartments in that late 1960's, early 70's era. I took the characters in that old gang and made them minor celebrities over numerous columns and years for that matter, ending in late 1999. I then wrote a book about the period in 2000 and it sold out quickly. Point is, what should have been dull and unremarkable, became quite the opposite, and it highlighted an aspect of the town history that apparently was important afterall. Not my childhood as such, but the fact that highlighting mine, and ours in that neat old neighborhood inspired recollections of others who had also had a blast growing up in small town Ontario.

     I want to share some of this material I wrote back in those years of the 1990's, as a low-key tribute to my old chums, who made growing up in Bracebridge so darn much fun. My memories at Christmas in particular still inspire misty eyes, when I re-read them, and some general sadness when I think about some of those buddies who have since passed on. My Alice Street recollections, will always be my favorites, because I mostly wrote them about our activities in the holiday season, playing road hockey, or on the small rink the Hillman's had in their backyard for a little early evening shinny. We had our whole lives ahead of us, and we had big, big plans, like one day playing in the National Hockey League. None of us got that far, but daydreaming was an art form to us, just like the wishful thinking about girls who would one day, for whatever reason, find us interesting enough to date. I can't accept that these stories aren't just as deserving of mention, as the more formal histories that documents the town chronicle year by year. Folk history deserves better treatment, so here goes:

CHRISTMAS IN BRACEBRIDGE - THE KID CHRONICLES

I LOVED THAT LIFE UP ON ALICE STREET - BUT I APPRECIATE IT EVEN MORE NOW…..AND WISH I COULD GO BACK IN TIME, AND ENJOY THAT MUCH MORE

The Alice Street apartment, at times, was more like a hostel than a residence. Most folks left their doors open through the day, unless they had to go out, and we all wandered in an out of each others pads……pretty much when the mood struck. It wasn't a hippy hang-out or anything, but we all felt comfortable with one another, to be openly liberal in this fashion. I can remember great practical jokes being played, where a bathroom door would be flung open, while a resident was having a bath. The long hall, and the bathroom at one end, allowed for a pretty good view from doorstep to bathtub. Oh there were a lot of howls after something like that. TheN there was the time one resident, goaded by another, decided to don downhill skis, and try the staircase. I didn't say the apartment was known for its sobriety. There were a thousand incidents of this happening, during our years of residence. As confessional, I cut my teeth as a practical joker, in that same building, on some unsuspecting folks…..who just thought I was a snotty nosed kid….always staring and making snide comments. One day, and as God is my witness, I planned to startle my mother coming down the stairs with laundry. I whipped around the corner with a "boo" or something like that, and put a woman on her keister, down a full flight of stairs. I didn't know an arse on linoleum could sound so horrific. She got to the last stair with a thud, some nervous flatulence and an audible "ouch, ouch, Christ, ouch," looked at me, and said something like…."Teddy Currie…..if you as much as smile, you will not survive the beating you are going to get." Jesus, I was scared-straight for the next fifteen minutes, until the urge consumed me all over again. I did do it once more that year of infamy, and yes, I scared my mother the same way, and she hit eight of eight stairs with her behind, and said roughly the same thing as I'd heard before. I ran and ran and ran.

Eventually, I got enough retaliatory action to pay off the debt of pranks-played. But everyone in that building was some sort of prank artist. They may have been subtle, but I'm telling you, it was neat stuff…..all these adults screwing with each other's normalcy. The landlord was just as bad. He liked his Christmas grog, and loved to visit the tenants when he got tipsy. He came to our apartment one night, when my parents were out at a party, and told me he wanted to give me a little present. I used to mow the lawns so I supposed it was a bonus for a job well done. He insisted on visiting our newly erected Christmas tree, and fumbling with his wallet, and balance, stuck a ten dollar bill into the needles on a high branch, and then proceeded to fall head first into the illuminated shrub……causing a roll of epic proportion, such that he was matted in tinsel and tree lights, and my friend and I had a Dickens of a time, freeing him from his predicament. We got him out the door finally, a little bruised, but festive none the less, and he went on to other apartments to spread the goodwill. My friend Rod looked out the window, a short while later, and the portly gent was making snow angels on the lawn…….until we realized he was just trying to get up, and failing to do so. Maybe it was a sad situation, from a social point of view, but he wasn't crying and neither were we. He gave us extra money for getting him home that night, which was only next door. Then his wife didn't want him there, and the dog tried to bit him. Merry Christmas. He may have slept in the car that night.

So much in those days was speckled with humor, even though it might have been an adverse situation at the precise moment it occurred. It was like the landlord's wife, Hilda, asking us wee chaps to help her clear the weeds from the rock garden on the back hillside. We didn't know it would involve fire-setting. Geez she almost burned down the building and about four neighborhood houses. We were supposed to hit the fire with shovels if it went out of control. Well that took about four seconds of wind. Even we thought the idea sucked, but Hilda was an adult, and we were just curious…..and suckers for a couple of bucks she had promised to pay us. Our respective mothers were not impressed at all, when they came running behind the fire engines, to see what their wee lads had been up to. Word hit the main street in about five minutes, that Currie had set fire to the Alice Street apartments. No mention of Hilda. She was an adult after all…..apparently allowed such indiscretion as setting out fires on a windy day. My chums got led away by their ears, despite Hilda's explanation, and the firemen saved the building and the houses from her handiwork gone amuck. I heard one fireman say, "Hilda, what the hell were you doing, corrupting these kids?" No answer. Just a tray of cookies from her kitchen before they'd finished mopping up the blaze.

I got a pretty bad reputation because of things like this….that while I participated, I didn't actually initiate. It was that "by association" thing I'd always been warned. Like the time we decided to play "Nicky-Nicky-Nine-Doors," at my cohort's urging, and one of the perpetrators……of all knock-and-escape strategies, hid behind the family car in the driveway. This was the one guy who was going to catch the trespassers, by getting in that car, and motoring after us. I thought Don was a dead man (kid). We screamed at him to move, and got caught for saving his life. The homeowner was so thankful he hadn't run over a kid, that he just gave us a stern warning, a cookie, and told to get lost. We always got cookies in that neighborhood, even when we were in crap. I loved that about Alice Street.

At Christmas we intensified our road hockey campaign, and there would be few nightscapes on that snowy street, that you wouldn't see the moving silhouettes of an imitation NHL game. Night after night, and most weekends. We had "sliver sticks," some with the new-to-us innovation of screw-on plastic blades. We often got our sliver (blade) sticks from the arena, when they were tossed over the boards by a senior player. We'd take it if there was any potential at all, for a re-build. We hunched over a lot, as we played, because most of the recovered sticks had short shafts with a blade, the stick having been broken in the middle, and then tossed over the boards……and into our eager grasps. The sliver stick was the most dangerous, because it was usually about a half to a quarter of the actual blade, that was remaining. It could definitely poke out an eye. High sticking wasn't our thing. There was rough stuff, but not so much that any of us were ever seriously injured. Now as far as injuries go, the frozen ball in the testicles-thing was frequent and nasty. My mother would ask me why so and so had been jumping up and down in the middle of the game. "Oh, he just took one in the nuts Mom," I'd answer with the caveat, "we told him that the pain would only stop if he jumped up and down after getting hit. Now they all jump up and down when they get hit. Turns out it works."

We played in snowstorms, wind events, at forty below, on cloudy days and sunny, but my parents…..even though they weren't religious as such, insisted I not get a game going on Sunday before noon…..as this was church time. Only two of my ten or so road-hockey chums went to church. But we thought we'd honor them with afternoon-only games on Sundays. But you know, although I played organized hockey from a young age, and travelled thoughout our region and beyond, on both town league and all-star teams, the most enjoyable hockey I would ever play, was on that tiny stretch of old Alice Street, in front of our apartment block. There was no coaching, no referees, and the play by play came from Randy Carswell, because he couldn't play without imitating Foster Hewitt. What did we care. We all had our NHL characters to imitate anyway, and Randy called the game for free. Bonus.

Now that we're being so honest with one another, there's no way I'm going to tell you everything went smoothly either……like the kind of neatly framed love-springs-eternal paintings, you see in gift shops, depicting the romance of Canadian pastime nostalgia; you know the ones, where everyone is dressed beautifully, the hockey sticks being used are full and new-looking, and that every player wore an ear to ear smile. My mother Merle had to intervene often, as she was in the best position to oversee the games from our third floor picture window. There was nothing serious, although I do remember Don Clement and I exchanging whacks to each other's chin……and respectively crying about our massive injuries. Once again, my mother would show up at the front door of the apartment with a tray of cookies and hot chocolate in mugs. That quelled emotions for awhile. Often we went from outside, to inside, where we held incredible table-top hockey tournaments that could last for days on end. I went through a lot of games, because the donnybrooks, while small, in a small room, usually resulted in someone's behind landing on the Eagle or Munro ice-surface. "So, you broke another one Ted Currie……we're not buying you a new one; that's it, you'll just have to live with the crack (or depression on the masonite)," Merle bellowed through my doorway, shaking her head about the "boys being boys" thing.

I enjoyed Christmas in Bracebridge for what it didn't have. As a transplant from city life, and the Southern Ontario race to build bigger and more imposing urban calamities, I had such a good time with ease of motion, and free time, in a town that wasn't interested in the urban pace for bigger and better. If a town had an attitude, this one, at this time, was comfortable with the size it had attained by the mid-sixties. It didn't appear anyone was terribly vexed by the fact it was a town of only 2,500 souls. It was a home town, with aspirations to be as good as possible, at what being a home town was all about. Not much more. That came later. By the late 1970's, there was more interest in what every other town was getting, in the way of urbanizing enhancements. By the mid 1980's, I was lost in my own town. I wasn't disappointed by progress, and by improvements with services and options for shopping, but moreso that many longtime citizens seemed to be forgetting about the neighborhood qualities, and quantities, that had seemed so important back then…….only a few years earlier. A lot of folks don't like me saying this, because it would appear then, there must have been some conspiracy at play, to eliminate all traces of the town it had once been…….in its own halcyon days, when sporting prowess was infinitely more important than opening a new plaza, and chopping down a forest, or bulldozing a beautiful pasture, to put up a parking lot. By the latter 1980's, frankly, I'd had enough. I fought urban sprawl as an election candidate, on two occasions, and was defeated both times, by those candidates who embraced the kind of progress we see there today. I was the keeper of nostalgia, and for most of a decade, I wrote a column for the Muskoka Advance, a give-away publication, entitled "Historic Sketches of Bracebridge," where most of the emphasis, was on capturing those years of the hometown…….because it's all that I knew…….and what I cherished of my own life and play. I got good reviews for most of it, which told me there were many kindred spirits, but when I veered into the political realm, the critics clamored that I was adversely influencing the urbanization…..of what I called "paradise." It's a lot of years down the road, and I still feel the same. I moved our family to Gravenhurst so that they could benefit from the last vestiges of small town life in the hinterland. I'm glad I did. While some will say Gravenhurst never fully came out of the 1950's and 60's, I can tell you, it had its virtues…….and my young lads had an opportunity to enjoy the hinterland within a stone's through of the so-called urban neighborhoods. Nature abounded close by, just like I remembered it as a kid, in Bracebridge. My core values have trees and ferns, and creeks and wildflowers running through their centers, and once again, I will make no apology. What I had, in Bracebridge, during my youth, was a street with very little traffic, in a sparsely populated area, with lots of wild spaces buffering the neighborhoods……that while urban in nature, were country in social / economic reality. Even in the centre of town, we lived across from a cottage resort, and we were at least two blocks from the closest waterway. If you know Bracebridge, think about it. Before you make it up Toronto Street, to the new round-about (in construction), you would have to pass Woodley Park Court, and Bamford's Store, where there were six or seven small rental cottages, and an abutting woodland for the kids to play…….and a nice evergreen backdrop to the cottages. This was rural living in town. I loved it.

In the Alice Street apartment, most of us inmates were of modest income. Hilda Weber was the kindest person on earth…..to us, because she let the rent date slide for just about everyone in that building, at one time or another. We probably had rent difficulties ten months out of twelve, for the years we dwelled there, and Hilda just said, "pay me when you can." To Hilda, food came first, and at Christmas, well, she was a good spirit, and allowed everyone some flexibility for a festive holiday. We returned the favors in-kind, because we would all do anything for this kind lady, from changing hall lightbulbs, to tending the basement floods that occurred in the fall and spring. It was a very sharing place, and it gave me my education in good neighbors, and community. For any one down on their luck, there were always care packages, that arrived on your kitchen counter, without fuss, or recognition, or any expectation of repayment. The word would go around the ten person apartment building, that one family or more, was facing a bleak Christmas, and magic would happen. Always subtle. But each contributor appreciated the fact, that if they, on the other hand, were in some immediate peril, the packages and offers of assistance, would benefit them as well. It was a nice secure feeling, even for a kid pretty much out of the loop, on "who was helping who," to be in the company of people who genuinely cared for each other's welfare. If you needed to borrow something…..sugar, flour or milk, there was no stipulation you had to pay it pack. Some never could, and were living the cheque to cheque existence that only barely covered the rent and a few groceries each month.

Many people did find the success they were seeking, and were able to move away from Alice Street, and on to better-off neighborhoods. I often wondered if, in their new digs, they ever thought about us, still at the apartment, laughing, playing together, playing practical jokes and stuff. After I began writing about those days in the local press, I got lots of calls and letters from former residents, cheerfully recalling those days at 129 Alice Street……in company of some really good friends.

I can remember one Christmas Eve in particular, that I truly felt, this apartment was the difference between misery and contentment. My father had experienced a slowdown at work, and didn't get the Christmas bonus he had counted on, to give us a proper celebration. Merle had been very worried about finances, and as a temporary bank teller, she had asked a small favor of her manager…..a small personal loan over the holidays, to be paid back in the New Year. The manager's name was Ralph Melvin, from the Bank of Nova Scotia, and he was a most generous and kind man…….a trait many in the community benefitted over the years. He patted my mother on the back, at about her lowest moment on the cusp of Christmas, and handed her an envelope of money she had requested. There were no forms to sign. He had loaned this money from his pocket, not from the bank. It was on that Christmas Eve that I genuinely felt some ease, for my parents, and the feeling it was going to be a happy occasion, when for most of that fall season, there had been arguments about money, and long, long stretches of silence in our apartment……when my parents had always been the life of the party, whether at euchre, bridge or a gathering to watch Hockey Night in Canada. Mr. Melvin had made our Christmas a happy occasion. His kindness stuck with me for all these years. I don't know what we would have done that year, that Christmas…….but I know, one way or another, the inmates of 129 Alice would have rallied……without ever being asked, to put some food on the table, some gifts under the tree.

On the Christmas Eve, of which I speak, I sat out on the landing, for a long while that night, looking up at a large photograph that hung on the wall above the staircase. It was a picture of several deer standing against a beautiful snow-clad woodland. I studied that picture for a long time, as I listened carefully to the confluence of Christmas good cheer going on around me……even the laughter of my own parents, which was a rarity that season. There were cakes and pies being baked up, the wafting, intoxicating aroma of ginger wafting the hallways. There was the sound of televisions, radios, and phonographs, and it all should have been an unkindly din…..yet I found it as soothing as a Christmas slumber, in the neverland of expectation and adventure. In a sort of festive-coma, I was startled by a neighbor lady, who had stuck a plate of still-hot gingerbread cookies under my nose. "Merry Christmas Mr. Currie," she said. Nothing more needed to be said. I was being embraced by every home value I thought important in my young life. As it has remained important in my life, and my family's, ever since. Simpler times, happier days, when neighborhoods were communities….where your home was situated. It was where you lived….truly lived.

I heard someone recently referring to their big new house, as well……"it's a comfortable place to hang our hats."

Then it's just not a home!!!

Up there on Alice Street, we lived humble, had no pretense about our place in society, there was no reason to boast, or be insincere with one-another, and when you hung up your hat, you were enveloped in home atmosphere……despite the fact it was a ten unit apartment, in a lesser income part of town, where spare money was tossed into a jar on the counter…….to be used, just in case, someone needed it more than you.

Merry Christmas, one and all.