Singalong with Billy the Kidder

When I was a kid, we went to church a lot and at Sunday Mass, the ushers took up a collection. On some days, when the church was involved in a special project somewhere  — like  helping lepers, say —  there’d  be a second whiparound, and the priest would tell us, it’s “for the missions.”

Last night, in a bar near my house, I heard that same story. Ish.

CHARMING BILLY: He puts the impress into impresario

The band’s second set of the evening was about to wind down and a guy with a sailor’s hat, sailor’s beard and wielding a big glass jar told the packed bar about the church collections of his Catholic childhood then added “and now we’re taking up a second collection — for the musicians.” He made “musicians” sound like “missions.”

You had to be there.

The man who made the joke is Bill Heffernan, and if I had time, talent or energy I could write a book about him.(Read more about Bill’s adventures here but don’t even think about it until you’ve finished my blog.)

But this isn’t about him as much as it is his party; a party, that is, that I think you ought to attend next time you’re in Toronto.

I was at one yesterday, Saturday afternoon. At a bar about 700 giant steps from my house called the Inter Steer Heffernan once again hosted a weekly musical event I shall refer to as“Billy’s Thing” because I don’t know what else to call it.

If somebody asked me to choose five of the most memorable attractions for a recently arrived tourist in this city, Bill’s Saturday party at The Inter Steer would top the list.

THIS HIGH: The answer to your question, "how high
does the Inter Steer set the bar?"

He’s been running the whatchamacallits for going on 13 years. What they are are late-afternoon jam sessions featuring an ever-changing troupe of some of the most talented folk, bluegrass and celtic musicians I’ve come across. 

Admission is free but as I said a few paragraphs ago, they pass the jug a few times. The Inter Steer bar (or as regulars call it, The Steer) is unpretentious and the crowd’s welcoming. Food’s good too.

I don’t go to Billy’s thing every Saturday but some people sure do and I don’t blame them.

Last night, when I arrived at about 6:15, the performer was rocking out an acoustic version of Tom Petty’s “I won’t back down” and get this: The entire bar was singing along.

Right now, you’re thinking, “does life get any hokier than that?"

Meantime, I’m like, “I love it.”

RANKIN FILE: Mary Rankin, another Caped Breton
Crusader

I was immediately yanked back to my home in Sudbury, where my older brother Tom’s friends — Joe Nichols, Moe Sauve or my cousin Gerard MacIsaac — hauled out six strings and got everybody singing and drinking and laughing. (Regular readers of this blog know I grew up on Walton Mountain. We Carters were a big sprawling church-going party-loving family and just like John Boy, the handsomest and funniest of the bunch grew up to be a journalist.  But I digress.)

Back to Billy’s Thing.

Every time I’ve attended one of these jam sessions, I’ve made friends and yesterday, I met singer Mary Rankin who — it turns out — has roots in the same part of the world as my mom; i.e., Inverness County, Nova Scotia. Around those parts, the name Rankin is synonymous with angelic voices and talent; Mary’s carrying on the tradition with grace and charm. 

Plus she was as friendly as one of my down east cousins.  (Believe me, not only does that bunch set the hospitality bar high, they open it way before noon.)

Another performer from yesterday’s thing looked like he could have just pulled up on a fishing trawler but sang some Irish ballads so beautifully he’d  make a rock cry. His name’s Kevin Kennedy.

One after another and sometimes together, for three hours they played. In addition to Heffernan and the others I mentioned,  yesterday’s players were Michelle Rumball, Michael O’Grady and Alex Fraser. The last guy — Fraser  — plays the Steer I think every Wednesday night and he’s Spotify personified. Name a song. He’ll nail it.

The last piece I heard before heading home yesterday was an inner  ear-worming rendition of what I think should be Newfoundland’s National Anthem — Sonny’s Dream by the late Ron Hynes.

Got home by 8:15. Which is not a bad thing.  Like Yogi Berra might have said, “it sure gets late early these days.” 

Billy’s thing: Saturdays at The Inter Steer Restaurant. 357 Roncesvalles Ave., Toronto.  

You can crash at our place if you like.

   

Canadian Tire: A lot lot more than tires

When the triage guy at Canadian Tire booked me in for my left head light repair, he estimated it’d take maybe half an hour, 45 minutes.

CANADIAN TIRED? The service department's waiting room
welcomes you weary travelers

I thought: “Perfect. An hour in the Canadian Tire waiting room! What more could a guy ask for?”

I’m not being sarcastic.  

It was about 10:00 a.m. Forty eight hours earlier, my wife Helena and our three children Ewa, Ria and Michel, along with dozens of other family and friends, had been at St. Bernadette’s Roman Catholic Church in the town of Elliot Lake, Ont., about 6.5 hours north of our Toronto home, at my brother Tom’s funeral.

The morning we were to head north, I realized my left low beam didn’t work. I figured if I scheduled right, I could drive during daylight, nobody would notice I had my high beams on and I could wait until after the funeral to get the light repaired.

My plan worked. We arrived back home early Saturday afternoon and Canadian Tire is open Sunday mornings. I welcomed the opportunity.

TOM: PRESIDENT OF PETE'S B&G FAN CLUB, Elliot
Lake, division. I hope I never stop forgetting he's gone..

Here’s the thing: After a family gathering like Tom’s funeral, there is much morning-after (mourning-after) quarterbacking to do. You have to contact everybody involved to get their interpretation of whatever everybody else said and did.

“Why did Jim mention Jack’s old boat within earshot of Dirk? He knew it would be a sore point!” 

“Why would Beth get up and say that stuff about her stupid dog right in the middle of the funeral home?” (I’m faking these examples because if I reported what was actually said after Tom’s funeral, mine would follow shortly aftwards. But you already knew that because nobody related to me is a Dirk.)

What better base to contact everybody from than  the forced exile of a Canadian Tire waiting room?

I like Canadian Tire. I still think perfume that smells like a Canadian Tire store would be a huge seller;  I also made up a joke: Do you ever find yourself exhausted after a long day’s drive on icy roads, worrying if you have enough windshield washer and stressing that your head light’s out? If that describes you, you are  ... wait for it ... Canadian tired. 

At Tom’s funeral, I met up with one of his oldest pals — Joe —  who told me that after retiring from a long career with INCO, the mining company that dominated our home town of Sudbury, Joe responded to a Canadian Tire help-wanted ad that said the store was “looking for pensioners.” 

He applied and loves it.  At Tom’s wake, he and I were joking about his red shirt being a chick magnet.

A good funeral has huge upsides. People like me and Joe get to catch up. 

Long-overdue hugs get hugged. 

In my world, you can tell a good funeral because people are laughing. And many saying “let’s not wait until the next funeral to get together” only to say the very same thing at the next funeral. 

Except for the fact that he was the centre of attention, I believe Tom would have given his own funeral 10 outta 10.

But enough about him.

Back to me.

Forty five minutes into my cross-country Carter family check-up, the CT service tech reluctantly informed me that the problem was more complicated than they’d originally thought. Hesitantly, as if he didn't like delivering the bad news, he said the procedure was going to take a little longer and cost a bit more.

He estimated an hour.

I was like, “great!”  

Here’s what my brain thought: “What a world!  Here we are, bumping up against $200 for a measly light bulb and we can afford it without taking a breath.

“Look at us! We can get new head lights put in on a Sunday morning! We don’t have to wait for the shop to open Monday and then for some courier to deliver a replacement bulb. We don’t have to miss work or so much as a coffee break. I don’t have to get my hands dirty. We’re so stinking lucky it hurts! We never even run out of exclamation marks!”

Then I was like, “Tom loves this kinda crap. I think I’ll call and make him laugh...”

Yup.

I’d forgotten — for half a second — that Tom would not be picking up. It wasn’t the first time and it won’t be the last.

I dialed my sister Bertholde instead. I warned her: In the coming months, there’s probably going to be times when I feel like ringing Tom so she has been named the designated call receiver. She was fine with this.

About a half hours later, when the service guy presented me told me the car was ready and the total was less than I'd anticipated, I asked myself whether I should call Bertholde or just let her read the good news here. I opted for door number two.

Coming from me, Bertholde, I guess you won’t be surprised to hear that if you’re talking about replacing headlights — especially after a particularly dark couple of wintry days with a big brothers’ funeral thrown in —it’s really easy to see the bright side.

And the band played Wake Up Little Sushi

TANKS FOR THE MEMORIES: Keep your friends close,
your anemones closer.

Here’s something I just learned. 

When a giant red sea cucumber  --  one of the 450-odd creatures that make their home in Ripley’s Believe It Or Not Aquarium in downtown Toronto -- feels threatened, it frightens off its predator by ejecting a portion of its gut out through its anus. And I totally get that. When I'm scared who knows what might happen?

But that’s not my point.

My point is, that giant red sea cucumber factoid is just one of the countless important things I learned this past Friday evening, when my wife Helena and I visited Ripley’s aquarium for its monthly Friday Jazz Night. 

You heard right. Twelve Fridays a year, the aquarium features live jazz, from 7:00 to 10:00 p.m. Visitors can wander among  more than 16,000 marine critters sipping wine or beer; specifically,  Lagoon Lager, listening to live jazz.

It’s even more fun than it sounds. It's like you're dancing with the fishies!

  GREAT CORRY RIFFS:
Horn player and singer
Ouellette

And you want to talk educational? 

The red sea cucumber intel was just a tiny sample of all the stuff we learned. Here's six more take-home gems.

6. English is weird. Not only did we see several rock bass and striped bass, I saw a bass clarinet. Bass and bass. What are ESL learners supposed to do with a situation like that? I'm sure glad I was born knowing the language and didn't have to, like, learn it.

5. The bass clarinettist was one of the Sonny Balcones, the jazz combo that outshone even the most Finding Nemo-ish creatures at the aquarium Friday. I'd say the Sonny Balcones were worth the price of admission. At centre stage: A laughing trumpet-playing lead singer named Corry Ouellette. When we first got there, Ouellette wore a long silvery sequined dress that looked like it could have made from the same sparkly stuff the school of shimmer fish in the tank directly over Ouellette's head were wearing. For the second set, Ouellette changed into a flappers-style mini -- get it? flapper? oh never mind -- and her third-set look was long, slinky and if you really used your imagination could be seen as mermaidy. The Sonny Balcones not only took the gig seriously, they had serious fun and even had people up dancing. Imagine! At the aquarium! The Sonny Balcones: Two fins up! Four starfish out of four! Catch them if you can. Tell me to stop making fish puns!

NASTY OVERBITE: Nothing
preps you for being under a shark.

4. The glimmering fishes wearing the same look as Ouellette? They're "alewives". Why isn’t the person who named these fish famous? Another winner? Hands down the biggest fattest laziest and by my reckoning the contentedist critter in the place -- an underwater Jabba The Hut--is the Potato Grouper.

3. Speaking of inventive, I’d love to have been at the meeting where somebody came up with the idea of mixing live jazz with live fish. It's like pineapple on pizza. Who would have thought it would work? At Ripley's Friday, everybody in the joint was laughing and joking. It was a fish party. 

2. Walking under a two-metre long shark with its teeth bared is simply not an activity that human brains have evolved to handle with ease. It didn't matter that we were safely separated from the sharks by what I'm sure was thick plexiglass, it felt just a tad unnerving; very easy in fact to identify with that giant red sea cucumber we discussed back up there at the beginning of the story.

1. Finally, Jazz at the Aquarium would be a marvelous first date. Unless you're a sea cucumber.

How to Get an F in French

EH VOILA: My first peek at the Far Side
 Photo by Chuck Swinden, first published in Northern Life

When I was growing up in the west end of the Northern Ontario mining community of Sudbury, I attended St. Albert's Catholic Elementary school for exactly eight years and one half day.

Yup. An extra half day.

On what was supposed to be my second day of kindergarten, instead of heading up the hill to St. Albert's, I snuck around the house and hid under the back porch where I remained until it was safe to come out, certain that I wouldn't have to go back to school ever again.

Here's why:

We Carters — and there were lots of us — lived a block south of St. Albert’s, on Eyre Street. I was the youngest of 10,  so was the last to go to school. 

My parents Tom and Huena were extremely progressive and thought it wouldn’t be bad if we were bilingual so they gave us a choice: St. Albert’s had two streams; one French and one English. Most took the easy route and went English though my sister Mary wisely opted for French and is now fully bilingual with I believe two university degrees; one in either official language.

But more than two streams, St. Albert’s actually consisted of two schools: the first floor was English; the second storey French.

And I just thought of something. We called St. Albert’s a separate school. Until 10 minutes ago, I thought that meant, separate, as in “not public.”

But what it really meant was that it kept two cultures firmly and distinctly and — I should add  unfortunately — separated. 

The French and English kids had separate classes, separate administrations, separate entry and exit times. Separate Christmas concerts. Separate everythings.

The French kids’ 15-minute morning and afternoon recesses were 15 minutes before ours, so we could hear them in the yard, having way more fun than us while we were still in whatever class we had before recess.

I’m sure there was a logical explanation for the separation but for the life of me; I mean literally —  for as long as I’ve been on earth — I haven’t been able to make sense of it.

All we knew was that the French kids were different and I’m certain it was a case of vice versa, too.

A few years ago, I was at a street festival in downtown Toronto and had a conversation with a woman that went something like this:

Her: “You’re from Sudbury, you say? My husband’s from Sudbury.”

PETIT CHIEN CHAUDE: Who thought he
could outsmart the system.

Me: “Really? What part?”

Her: “West end. Pine street.”

Me:  “Ha! I was raised on Eyre, which is very close. I wonder what elementary school he attended.”

Her: “St. Albert's.”

Me: “What year was he born?”

Her: “57.”

Me: “Me too! What’s his name?”

Her: She said a French name, that I remember but won’t use here because I didn’t ask her permission.

The thing was, he and I had never met. He was French!

She and I laughed and commented how strange it was and I was like, “to us English kids, all we knew was the French kids liked to fight; the boys were dumb and the girls were easy.” 

(I've not sure but I'm pretty sure my bilingual sister Mary is no easier than the other Carter women.)

We were laughing a lot by this time. 

Her again: “My husband thought the same thing about the English and he didn't find out until he was at university that English moms and dads sleep together, too, just like French ones.”

Here’s something weird. 

I had a friend in high school and then university named Raymond Cote; one of the coolest kids around. 

He rode a motorcycle, had more than his share of artistic ability and super taste in music. Loved parties. 

Get this. Ray was my age. He lived directly across the street from St. Albert’s, two houses west of my aunt Kaye MacDonald. He, like, me, was Catholic though I should add that the French and English Catholic kids attended separate churches, too. The English St. Clement's was kitty corner from the school; the French St. Eugene's was another block north. Sheesh!

Ray and I didn't even get to know each other until high school.

(Of course Ray Cote was one of the brightest kids I ever hung out  with.)

Decades after I had left Sudbury, Northern Life newspaper published that photo of St. Albert's being demolished and I realized that was the first time I got a look at the second floor of the building. 

I can’t believe I’m not making this up!

And that, to make a short story very long, is why on day two of KG, my mom found me under the porch..

When I was four, I thought I’d be smart and attend French school. So my very first day of school was spent in French kindergarten. surrounded by people speaking a language I couldn’t understand a word of.  I did not see an upside.

And my mom — who I should add spoiled me something perfect — never forced me to go back.

I missed kindergarten in either official language. 

So here I sit; unilingual and really bad at colouring inside the lines. 

Would I join any Hub's Club that would have me as a member?

SUDBURY, ONTARIO: It just occurred to me, after all these years,
what the "SO" stood for.  And you're surprised I still believe in Santa?

When I was a very young kid growing up in Sudbury, Ont., we had two TV stations: CKSO and CKNC. Three if you were French.

The two we Carters mostly watched were CBC and CTV affiliates and one of them — CKSO which I believe was the CBC station — was  broadcast out of a studio located at the very top of the street that I grew up on.

Twice in my life did I visit that mysterious and exciting place; both times to appear on TV.

One of those visits involved lining up to see Santa Claus to tell him what I wanted for Christmas. I and my pal who came with me were in the latter half of our elementary-school years; a fact not lost on the man in red.

When we got to the podium, he leaned in and whispered,  “How old are you boys anyway?”

We told him. Santa said, “You’re a little old for this sort of thing aren’t you?”  (He was a fraud. The real McCoy would never have said anything so klutzy.)

The only other time I remember visiting the studio, I did so as part of what might be called a gang.

Like a lot of local TV stations, the Sudbury broadcaster produced a live after-school kids’ show, featuring a local host who somehow entertained small groups of visiting kids, for 15 minutes or a half hour at a time. I’m talking versions of Razzle Dazzle or Tiny Talent Time, two big-time shows with actual budgets and paid professional talent. (Meantime, if anybody out there can remember what the local hosts did to keep the visiting audiences amused, I’d like to hear it.)

I recall two Sudbury versions of said children's shows: Hub’s Club  and  Cook’s Clubhouse.  The latter was hosted by a local personality named Joe Cook.

HUB-A-DUB-DUB: A recipe for success in Sudbury?
Good looks and hockey scars

The other host was Hub Beaudry, who before becoming a Sudbury TV personality, had a brief career as a kick-ass major junior hockey player, a detail that you should never forget makes a Canadian job seeker’s resume sparkle; as in, “Mmmm. It says here you played right wing for the London Knights? Was that the ’86 Knights or the later, more defence-oriented squad? Doesn’t matter. You can start as bank president Thursday.” And I know nothing about hockey. 
(But I digress.)

For me, far more significant than his hockey career was the fact that Hub Beaudry sometimes attended and took up the collection at St. Clement’s Roman Catholic Church, the parish we Carters spent so much of our time at. Yes, a local TV celebrity attended St. Clement’s.

And that gang of kids that showed up for Hub’s Club? Most of us were altar boys. (Now there’s a position it’s safe to leave off the old c.v.—ed.)

We were all in grade six or seven. Hub mentioned that we looked familiar.

NO ANGELS HERE: Beneath the surface of every altar boy you'll find a
a potty mouthed felon. Exhibit A: The Hub's Cub joke.
Exhibit B: I swiped these photos off the Internet

And we may have been altar boys, but we weren’t wusses.

Case in point:  Hub asked us if we knew any good jokes.

“What’s hairy,” one of my altar-boy colleagues asked, “and sticks out of your pajamas?”

Sensing danger, Hub quickly moved the microphone away.

But not fast enough.

The jokester — who I proudly add remains my friend to this day — yelled, “your head!”

Now that was entertainment.

I is for Italian

Sometimes when I can’t get to sleep at night, I alphabetize lists in my head: Places I’ve flown to; models of cars I’ve driven; people’s names that go naturally together: Alex & Brenda (My brother and sister-in-law); Chuck &  Di, Eddie & Flo, and like that.

LITTLE ITALY: Cultivated gardens and lots'n'lots of wine

Invariably, I nod off before I get anywhere near the tail end of the alphabet.

And here’s something you might find surprising, the more challenging the list, the more effective it is at putting me to sleep.

One night a few weeks ago, I set the alphabetizing bar at an unprecedented level. Said I to myself:  “When you were growing up in the west end of Sudbury, Peter, you sure knew a lot of Italians.  I bet you could do an alphabetical list of their surnames.”

I’m not making up a word of this.

So.  

First one was easy: Anselmo. Tony Anselmo.  A few years older than me but from the same side of town, Tony Anselmo became something of a well-loved local character because he eventually owned a very popular hangout on Elm Street, the Records On Wheels store.

Second?  Easier.  Bortolussi.  Alfredo. My very first day in grade one, they sat us in alphabetical order and I found myself behind named a kid named Alfredo Bortolussi and then — I find this hard to believe — he and I not only finished grade eight at St. Albert's, we were altar boys at St. Clement’s Church; we both attended St. Charles boys’ school then switched to Sudbury Secondary school and then and then…Fred and I went to Carleton university in Ottawa!

I haven’t seen Fred in ages. I heard he's a teacher. Must have enjoyed school more than I ever did.

But I sure like him. Have since grade one.

C? Another minimal brainer. Ciccolini. Michael to be specific. 

ANSELMO'S VINYL DESTINATION: The Lord
 LPs them what LPs themselves

 I probably didn’t spell his surname right but wouldn’t be surprised if I did.

He, too, was an altar boy and I remember once many years later when I was home visiting from Carleton, my folks took me out to a restaurant called the Silver Beach Tavern, and Mike--I think he was the head waiter or owner or something--brought some wine to the table and said, “This is way better than that homemade stuff we used to swipe from my dad when we were kids, eh Pete?” (Just what my parents needed to hear.  Thanks, Mike.)

That’s one of the things about the Italians. All their dads made wine. Lots and lots of wine.  It was no big deal for the kids to have wine with meals.

Another thing? All of the Italian guys had terrific-looking sisters. In fact, my brother Alex married one of them. But I digress.

Dorigo.

Eussepi.

Putting a whole bunch of west-end Sudbury Italian names in alphabetical order was way easier than I thought. Maybe that’s why they call it the Roman alphabet. Hahahaaha!

Fabbro. Fabbros were everywhere. Joe Fabbro was mayor for goodness’ sake. And remember I talked about being an altar boy? One of the older altar boys was Ron Fabbro, who must have been the Kahwi Leonard of altar boys because he is now a Roman Catholic bishop, in London, Ont.

Galardo and Grottoli. I have to use two G names because according to the rules of my mental alphabetizing game, if you can’t come up with a name that corresponds to the next letter, you have to find two that work with the previous letter, and I’m pretty sure I'll never find an Italian surname beginning with H. 

Okay, Gallo, too, because I got nothing for I either.

Speaking of, I will be passing Roy Gallo’s house tomorrow when I visit my sister Norma who lives on the same street that Roy grew up on. It’s one of Sudbury's tonier (ha-ha) neighbourhoods.

Which reminds me of something else.

Not only did all the Italian guys all have pretty sisters, their houses and yards were meticulously maintained, with colourfully painted wood trim and flourishing gardens. Which is all the more astonishing because so many of their dads had at least two jobs: one at INCO, the huge mining company, and another at their own family business.

Did those guys ever stop working? When did they find time to make wine?

I bet that when they hit the sack, they never had to make up dumb head games to help them nod off.

I’m stopping here.

Not only do I forget what point I was trying to make but it was me I was trying to put to sleep, not you!

Buon Natale!

All the Pellis News That's Fit to Print

 LIFE IMITATING PULP: Why did Mother Nature give us
siblings if we can't exploit them?

Pellis News--or "Pellis's"--was a variety store precisely one city block east of the house in which we Carters grew up in the northern Ontario mining town of Sudbury.

About the same number of steps from our home in a northerly direction was the elementary school  that we Carters all attended--St. Albert's--but Pellis's was where a few of us got most of our education.

To whit: It was at Pellis's that I learned how to buy smokes.

After I got to maybe seven or eight years of age, my dad and later my older brother Tom sent me with some regularity to Pellis's to buy "large Export Plains," which meant when the time came for me to start sneaking smokes at 11 or 13, Export Plain was the only brand I knew how to buy.

Pellis's sold everything a human needed to survive: birthday presents, greeting cards, pop, ice cream and several hundred different types of candy, from two-cent paper straws filled with sugary something to boxes of Mother's Day chocolates.

The racks along the south wall? A magazine lover's paradise though young Peter had neither the height nor the nerve to reach way up there to the very back rows from where the Playboy magazine models smiled down at him.

But MAD and Cracked and Archie Comics Digests? Right at shin level and here's something: I don't recall any signs that read: "Buy'em here; read'em at home." (Speaking of Pellis's magazines, I just remembered something  that verges on the miraculous. I'll get to it in a minute.)

Pellis's was for hanging out at. It was west end Sudbury's pre-Internet version of  Facebook.

The store did God's work in many many ways

To Pellis's-purchased Classics Illustrated comics (and Bugs Bunny operas) I attribute much of the stuff I pretend to know about western civilization's finest art and culture.

 DUMAS FOR DUMMIES: Therein we studied
the canon

Right near Pellis's westernmost wall was a pinball machine with a sign that read "Restricted to 16 and over" or something like that.

I find this hard to believe but we little guys used to pay the older boys to let us share the machine. Using the nickel we provided, the older kid would, with his right hand, press the ball release and right flipper while I--feeling very grown up and somewhat sinister -- got to press the left flipper button.

To do this, we asked the older guys "to let us play a flipper," which now sounds really creepy.

That my dad sweated every day and night to earn those nickels that I then wasted in Pellis's pinball machines never ceases to astound.

I think I was a bit spoiled.

Perpendicular to the pinball machines hung row after row of paperback novels, many of them very--to a 10-year-old boy--provocatively covered.

Mickey Spillanes were my favourite.

I included that picture of the novel called Norma: How low can a woman sink? because of the following true story.

When she was a teenager, my older sister Norma actually worked at Pellis's. Many of the older guys had a crush on Norm and I remember exactly where I was standing when one of them--who went on to be a Mountie--picked this exact item from Pellis's bookshelf and waved it in my sister's direction, saying: "Norma. How Low Can A Woman Go?"

Mr. Mountie-to-be also had a lisp and I thought he sounded, well, worldly. The depths of my little-boy idiocy would challenge Jacques Cousteau.

Here's where we get to the miraculous part.

Much, much later in life, I grew up to be a magazine and newspaper editor.  A not-insignificant arrow in my journalistic quiver was my ability to write attention-getting headlines. One of my mentors, the founding editor of the Toronto Sun, Peter Worthington, said my facility with headlines could be attributed to the fact I was the youngest of 10 and learned early how to get attention. He might have been on to something.

Worthington and I were not the only ones who figured I had a flair for catchy titles. A bunch of  years ago, I won second prize in the "Best magazine headline writer in the country contest" (or something like that), held by the Canadian Society of Magazine Editors. I was thrilled.

SILVER-PENNED WALSH: He has headline writing
down Pat.

But pay attention.

The guy who won gold--and I hope you appreciate how painful it is for me to admit this-- writes headlines so sparklingly they make mine look like Ikea furniture-assembly manuals.

His name is Patrick Walsh and he is the editor of Outdoor Canada magazine.

But that's not important.

What's important is Pat's father Bud was born four houses north of me, on Eyre Street. Patrick's grandparents Frank and Mary were almost like members of our family.

And I happen to know that when Pat--empirically the best magazine cover line writer in the whole country--was a kid, he often visited his grandfather's house and from there, he would sometimes be sent on errands to--I'm getting all teary-eyed excited in a Lourdesy sorta way about this--Pellis's.

Where all the great magazines were.

Pellis News.

It's no longer in business. I'm pretty sure that its owner, Gino Pellis, has since died and gone to heaven.