Musical Influences

Musical influence of the relatives. Zero distance or sometimes across town.

As I sit down to write I am satiated. My tummy is full of warm porridge. I realize that I have never been hungry in my life. Not really. Not ever in danger for lack of food. But was Shaughnessy Heights a land of plenty?

The street vendors of Shaughnessy Heights included the milkman, the breadman, and in summer, the ice cream man. I still eat pretty much the same as I did back in my old North End neighbourhood. Pizza and yoghurt hadn’t been invented, but we did have fantastic rye bread, fish and chips, pea soup, and oxtail soup. On Sundays we usually had a roast – beef and Yorkshire, or pork and applesauce. In our house we had a very strict rule. No singing at the table. This was a heavily enforced rule, and I thought it was part of the etiquette of every good family. I was punished frequently for this misstep. It was the hardest rule for me to keep, and I was a good girl. 

Ours was a sing-along house. There was always a record player. It was my mom’s passion. She loved her movies and her records. She vacuumed with the old canister Viking to records that came in the mail from the Columbia Record Club. The show tunes. I could sing every song from My Fair Lady and South Pacific. I had a comical guess about the story that was strung between the tunes.

I’m gonna wash that man right outta my hair. I knew she was sick and tired of some fellow and was happy to get rid of him. Foreign Tanginiki... I imagined, with clues from the scene on the album cover, a pensive young man dreaming of the next tropical island far way, where his love had gone. It was decades later that I realized that Omar Sharif had been singing Some Enchanted Evening, but my mom never corrected me. She had a sinister streak. She played lots of music for us like the Frankies, Lane and Sinatra. Well, actually Sinatra was a standby on my cousins’ record player, more than on ours.

Those cousins lived in St. James. By the time I had reached junior high, my cousins were already in their third house in St. James. Their second house had been a split-level, so at that house we had to sing for the grown-ups using the stairs to the top level as our stage. No amount of feigned shyness could get us out of our obligation to do our duty for the party. As soon as anyone would try to beg off, we would hear the chant from the grown-ups. 

Tell a story
Sing a song
Show your bun
Or out! You’re gone!

(Irish Rhyme, author unknown)

The chant would go on for a while, interrupted by laughter, very loud orders and finger pointing, kids running and ducking, and eventually close-up breaths of Five-Star or Black Label when they grabbed you. 

“Come on, you grubby kids!”

“Kelly! You get up there right now!”

Louder and louder they’d insist. There was no choice. And quiet singing was not permitted. My St. James cousins were obviously used to this routine. They could tap dance and would raise their hands like Judy Garland at the end of their songs. Real show-biz stuff. And when it was our turn, we did our best, but it was never as flashy as what those St. James kids could do.

I always had a sense of belittlement when I was there. We had a great time screaming and yelling and playing with our cousins while our parents screamed and yelled and played in the other part of the house, but they had so much fancy stuff like pianos and organs and ornaments from Hawaii, stuff we couldn’t touch. And they had wall-to-wall carpets and matching bedspreads. And their clothes closets had doors. My god. Their house even had a dishwasher! But for some reason we still had to wash the dishes by hand when we visited. And they had matching pink melmac dishes with oval plates. And they had no back lane! Imagine, a house with a driveway where you could pull right into your yard. And there were no sidewalks for hopscotch and there were no curbs on the edge of the street. And man alive! The trees were big on that street. I think I could smell the river nearby. But you couldn’t go to the store. They used cars to do that.

Eventually, every time we went to St. James there would be a huge yelling contest at the end of everything and we’d pile in the back seat and head back to Shaughnessy Heights in a dark mood with plenty of cigarette smoke punctuating the trip. I always felt glad when we turned off Keewatin and into the neighbourhood. St. James just wasn’t for me.

Crossing the Tracks

Crossing the tracks. Going east, 750 metres from the wartime house.

Eventually, the time came to venture out of my world, my flat concrete world with paved back lanes that slanted inward to a perfect vee, where we could play tin can cricket with tomato juice cans. My flat concrete world with perfectly pocked sidewalks poured in perfect blocks and hemmed with a nice smooth border. Ideal for hopscotch. My flat concrete world with solid curbs, majestically rounded down to a good cement street. Lots of grey. Right up to the fields. I didn’t know that in some parts of this city, Charleswood and St. Vital, for example, they didn’t even have paved back lanes yet. In other parts of the city, like the new Garden City that was just popping up, they didn’t even have back lanes! Here, we even had nice square pads of poured concrete dotting the way from the big sidewalk into our front steps. It came with the house!

Grass grew between each cement block, and, of course, you never stepped on the cracks. Everyone in Shaughnessy Heights had these good cement sidewalks up front, but nobody had them at the back.

It turned out that we had been living in a gauntlet. There was only one way out.
There was nothing to the south. We could not wander that way. There was only the CPR and it was successfully barricaded by a ten-foot fence. To this day, I have never seen past the fence.

We used to call it the Piggy Back and the only place you could almost see into the CPR yards was at the tracks, where they jogged past Matela’s and the drug store.

To the North, there were only the fields. Later, long before the fields became Inkster Industrial Park, they paved many of the newly surveyed streets out there, but they didn’t put up any street lights for several years. We called that dark series of streets Dunlop. It became the famous drinking and necking grounds. Anyone who went for a ride to Dunlop knew what they were getting into, but in the early days, before Dunlop, wandering north offered nothing but the splendour of tall grass prairie. The crocuses, the fleabane, the gopher holes, and every so often, a piece of junk, a true treasure.

To the west of us, Keewatin was unpaved, the end of the city. The few ramshackle houses beyond there had no plumbing.

East it would be, across the tracks and into the mysterious world inhabited by those other kids, the ones who went to that other school, Florence Nightingale. I would venture inward, toward the city I’d only seen from the bus. I was almost old enough.

Every day in Shaughnessy Heights, you would hear kids getting called in for supper then see them cut through yards and jump fences and cross lanes, being beckoned home like puppies for some food. Kids generally played within earshot. I knew nothing past Magnus, just the fields, and nothing past Selkirk, just the CPR. My world was three blocks long, ending at the tracks, and at the north end of Railway, on our side of the tracks, was my church, the United Church. The Catholic Church was across the tracks, so I figured the Catholics were all over there too.

Summers were never-ending in Shaughnessy Heights, and eventually, the days dragged for our moms too, with mountains of kids hollering and brawling and creating one ruckus after another. Thank heavens for Northwood! By the time I’d heard of Northwood, it already had a reputation as a place for the teenagers, the big kids, and the dances. It was a real action place. Bands even played there. But for me, at that age the big attraction there was the wading pool.

When you live in a flat concrete world, a world that absorbs the heat of a long hot summer, a sprinkler is a really big deal. The upstairs bedrooms in the wartime houses were nested under slanted ceilings protected by black asphalt shingles. It was a perfect heat sink. There were no breezes coming through because the houses blocked each other. It was just plain hot. And eventually, by the time our moms were on their second or third child, they had lost their sense of protection and would cast us off, armed with squashed peanut butter and banana sandwiches. We would hike three blocks up the concrete sidewalks and across the tracks and behind the Catholic Church and down the short street, across Burrows, the boulevard avenue, and into the wading pool at Northwood. We’d lie on our bellies, feet toward the middle and heads facing out, like seals or walruses. It was a scratchy bottom, but it was wet and wild and a major adventure. And there were strangers too. Other kids. Maybe I’d seen them at the store, or maybe that time I was at Brownies for two weeks at the Catholic Church. I saw my first Mennonite there, Helene, with the lovely blue plaid dress.

The neighbourhood across the tracks was much bigger than ours. It went to the CPR yards too, but there were houses on both sides of Selkirk once you crossed the tracks. And, well, it was bigger. It went all the way to McPhillips, a long way. And there were all of those old houses. Creepy. But eventually we were forced to socialize with the kids beyond our safe haven. And that was where the kings of my neighbourhood lived. Heady and Deigo. Maybe they’re dead by now. All the other boys, the big boys, the smart boys, they all took after Heady and Deigo. Nobody ever fought with Heady or Deigo, unless they came from somewhere else. If you were from Shaughnessy Heights, you never fought with Heady or Deigo.

From my perspective, about seven years behind the first wave of baby boomers, Heady and Deigo were practically grown-ups, and they set the tone for who we would all become, and for the most part, who we are today. The girls from the neighbourhood were teased by Heady and Deigo and the rest of the boys went along with them.

Next Week, Episode 7: Musicial Influences

TV Front Room

Television. Front room, ground zero.

I was sitting on the gray chesterfield and the house was tidy, probably because we were getting a babysitter. I was about four years old and was I watching our black and white TV while my mom and dad were getting ready to go out. I can always remember the smell of my mom when she was going out. It was a mixture of hairspray and perfume, but even her clothes had a special aroma, because in those days, stuff had to be dry-cleaned, so dresses were worn quite a few times. I could smell the last time she went out dancing with my dad.

I was clean and cozy. I had had my bath and was in my clean pajamas nestled into the corner of the chesterfield. The new gas furnace was running and the air was blowing up behind the front-room drapes, billowing them so they reminded me of the bustle of an old-fashioned dress. There was a show on about a family whose dad was a scientist and all he wanted was to be a tree. It would be the highlight of his career and he would make his family proud. And finally he figured it out! Despite his family’s pleading with him to stop the experiment, he planted himself and the bark started growing up his legs. But when it reached his chest, he changed his mind. I can remember the close-up facial expressions of his wife, then his own, and his wife’s again: full screen shots, tighter and tighter. It was too late. Then it cut right to his family having a picnic under him. It was Ovidian and creepy.

Another memory has haunted me even more. I was about the same age, and the situation felt the same. This time it was a movie, The Lost Horizon, that was on TV. The picture was really snowy. The man loved his woman from Shangri-La and wanted to bring her home to his land. She was reluctant and her family kept saying, “No! Don’t go!” He had to bundle her up and carry her through the vicious wintery mountains. But she loved him and she agreed, finally, to go with him. She was just like the man who turned himself into a tree. She didn’t listen to her family either. As he carried her across some sort of threshold in the mountains, she aged a hundred years in a hundred paces. She was no longer the young beautiful woman. They showed a close-up of her face, and he dropped her into a giant crevice or canyon. It was too snowy, I couldn’t tell. I figured that he dropped her because she was no longer beautiful. As my brother would have said, “She turned into an ugly scrag, just like you!”

After that I never was a big fan of night time TV. I’d go to bed in the middle of Perry Mason, before he ended up in the wheel chair, while everyone else in the family remained glued to the TV. My dreams had simply more to offer me.

One of the most useful functions of television hooked me in the early years. That was its daycare capacity. I must have been one of the first generation of TV lunch-and-after-school kids. We’d sprint home for Popeye at lunchtime. Some of the biggest battles in our house were when trying to get us out the door before a Popeye cartoon had ended. I lived a solid 35 seconds from school, but the cartoons went to the top of the hour and if it was one that I hadn’t seen for a few weeks, I couldn’t be pulled away. First came the reminder to get to school, then the yelling would begin. Then came the yank of the plug and the open door. I had succumbed to the lure of the small screen. The after-school routine was less stressful. We just laid on our asses and watched Razzle Dazzle and The Forest Rangers. I still whistle the theme song for The Forest Rangers.

Late one Sunday evening my mom came home with a cool curling prize: the fiberglass TV tables with the embedded butterflies. Dinner around the kitchen table just disappeared. We even tried those disgusting TV dinners a couple of times, but everyone agreed that the potatoes felt like slime, the beans smelled like shoe polish, the vegetables all tasted the same, and the meat was usually still cold when the rest of the dinner was ready to eat. It was a bad invention. We went back to home cooking.

As history has documented, television became the culture, even in Shaughnessy Heights.

Everyone, even farm folk, could get CBC, with its moony belted test pattern face. When we went to visit Granny and Grandpa in Russell, that’s all they could get, but the broadcast there was from Yorkton. And that doubled the disaster. We were stuck with Mr. Fixit and Don Messer’s Jubilee and had to miss our favourite weekend rituals on CJAY, our new sexy channel. We were cool in Shaughnessy Heights, much cooler than the Mr. Fixit sufferers. Their laughable pitiable useless plight.

For my top 20 radio hits, I was a big fan of CKRC. I was a pre-teen with a funky pink plug-in AM radio. My most treasured gift. I loved that colour of pink and that radio. It was on the dresser beside my bed until my dad smashed it because I was being a teenage asshole one day, years later. He replaced it with a beige one, not as cute.
But some kids liked CKY better. And our parents listened to Red Alix on CJOB. I’d never even heard of CBC radio until years later when I moved north of fifty-three, where CBC was the only choice. But CJAY and CKY were somehow connected. They were both located over by Polo Park, our very first shopping mall. They cross-promoted each other and became all the buzz, the new cool. They introduced a craze with Old Dutch Points. If you collected enough empty chip bags, you could get on TV and bid for cool prizes. The show was called Kids’ Bids. And sometimes there were kids you knew on the show, but most were from across the river, because over there, they had more spending money. Back in Shaughnessy Heights, we’d scrounge through mucky puddles, if we thought we saw an empty chip bag. Eventually we figured out that you could never get on the show unless you had fifty thousand Old Dutch Points, so we’d give whatever we had to anyone we knew who collected. I don’t think I ever knew a winner. I think all of those kids’ parents owned grocery stores.

These contestants would sit on bleachers and there would be an auctioneer pointing at a bike or a baseball glove or tickets for a movie. Those kids were probably raised on junk food, but in our wartime house the best we ever got was one 16-ounce Pepsi to share among three of us. Usually there was a fight over which glass was fullest and one would get pushed and spilled. Snacks were only on babysitter days anyway. Maybe our parents were trying to prove to the sitter that we had discretionary income, which we most certainly did not. Their laughable pitiable useless plight.

Snacks for us depended on the time of year. The winter standby was a saucer of corn syrup with strips of toast to dip in it. We’d have lots of choices in the fall, carrots and tomatoes from the garden to our hearts’ desire. Fruit was not a plentiful commodity in our house, and when we had it, it didn’t last long. Crab apple fights were popular in the fall, and I would eat any crabs I could get, but there were no trees producing fruit on our block, not then. The ammunition must have come from across the tracks or from someone’s grandma’s farm. Simply put, our cupboards had the basics. There were no run-and-grab kinds of foods. Peanut butter didn’t last long in our house because my brother ate it with a spoon in the middle of the night. For breakfast, we got hot porridge with rivers of milk and brown sugar, or shredded wheat that had been heated under the kitchen hot water tap and further sogged up with milk and a sprinkling of white sugar.
This menu was the best thing that could have happened to me in my Shaughnessy Heights childhood, because undoubtedly, unlike all of the River Heights kids, I still have all of my teeth and they are sparkling and white. I have no implants, no caps, and no fillings! So there! Actually, I feel lucky that I never earned enough Old Dutch Points to go on the show.

And after Kids Bids came Teen Dance Party, Winnipeg’s version of American Bandstand, and for us, it was the real thing. We would watch all the first wave of boomers, who were the big cool teenagers, dance on TV. Hairstyles and clothing were dictated by that show. It was all very important. You would watch a fat Jack Skelly dance the bird or the mashed potato. That was when we started to learn what was cool. All of that long blond flipped hair and those wide hair bands and the pleated plaid skirts. The eyeliner. It was right there, every Saturday, in our own front room. We’d run home for supper because we were famished and lock onto Kids’ Bids while eating either porridge-thick pea soup or Irish spaghetti, twice as thick, ninety-nine percent pasta with hints of tomato sauce and a bit of onion, no parmesan. The timing of that show was perfect. CKY was every Winnipeg kid’s first glimpse of the demanding consumer world we were about to enter.

The closest I ever got to Teen Dance Party, which was off the air by the time I became a teen-ager, was tobogganing a the dump. It was only a few blocks from CKY, but it was too far away from Shaughnessy Heights to walk, so we never went more than a handful of times. It drew kids from Weston or Brooklands or the West End, or maybe St. James, unless they had parents who would drive them. And there were hundreds of kids, screaming willy-nilly down the north side of that hill. It was pretty dangerous, for sure, but flat city folk don’t have much opportunity for thrills. Once we went to a bit of hill at Bruce Park, over in St. James near my cousins’ house. I guess it was okay. All of the kids had matching snow pants and their toboggans all had fresh paint and varnish, no chips or scratches. I just felt so out of place when I wasn’t in Shaughnessy Heights. I thought these cool rich kids could smell me or read my mind. I didn’t laugh at things they thought were funny and they beat me up when I laughed at the things I thought were funny. Gawd, St. James was a strange place. But in its defence, none of us realized that we were flatlanders, not even our parents. It had to have been grown-ups who built the toboggan slides at Lockport and Kildonan Park. You’d drag your sled up these stairs to an open chute, as high as anything I’d ever known, other than Eaton’s or The Bay. There were just two-by-fours for edges to keep your toboggan on the slide, and there were no curves so you would go faster and faster, and if you forgot your mitts, you would get slivers from trying to hold on, and at the end you were dumped onto a snow bank and would slide a little further before hearing the screams of the next kids heading for you from behind. Talk about death traps. The wooden toboggan runs were only temporary, so they weren’t even as well built as the wooden roller coasters that thrill-seekers would crave in the summer at Lockport and Winnipeg Beach. It was lucky we weren’t dragged around to be entertained like the kids whose parents had station wagons. I’m sure if I lived up in North Kildonan and my parents had weekends off, I probably would have died on one of those toboggan runs.

Next Week: Episode 6 - Crossing the Tracks

The Brightest of Lights

The brightest of lights. Six doors down, east 75 metres.

Shaughnessy Heights was in the boonies. The trolleys didn’t reach us, so we had to transfer at McPhillips to get home. The thought of walking from there never crossed our minds. It was over a mile. We had the loud and stinky diesel busses up and down the street, but in the winter, they were the biggest fun. Yeah, for bumper rides. The roads were ploughed, but got narrower and narrower as the winter unfolded. Our street had the bus and was cleared first, but the grader never seemed to get right down to the cement so there always was a super slick layer of hard and shiny snow. Maybe it was Mayor Juba’s policy to protect the new cement. If so, thanks, Steve. It was perfect. You’d just gather in a group of five or six kids and pretend you were waiting to cross the street as the bus approached. Then we let the bus stop for passengers, cross as a group behind it, but fewer kids would come out the other side of the bus. I was always the decoy, never the daredevil. Usually they would bumper ride in pairs, so they would have someone to walk back with. They would hang on to the bumper for the big ride and the long walk back. Sometimes one of the bumper riders would hit dry pavement and go rolling down the street. That was a laugh.

The streets of Shaughnessy Heights were a proving ground, but bumper rides weren’t the most foolish excitement. Lawrence and his brother Ulysse had special prowess on that front. That winter they decided to fulfil their dream of flying.

Anyone who has ever seen a neighbourhood of wartime houses knows about the back shed.

Inevitably, the back shed was renovated and improved to some level, but in those early years, they were just plain old lean-tos attached to the main part of the house. The roofline of the shed was maybe twenty degrees above horizontal, while the roofline of the story-and-a-half house was pretty steep, possibly forty-five degrees.

It was the perfect launch pad.

Lawrence and Ulysse were not at the top of their class. They were French, and in their defense the science curriculum in those days was weak on physics. What they did know was that “What goes up must come down.” Among the Scammells and the Sarvesses and the LaFerriers was a group of big boys on our block setting out the dares. This one started with an imaginative “I betcha” and was quickly converted into a double dare, so there was no backing out.

It was winter and the winds had blown across the flat landscape and had surrounded the little houses on the northwest edge of the city with rock hard snowdrifts, higher than any fences and taller than most of the kids.

Climbing on the roofs  of these houses was no biggy. Jumping off was no biggy. Kids would hang ropes out the upstairs windows and climb down without an ooh or an aww. Hauling up the bicycle onto the roof had been a bit more of a challenge. In the end, they dragged it up by using the chimney to create a make-shift rope pulley. The idea was that Lawrence would fly the bike down the roof into the snow bank.

Shaughnessy Heights invented pissing-your-pants laughing that day. Lawrence didn’t die but the bike was totaled and maybe a couple of bones were broken. He never overcame his reputation for stupidity and disappeared from the neighbourhood long before he finished high school. He probably moved back to St. Boniface where the kids were less demanding, or maybe to one of the towns in the flood zone south of the city.

Next week: Front Room TV