BIOGRAPHY 1

NOTE:   I have decided to place, in serial form, reflections on my life, though not in chronological order. I will try to put something up each Saturday. The texts have existed for some time and are still in draft form. Whether they are of interest is not for me to say. I put them here because I think my life has been somewhat unusual in its own way.

 

 Childhood

      I have lived in remarkable times, a time of turning, a time of much that is new in human history; most of all, it has been a time of endings. I feel the need at least to take account of all these turning points. I do not envy the generations after me. What will come after me will be much more difficult. My generation did not learn; perhaps, those who follow will.  I hope so.

Writing these pages is a dangerous undertaking. For one thing, it is a revelation of who I am and coloured by my own self-perception but read perhaps by many who have other perceptions.

    

     Sitting in my basement apartment in Montreal on a September morning, the front window sits level with the ground outside. A tiny garden patch between the house and sidewalk has a potted cactus as its centrepiece. I can see the trunk of a Philadelphia ash and, looking up, a bit of the leaves from the lower branch – the rest blocked by a first-floor balcony. Across our little one-way street are square boxes with small apartments inside and the outside stairways that are so typical of Montreal and a lot of construction noise as one building after another is demolished in favour of condos.  I have been here for 15 years now. It has been a time of much activity and considerable learning.

Buffalo, from Lake Erie

(1940-1956) :

     I was born in Sisters’ Hospital (Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul) in Buffalo, New York. I was the first child of parents who were both the oldest in their own families. So, the welcome was quite enthusiastic. My mother was American. (She only became a Canadian citizen toward the end of her life.) She met and married my Father, a Canadian, in Canada. Both were living in Fort Erie, Ontario. My mother had had a difficult time during the depression of the 1930s and had found work in Buffalo. (She used to walk from Fort Erie to Buffalo -- and back -- each day in order to have a job as a waitress.) Dad was not a Catholic and in fact was quite anti-Catholic. However, he agreed to be married by a Catholic priest (in the sacristy) and to allow the children to be raised Catholic (in a town that was 90% Protestant). Buffalo, on the other hand, though just across the Niagara River, was 60% Catholic and largely Polish. Dad had no work at the time. He sold Rawleigh’s Household Products door to door. Only when I was about two years old did he land a job with the Canadian Immigration Service at the Peace Bridge. He remained there until he retired. In this way, my father was a security figure in my first years. He took me on his door-to-door rounds (giving my mother a break, I suppose); He made me toys (a pedal car, a workbench). One Christmas, Santa brought me an electric train, an extraordinary luxury for a child at the time. Every year thereafter, and for many years, Dad would set up the train, ever more elaborate, and we would run it around a track. I remember once, when I was older, perhaps 11, I got the train out of its boxes and set it up myself in the kitchen. In doing so I crossed a boundary. I asserted that this was really my train and not just Dad’s. Christmas and Easter were big moments, perhaps especially because of the many, many gifts. One Easter I received a live bunny, in the hospital. I had taken sick one evening when I was perhaps 4 or 5. The pain was excruciating. I was operated on that same evening for appendicitis. A few days later the wound had become infected and I was diagnosed with peritonitis. Even a few years earlier this would have been fatal. However, by then sulfa was around and I recovered.  These were war years; there was rationing and I remember a tank driving down our street the day the war ended. I had an upstairs room to myself; my mother made me nap in the afternoon while she did housework (I still have a tendency to want to sleep when I hear a vacuum cleaner!); there were deliveries of basics like bread, milk, eggs, ice, eggs. The “egg-man” was special. He was from the Church of the Brethren (a Mennonite sect) and profoundly but not totally deaf. He lived on a farm just outside town and usually arrived with his sister. To speak with him you had to shout really loud. On the other hand, I always had the impression that he was a kindly man.

     Obviously, I had contact with my relatives on both sides of the family, but the contacts on my mother’s side were the important ones even if they were less accessible since they lived in Buffalo across the border.  Grandparents were important: I had two grandmothers: “big” and “little” – based on their relative size. The first was a staunch Catholic and the other a fervent Jehovah’s Witness. Both took me to Church when I stayed with them. It took me a while to figure out that I preferred the Catholic one. I felt quite close to her.

     When I was three years old, I fell off the front porch, landed on the corner of a brick and suffered a concussion. Nothing was known at the time of the consequences of concussions. However, looking back, this could have something to do with the terrible nightmares I had when I was around 7 or 8. Around that same time, my mother suffered a major depression and had to take strong anti-depressants for several years afterward. So, I already had a couple of challenges to deal with: aftermath of concussion --a pretty serious one it seems because there is still a small crease in my skull seventy years later -- as well as a mother who was trying to raise kids while living with a major depression.  At the time, the doctor suggested my problems might have to do with the tensions about religion between my mother and father and he suggested they tone it down. (Dad was nominally Presbyterian, as I said, and his family were largely Jehovah’s Witnesses; Mom and her whole family was staunchly Catholic.) 

     Dad’s job in Immigration at that point was focused on passenger trains moving between Buffalo and Toronto. This meant riding the train, usually by boarding either in Fort Erie or Buffalo, if there was no stop in Fort Erie and then riding it to Hamilton or even to Toronto if it was a large train. On one occasion, he took me along on the trip. These trains were pulled by the old steam locomotives. Dad’s father had worked on the railroad all his life. It was a tough life and he had to support eight children. Early on, in Caledonia, Ontario, he had an accident where he lost four fingers on one hand.

The company transferred him to Fort Erie. At that time my father, the oldest child, was still quite young. On my mother’s side, one thing that was special was that the household of her mother was all women. She had had three girls through her husband who was the son of German immigrants to the United States. He was deeply involved in the world of boxing, a tough world in those days but extremely popular. He was a trainer and had a very good reputation. The family lived relatively well. My grandmother came from a well-to-do middle-class family.  However she had, apparently, been rejected by her parents when she married a boxer. Only her brother, after whom I am named, remained close to her.  That side of the  family was hard hit when the depression came and Mom’s dad died suddenly of a heart attack. Initially they had moved from Buffalo to Fort Erie to provide a better climate for my mother who was not well. However, when times went bad in boxing for my grandfather, the family lived in extreme poverty. This was traumatic for all of them. My grandmother had to sell their home and moved into a little shack just at the edge of their old property. That house remained there for years after she moved back to Buffalo to earn a living cleaning houses of rich families. The tiny bungalow served as a summer cottage where we gathered often as a family during the summers. Historical Fort Erie, built for the war of 1812, was just at the end of the street.

     My sister, Margaret, was born when I was two. When the third child was born two years after that, my parents decided that the house they were renting was too small and so they took a risk and bought one-story bungalow just 50 or 60 meters from the Niagara River. It was close to the Catholic church and also to the newly-opened Catholic school my mother had enrolled us in. Three more children were to be born over the next twenty years.

      When I was 8, and had learned the basics of reading, I became very religious perhaps due to the catechism at school combined with the religious tensions at home. I read the bible and paid close attention to religion classes at school. One of my waking nightmares included running outside in my pyjamas and bare feet in the middle of the winter, in the middle of the night to try to get to the parish house. (A police car passed, picked me up and called my parents.)  I was not sleep-walking nor was I consciously reacting to anything specific at that moment. I was very conscious of waking up and running outside though I didn’t know why. Religion had clearly become identifiable for me as an extremely important issue and the Catholic Church as a safe place. In my bedroom, I set up a shrine with statues and carefully attended it for quite a few years. Looking back, I think I saw the shrine as providing protection over the space that was my bedroom.

     My father’s family, with eight children, while originally Presbyterian, had, by the time my Dad married, largely passed over to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, except for Dad plus a sister and a brother who also married Catholics. Another brother married into the Anglican Church. My mother had two sisters; both younger and unmarried when I was born. I attended both their weddings. They lived in Buffalo with my grandmother.

     Among my earliest memories are those of napping in the afternoon while my mother did housecleaning, of playing in the backyard with several other kids from the block. My mother made a point of developing good relations with her neighbours. We were well known by most of the families on our block, especially the Czechoslovakian family who lived next door.  The lady on the other side of us committed suicide. That memory would return later in life as I lost 3 siblings to suicide.  I began school at Phipps Street Public School, not far from where I lived at that point (Dufferin Street). It was the same school my father had attended and his parents’ home was just behind the school so that I could easily pop in during the day.

     When I was seven we moved from our rented house to the one Dad had bought in another part of town. Children have special ways of measuring value: for me the house was a marvel because it had a coloured cement walk and a lovely lamp post in the backyard. It had a basement where I could play and an empty lot next door.  It was near St. Michael’s parish and Our Lady of Victory school run by the IBVM (Loretto) sisters.

     Even though the infrastructure for the school was rudimentary, I really enjoyed those years and they provided an important foundation for my future studies. I completed the first three years of high school (9-11) at St. Michael’s High School located in the same building as the elementary school. Total enrollment for the high school was 50 students divided into two classrooms.  Unfortunately, the school only existed for those three years. At the beginning of the third year, a significant part of the building, a former wartime housing construction, burned down. I finished my third year there and then the secondary school closed. The primary school, on the other hand, was rebuilt.

               My parents were not politically inclined but both were avid readers of the newspapers. We had daily delivery of both a Toronto and a Buffalo paper. I was therefore always aware of the news, especially world news: the bomb over Hiroshima, the end of World War II, the death of Stalin.  When I was fifteen we were asked to prepare a speech to be given before our peers. My speech focused on the situation in Austria at the end of WW II. I came out on top at the school and was send to speak at a meeting of the local Rotary Club. That led to an invitation to join a group of young people, sponsored by the Rotary Club, to visit the United Nations in New York. It was a wonderful adventure. I remember nothing of the people who led us there or even of the other young people, who were mostly from Buffalo. What I remember vividly is visiting the General Assembly (not in session) and the Security Council (in session and discussing the problem of the Palestinians – in 1955!). I also remember a meeting, in this Cold War era, with Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., US ambassador to the UN and also with the Indian Ambassador, who spoke to us of the non-allied nations. This was a new idea to me and has stuck with me to this day long after the end of the “Cold War.”

     For my last year of secondary school, I was determined to go to the only Catholic high school in the region that accepted boys: Notre Dame College School in Welland. This meant travelling almost 40 kilometers each way every day. Fortunately, I got help from the manager of a supermarket in Welland who made the trip by car and took me along – for a price. The school had 500 students – a size which was, for me, enormous. However, I really enjoyed it. I had worked during the summer and paid my own tuition, books, uniform and travel.

Every Sunday we had supper with my mother’s family on a turn-around basis. This pattern of Sunday dinners continued for 70 years at least until my last surviving uncle on that side could no longer drive; the other had already died and my father had long given up driving. On my father’s side, I was close to my oldest male cousin (David). This was helped by the fact that we were together at school. 

      Beginning when I was about 11 years old I started taking jobs to have some money. I delivered newspapers for several years. Then, I got a summer job as a dishwasher in a hotel, then helping park cars at an outdoor drive-in theatre. The owner of the theatre was Jewish, Mr. Levi. It was my first experience with someone Jewish. He was very good to me and I remember him with much affection. I think he planted in me an spontaneous liking for Jews. This was strengthened by allusions my grandmother made to the Jewish families she worked for.  During one summer, I also did inventory at a large department store in Buffalo. This entailed getting an American Social Security number and a “green card”-- not like the one spoken of today-- that allowed me easy access in crossing the border each day. I also worked one summer in a small woodworking shop run by a neighbor just behind our house. We fabricated panels used for construction. All of this enabled me to pay many of my own expenses, to buy a good bicycle (that stayed in the family for 50 years until my father died) and to help with my tuition and travel when I went to Notre Dame in Welland.

     There was one final job. I worked for my final summer before going to Welland at cleaning up the school after the fire. More specifically, I swept up the dust and soot in the classrooms and other areas of the school. I enjoyed the work. I was alone and could work at my own pace. However, years later I realized that much of that dust and soot had gotten into my lungs and done damage.