Eavesdroppings - Bob Green

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      Just for the archives: is there a person alive who has actually seen a radio inspector? This isn’t a question for anyone born after World War II. Before the war, radios were considered luxuries to be taxed. I believe it was $2 a year, and it was hated as much as today’s GST.

      Everyone but the Mennonites had a radio, so you had to cough up for at least one licence. It was the fees for the second and third radios that people tried to avoid.

      Our one declared radio stood like a little veneer cathedral in the living room. The unlicensed ones were in my parents’ bedroom, the bathroom, and Pop’s dilapidated greenhouse. I remember Pop telling Mom with alarm in his voice, “Alec Rouse just called to say the radio licence inspector has been spotted on Lincoln Avenue.” One block away!

      Alec Rouse had a radio repair business in Rouse’s Music Store, which he shared with his brother, Gordon, who repaired washing machines and later became mayor of Galt. On Saturday night when the Salvation Army Band played right outside their front door, customers in the store had to shout.

      Alec lived just three doors north of us on Lowrey Avenue and took upon himself the responsibility of warning the whole block of the radio inspector’s approach. My dad reacted to the alert the way people in Germany were reacting to the Gestapo. “Hide the bedroom radio in the hall closet!” he would holler to Mom. “And stick the bathroom radio under the straw in the fruit cellar!” Then he would run out and hide the greenhouse radio under some fish flats in a coldframe.

      The alert touched off quite a flurry of housecleaning on the block. Everybody seemed to have a carton of trash for the garage. The telephone operators, who listened in all the time and knew everything, passed the alert to the whole town. In some houses disconnected aerial and ground wires dangled in every room. After a couple of days, Alec Rouse, mysteriously informed, would sound the all-clear and the radios would come out of hiding.

      Oddly enough, no one ever saw a radio licence inspector. A boy might say that his aunt had talked to one on Pollock Avenue and that he was knocking on doors, but by the time we ran over there the street was empty. I asked my dad how a person could recognize a radio inspector, and he said they looked like bailiffs and walked through the Legion Hall without taking their hats off.

      Passing Central School in Galt and seeing the children playing with their lawyers at recess takes me down Memory Lane to when we had playground justice without litigation or emergency meetings of the Home and School Association. It was quick, decisive, illegal, and effective.

      Central School discipline, like discipline in all the schools in those golden days, would serve now as an on-site demonstration of every possible parent-teacher-pupil and accessory legal action for articling lawyers’ enrichment days. Safety, another of today’s legal minefields, was an aberration practised by girls. Boys, especially in the presence of girls, flouted safety.

      We didn’t have condom machines in the schools sixty years ago, so there was little to do at recess but defy death. In winter the steep hill that Central School sits on became one huge slide. We slid, bumping our heads on iron posts, down the concrete walk leading from the upper to the lower yard. And we slid down the ash heap that Mr. Campbell, the school janitor, dumped out of the furnace room tunnel.

      The most life-threatening slide was the concrete drain trough running from the upper walkway straight down to the lower playground. We called it “the chute,” and it would drop you sixty feet in five seconds. The only way down the chute without ripping your pants to shreds and endangering your ability to procreate was to squat on one heel and stick your free leg out in front of you in a manner most likely to break it. Only the bravest boys and wildest girls risked the plunge. The only girl I remember doing it regularly was Janet Winter, later Ms. Elliott of St. George, where she did even more dangerous things.

      Teachers on yard duty blew whistles to stop the sliding on the chute long enough to clear away piles of children at the bottom. The chief enforcer for a couple of years was a grade four teacher named Mr. Pleasant (I am not making this up), a virtuoso with the strap. If he caught you loading a snowball with a rock, he would strap you thrice on each hand — hard. He strapped boys in lines of four and five with a foot-long length of rubber brake lining laced with asbestos fibres. A lawsuit today involving a schoolboy strapped with asbestos fibres would fill page one of the Toronto Sun for a week. One day word went around that Grenfell Davenport had pulled his hand back so that Mr. Pleasant hit his own knee. That was one of the times Grenfell hid for a couple of days in McBain’s barn.

      One thing you didn’t do for sure, though it is commonly done today even by lawyers, was throw a snowball at a girl. When Boyd Shewan, the principal, caught a boy tossing a snowball at a girl, he stuck two fingers in his mouth and sounded a whistle that stiffened even Mr. Pleasant. All playground activity ceased, and the guilty boy was led to face the wooden schoolyard fence. Mr. Shewan, hand raised and eye on his watch, would shout “Fire!” and 200 crazed boys would paste the condemned to the fence with a withering barrage of snowballs — the firing squad. He stopped the barrage after precisely two minutes with another piercing whistle. On a good packing day the wet snowballs hit the fence like horses’ hoofs. Imagine in this day of law and order trying to get a jury to a schoolyard on a good packing day.

      That we survived such primitive and lawless times explains why seniors today are so tough and never complain about anything. And where were the lawyers when we needed them? Probably throwing snowballs at the boy pinned to the fence. One thing about those golden days, though, was that we kids never had to pass through metal detectors.

      In l928, when Al Capone was shooting up Chicago with machine guns, a gang of twelve-year-old boys roamed our neighbouring town of Hespeler, shooting out streetlights with slingshots. The slingshot (ask Goliath) is a lethal weapon, and today boys would be forced to register them.

      One sunny day Odele Gehiere, his brother, Arsiene, Cecil Proud, Billy Black, Ernie Lee, and Archie Scott armed at the gravel pit behind Hillcrest School and swaggered down Queen Street with pockets full of stones as round and smooth as robins’ eggs. They were sly enough not to shoot at anything in broad daylight, but Arsiene Gehiere, testing the feel of a stone in his sling, lost his grip and accidentally fired the round through the front window of a house owned by a man notorious for his hatred of little boys.

      The man charged into the street in a frothing rage, ordered the boys to stand where they were, and ran back into his house to call the police. The police at that time consisted of Chief Tom Wilson. The chief had a jail but no patrol car and had to call George Woods’s taxi service to deliver him to the sites of crime. Failing to get a coherent explanation for the broken window at the site, the chief made the boys march ahead of the taxi the few blocks to the police station in the town hall.

      There he drew a confession from Arsiene Gehiere and demanded to know how such an “accident” could happen. Gehiere loaded his slingshot with a choice stone and stretched the rubber. “It just slipped from my fingers,” he said, “like this.” And the stone shot across the room straight through the frosted glass on the door that said Chief of Police. The chief, adjusting his face, marched the six boys into a jail cell and held them there for one hour.

      Archie Scott said the boys’ parents had to pay for both windows but couldn’t remember how much they cost. The brief jail term seemed to straighten out the boys. Archie told me this story just a few years back, and he was still law-abiding. Indeed none of the boys involved embarked on a life of crime except Ernie Lee who, I am told, joined the Tory Party.

      George Woods, the taxi driver, told me he drove Chief Wilson to crime sites, usually the local beer parlours, and to the jail for years, even helping him carry drunks to the cells, and never once billed the town for his services.

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