Eavesdroppings - Bob Green

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to him, “George, some day when you can spare the time it wouldn’t be a bad idea to drive down to Galt and get your driver’s licence.”

      Coutts and Son Funeral Directors in Galt used to be owned and operated by Harold Gray, and during the 1930s and 1940s it was the prestigious way out. Mr. Gray made every effort to sustain the tone of his service — dignified, elegant, and serene, goals he met until he brought his son, Bud, into the business.

      Bud, like his father, was rotund and tall, an imposing figure. Bursting with youth, he had the self-discipline of a circus bear cub. He had a friend just as large and even more uncontrollable, who he talked his father into hiring as an assistant. The friend’s name was Willis Toles, an accomplished jazz trombone player who could double ably on bass, piano, and guitar; was a veteran cab driver; and was a crack shot with a revolver and consistently beat out the local policemen in marksman competitions.

      Business was good, so Mr. Gray had no need for a revolver marksman, but Toles’s experience as a cab driver made him a natural to drive the ambulance, a service then in the hands of funeral directors. Bud was assigned to drive the hearse. It wasn’t surprising to see the hearse clear St. Andrews Street at sixty miles per hour chased by the ambulance with the siren on. Occasionally, the two would run out for coffee in the ambulance with the siren on. It must have occurred to Mr. Gray that his funeral parlour had been taken over by the Marx Brothers.

      When the solemnity of a service was rent by shouting in the yard and hoots of laughter coming from the ambulance garage, Mr. Gray would run out of the chapel, wave his arms wildly, pretend to strangle himself, and run back inside. One day, after Bud banged up a front fender on the hearse, Harold sent Toles down to Bennett City Garage Body Shop to pick it up. He wouldn’t trust Bud. Toles brought it back intact, but while nursing it into the garage scraped it from end to end.

      Mr. Gray, when he wasn’t pretending to strangle himself, was noted for his composure. He finally lost it at a funeral in Sheffield. The service was in an old country church, and Mr. Gray sent Bud and Toles into the basement to keep out of trouble. However, Toles found a piano in the Sunday school room and began to pound out “C Jam Blues.” Bud joined in by pounding jam tins with chair rungs. Mourners seated upstairs weren’t amused. Neither was Mr. Gray who, really strangling himself, raced downstairs. He couldn’t fire his own son, but Toles had to go.

      Toles went to work for the opposition, Jimmy Little, when his funeral home was on Grand Avenue. Because Toles lived in a double house on Barrie Street, he wasn’t allowed to practise his trombone or bass fiddle at home, so he rehearsed in the embalming room at Little’s. On his way to his band job at Leisure Lodge, he would drop into Little’s and pick up his bass. One time a passerby, seeing Toles carrying out the casket-size instrument in the dark, thought it was someone stealing bodies and called the police. The officers searched high and low until Jimmy Little assured them the body count was okay.

      One summer day in l940, Grenfell Davenport said we should visit Janet Winter who had just moved from a house on east Main Street to a big home on the crescent above Queen’s Square. Janet was always moving and going to different schools, but we thought we should keep track of her because she was the only girl we knew who would kiss anybody. She was ten years old.

      So we recruited Kenny Lee and Jim Bastin at the East Street dump, where they had been picking over odds and ends, and headed for the crescent on the west side. We found her house by asking where the new girl with the skinny legs lived. She was really pleased to see us and suggested we visit the animal pens in Victoria Park. There she introduced us to two girls who would soon be her classmates at Dickson School.

      The sound of a steam train whistle prompted Grenfell to suggest we pop up to Barrie’s Cut to visit the spring where the hobos camped. He claimed to have sat by their fire at night and drunk beer with them. So up we went along the trail through the hawthorns (all subdivisions now) and down to the spring. It is still there beside the tracks just south of Simpson’s sawmill. There we splashed around until we were pretty well soaked and one of Janet’s new friends started to cry.

      “Don’t worry,” Grenfell said. “We can all dry off on the bridge.”

      Close to the spring a high wooden bridge carried the lane to Linton’s farm over the tracks in the cut. It was a favourite thrill of boys to stand on this old bridge and brace the exhaust of a train blasting up the grade. Now we could hear a train rumbling over the Grand River bridge and heading our way. We told the girls we were really in luck, that we could stand on the bridge while the train passed under and dry our clothes really fast.

      The girls, except for Janet, didn’t like the idea, but Grenfell told them they hadn’t lived until they had had steam up their skirts. Janet, who was precocious, said it would at least be safer than sex. So we dared each other onto the bridge and watched the roaring black smoke approach. The wooden bridge planks had two-inch-wide cracks between them, and we positioned the girls over them for their maximum pleasure. Actually, we wanted to see if their light summer skirts would blow up. They couldn’t hold them down with their fingers in their ears.

      The freight, westbound on the heavy grade, had two locomotives blasting with every pound of steam they could muster. The advancing tornado raised the hair on our necks, and we stuck our fingers in our ears and closed our eyes tight. The lead engine’s exhaust shook the bridge and exploded up through the cracks, firing sparks up trousers and skirts. To top it off, the engineer, spotting us, blew his whistle. The power of a steam whistle six feet beneath you is enough to shake the fillings out of your teeth.

      We were reeling so much from the first engine that the second, the most powerful, caused the girls to scream. After it passed and the bridge settled down, we stood shaking our heads and patting bituminous gases back down our pant legs. I pried cinders from my eyes.

      “My skirt blew up,” Janet said. “Did you peek, Grenfell?”

      “How could I see with cinders in my eyes?” he asked.

      “You wouldn’t get cinders in your eyes if you hadn’t peeked,” she said. “I’m telling my mother.”

      The only boy who didn’t peek was Jim Bastin, who went to the Gospel Hall and could be trusted. Grenfell, Kenny Lee, and I all went to First United and couldn’t be trusted. What’s more, Kenny, because he wore glasses, didn’t get cinders in his eyes and gave us such graphic descriptions of the girls’ underwear that we wondered about the state of decency on the west side of town. Jim Bastin even said he wished he had opened his eyes.

      We talked about that time on the bridge for weeks afterwards while we picked over odds and ends at the East Street dump. Of course, more sensational things have happened in the years since, but not much more.

      Professor Thiele was the first charismatic person I ever saw. I was with my parents on Water Street trying to see a parade through the legs of a crowd.

      Parades in the 1930s were one of the few forms of entertainment people could afford, mainly because they cost nothing. Several bands had gone by, huffing and puffing, and all I saw were flashes of braid and brass. Then someone said, “Here comes Professor Thiele,” and the whole crowd rose on tiptoe. His band, the Waterloo Music Society Band, exceptionally precise and powerful, towered above every band that had passed.

      I managed to pop my head out from under a fat lady’s arm and — pow! There he was, Professor Thiele, the legend, baton in hand, his white uniform gleaming, marching before a wall of trombones. That the band was dressed in dark blue made him gleam in white all the more.

      John Mellor, in his biography of Thiele, Music in the Park, says the professor and his family, before they immigrated to Canada, were virtually

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