The Day Inky Went to School

Inky was a mutt with a lot of border collie in him.

Inky was a pretty imaginative dog. For instance, to appease his herding instinct, he chased cars on our one way street. When he had nothing else to do, he would go to the corner of Grove and Bruce, pick a car, then run next to the front fender barking until he made the car pull over. Then he would cut back to Pine Street, around down the alley to Grove, back to the corner to lurk behind a tree, and then do it again.

In summer, he did not have to do this because he was with me. I’d be 12 or 13. I’d walk or go on my bike to a park or friends’ homes. Didn’t matter where. Inky followed. I might go into a house. He’d sleep somewhere outside until I came out. It wasn’t something to which people gave much thought in the late 1950s.

Lots of kids had their dogs following them. Shawn Ripley had a little terrier named Sugarfoot. If we were playing scrub – a form of softball that could be played as long as you had at least a half dozen players – Sugarfoot, Inky and any other kid’s dog just laid together behind the backstop. I am not sure any of us owned a leash.

Inky and I played in the field by the railroad tracks near our house. I’d say, “Let’s go hunting.” Inky would be out the door, over the four-foot fence, and off to the field where he would hide someplace in the high grass and bushes. When I got there, I’d shout, “I’m going to find you.” I’d search a minute but Inky would come out into the path and run at me, jump up against my shoulders and chest with all four paws, laugh in my face, then he’d go looking for pheasants to roust.

I was home from school at noon one day. Normally, I’d eat lunch at school. That day, when I headed back to school, Inky got out and caught up to me a couple of blocks from my house. I took him home. So he wouldn’t know where I’d gone, I went onto a porch across the road. Jumped from porch to porch for a few houses and then cut through a backyard. My mom let Inky out mid-afternoon.

Mom told me that Inky jumped our fence, found my scent, and followed it through the porches and to the high fenced yard that I had cut through. Inky took off like a shot down to Grove and around the corner.

It was last period that day, I was at a table in art class on the second floor. Inky came into the classroom, trotted up to my table and laid down under my seat. He realized I was doing something, so he would wait, just as he would wait when I was doing something with my friends in a park. 

Somehow, he had found where I was – three blocks west and four blocks south. He must have slipped in when someone opened a door and then found me in the art room up on the second floor.

Mrs. Boyle said, “Is that your dog?” I thought that was a silly question. Could there be any doubt?

I had to leave school early and take Inky home. He seemed to get the idea that he couldn’t be with me in the school. He never came to school again … that I know of.

Lucky Idiot

So, you think this is cold.

In the early 1980s, I worked for the Ministry of Natural Resources at Queen’s Park. (The provincial government in Toronto.) The Ministry was launching a series of public meetings for its 20-year Strategic Land Use Plan. (Did you just say, ‘wow!’ No?)

The high-paid help in the government was so intense about these meetings that the content of posters about provincial goals was not approved until the very last minute. That resulted in the posters not being done in time for any delivery service to get them to Fort Frances for the first public meeting.

Fort Frances is on the Ontario--Minnesota border in an area that was called Mooselvanyia in Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons. I was asked to take the poster boards as luggage to Dryden and drive them to Fort Frances. [At this point, you may like to take a second to go to Google Maps and get directions for Dryden to Fort Francis]

It sounded like fun. I’d never been to Fort Frances and I like seeing new places. I jumped at the opportunity – stupidest thing I ever did.

It was a Saturday. Nordair’s flight landed in Sault Ste. Marie and Thunder Bay before stopping in Dryden. I knew record low temperatures were being recorded through the prairies and Northern Ontario, but I had lived in Ottawa and had learned to accept cold weather, but I was clueless.

When I got off the plane in Dryden, the air was eerily still and heavy. The snow on the runway was solid and cracked like old concrete. Breath hung in the air in front of faces as people tried to talk, but taking a breath was difficult. I felt like my lungs were going paralyzed.

The guy from MNR who met me said no Ministry vehicles would start but a rental agency got a Pontiac station wagon running. He said some pick-up trucks had block heaters and the batteries had been kept inside so they would not freeze. He got a truck started but the wheels were frozen solid. He advised that we not turn the Pontiac off because we might not get it started again. We put the poster boards in the back. The exhaust from its tail pipe laid around our legs like fog in a bad horror movie.

The guy said that the temperature had been as low as -60 F but that it was now -40 something. It was hard to say. Most thermometers didn’t go that low.

I knew my way around Dryden because I had been there one June to work on a forest fire emergency. I went into the town and stopped at the Canadian Tire to buy candles, chocolate bars, an extra scarf to wrap over my head and ears … the kind of thing they tell you to have in case of emergency. The parking lot was a fog. You could see peoples’ heads but not bodies as they moved through the exhaust cloud that kind of swirled but did not blow away. All the cars and trucks were left running.

I drove to the edge of town to take Route 502 south to Fort Francis. Smoke from chimneys ran like a thick rope along roofs, down the side of homes and along the snow for yards before they disbursed. I turned onto 502, past a couple of remote homes and then saw a sign: “No habitation for 180 KMs.”

I kept going – stupid, stupid stupid. The evergreen forest was still. All bright white and dark green. The white crust on the road sprouted a silvery grey crown of smooth ice in the centre. I tried to keep at least two tires on the white part, especially on hills and curves. I drove slowly, often passing areas where the earth fell away, perhaps to a lake or marsh covered by the deep snow below. I thought, ‘if the car fell over a bank, no one would know I was there.” After 15 or 20 minutes, I realized that no car had caught up to me, nor had passed me going the other way. I was the only car, the only person, on the 502.

The Pontiac’s heater worked well. The windshield stayed clear, although the back windows were frosted. I looked at the gas gauge and my heart bounced. It showed all the way full. It stayed that way through the trip, frozen in place, not registering the gas that I was using. I was worried that the rental guy looked at the gauge, thought the car was full. “What if I do not have enough gas to get to Fort Frances?” (By the way, kids. Cell phones had not been invented.)

The drive took all afternoon, but when I got to Fort Frances, I could tell the people who met me and invited me to supper, and put me up at their house because everything was closed because no one could get to work, thought I was an idiot from Toronto. They were right. A very lucky idiot.

The Strap

The first time I got the strap I was seven years old. Even if you agree with giving the strap as punishment at school, I still didn’t deserve it.

It was Fall or early Winter in 1954. I was in Grade 2 in Aberdeen School, London, Ontario. The night before, my Dad took me to a store on Dundas and bought me a new coat. I rarely got things that were brand new, so, that alone would make the coat special. And the fact that my Dad had taken me to buy it would make it special too. But the most special thing was that it was black and yellow with big football patches with slots in the footballs for the pockets and big yellow snaps down the front. Hamilton Tiger Cats colours, my Dad had said. This was the coolest coat ever made.

That morning, I was walking up Hamilton Road toward the back entrance to the school yard. I was just cooking with happiness in my new black and yellow Hamilton Tiger Cats coat with yellow football patches and big yellow snaps. My friends stopped playing marbles when they saw the coat and were watching me when one of them shouted, “Hey, that’s Carrington.”

At Aberdeen, the bell would ring and everyone would come to a stand-still. Then at a second ring, everyone would walk to the place where they lined up to enter the school.

In my exhilaration, I was doing a cartwheel as the bell rung. I stood still afterward and when the second bell sounded, I walked toward the place I would line up. A man’s voice said, “You in the black coat.” It didn’t occur to me that he meant me. I hadn’t done anything wrong. Then the voice again, “You in the black coat.” That wasn’t me, I thought. I had a black and yellow Hamilton Tiger Cats coat with yellow football patches and big yellow snaps. The voice louder, “You. Stop.” I looked. The man was the Vice-Principal, Mr. Thompson, and he was looking at me.

He took me into the school by a different door, and up to the second floor, where I had never been, and into a room with couches and chairs, which I had never seen the likes of in a school. It was pretty scary. Another man was there. The V-P showed the other man the strap. The V-P then had a brief conversation with me about the bells and my cartwheel. Then he strapped me twice, hard, on both hands. It really, really hurt.

I did not cry. He sent me to find my class all by myself. Miss Murphy was our teacher. She looked at me but said nothing. I walked to my seat with my red palms out so classmates could see that I gotten the strap on both hands. Both hands was serious stuff. At recess, I got to describe the strap – more than a foot long, about a quarter inch thick, bumps built into the leather. Boy, I had the coat, I got the strap; was I ever popular that day!

Soon after that, we had a couple of practice teachers in our class. One was the other guy who watched me get the strap.

I got the strap again in Grade 4. It was a rowdy class at Victoria Ave. School in Windsor and Miss Farr was a grumpy old teacher so lots of guys in the class got it that year. The last time I got the strap was the first day of Grade 8. I was a hyper kid. Miss (Helen) Golden took me into the office and brought in a big male teacher to give it to me. Miss Golden got my attention that day and she turned out to be the most marvelous teacher. I had 100 in math, 100 in grammar, 100 in literature, an 89 average overall at the end of Grade 8. The average was pulled down because I nearly flunked spelling.

Here’s the fun part of this story. In the 1970s, I was a reporter with The Windsor Star bureau in Chatham, Ont. When I was interviewing a retiring school board superintendent, he mentioned he started his career in London. I said I started my education at Aberdeen. “Oh, my brother was vice-principal at Aberdeen,” he said. The superintendent’s name was Thompson. I asked if he had taught there. “No, but I was there for practice teaching when I was in teachers college.”

I nearly lost it. I told him about the black and yellow football coat that my Dad had taken me to buy even though we were very poor and I never got new stuff, and the cartwheel that I was starting to do as the bell rung, and getting it on both hands at seven years old. I told him that I did not deserve the strap, and now I know that I got it because his older brother went out to the school yard looking for a kid to strap so he could teach his little brother how to do it.

I asked where his brother was now and was told he had passed away. “Lucky for him,” I said. I’d have liked to pay him a visit.”

November 22, 1963

Until we heard the news, the day Lee Harvey Oswald shot and killed US President John F. Kennedy in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas, was just like any other day at Patterson Collegiate Institute at Goyeau Ave. and Elliot St. E. in Windsor, Ontario.

I was in Grade 10 in the Fall of 1963. Our class had gym (Phys Ed) after lunch period that day. The boys were playing flag football in the yard behind the school. Our teacher, Mr. Dawson, came out in the middle of the period and waved us all over to him. The boys gathered around. Mr. Dawson was a large man, certainly an athlete when he was younger but now wider at the waistline. His hair was going grey. Mr. Dawson didn’t anger when the guys fooled around, so normally there would be some shenanigans but this time the serious expression on Mr. Dawson’s face caused us all to pay attention. He didn’t preface the news, but just said it straight out.

“The President of the United States has been shot,” he said. “I want you to all go inside, change and go straight home.” Everyone did. There was little discussion. I ran home alone as fast as I could.

Looking north in our school’s neighbourhood, we could see the skyscrapers of Detroit. We knew that the United States and Russia were at odds in the cold war. The Cuban Missile Crisis had had us all worried about war just one year previous. We knew the factories of Detroit would be a main target of Russian intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads. I thought those missiles might be in the air and on their way. I thought that my city could be wiped out that day, perhaps that hour, my friends, my parents, my brothers and sisters, my dog, my neighbours, everybody.

I rushed home. My mom was watching the TV, where regular programming had been pre-empted for reports about the hunt for the killer, watching the news footage of the motorcade and the shooting, Jackie reacting, reaching for something that we later learned was a piece of the president’s head, Governor Connolly of Texas also getting shot, the secret service people running from their car and throwing their bodies over the president and his wife, Jackie, shots of the building where the shooter was believed to have been, the report from the hospital. The newscasters were all very upset.

I thought about my grandparents who had recently moved to Windsor from the boonies way up in Waubaushene where they might have been safe from the missiles and atomic bombs but were likely to die with us here. I was thinking, “If the bombs do not get us, we will die slowly from the fallout. Where would we go? Who would be contact? How would we contact them?”

This is why my generation remembers where they were on November 22, 1963. It was a day we thought there was going to be a war and a lot of people were going to die.