Occasionally I’ll crowdsource, as it were, a childhood memory. I was born and grew up in Oshawa, Ontario, living there between 1957 and 1976. Other than brief work-related stays from December 1983 to September 1984, and again from June to September 1992, I haven’t lived there since 1976, some 46 years ago. So when I needed help recalling a particular used and rare books dealer, my go-to place for research was the private Facebook group Vintage Oshawa, which has about 19,400 members and describes itself as “a place to post pictures, memorabilia & share tales of Oshawa past (pre-1980).” After all, 19,400 heads might be better than one in this case, I reasoned. And I had success almost four years ago back in May 2018 when I asked in classic Facebook style “who remembers” Rose Bowl Fish and Chips that operated at the corner of Bond and Prince streets? More than 200 members of the group either liked the question or responded with a comment.
How we consolidate, access and sometimes geographically transpose locations in long-term memory is a complex process beyond the ken of my knowledge of neuroscience, but here is what I asked earlier today based on what I suspected to be a real but perhaps flawed memory:
“Does anyone recall a used bookstore on Division Street in Oshawa in the 1970s and 1980s, not far from the old General Motors North Plant? Brown brick, I think, like other buildings in the neighbourhood. A bit dingy in terms of lighting inside but not without its charms. I think the name might have started with the letter M, but it was all quite a while ago. Given that we’re talking about 40 or 50 years ago, it’s also possible I’ve conflated the idea of a bookstore on Division Street in the area of the GM North Plant with a health food/Asian vegetable market store in that location and the bookstore was on the west side of Simcoe Street South, near John Street East, not far south of a Pepi’s Pizza location on that corner. I still have fond, though distant memories of my friend Mike Byrne, working there as a cook in high school circa 1973-74, and wrangling his friends the odd late-night pie … the pepperoni pizza … greasy, yes, sure. But superb also.
The mention of Pepi’s Pizza was perhaps not essential to answering the question, given the focus is on a bookstore and Asian grocery store, but mentioning a favourite childhood eatery in Oshawa, be it Pepi’s or Mother’s Pizza Parlour and Spaghetti House, or perhaps Red Barn or Burger Chef, always is a good memory prompt for any even tangentially related story I’ve found as a writer.
So what did I learn today from folks in Vintage Oshawa? When I said, I think the name might have started with the letter M,” turns out I was correct as dozens of readers spelled it out for me as Morgan Self, which I instantly knew as correct. But commenters went well beyond that in their help. Apparently, there were two Morgan Selfs who were proprietors of their … err … self-named bookstore, father and son. And they lived on Shakespeare Avenue another commenter noted (their bookstore was at 84 Simcoe St. S.) Now, I confess my fact-checking skills as a blogger aren’t perhaps as well-honed as they had to be as a pre-Google and pre-Wikipedia copy editor on the rim at daily newspapers, but I just had to Google Shakespeare Avenue to make sure this was by the book and there was such a street in Oshawa (I didn’t recall it) and I wasn’t being audaciously pranked on social media prior to April 1. Turns out to be legit. There is such a street. Whether the book-selling Selfs lived on it would take more verification for a newspaper back in the day, but for us present-day bloggers, not so much. Editors in their day were the last-line-of-defence fact checkers. When you wear a writer’s hat, you are a storyteller and there’s an admonition that a writer should never let the facts stand in the way of a good story. This was true even before 2017 when Sean Spicer came along and elevated the notion to high principle. That said, the photograph accompanying this post is admittedly for illustration purposes only. It is not the inside of the long-gone Morgan Self bookstore in Oshawa. At least I think it’s not.
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