Hitchhiking down the road to Edmundston, walking across the water to Madawaska, Maine for a few beer, and camping out in His Honour’s back yard

I have fond memories going back to 1975 of my first long-distance hitchhiking expedition from Oshawa at 18, just after Grade 12, to the Baker Lake and Edmundston areas of New Brunswick, and then walking over the Edmundston-Madawaska Bridge, which opened in 1921, from Des Veterans Promenade, as it is known now (not sure about back then)  or Highway 2 to Bridge Street or US Highway 1 in Madawaska,  just across the Saint John River in Aroostook County, Maine.

 

I think there was something about a girl in a bar in Madawaska (I know, sounds a bit like the opening salvo of a country-and-western song; I believe the legal drinking age may have been 18 in Maine at the time) and me later sleeping in front of either Edmundston City Hall, or the Edmundston Police Force station (I’ve forgotten which, but the building was downtown, near the old S.M.T. (Eastern) Limited bus station, I think, in those days).

 

Remarkably, I only had a summer-weight sleeping bag and packsack (and notably no tent) in late June in the Maritimes.

 

Remarkably, no one either disturbed me or arrested me.

 

My next stop would be camping out with the same gear in  Charlottetown in the back yard of the Government House of Prince Edward Island, often referred to as Fanningbank, where I was again neither disturbed or arrested, albeit I don’t recall then Lt.-Gov. Gordon Bennett inviting me in for some breakfast either.

 

A few days later, my sleeping back and I wound up camping out for the night atop some embankment, surrounded by cedar trees, I believe, in Truro, Nova Scotia. When I woke up the next morning my sleeping bag and I had descended about 30 yards down the embankment during the night, while my packsack was still back at top, marking where we had started out.

 

One of my last stops was  Channel-Port aux Basques, Newfoundland, where I discovered endless fog and Pizza Delight, which had been founded seven years earlier in 1968 in Shediac, New Brunswick. While it would be another 24 years or so, Chez Camille Take-Out on Chemin Acadie in Cap-Pelé, about 15 miles east of Shediac, and also on the Northumberland Strait, would become my favourite fried clams joint anywhere, with John’s Lunch on Pleasant Street in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, running a close second. Now if I could only make it back to check out the Shediac Lobster Festival!

All in all, this admittedly was not a particularly well-thought out adventure at the age of 18, but I was fortuitous in more ways than one. Along with not being disturbed or arrested, it didn’t’ rain for the 11 or so nights I spent under the starry Atlantic summer night sky, sans tent, and I wasn’t unduly tormented by mosquitoes or blackflies, both of which, I suspect, are not unknown to inhabit the Maritimes that time of year. 

Hitchhiking, at least in much of North America, is something of a lost travel adventure art that more or less disappeared around the time of my mid-1970’s trek to the Maritimes (with the odd exception such as Globe and Mail writer John Stackhouse’s insightful Notes from the Road cross-Canada series in the Summer of 2000.) Of course, fear reigns supreme now and no one is going to pick you up, right? Well, maybe not. About a dozen years ago now, and more than 30 years after my Maritimes saga, I did a fair bit of hitchhiking again in Ontario, down in Prince Edward County on Lake Ontario, or simply “The County,” as it is known to locals.If you wanted to meet some interesting County characters and hear some down-home stories, all you had to do was stick your thumb out. I did it many a time on the Wellington-Bloomfield-Picton routeOne Sunday morning a man picked me up in Wellington and drove me to Picton, all the while telling me stories about what he considered to be the two worst winters in the County in his experience – 1946 and 1977. In ’46, he was in school and the snow was so deep, he said, you could touch overhead telephone lines (not that it was advisable to do so) walking on top of snowbanks. But ’77 was even worse, he said, with the County briefly loosing a snow plow in Lake Ontario near Wellington; the military having to bring their big blowers out from CFS Mountain View to clear some areas; a couple of kids with their dad’s car hitting a snowbank on the way home from school in a blizzard and being stranded for several days in Bloomfield. In both 1946 and 1977, my driver said, the County was cut off from the mainland for five days straight. Then passing through Bloomfield, he told me about an-all-but abandoned house on the outskirts of the village toward Picton. Well, not quite abandoned. While there were no longer human inhabitants, the elderly woman who owned it, with some help from relatives, he said, still returned most every afternoon from her home nearby in the village to feed her birds, which still lived there on Highway 33.

Another time, I was picked up by a grandmother and her grandson while I was hitchhiking. Her family home had been in Bloomfield for 130 years. But she’d also travelled far and wide before her path took her back to the County. While she was well-known for many things, including being the spouse of a well-known-in-his-own-right Hallowell politician, less well known perhaps was the true fact that she gave Hollywood screen legend Clark Gable his last x-ray in Los Angeles in 1960.

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A taste for yesterday: Mother’s Pizza and Pepi’s Pizza

Readers know that it’s not unheard of for me to sing the praises of some long-forgotten (by most anyway) defunct fast-food restaurant I have known, or present day greasy spoon. A reference to fried clams from the Northumberland Strait at Chez Camille’s in Cap Pelé, New Brunswick made it into the very first Latitude 55 column I wrote for the Thompson Citizen on July 25, 2007.

I got thinking about defunct fast-food restaurants I have known earlier this year when I stumbled on a webpage called “Share Your Memories – Oshawa’s Municipal Heritage Committee” at: http://www.heritageoshawa.ca/share_your_memories.php#post, which is dedicated to “Keeping Oshawa’s Heritage Alive.”. The page has apparently existed since Friday, Dec. 22, 2006, so I guess stumbled is the right word to describe me landing on it some seven and a bit years later.

What I noticed is how many of the contributors talked about bygone Oshawa restaurants and their fond food memories of yesteryear. On Dec. 22, 2010 – coincidentally four years to the day after “Share Your Memories” went up online – I wrote a Soundings column in the Thompson Citizen headlined, “Red Barn, Big Barney and the Barnbuster,” extolling the culinary wonders of the Red Barn, a fast-food restaurant chain founded in 1962 in Springfield, Ohio by Don Six, Jim Kirst and Martin Levine. Red Barn peaked in its heyday in the early 1970s with more than 400 restaurant locations in 22 states, as well as locations in Canada, and even a dozen in and around Melbourne, Australia.

On Feb. 20, 2013, I wrote a column ostensibly about my two university roommates, but also in part about driving a Plymouth Duster to deliver for Mother’s Pizza Simcoe North for $2.65 per hour – plus tips. Mother’s was an iconic Canadian pizza parlour chain from the 1970s – with its swinging parlour-style doors, Tiffany lamps, antique-style chairs, red-and-white checked gingham tablecloths, black-and-white short silent movies shown on a screen for patrons waiting for their meal to enjoy, root beer floats and pizzas served on silver-coloured metal pedestal stands.

I’m happy to say that in 2008, Brian Alger acquired the then-expired trademark to Mother’s Pizza – one of his favourite childhood brands – and along with another entrepreneur, Geeve Sandhu, re-opened April 1, 2013 at 701 Queenston Rd. in Hamilton, Ont. Mother’s Pizza was founded in 1970 by three partners, Grey Sisson, Ken Fowler and Pasquale Marra, and got its start in the Westdale Village area of Steeltown. The chain eventually grew to about 120 locations in Canada, the United States and England.

“I have fond memories of downtown too with the lunch counters at Karn Drugs and Kresge’s. You could get a cheese sandwich and a glass of milk without it being enough food for two meals and costing $12,” Andrew McCarnan wrote on Oshawa’s “Share Your Memories” webpage on March 27, 2011.

That must have trigged thoughts of food among the site’s readers because a few days later on April 1, 2011, a poster known as doraryan@cogeco.ca wrote, “I was born and grew up in Oshawa. One of my memories as a child was going to the Oshawa Bakery after church on Sundays to get their warm rye bread. Does anyone know if their rye bread recipe is still in use and can you still get their bread?”

Clearly, food, especially not particularly fancy fast-food, resonates for us working stiffs from Canada’s Motor City. The closer I looked, the more I realized many, if not most commenters, had at some point mentioned a bygone restaurant or food favourite in their posting. Vince Robichaud on Sept. 29, 2012 wrote, “I don’t know if anybody remembers Mike’s French fry truck that drove around selling fries. The truck was a 1948 Dodge Fargo. The best fries in town, back in the 60s.”

In keeping with the spirit of the thing, my own comment Feb. 3 reads, “Pepi’s Pizza, eh? Simcoe and John streets. I had a friend who worked there circa 1973-74. I still have fond memories of the pepperoni pizza … greasy, yes, sure. But superb also.”

Pepi’s Pizza restaurant locations in Oshawa were owned by the Firmi family.  Brothers Lewis and Ron Firmi opened the doors of Pepi’s Pizza, still famous for its handmade dough, at the corner of Water and Weber streets in Kitchener in 1962.

The Record, Kitchener’s daily newspaper, reported on Dec. 20, 2014 (https://www.therecord.com/shopping-story/5216482-history-of-pepi-s-pizza-kitchener/): “Most people expected the restaurant to fail soon after it opened.  They thought the brothers were crazy, that pizza would never catch on.  The brothers were determined to prove people wrong and to encourage customers to give it a try. They offered incredible specials, such as all you can eat pizza on Friday nights for a dollar.

Rhonda Firmi, the daughter of one of Pepi’s founders, and her husband John Guy, have been operating the remaining three Kitchener Pepi’s Pizza locations for more than a decade.

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