The challenge of being here now and the illusion of ‘Golden Years’ living

I was deeply touched yesterday by two old friends – Paul Mason and Ron Graham – and the insights they shared on Facebook on Paul’s timeline about the reality of aging parents and the choices we all will or have faced as grown sons and daughters in that regard. My friendships with Ron and Paul dates back to the mid-1970s at Trent University in Peterborough, Ont. Almost 50 years on, I still cherish their wisdom and empathy – as well as the ongoing and civil religious debates between us.

As Paul writes, “There’s something unnatural about a community made up predominantly of old people. Yes, there are plenty of young and middle-aged staff, several of whom I’ve come to know and like very much, but everywhere one looks there’s evidence of ill-health and decrepitude. Visiting a seniors’ residence swiftly dispels any illusions one might have about the ‘golden years.’”

At some level, I agree. I, too, think it deeply unnatural that old people live together in community alone. Unless perhaps you don’t have that option.  The Northern Spirit Manor Personal Care Home in Thompson, Manitoba opened months before I arrived here in 2007, built in no small part through volunteer community fundraising. Now, grandparents, and other elders, can remain in the community, closer to their children and grandchildren, an unbroken circle. That matters to us here deeply.

Still, I get the servicing model for older folks, both here and in the south, especially in terms of medical needs, that makes a facility such as where Paul’s mom now resides a reasonable choice. And I also understand there are often difficult, if not near impossible, choices involved. In the Summer of 1989 I was married to Heather, who was accepted into the PhD program in cultural anthropology at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina for September of that year. Heather has gone on to become an associate professor in women’s studies and cultural anthropology at the University of Illinois Springfield.

My parents had moved to Bridgenorth, Ontario in 1980 while we were living in Boston. My mother died in 1986 after a year-long illness. While she spent that year in and out of hospital, she continued to live at home in their apartment in Bridgenorth, just north of Peterborough on Chemong Lake. My father’s homecare efforts, while supported by provincial homecare staff and doctors, still to my mind, became Herculean. My dad’s idea of cooking, up to that point, had been summer barbecuing, which he was quite skilled at. Overnight, quite literally, he took over the marital indoor domestic cooking in the kitchen, as well as cleaning and laundry chores without complaint, and also attending to my mother’s personal needs, while in mixed health at best himself. There was absolutely nothing in my dad’s background up to that point that would have suggested to me he could rise to the occasion such as that. He wasn’t a saint or a martyr, but his unexpected and surprising example still serves as a lodestar pointing to the meaning of unconditional love in my eyes. He continued to live in the apartment in Bridgenorth after my mother died as a widower for three years from 1986 until 1989.

By 1983, we were living in Canada again, and Heather began a master’s program at the University of Western Ontario in London. She spent from September 1983 to August 1984 in London, and then followed me to Toronto and Peterborough for the next five years from 1984 to 1989, as I spent most of the early years of my journalism career at Ontario Lawyers Weekly and the Peterborough Examiner, after starting at The Standard-Freeholder in Cornwall, Ont. in June 1983. We agreed in March 1985, when we moved back to Peterborough, having spent several years there earlier as undergraduates at Trent University, the next move would be where Heather wanted to be, wherever that might be. My dad and Heather got along well. My parents treated her as a daughter, and she was fond of both of them. In fact, in August 1987, my dad was planning a trip to Indiana to visit my Uncle Bob and Aunt Joan. I was working, and Heather’s thesis defence coincided with my dad’s trip, so he drove her to UWO in London, where she showed him all around campus for a day before he continued his journey to Indiana. I chuckled later when he also told me he had got his first VISA card shortly before in 1987 for gas and hotels on the trip, as gas/oil company cards, which he did have a few of, were starting to disappear by the late 1980s.

Fast-forward two years from 1987 to 1989. My dad’s health had declined some, but he was still living in his apartment in Bridgenorth and driving, Heather, meanwhile was on the cusp of starting at Duke in North Carolina. And I was working still at the Peterborough Examiner, faced with the likely choice of being near my spouse, or my father, who was still living at home, but showing signs he might need to move to a retirement home sooner than later. Yet, his decline wasn’t linear, although he was starting to spend more time in hospital by the Spring of 1989; a few days here, a few days there. While he was in hospital for his 70th birthday on July 13, 1989, he was well enough for to go out for a birthday dinner at the Ponderosa Steakhouse on Chemong Road in Peterborough on a day pass. My dad was a Ponderosa aficionado (along with Dixie Lee Fried Chicken). But there were warning bells. Around the same time, he asked for my help for the first-time in his life writing a cheque, in this case to pay his Ontario Hydro Bill.

He died exactly a month later on Aug. 13, 1989. I gave my two weeks notice at the Peterborough Examiner and moved to North Carolina with Heather. I returned to work at the Peterborough Examiner as a reporter in the old Hunter Street second-floor newsroom almost eight years later in April 1997. Jack Marchen was still sitting directly across from me and Phil Tyson beside me.

Back in 1989, Heather and I had spent the summer looking around Peterborough and surrounding area for a possible retirement home for my dad to move to, although we hadn’t reached the point of broaching the subject with him. All of this was a very long time ago (I was 32 years old), but I have two still distinct memories. One is of being overwhelmingly depressed by the cumulative effect of visiting such facilities. The other is a particular memory, although which retirement home it was, mercifully escapes me 34 years later. What I do remember with clarity is seeing a group of retirement home residents at a place Heather and I were checking out, sitting in their wheelchairs in eerie silence, eyes glued to the overhead communal television set. Heather and I used to say afterward, only half-jokingly, that my dad had known when to make his exit.

My own thoughts on aging gracefully, aging well, wherever you may live, might be summarized thusly: If you can, be mellow, be grateful. Much easier said than done, I know from personal experience, if you are sick or otherwise in pain.

First, some words on mellowing with age: As a young reporter, and even much later as an editor, I several times came very close to quitting newspaper jobs as a matter of principle over some story, editorial or column dispute with my bosses. While I still think there are times when that is the only appropriate and ethical thing to do, I have come to realize they are probably few and far between, and ego and arrogance were bigger factors driving my soapbox fury than I realized at the time. 

My gratitude has also increased with age. Reality can be sobering. I have two first cousins who lost their husbands last year and are now widows. In the Knights of Columbus, our fraternal Latin motto is “tempus fugit, memento mori,” which translates in English to “time flies, remember death.” When I was tempted to think of counting a cash drawer at the hotel (regularly) for seven years until last summer, or at the university college library (occasionally) still, as tedious tasks, I usually catch myself and think something to the effect of thank God that I am still blessed with the cognitive skills (aided by a pocket calculator) to count the cash. The late Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh, who died in January 2022 at the age of 95, had many useful things to say over many decades of teaching on mindfulness and seemingly ordinary and mundane tasks. If you’re still able to look them up, count yourself fortunate.

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We haven’t had that spirit here since 1984: The zeitgeist of self improvement and The Learning Annex

The Learning Annex is an American education company based in New York City. It was founded in 1980 by Bill Zanker in his New York City studio apartment with a $5,000 investment.

It is hard to exactly recapture the zeitgeist of that era, but in 1984, I moved to The Bain Apartments Co-operative Inc., the oldest housing co-op in Toronto, located at 100 Bain Ave. in the Riverdale area of Toronto, where it provides affordable housing to mixed income people.  Our neighbourhood was a rectangle formed, give or take a few blocks, by Broadview Avenue in the west, Danforth Avenue in the north, Withrow Park in the east, and Gerrard Street in the south.  My good friend, Ron Graham, from university days a few years earlier at Trent University, who has lived in Vancouver for more than three decades now, lived around the corner on Logan Avenue near Withrow Park at the time.

It is easy to poke fun at Toronto’s sense of self-importance; we did it more than 40 years ago. But truth be told, the Riverdale, Broadview/Danforth area was one of the most beautiful areas I’ve lived in anywhere, including lots of small cities and towns in Canada and the United States, as well as larger cities such as Ottawa, Halifax, Boston, and Durham, North Carolina.

In 1984, I was writing for Ontario Lawyers Weekly, and perhaps as close as I’d ever come to being a “young urban professional,” albeit minus the money and upward-mobility, as this was still journalism after all.

A big part of the mid-1980s’ zeitgeist was self improvement: mind, body and soul. The Learning Annex, with its ubiquitous street boxes, filled an important niche, providing continuing adult education for all kinds of general interest and hobby courses and workshops, often in the evening or over a two-day weekend. If you wanted to learn about tax planning strategies or how to deal with stress, for instance, The Learning Annex likely had a seminar on the subject. While I took several offerings in the autumn of 1984, the one I recall best was a bicycle repair workshop weekend at a bike shop, the name of which I’ve long forgotten, on King Street. I think I still recall it best because I was a pretty unlikely participant. I have been an avid cyclist for most of my life; avid bike repair guy, not so much. From 2007 to 2014, Ian Graham, then sports editor of the Thompson Citizen (now editor), was my go-to-bike repair guy. I’d grab a few Allen keys at home, and deliver my bicycle to the newspaper’s abandoned pressroom at the back of the building on Commercial Place for Ian to work his magic in about 30 seconds on my latest handlebar fiasco. These days, my bike gets dropped off at Doug’s Source for Sports as needed.

Zeitgeists change, of course. While The Learning Annex still exists as a shell of its former self in some larger American cities, it decamped from Toronto some 15 years ago in 2007.

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Killer comets, killer asteroids: Make my day, planet-killers

Nudge it, nuke it, tug it with a gravity tractor, or slow it down with some concentrated sunlight. Make my day, planet-killers.

Those are your choices if a planet-killing comet or asteroid is en route to rather imminently collide with Planet Earth. Asteroid PZ39 shot by the Earth from a distance of more than 3.58 million miles (5.77 million kilometres) earlier this month. It flew towards us at speeds of more than 35,500 mph (57,240 km/h), approaching  just after 11 a.m. GMT two weeks ago on Saturday, Feb 15.

A near-miss? “A little over 9x the distance of the earth to the moon,” Ron Graham helpfully explained. “A near miss is, in fact, an impact,” Kevin Hopton added

Both asteroids and comets are bad to have coming toward you, but comets are worse apparently simply because they can be travelling up to three times faster than Near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) relative to Earth at the time of impact. The energy released by a cosmic collision increases as the square of the incoming object’s speed, so a comet could pack nine times more destructive power than an asteroid of the same mass. But both are considered to be a potentially hazardous object (PHO).

“It would be a much bigger explosion, a much bigger crater, much more damage,” (https://www.space.com/26264-asteroids-comets-earth-impact-risks.html) impact expert Mark Boslough, of Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, said in June 2104.

If Boslough says it is so, that’s good enough for me. After all he is the author of this now famous account, dated Dec. 25, 1998, which I wrote approvingly of in a post on Nov. 9, 2014 headlined “‘Edward Baker:’ Thompson, Manitoba’s microwaved telephone company night watchman 1998 urban legend owes its fame to real-life American scientist and a Denver newsman” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/11/09/edward-baker-thompson-manitoba-s-microwaved-telephone-company-night-watchman-1998-urban-legend-owes-its-fame-to-real-life-american-scientist-and-a-denver-newsman/)

Wrote Boslough back in 1998:

“Telephone relay company night watchman Edward Baker, 31, was killed early Christmas morning by excessive microwave radiation exposure. He was apparently attempting to keep warm next to a telecommunications feedhorn.

“Baker had been suspended on a safety violation once last year, according to Northern Manitoba Signal Relay spokesperson Tanya Cooke. She noted that Baker’s earlier infraction was for defeating a safety shutoff switch and entering a restricted maintenance catwalk in order to stand in front of the microwave dish. He had told coworkers that it was the only way he could stay warm during his twelve-hour shift at the station, where winter temperatures often dip to forty below zero.

“Microwaves can heat water molecules within human tissue in the same way that they heat food in microwave ovens. For his Christmas shift, Baker reportedly brought a twelve pack of beer and a plastic lawn chair, which he positioned directly in line with the strongest microwave beam. Baker had not been told about a tenfold boost in microwave power planned that night to handle the anticipated increase in holiday long-distance calling traffic.

“Baker’s body was discovered by the daytime watchman, John Burns, who was greeted by an odor he mistook for a Christmas roast he thought Baker must have prepared as a surprise. Burns also reported to NMSR company officials that Baker’s unfinished beers had exploded.”

The clues, of course, to the fabricated nature of the story are contained in the names of the participants: the victim, “Baker”; his discoverer, “Burns”; and the spokeswoman, “Cooke.”

Boslough attached his microwaved worker offering to a then-current list of Darwin Award stories for 1998, declared his entry to be that year’s winner, sent it out to a few friends and sat back and watched the inevitable unfold, as veteran Denver Post editor and columnist Dick Kreck was taken in by the hoax, publishing it as the authentic 1998 Darwin Award winner. It seems, at some level, we all want to believe.

Certainly, Kreck, who retired from the paper in June 2007, was no rookie. Born in San Francisco in 1941, Kreck grew up in Glendale, California. After earning a bachelor’s degree in journalism from San Francisco State College, he worked as a reporter and copy editor at the San Francisco Examiner and the Los Angeles Times. He joined The Denver Post in 1968 and held various jobs, writing a city column for 18 years and covering television and radio. His books include Colorado’s Scenic Railroads; Denver in Flames; Murder at the Brown Palace; Anton Woode: The Boy Murderer ; and Smaldone: The Untold Story of an American Crime Family.

Boslough wrote to Kreck in 1999:

“Dear Mr. Kreck:

“Thank you so much for reprinting my Darwin Award hoax in the Denver Post.

“Like you, I am a skeptic and have always very suspicious of these stories. However, I am also a scientist so I decided to do a little experiment. I made up the most outrageous and twisted death-by-stupidity tale I could imagine. I made sure that all the characters in the story had names (Mr. Baker, Mr. Burns, Ms. Cooke) that would give my joke away to any wary reader. I set the story in a location that allowed the company “Northern Manitoba Signal Relay” to have the same acronym as New Mexicans for Science and Reason, our local version of Boulder-based Rocky Mountain Skeptics.

“I took a list of Darwin Awards that somebody sent me and attached my own creation, which I also declared to be this year’s winner. I turned it loose by e-mailing it to a few out-of-state friends on New Year’s Day. Seeing it this week in the Post is a bit like getting a response to a note in a bottle eight months after throwing it into the ocean. It is also a good lesson in why we should all be skeptical of what we see on the Internet … not to mention what we read in the newspaper!

“By the way, NMSR president Dave Thomas – a recent guest speaker at Rocky Mountain Skeptics – is the only person who discovered the hoax and correctly attributed it to me. He had searched for “NMSR” under Deja News and recognized my brand of humor when his search turned up my story.

“Best regards,

“Mark Boslough”

There are, of course, lot of people besides Boslough whose job it is to think about such things on both a theoretical and practical basis. I’m not one of them.

Rafi Letzter, a staff writer for New York-based Live Science wrote earlier this month:

“If a giant object looks like it’s going to slam into Earth, humanity has a few options: Hammer it with a spacecraft hard enough to knock it off course, blast it with nuclear weapons, tug on it with a gravity tractor, or even slow it down using concentrated sunlight ” (https://www.livescience.com/how-to-stop-asteroid-from-hitting-earth.html)

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers have come up with an 18-page guide titled “Optimization and decision-making framework for multi-staged asteroid deflection campaigns under epistemic uncertainties” (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0094576519313700?via%3Dihub), also published earlier this month, in the journal Acta Astronautica, to help, in Letzter’s words, “future asteroid deflectors.”

For those taking the longish catastrophic view, rather than the shortish catastrophic view, here’s something to consider:

“If an approaching asteroid were detected early enough,” the  National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) says, “it could be possible to divert its path using the gravity of a spacecraft (https://www.nasa.gov/content/asteroid-grand-challenge/mitigate/gravity-tractor). “Instead of sending an impactor to ram into an approaching object, a gravity tractor device would fly alongside the asteroid for a long period of time (years to decades) and slowly pull it out of Earth’s path.

Gravity tractors would be most likely to work on any shape or composition of approaching asteroid, even if it were just a pile of rubble. However, gravity tractors might not be effective for the largest asteroids of over 500 meters in diameter which might be the greatest threat to Earth. Gravity tractors offer the greatest control and could perhaps even divert an approaching asteroid to other locations in space where people could theoretically use them for research or commercial purposes. However, these techniques have never been tried and would require decades for building, launching, and carrying out a mitigation mission.”

On March 26, 1997, police in Rancho Santa Fe, California discovered the bodies of 39 members of Heaven’s Gate, an American UFO religious millenarian celibate cult based in San Diego, founded in 1974 and led by Marshall Herff Applewhite and Bonnie Lu Trousdale Nettles. The 39 cult members who died almost 23 years ago took phenobarbital mixed with apple sauce and washed it all down with vodka. Additionally, they secured plastic bags around their heads after ingesting the mix to induce asphyxiation. Authorities found the dead lying neatly in their own bunk beds, faces and torsos covered by a square purple cloth. Each member carried a five-dollar bill and three quarters in their pockets: the five dollar bill was to cover vagrancy fines while members were out on jobs, while the quarters were to make phone calls. All 39 were dressed in identical black shirts and sweat pants, brand new black-and-white Nike Decades athletic shoes, and armband patches reading “Heaven’s Gate Away Team.” Among the dead was Thomas Nichols, brother of actress Nichelle Nichols,  best known for her role as Uhura in the original Star Trek television series.

They had participated in the mass suicide in order to reach what they believed was an extraterrestrial spacecraft following Comet Hale-Bopp, as it approached Earth. They believed an alien spaceship hiding in the tail of a speeding comet was coming to collect their souls.

Earth-threatening asteroids might well be movie or book genres of their own. On the movie side, there are such classics as American science fiction disaster film classic Armageddon from 1998, depicting Bruce Willis et al. saving the Earth. The movie has Harry Stamper (Willis) and his oil rig crew (who are mostly losers who have done time in jail) being hired by NASA as astronauts. Their goal is to drill into an asteroid the size of Texas and deploy a bomb to break it into pieces, before the asteroid hits the Earth.

One of my favourite cover versions of the many that have been done over the years of the song Leaving on a Jet Plane is by Winnipeg’s Chantal Kreviazuk from Armageddon, produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, and featuring a heartfelt, if somewhat off-key, opening rendition to the song by Ben Affleck from the movie, leading to the delightful mission control quip: “So, Truman, this is who you found to save the planet.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbt2G71uT1M&feature=share&fbclid=IwAR1KgfVHJxTwyayZ-pLStZ2H0RSeinmKhRqhPPGxR3L2HcIFj6j8vXbdj5s).

On the book side, I’m partial to Lucifer’s Hammer by Jerry Pournrelle and Larry Niven. I read the novel an early paperback edition shortly after it was published in 1977, while I was a student at Trent University on a late fall three-hour one-way trip on and old Voyageur Colonial Bus down Highway 7 and back from Peterborough to Ottawa and back on weekend trip. A great page-tuner for a cold late autumn bus ride.

This is also around the time Pournelle, an American polymath: scientist in the area of operations research and human factors research, as well as noted science fiction writer, essayist, journalist, and one of the first bloggers (https://io9.gizmodo.com/rip-jerry-pournelle-a-tireless-ambassador-for-the-futu-1803143871) became perhaps the first writer from any genre to sit and compose at a typewriter connected to a television screen, forerunner of today’s desktop computer, to compose, edit, and revise there, and then to send copy to his publisher.  Jerry Pournelle, early adopter, died in September 2017 at the age of 84.

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Friends, Catholics and accidents of geography: Here we are at 55.7433° N latitude and, yes, it’s been a long and sometimes strange but always interesting trip

Photos courtesy of Ken Bodnar, My OCHS, Dave Beirness and Jeanette Kimball

Many people, myself included, subscribe to the notion that even if you haven’t seen a childhood or teenage friend for decades, you can both pick up pretty much where you left off 10, 20, 30, or even 40 years ago. That’s how comprehensive the comfort zone is between you.

I have a handful of friends, mainly from my days growing up in Oshawa in the 1960s and 1970s that fall into that category. It’s quite a small list. In most cases I went to school with them at some point, although many of my classmates I did lose touch with after high school. In fact, it wasn’t until I got an e-mail from Ken Bodnar June 30 that I learned Kathleen Taylor, a classmate all through school from St. Christopher Separate Elementary School on Annapolis Avenue to Oshawa Catholic High School on Stevenson Road North, had just been appointed a member of the Order of Canada.

Taylor, 58, is the chair of the board of RBC and the former president and chief executive officer of Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts in Toronto. Thank goodness for Ken or I’d have no idea probably about Kathleen’s recent honour. Congratulations, Katie!

Ken Bodnar’s blog called My OCHS at http://myochs.blogspot.ca/ is the first and last word on our high school days and years. Ken has it all: history, both official and unofficial, trivia, the arcane, milestones, biographical sketches and old photos from his own archive of old negatives, yearbooks and other sources. Ken is the unofficial archivist for all things relating to St. Joseph’s High School, Oshawa Catholic High School, or Monsignor Paul Dwyer Catholic High School, as students now call its hallowed halls.

In a new study published in April in the journal Royal Society Open Science in London, the authors set out to explore “the way life history influences human sociality and the way social networks are structured.

“Our results indicate that these aspects of human behaviour are strongly related to age and gender such that younger individuals have more contacts and, among them, males more than females.

“However, the rate of decrease in the number of contacts with age differs between males and females, such that there is a reversal in the number of contacts around the late 30s. We suggest that this pattern can be attributed to the difference in reproductive investments that are made by the two sexes. We analyse the inequality in social investment patterns and suggest that the age – and gender-related differences we find reflect the constraints imposed by reproduction in a context where time (a form of social capital) is limited.”

“The number of friends a person has can be difficult to quantify, especially when social media has served to widen the definition of ‘friend,’” observed freelance reporter Elsa Vulliamy in a May 23 piece on the study in the London-based Independent, “but these scientists stuck to the basics – they measured how many people subjects contacted via telephone.

“The study shows that both men and women continue to make more and more friends until the age of 25, when the numbers begin falling rapidly and continue to fall throughout the rest of a person’s life,” wrote Vulliamy.

“Researchers found that the average 25-year-old man contacts around 19 different people per month, where 25-year-old women contacted an average of around 17.5 people.

“By the age of 39, however, men and woman are calling an average of only 12 and 15 people per month respectively.

“The rapid decline in the number of people being contacted by both men and women comes to a stop around the age of 80, where the numbers plateau at around eight for women and six for men.”

What I have observed personally is that after my mid-20s, most of my new friends over the years have tended to be professionally or work connected, directly or indirectly. Or at least travel in the same social circles. Sure there are some exceptions to that observation, but not many.

On the other hand, I would venture to say most of my friends up to my mid-20s, when I began working as a daily newspaper reporter, were of greater variety – eventually – in terms of occupational backgrounds. That may well be because none of them really had an occupation, unless playing road hockey or house league baseball counts. Mind you, we did get a few chances to rub shoulders, however, briefly through road hockey and baseball with greatness, even if their greatness was just starting to shine through when we were kids.

I didn’t get to skate with Bobby Orr, hockey’s greatest defenceman. But I did get to play a bit of road hockey with him. My occasional contact with Orr between 1964 and 1966 was limited to some road hockey shinny in our Oshawa neighbourhood.

Orr, from Parry Sound, Ontario, was playing OHA Major Junior A Hockey then for the Oshawa Generals, a farm team of the NHL Boston Bruins. He was between 16 and 18 then. Bobby boarded with a family on Walmer Road, as did Wayne Cashman, the hardworking right-winger, who would go onto captain the Boston Bruins.

Sometimes they’d let us younger kids, who were seven to nine, join in. Bobby and Wayne were like that.

Hockey was our lives. Every Saturday meant a dinner of steak and fried onions at 4 p.m. After dinner it was off to mass at St. Gregory’s for 5 p.m., and back home again only to be knocking on Mike Byrne’s door at 6 p.m. to “take shots” with him on net. Mike shot left. I used a right-handed Hespeler. I am quite convinced that childhood friendships like I had with Mike Byrne are largely accidents of geography, as it were. There is a common saying that while you can’t choose your family, you can choose your friends. Maybe. Sort of. At least after you’re old enough mid-high school to get a driver’s licence or later when you’re off at college or university. But the pool or circle you are going to choose friends from when you are say between six and 15 is going to be based largely on geographic proximity to where your family lives, likely within walking distance. Accidents of geography. Sure you can make choices within that pool or circle; not everyone within it is going to be your friend, but what friends you do have as a kid are going to, for the most part, come from within it.

In 1972, Mike Byrne and I were both 15 and coached a Nipigon Park house league baseball team, which included future Winnipeg Jets’ hockey legend Dale Hawerchuk, then nine-years-old. Unlike road hockey, where we had been the youngsters hanging out with Orr and Cashman, in baseball the reverse age factor was in effect for baseball. We were the old guys. The coaches.

Last Thursday, I saw my old friend Dave Beirness, from Oshawa. He was in Winnipeg for a few days and rented a car and made the 750-kilometre drive up Highway 6 to Thompson for an overnight visit. I’ve known Dave since about 1974.

In the spring of 1976 we both drove white company-owned Plymouth Dusters delivering pizzas for Mother’s Pizza Simcoe North in Oshawa for $2.65 per hour plus tips. Those beasts could just fly! What pizza company delivers in that cool a car today? Or for that matter, what pizza company has a fleet of staff delivery vehicles of any kind? “I’ve always said it was the best pizza restaurant with good food!” Dave said in an e-mail back in 2013. “I even loved working for them, even if I had to drive a Plymouth Duster!!!”

You can imagine how pleased we both were then to read a few years ago, around the same we re-connected in 2013 actually, that the iconic Canadian pizza parlour chain from the 1970s – with its swinging parlor-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, was to be reopened by two local entrepreneurs, Brian Alger and Geeve Sandhu, in April on Queenston Road in Hamilton, Ontario. By all accounts they are doing well with the venture.

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.

Sisson, Fowler and Marra sold their stake in Mother’s Pizza in the mid-1980s, after taking the company public. In 1986 there was a leveraged buyout and Jerry White became chief executive officer. He sold franchises to a group of Toronto Blue Jays players but revenue began to plummet.

Little Caesars bought some assets of the Mother’s Pizza chain when it was in receivership in 1989, while existing franchisees also had the option to purchase their restaurant outright.

Locations began to close a few years later, including the landmark first one in Westdale in 1992, although one Mother’s Pizza franchise from the old days has apparently hung on all these years at 10 Country Hills Landing NW in the Beddington Mall in Calgary, making it something of a cult favourite for Mother’s Pizza aficionados.

Dave and I went to different high schools (R.S. McLaughlin Collegiate for Dave, while I was across the street at what was then Oshawa Catholic High School) but in the fall of 1976, months after our pizza delivery experiences, we both wound up heading off to Trent University.

The last time I saw Dave before July 7 was 24 years ago in July 1992 at a Sunday barbecue at his place in Oshawa before I headed down to North Carolina for a week. Dave went on from university to be an elementary school teacher in the Durham Region for many years before retiring in 2011.

While Dave is not on LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook (except for trolling his wife’s Facebook page occasionally when curiosity gets the best of him) he does Google searches and uses email. He tracked me down in Thompson almost 3½ years ago now when I was editing the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News.

It started with an e-mail I received at work on Feb. 5, 2013: “Dave Beirness here! I have finally (I think) found out where you are. Ron G. and I were both thinking about you and your whereabouts during our high school reunion this past fall.

“We have a lot of catching up to do so keep in touch and please give me a home email address so I don’t have to correspond through your work address.

“P. S. I knew it was you when I saw your picture. Your head still has the same tilt.” Dave calls it my “thinking” pose. Friends like Dave can get away with implying work email really wouldn’t be appropriate to use from here on out because of the possible nature of the ensuing correspondence, and also remark on the tilt of your head in your newspaper photo they spotted in your online column without sounding offensive, but rather simply candidly familiar.

It’s rather refreshing because who actually tells you how it really is after you reach a certain age and stage of life? Your spouse or partner? OK, sure. And your former university roommates, that’s who.

Dave and I have shared more than four decades of friendship from high school days in Oshawa and delivering pizzas for Mother’s Pizza through being roommates off-campus from September 1977 to April 1978 at a townhouse at 1100 Hilliard Street in Peterborough, along with Ron Graham, another friend from Oshawa, while we were at Trent University in Peterborough.

While not all former roommates considered themselves friends (I had several excellent roommates who were just that and not really friends per se) they were the people who lived with you under the same roof when you were 19, 20, or 21-years-old, or whatever. In many cases, they were the first non-family, non-related people we lived with as young adults after leaving home.

A photo from that academic year, taken no doubt after a night of hard studying, shows me with Dave in my room and what appears to be a mickey of Canadian Club rye in one hand and a libation in the other. The colourful shirt is my dad’s, which was his favourite cottage shirt at Lake Simcoe, and which I somehow must have convinced him to donate to his son for university.

The purple and gold headboard were also my dad’s handiwork. As a teenager in Oshawa, I had some fondness for both the UCLA Bruins basketball team and the NHL’s Los Angeles Kings, both of which were sporting purple and gold uniforms in those days, so I convinced my father to paint my bedroom at 537 Nipigon Street in Oshawa, along with some of the furnishings … purple and gold, of course. I remember the realtor and my father discussing just how many coats of paint it might take to cover over my inspired idea (especially the purple) when my parents retired and put the house up for sale in June 1976. It seems some of the furnishings went off to university with me and escaped any repainting.

Sitting out in my backyard late in the afternoon last Thursday with Dave, and then later at Santa Maria Pizza & Spaghetti House on Station Road (where else would ex-Mother’s Pizza drivers go for dinner but to a pizza joint?) and Pub 55 (as in Thompson at 55.7433° N latitude) did yield several surprises though, as we put back a couple of Shock Top Belgian Whites and other libations.

While some of the conversation inevitably trended to things like “whatever happened to who?” questions back and forth, I learned a couple of things about Paul Sobanski, who is a mutual friend, but one Dave has kept in touch with over the years, while I sort of lost track of Paul. Truth is I’ve known Paul probably 10 years longer than Dave. I met Paul when we were six and seven-years-old and he lived in the next block down from me on Nipigon Street in Oshawa. I met Mike Byrne the same year. He lived on the same street between Paul and me.

Paul went off to Queen’s University a year before I finished high school, if I recall correctly (again, like Dave, Paul was at R.S. McLaughlin Collegiate, while I was across the street at Oshawa Catholic High School) to study engineering.  From our conversations before he went off to university, it seemed Paul wanted to pursue engineering at Queen’s and then maybe do some specialized work at General Motors Institute (GMI) in Flint, Michigan before launching his career with General Motors Canada at the plants in Oshawa. In fact, during my summers working at GM in Oshawa as a university student from 1976-1979, I heard that Paul was also working elsewhere in the plants for the company at least some of those summers.

So not seeing Paul, I simply assumed his trajectory put him on a 30-year or so career with General Motors that only would have ended a few years ago with retirement.  Journalists learn early on never to assume anything. Perhaps that rule should be extended to friendship also; Dave, when he stopped laughing, told me Paul had only worked for General Motors for the first three or four years of his career perhaps in the 1980s, before heading off to work as an engineer outside the automotive industry. Now Paul has indeed retired. To Peterborough. A place I lived for years and to which Paul had no known connection prior to retirement. At least that I know of. But I won’t assume anything.

Before he ventured north last week, Dave’s wife remarked to him I was a rather prolific poster of Catholic articles on Facebook. Which is quite true. Dave was nonplussed. “John’s always been a Catholic. He went to Oshawa Catholic High School,” Dave said his reply was. Dave himself is Protestant or perhaps what might more likely be described today as among that growing cohort pollsters describe as ”nones” (as opposed to nuns). While my Protestant friends went mainly to R.S. McLaughlin Collegiate, part of the public school system, a good number of my Catholic friends in what was then known as the “separate school” system wound up transferring to R.S. McLaughlin Collegiate after completing Grade 8 at St. Christopher Separate Elementary School or even more so after Grade 10 at Oshawa Catholic High School, spending their last three high school years at R.S. McLaughlin Collegiate for Grades 11, 12 and 13, as Catholic schools in the 1970s in Ontario were only taxpayer-supported as far as the end of Grade 10.

After that they were considered private schools and parents were required to pay tuition, which in the early 1970s, was running at about $300 per year, I believe. It sounds like a modest sum, and while it wasn’t prohibitively expensive for most, it was at the same time not an inconsiderable expense for Catholic parents who were middle-class blue collar wage earners making under $4 per hour on average in 1973, along with the added costs of mandatory school uniforms – grey flannel pants and navy blue blazer and tie for the boys and white blouse and blue kilt for the girls.

According to Statistics Canada historical data, the average manufacturing wage earner in Ontario in 1973 made $8,042 in annual salary, which works out to $154.56 per week or about $3.87 per hour for a 40-hour work week. So $300 in private annual tuition for a Catholic high school for senior grades represented almost two week’s annual salary. It was a sacrifice for many Catholic families. Other Catholic students, however, transferred from the Catholic to public system in the early 1970s for philosophical reasons flowing from the great social changes sweeping the Catholic world in those early years after the end of the Second Vatican Council, while others transferred simply for reasons of being with their peers and friends, if the majority were in the public system. The reverse occurred, too, as a small number of Protestant families sent their children to the private Catholic high school system, attracted not by Catholicism per se, but rather a sense, justified or not, that Catholic schools had a somewhat higher quality of education and more rigorous discipline.

I’m not sure how reassured Dave’s wife must have been when he went onto to tell her that Paul Sobanski had told him as kids I used to excitedly want to talk to him about the Second Vatican Council, which ended on Dec.8, 1965, when I was eight, and had opened on Oct. 11, 1962, when I was five. Mind you, as a kid, my idea of fun late on a Saturday afternoon at the cottage at Lake Simcoe, near Beaverton, Ontario and down the road a small piece from Orillia and Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock’s somewhat fictional, somewhat true Mariposa setting for his 1912 classic Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, was walking the beach road past the Talbot River and down to the blue Toronto Star “honour” coin box and buying the unbelievably fat Saturday Star. My main interest was the “Insight” section and the rotogravure colour-printed Star Weekly magazine.

More than four decades of friendship with Dave. It’s been a long and sometimes strange but always interesting trip.

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