Today In History — Me!

Rather a long time ago on this day, my mother missed lunch because she was giving birth to me.  Thanks Mum!

15 Years And Counting

Today is the fifteenth anniversary of the day I finally quit cigarettes.

I was into my thirty-third year of a two-pack a day habit when a doctor I really trusted and respected told me that he wasn’t going to treat me any more unless I stopped smoking cigarettes. I never smoked a cigarette from the very moment of that phone call. It was the easiest cold turkey I could ever imagine; I guess I was just ready.

About six years later, I woke up one Saturday morning yearning desperately for a smoke. I fought it back but that yearning lasted all day and until I finally went to sleep that night.  But it was gone the next morning, and that Saturday remains the only bad quitting day I’ve had in those fifteen years.

Happy anniversary!

 

 

 

25 Years A Full-Patch Canadian!

Twenty five years ago today I took the oath, sang the anthem and became a Canadian citizen.  It remains one of the proudest moments of my life and I haven’t regretted it one single minute.

I love this place, warts and all. Thank you Canada!

Spies In Suburbia: A Memoir

When I was eleven years old I lived in Ruislip Gardens which is a tiny suburb of Ruislip which, in turn, is a small suburb hanging on to the western edge of London. When I wasn’t away at school, I had a newspaper route which I took care of seven days a week starting at six each morning.

In London in those days we had a dozen or more daily newspapers and each subscriber to our delivery service could receive any permutation of papers. Most houses took two papers, and some many more. Sorting the right papers into the the right order in the right bags was a vital part of each morning’s routine at the shop.

By Christmas 1960, I was one of the senior delivery boys and had thus inherited a long route that covered the main road from Ruislip Gardens to Ruislip and included several side streets along the way. It took almost two hours and I sure earned my breakfast every day. On school days, it was split between two boys.

One of the side streets to which I delivered newspapers every day was Cranley Drive. And at 45 Cranley Drive lived a Canadian couple, Helen and Peter Kroger. I know I delivered papers to them but I don’t recall them at all, not even from the Christmas tip. However, in January 1961, the Krogers were arrested, and I do remember the street being closed off one cold morning by police cars and constables. It was revealed over the next few months that the Krogers were really Russian spies Morris and Lona Cohen, and that their basement on Cranley Drive included a sophisticated radio communications setup with Moscow.

It seemed exciting to a young kid in those dangerous days of Atom spies, the Third Man, Checkpoint Charlie. And I have kept my fascination with moles and sleeper cells ever since. It is no surprise then to find me reading everything available about the network that was just wrapped up in the States.

Street View: The Upside

I had barely touched the Street View functionality of Google Maps before today.  I was aware of the political and privacy arguments against the technology, but hadn’t really put it to use.

Today, while in the process of writing memoir notes about my earliest years, I was using Google Maps to check locations from my boyhood in London.  I was looking at the highest magnification to the arial of one location and accidentally pressed +Zoom again.  I was transported in StreetView and there before me, as clear as day, was the house I lived in from the age of 9 until I left home in my teens.  I spent ages just zooming the view up and down the street, and tracing my walk to primary school.  Then I was hooked.

I have now looked at each of the places I lived in from my birth to the age of about 25, each of my schools, places friends and relatives lived, places I played.  And each image brought memories flooding back in ways that probably couldn’t have happened without the pictures.  Extraordinarily powerful stuff.  Great technology.

The picture shown here is of 3, Annandale Road, Chiswick, London W4, with the blue door.  (The out of focus areas are a Google artifact.)  I lived here, in a cold-water third floor walk up, from my birth until a little before I was 10.   This is a very fashionable area today (the building at number 7 is for sale at $1.2m), but back in the early 1950s it was a heavily-bombed lower working class area.  Chiswick was grey and dirty and I am sure I lived my life in black-and-white until we moved away.

This house has hardly changed (except for the painted door).  When I lived in the building, a lady called Agnes lived on the ground floor, a spinster lady.  On the second floor lived my Nanny Bull (mother of my paternal uncle’s wife).  She was “a very old” lady (though probably younger than I am today) and as I remember, she always sat in the bay window, looking out at the street.  On the third floor, the window to the right was my bedroom.  The windows centre and left were the tiny living room.

Amazing to be given such access to our memories.

The Day The Music Died

A long, long time ago…
I can still remember
How that music used to make me smile.
And I knew if I had my chance
That I could make those people dance
And, maybe, they’d be happy for a while.

But February made me shiver
With every paper I’d deliver.
Bad news on the doorstep;
I couldn’t take one more step.

I can’t remember if I cried
When I read about his widowed bride,
But something touched me deep inside
The day the music died.

You have to be almost as old as God herself to remember this, but 50 years ago today Buddy Holly, Big Bopper and Richie Valens died in a snowy plane crash at Clear Lake , Iowa.  I, too, learned about it from the headlines I read during my paper route the following morning.  It’s a long, long time ago.

A Death Triggers Memories

My Dad loved boxing, and he passed that delight along to me.  We listened to the fights on the radio when I was small, and later watched tham on a tiny black-and-white TV.   During my away at school years, I took a transistor radio to bed with me and listened to fights on American Forces Radio.  The static and the in-and-out quality added to the pleasure of the experience.

One of my proudest memories is of taking my Dad and grandfather in 1985 to third-row seats at the Barry McGuigan-Eusebio Pedroza fight when the Clones Cyclone took the World Featherweight Championship by knockout in the 7th round.

My Dad and I watched and listened to a lot of British boxing in the 50s and early 6os:  Jack London, Henry Cooper, Freddie Mills, Randy Turpin were familiar names in my youth.  But we also managed to follow the American scene.  World Heavyweight Champion Floyd Patterson was one of Dad’s favourites and we eagerly looked forward to listening as Swedish champion Igemar Johanssen challenged him.  We were as amazed as everyone else when Patterson went down seven times in the third round and the referee stopped the fight.  Europe had the title for the first time in decades!

For each of the next two years, Patterson and Johanssen fought a re-match.  In 1960, Patterson became the first man to regain the title when he knocked out the Swede in the fifth.  The following spring, Patterson once again knocked out Johanssen.   These were the Swede’s only two losses in his entire professional career.

Outside the ring, Ingemar Johanssen was known as a charming bon vivant.  His death yesterday at age 76 triggered these memories of sitting around the radio with my Dad, imaging what these grand fights looked like.  Tempus fugit.

The Highest of Mountains and the Longest of Memories

Today is the 55th anniversary of the first successful climbing of Mount Everest by Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary.  News of the success arrived in England the day of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation and I remember my father, who was very excited by the news, telling me all about it.  For years thereafter Edmund Hillary was the greatest hero of my young imagination.

I have one or two memories about my brother and me that pre-date May 1953, but Hillary on Everest is the earliest I can recall anything outside the family.  I know from photographs that there were massive street parties I attended to celebrate the new Queen: I remember none of that.  But Hillary on Everest has stuck with me all these years.

The picture is of Tensing Norgay taken by Hillary.  There are no pictures of Hillary on the summit because Tensing didn’t know how to work the camera and, as Hillary said, the summit of Everest was no place to start teaching him!

It’s Time For Some Whine

One of the most popular articles in the New York Times this week was Eric Asimov’s excellent “Wine’s pleasures: Are They All In Your Head?” It is a well-written piece looking at recent work that seems to suggest wine drinkers are conned by price and status, but which, when looked at more closely, simply reveals differences between novice drinkers and experts. Well worth the read. Moreover, it got me thinking about suggestability and how it works in my own case.

From the early 1980s through to the spring and summer of 2000, my guess is that on average I drank one bottle of red wine every day — and much of it at lunch. It would not be uncommon for me to drink a full bottle at lunch, work through the afternoon, and then drink some more in the evening. It was one of my particular pleasures. But when my wife entered my life, she was concerned about how much I drank and so I consciously made an effort to cut down.

Now, less than 10 years later, I will enjoy the occasional glass of wine with lunch or dinner and feel fine about it. But if I have a second glass of wine, I will inevitably fall asleep and wake up with a thrashing headache. Obviously, I now avoid having a second glass on most occasions. But these effects show an amazing turnaround in my physiology in a relatively short period of time. Either my mind’s desire to please my wife has had a direct affect on the way my body processes certain chemicals, or the timing is just an astronomical coincidence. I’ll pick the power of the wife anytime!

Memoir: King

The dusty road had held us all day long. Huge trucks belching choking fumes had raced past us, barely missing our outstretched thumbs by inches it seemed. Sometimes they blared their industrial strength horns at us, scaring us, pushing us away from the road edge. There had been very few cars, and those mostly tiny SEATs already filled with farmers and dogs and kids, and certainly not looking to pick up two hippies dirt-encrusted from too much unsuccessful hitchhiking.

I guess we managed to walk three or four miles that day, in the blazing sun, just south of Valencia. We had expected better luck (“Gibraltar by evening!” had been our war cry as we emerged from a night in a roadside culvert) and had not prepared for such a long long day trudging through heat and dust and flies. We were exhausted, and more, we were dehydrated, the half dozen blood oranges we had each consumed notwithstanding.

Ahead of us we could see the outskirts of a village, and a village meant a cafe and Coca-Cola and even iced water, perhaps. It was one of those days when we knew we were willing to spend a few of our remaining pesetas. We stumbled forward, the dust scuffing beneath our feet, coughing. We must have looked liked ancient mummies straight from the desert as we finally collapsed into the two canvas chairs set out under the tin-roofed patio of a tiny cafe. I can only imagine the thoughts that were flowing through the old man’s head as he took our order for two Cokes.

We had been sitting for some minutes before we realized that an old radio was scratching its way through the late afternoon heaviness. And it may have been a minute or so more before we understood that it was speaking to us in English. American Forces Radio, probably from Germany. “…And as the crowds begin to gather from all across Memphis, we remind our listeners that President Johnson will speak to the nation this evening, on this day when Dr Martin Luther King has been shot and killed on his hotel balcony…”

The Cokes, glistening as the ice melted down the sides of the bottles, stood unremembered as our tears washed black gullies across our cheeks.

c.1998 Jak King