PAT HAMILTON
“My name was Hackett. My grandfather, John Hackett, was very wellknown. He had a shoe store on Bank Street, near Gladstone. He died at the old Auditorium, where the YMCA is now, at a Senators hockey game. They scored a goal and he jumped up and went, ‘Wow!’ and that was it. He had a heart attack. I don’t remember the year, but I was 12 then and I’ll be 81 next month.
“I saw Elvis at the Auditorium. I wasn’t allowed to, but I went anyway. All my girlfriends were going and my mother said, ‘No, you’re not going.’ So I said I was going over to a friend’s for a sleepover, and we went to the Auditorium. And on the way there, on the streetcar or bus, I said, ‘I am not going to be one of these people, these yelling, screaming crazy people. What’s wrong with them?’ I was so determined I was going to be a lady. And guess who yelled and screamed? I did. It was really something seeing him.
“I grew up in Hintonburg. We lived in the middle apartment of a three-storey apartment building, and in the hot summer weather I was allowed to sleep on the veranda. And so was the teenage girl upstairs, Barbara Follows. And we would trade movie magazines and comic books — she would tie one on a string and lower it down to my veranda, and I’d grab it and tie one of mine on and then she’d pull it up. It was unnecessary, but it was fun. And when it got too dark to read, we’d go to sleep, I guess.
“But sleeping on the veranda, all you head was Fleck Foundry — bang, bang, bang! — and I have completely forgotten what they made. I know Beech Foundry made machine parts, but I don’t remember what Fleck Foundry made. But it was going all the time. You couldn’t not hear it. I actually worked there one summer while going to high school.
“But then, all through high school I worked at Hilborn’s drugstore, on Wellington, just around the corner from Hinton Avenue. And one story I always remember was when young men used to come in and they wouldn’t let me serve them, and I had to go and get Mr. Hilborn, because they were buying condoms and they wouldn’t ask me. And I knew perfectly well what they were buying.
“When I was a teenager I went to
Fisher Park High School. Me and Paul Anka. I was in Grade 12 and he was in Grade 9, and we always thought, ‘Who does he think he is?’ Because at every school thing he had to be out there onstage, singing a song or something. He was a show-off. It was always, ‘Look at me.’ A lot of us thought he thought he was a big shot. And I guess he was.
“We were allowed to go skating on the rink at Fisher Park after supper. I had a girlfriend who lived on the other side of Wellington on Hinton Avenue. That was the rich side. We were on the poor side. And we would meet at the corner of Wellington and Hinton and walk up to the rink on Holland. It was a big rink and they had shacks with stoves and the whole bit, and they always played music through speakers. It was great; we all thought we were Barbara Ann Scott. And they used to blink the lights every hour, just to announce the hour. And when the lights blinked at eight o’clock, we had to leave, because mom said it was too late to be out after that.”