Driving home for Christmas with 1,000 memories
So, we’re on our way home from work last week and my favourite song at this time of year comes on the radio. Called “Driving Home for Christmas,” it’s by Chris Rea, the English songwriter and performer. You hear it all the time on CHFI. I’m driving home for Christmas, I can’t wait to see those faces, I’m driving home for Christmas, yeah With a thousand memories ... It’s that one line that always gets me going, the one that ends, “With a thousand memories.”
Return with me now to those thrilling days of yesteryear. None of the names have been changed.
One year, in fact, two weekends before Christmas in 1963, which was on a Wednesday, to be exact, I was in Pembroke, Ont., working on my second newspaper job and in love with a hairdresser named Sheila Helferty, who had a friend.
My pal, the late Roger Stanion, who was a disc jockey on CHOV-AM radio and famous for being the first in North America to play Beatles records, had said to me, “Why don’t we take the girls to Montreal for the weekend? Do some Christmas shopping. We can stay with my folks in Pointe-Claire.”
Which we did. For 25 bucks (a princely sum in those days), I “rented” a car, a 1960 Chrysler New Yorker, from a guy who sold advertising for the Pembroke Observer, where I worked, and away we went, in style.
We had a nice time and the only negative about that part of the trip came after the fact, when Roger’s mother told him she’d have appreciated the girls more if they’d bothered to take off their makeup before putting their faces down on her pillows.
On the way back to Pembroke, it had started to snow near Ottawa. We were on Hwy. 17, and as we drove past Renfrew, it was developing into a full-on blizzard. About halfway between Renfrew and Cobden, the snow was coming down so heavily that the wipers were hardpressed to sweep it all away.
I decided to pull over to the side of the road and push off some of the accumulated snow on the hood before it got to the point where I wouldn’t be able to see out.
As I started to stop on what I thought was the shoulder, and edging over to make sure I was really off it, I can still hear my friend Roger, who was in the front passenger seat, say: “I don’t think you should go any further.” I went a little further and the car slid into a ditch.
So there we were, in the middle of the night, in the middle of a blizzard, in a ditch on Hwy. 17, in the Ottawa Valley and there were no lights on in houses around there because there were no houses, and there were no other cars around, either.
We were in trouble — in more ways than one.
Little did I know that, at that exact moment, my sweetheart Sheila H. had decided, as she huddled in the back seat of the car with the other girl, shivering with cold and afraid for her life, that I was a NITWIT and she never wanted to see or speak to me again for the rest of her life.
We were probably there for an hour. Maybe more. I didn’t want to run the car and the heater for any more than 10 minutes at a time because I didn’t want to run out of gas and I was afraid of carbon monoxide poisoning.
In any event, a transport truck stopped and the guy had a tow rope and pulled us out. He was going to North Bay and so we followed him all the way home, thanking our lucky stars because we didn’t see any other cars or trucks on that road.
We got back to Pembroke about four in the morning, and I have never been so happy. We were all just drained. Roger, who lived across the hall from me in the Copeland Hotel, didn’t speak to me for a couple of days (which was just as well — he had a quick lip and could carve you up like a turkey with his tongue, if he was so inclined). And three days later, exactly a week before Christmas, Sheila got on a bus with a ticket to Vancouver.
“You are supposed to be one of the bright lights around here,” she said to me while standing in the doorway of the bus. “If that is true, I shudder to think about the intelligence quotient of the rest of the Palookas in this place, and I don’t have time to find out. Goodbye.”
And that was that. I never heard from her again. I think she was serious. Top to toe in tail lights, Oh, I got red lights all around, I’m driving home for Christmas, yeah; Get my feet on holy ground ...
I’d been a kid in Kapuskasing, although my father’s career took our family to Niagara Falls when I finished Grade 8. I missed out going to high school and, later, university with the children I played with when we all went to Diamond Jubilee Public School.
I’m sure kids in other small towns have kept in touch, although I can’t say for sure. But my generation of young people from “Kap” — who are not so young anymore — are a very well-organized group indeed, complete with an electronic mailing list and twice-a-year luncheon reunions in Toronto, natch. Only one or two of the old crowd still live in “Kap.” The rest have nostalgia.
As I have written from time-totime in my auto racing reports (yes, I have been known to wander offtopic periodically), the guys I admired and often idolized when I was a kid were the “big guys” who were pretty good hockey players or who were in high school — guys like Gary Ede (who nearly killed me once when he was running to catch a pass during football practice as I ran onto the field after a baseball, and he ran me over), Ted McCaskill, Nicky (Rocky) Ruckavina, Terry Talentino, Sonny Nelson, Toby Black, Scrappy Richardson, King Begin, Bobby Arnot and Charley (Chaz) Swain, among many others. (As I wrote once, I will never forget the sight of Chaz Swain, walking down the street on stilts — don’t ask.)
The sad thing about Christmas memories is that you often find yourself thinking about those no longer with us. Bobby Arnot died in 2014 (he was a pioneer in the field of community recreation and was employed by the city of Kitchener for many years); Ted McCaskill died just this year (he made it to the NHL and was the father of Kirk McCaskill, the major league baseball pitcher), as did Toby Black (who was another great hockey player who had a memorable minor league career).
But they were “big guys,” older than me and the others, and although sad, the news was not too much of a shock considering everybody’s getting to that age.
But it’s particularly sad for me today because a contemporary, a valued childhood friend, a guy I knew from the age of 4 or 5, maybe earlier, who was also a great communicator, died just a few weeks ago and his name was Andy Arnot. What’s doubly troubling is that he went about two weeks after the guy I wrote about earlier in this column, Roger Stanion.
Andy was the brother of Bobby (see a mention of him above) and he had two sisters — Anne, who was the oldest child of four, and Sheila. The parents were Dave and Mary and they all lived up the street from my mom and dad and my sister and me.
I looked up to Bob, played with Andy, was babysat by Sheila and knew the parents because it was a small town then and everybody knew everybody else. As of today, though, Anne is the only one left.
Andy and I played baseball together and went into the bush together. We played tag in the schoolyard.
The only time I ever got angry with him was when we were playing hockey against the Roman Catholic elementary school in town and there was a shot on the ice from the point and I was the goaltender and Andy was a defenceman. He stuck out his skate to stop it (I thought), so I let up. Just as the puck got to him, he lifted his skate and I watched it go in.
“I thought you were going to stop it,” I said. “You’re the goalie,” he replied. We would drive over from the Falls when we knew the “Kap” kids were in Toronto, and Andy and I (and my other great pal, Waldy Lepp) would line up together to buy standing room at the Gardens. One year, Andy rented a room at the YMCA when the CNE was on and we went to the Ex just about every day.
Andy was a sportscaster at Global Television in Winnipeg and eventually became news director there. I remember when I was first starting out in newspapers, I got a letter from him asking for some information. In it, he mentioned that he had applied for a job on a radio station in Timmins and the manager told him he had to practise announcing for an hour each day. It must have paid off.
But I remember, in particular, one Christmas morning — in 1950, maybe — when there was a knock at our back door and Andy came in, handing me a colouring book wrapped in Christmas paper. It was full of drawings of racing cars. Even at that young age, maybe he knew. I sing for you Though you can’t hear me When I get through And feel you near me Driving home for Christmas With a thousand memories ...
Merry Christmas, everybody.