The Alphabet Box and Other Snapshots From the Album: When Life Surprises You with Guardian Angels, Piranhas and Broiled Cake!

1. The Alphabet Box

My first year of formal schooling, in 1957, would be spent in Grade 1. Kindergarten classes did not exist for young children at that time. I have two memories of that Grade 1 year. With our house directly across the street from the entrance of the school, my mother watched me enter on my first day. She would tell me later that I entered like a marching soldier. In remembering that statement, I think that even at six years old, it was pretty clear that I had already learned of the importance of being on my best behaviour in this new endeavour called school.

The other memory I have from that year revolves around a box of alphabet letters distributed to each student in the class. Each box was filled with a myriad of small cardboard pieces with either an upper- or lower-case letter printed on one side. An examination of the cardboard letters revealed a mixture of worn, faded and curled pieces which all had to be turned over and spread out to reveal the letter hidden underneath. Even at six years old I wondered if the teacher knew that my box had all of the letters in it to complete the morning’s task. What was the task? Place all of the letters of the alphabet, both upper and lower case in their correct order on top of your desk. When each student was finished, we were to raise our hand and ask the teacher to check our completed list.

As I began looking through my letters, I felt confident. I knew my alphabet and the sequence. Besides, the teacher had hung the Grade 1 alphabet cards on the wall for any kid who might need help. The most time-consuming part of this activity was sorting through all of the pieces of cardboard to find the correct letters and then reaching up over the top edge of my large desk to arrange the alphabet in the correct order. The reach was difficult because the top of the desk was level with my chin. After much sorting and discarding of repeated letters I had a completed alphabet, both upper and lower case, on my desk. Before raising my hand to call the teacher over, I leaned back on my chair, heaved a big sigh of relief and blew all of my letters onto the classroom floor!

Six-year-old Phil gets ready to take on the alphabet box.

2. Boulders and Bouncers and Poons, Oh My!

My first childhood collection was bag full of marbles. As I grew into my early teen years I developed other collections. I really enjoyed assembling plastic model kits and finding spots to display them in the upstairs bedroom I shared with my four brothers. The bedroom was the whole upper floor, so I would try to claim the top of a dresser to array the model cars, airplanes and movie monsters I had glued together and painted. Yes, one of the model manufacturers produced a whole series of famous monsters from the horror movie hall of fame. I collected most of the series, and little by little, Frankenstein and Dracula collected dust on the dresser alongside the Creature from the Black Lagoon and the Wolf Man.

I received my first bag of marbles one Easter morning when I was five or six years old, and I appreciated that the Easter bunny had been so thoughtful to bring us some chocolate to eat as well as something to play with. For several years after, as Easter approached, I would make it clear to anyone in my family who was near that I was hoping the bunny would remember to bring me some marbles. He didn’t disappoint, and for several years I received a new bag of shiny marbles on Easter morning. The bunny always seemed to select a different style or type of marble to generously hide somewhere in my home.

The thing I instantly loved about marbles was that once you had them out of their bag you could handle them, organize them, trade them, compare them and, most importantly for me, play games with them. They were not a collection of dust collectors on a shelf like my legion of monsters. Put your marbles in a box or bag and go find a game. Early on, I found I could add to my collection, without the Easter bunny’s help, by risking my marbles in various games that were popular at the time. Of course, if you were unlucky or not as skilled as the other players you risked losing marbles after a day of playing during recess and lunch.

The holy grail of marble bags was, of course, the incredibly soft, dark purple bag with yellow Crown Royal embroidered on it. It was every marble player’s dream to store their marbles in this bag. It was easy to carry, had a drawstring top that you could cinch up so your marbles wouldn’t fall out, and I loved the way you could feel the marbles through the soft material of the bottom of the bag. Unfortunately, I never owned one and I was definitely envious of the kids who did. My dad was a beer drinker, and with a growing bunch of kids at home and a house he was still working on, laying out the extra money for an expensive bottle of whiskey so his kid could have a cool marble bag was not going to happen.

We placed our assortment of rounded glass that had been dreamed up by the marble makers into our bag or box. In went cat’s eyes and dog’s eyes, purées and crystals. In Windsor we called our larger versions of these marbles boulders. When I moved to London and began teaching in the primary grades there, the children called the larger marbles crocs. The London children used their marbles to play one marble game primarily, called Pots. All you had to do was scrape a small depression in the playground soil and two players stood about three metres from this pot in the ground. Each player would take a turn throwing a marble of the same size and try to get it to land inside the pot. If you were successful and the other not then you won his or her marble. If both players missed, which was usually the case on the first throw because of the long distance, then both players would go to their individual marbles and, using the side of their index finger, try to flip their marble into the pot. Both players kept taking turns until one was successful and they win the other player’s marble. We played Pots in Windsor, too, but we also played another form of the game. This revised Pots game was not for the faint of heart, and only once did I feel confident enough in my marble skills to enter into an all-or-nothing game. I’ll return to this story momentarily.

Not only did we play Pots, but we also played Bouncers, Hands and Poons. All three of these games were easy, and two of the games could be played indoors and outdoors. Poons was strictly an outdoor game. We usually used the larger boulders for poons, and it was your marble against mine. Both players would stand side by side and one player would toss his or her marble out a certain distance on to the ground. There was no set distance the marble had to travel. The other player would then take a shot at hitting that marble with their own. If you hit the marble, you won it. Miss it and the first player goes to their marble, puts their toe at the spot it ended up at, picks up their marble and takes a shot at the second player’s marble from that spot. The game carries on until someone hits the other marble. Poons players had to become adept at making that short throw from waist high to hit a marble that may be only inches away. If you could make these shots regularly, you could pile up the number of boulders you owned.

Cory and Cort were twin boys in my classroom. One day they each showed up at school with the biggest ball bearings I had ever seen. The metal ball bearings dwarfed any of the largest glass boulders we had. They announced that they wanted to play Poons with these behemoths but there was one condition: to win the ball bearing from them you had to beat them three times in a row. This experiment only lasted one day. The resulting carnage of smashed and chipped boulders from Cort and Cory’s shots dissuaded most of us to only try once to win these metallic prizes. When no one else would play them, the ball bearings were retired and didn’t show up on the marble playing grounds again.

You needed a wall or door to play Bouncers. The only drawback of this game was that you could lose a significant number of marbles in just one game, so you had to be a brave marble player. Simple game: either stand right next to a wall or two metres away from the wall and take turns bouncing marble after marble until one that you bounced rolls and hits any one of the marbles that has already been played. Hit one of their marbles or one of your own and you win every marble that was played in the game. I liked playing this game standing right next to the wall because I had more control over my shots. I could pick a portion of the wall that, if I bounced my marble straight out, it could have a good chance of hitting one of the marbles that might be in a cluster. Of course, the nuances of the terrain you were playing on could wreak havoc with what looked like a shot that was in the bag. A pebble could send your marble careening ninety degrees in the wrong direction, snatch a win and empty your marble bag at the same time.

Hands was a tactile game that was good for mathematics practice. Your competitor would turn their back and you would cleverly hide as many marbles in your fist as you could. The other player would turn around and he or she would have several seconds to squeeze and feel your closed fist to determine how many marbles you had hidden. The math was simple. If I had six marbles hidden and you guessed six, you won all six. If I had six marbles hidden and you guessed four, then you owed me two. Simple subtraction. Of course, some kids took this game to another level and played double hands. Now you could use both hands to hide as many marbles as you could in a type of two-handed dome. With a larger volume to fill, more marbles could come into play, and when you had the opportunity to feel and squeeze those cupped hands you better be thorough with your investigation. The kids with strong fingers could prevent you from feeling the marbles that lay hidden underneath and did well at this game.

My marble playing days ended with the epic Byng Road Pots game. It was the summer between Grade 6 and Grade 7, and some of the neighbourhood kids were playing Pots on Ronnie’s front lawn. Ronnie, a new kid on the block who was getting to know us little by little, had a shoebox that was two-thirds full of marbles. I had brought over my own box that was about the same size with only half of it filled. We decided to play Pots, but it would be an all-or-nothing game. Standing at a distance of about three metres, we would keep tossing marbles at the pot that was carved out of the grass just in front of the house’s brick flower planter. First marble in the pot would win all of the marbles played. Just two brave marble players going head-to-head.

As the game progressed that morning, more and more kids started to show up to see what was happening. We had quite a crowd watching. Many of them were marble players themselves and were incredulous once they found out what the stakes of the game were. This game seemed to last all morning. Toss after toss was made, and marble after marble missed its mark. Many just missed, sliding into the pot and then out again. The area around the pot was covered in marbles, so many so that a marble tossed would now hit another marble and bounce harmlessly away. I felt the ending of the game was a little tainted. One of our spectators had situated himself on the brick flower planter. He sat there with his legs resting on the top trying to stay out of the way of a marble bouncing off the wall. On one of my throws the marble seemed to land and stay in the pot. He jumped off the planter and said, It’s in! and started scooping a large number of other marbles on top of the winner. Was I 100 percent certain I had won? Nope. Two things happened then. Many more spectators started scooping up marbles and placing them in my box, and Ronnie ran into his house, with an almost empty box, crying.

The crowd receded, and I was left alone on the front lawn picking up the last remaining winnings. I returned home with double the marbles I had started with. As I walked into our kitchen, I told my mother, who was preparing lunch. It was then that my mother taught me a very valuable lesson. After I told her how Ronnie reacted to losing the game, she asked me how I might have reacted if I had been the loser instead of Ronnie. I really didn’t have to think long about her question. Losing sucked, and I probably would have gone back to my house crying as well. Mom’s suggestion followed: Give him his marbles back. Moms can be so wise.

Probably the best time of the whole morning was sitting down with Ronnie doing the marble sorting and making sure his box was filled back up. He was happy again and so was I; all tension had been alleviated. That was probably the last marble game I was ever involved in. You get older, you move on to other things. Even though I am now in my late sixties, I still enjoy building models. I enjoy building modular buildings with Lego as well, but the odd time that I am in a toy store I’ll stop by the marble display and hold up the mesh bags to the store’s fluorescent lights to watch the light cascade through the tinted marble glass.

3. Woodward Avenue

My First Hood

If you listened to the radio stations in the Windsor/Detroit area in the 1950s and 1960s, you’d hear Woodward Avenue mentioned a great deal. The name would be used in many of the commercials for businesses situated on the street or a cross street that intersected with it. Try driving north on it today and you would start near Ford Field, Comerica Park and the Fox Theatre and travel through neighbourhood after neighbourhood and cross several county lines until the land on either side of the street was more pastoral than urban. This Woodward Avenue, of course, was the famous thoroughfare that made its way from suburbia into Detroit’s downtown entertainment district. Today, you can catch a show at the Fox and walk across Woodward to see the Tigers or the Lions play. Want to go shopping? Head north on Woodward into a city like Troy and you’ll find every type of shopping venue you could ask for. The neighbourhoods you pass through on your shopping journey run the gamut of abandoned houses to streets under reconstruction and high-end gated communities. Woodward Avenue is a kind of microcosm of the economic disparity that can exist along one single American city street. There is another Woodward Avenue in the Windsor/Detroit area. It’s on the Canadian side of the border, and it’s the street my father built his house on.

My dad would tell you proudly that he built his house for his young family for approximately $9000. Of course, prices are always relative to their time in history, and we’re referring to a house built in the 1950s. Still, he did a lot of the work himself, and he had some great help from some of my uncles. All of these guys knew their way around tools, and there wasn’t any part of a house’s infrastructure they would find daunting. I am sure my dad did all of the electrical wiring himself, and my uncle Mike would one day be his own general contractor on a motel he would build and operate. So these guys were resourceful, helped each other out and saved money in the process. I think it was a real leap of faith for my mom and dad to buy a plot of land in a brand-new subdivision and plan to construct a house on it themselves. But they did it. My parents, my brother Larry and I moved out of my grandparents’ wartime house, where we occupied the top floor, and moved into the new Walker Homesites subdivision in the Sandwich East section of Windsor. Our new address was situated on Woodward Avenue, and it was one of the most memorable places I would ever live.

Even though I was rather young most of the years we lived at that address, my memories of the place and the people are still clear. The place and certain events still conjure up feelings and emotions that never left me. They have an uncanny ability to plunk me right back into the cornfield behind my school, bracing myself in the sturdy branches of a tall tree in the park at the end of my street or catching grasshoppers and praying mantises in the open field next to my house.

Woodward Avenue, on the Windsor side of the river, was only one block long. One side of the street was occupied by St. Christopher School, St. Christopher Church, the church hall and a big open field next to the hall. Seven houses had been built on our side of the street, and there were three open fields between them. There was a large cornfield behind the school and church. When the crop was rotated, peas were substituted as the crop of choice. Foster Avenue began and headed east at the south end of my street. The pavement went east but the western part of Foster was just one of those dirt roads where the tires of the farm machinery had matted down two furrows and the weeds had invaded the middle part. This was the short access road into the cornfield/pea field behind our school. Another kind of rudimentary road that allowed the huge tillers and combines into various parts of what seemed like an endless expanse of corn or peas ran the whole length of this field. The kids in our neighbourhood used this long access road to travel south to a large forest situated where the cornfield ended. We called it the Bush, and it was a great place to spend a morning or afternoon exploring.

Seymour Street began at the north end of my block and travelled east, parallel to Foster. There was no cornfield access off Seymour. It just turned left into my block. The neat thing about Woodward, though, was that if you continued north past Seymour, you drove or walked right into Walker Homesites Park. I could leave my house, turn right and be at the park in about a minute. This park would become a refuge, a source of income, a place of learning and exploration and the setting for an experience that still haunts me to this day.

Family of five standing in front of St. Christopher Church and church hall.

The Ditches

Today I searched the internet for a picture of what used to be our house on Woodward Avenue. Things have changed in the old neighbourhood. School: torn down. Church and church hall: gone. Only a street named St. Christopher Court remains to pay some kind of tribute to the church where my mother used to play the organ and the schoolyard which was our locale for so many epic marble games. The huge cornfield is now a huge subdivision. The park is still there and looks like it’s been expanded. There’s even a bike path. I would have enjoyed that about sixty years ago! Of course, kids can create their own ways of biking, and we knew how to get around the old neighbourhood, shortcuts and all. Looking at the image of my house online, I noticed one thing was dramatically missing: the ditches had magically disappeared!

Of course, there wasn’t any magic going on. Progress and a thing called a sewer system had happened. But in 1957, when I entered Grade 1, the systems in place for this particular part of the city were pretty rudimentary. How about this? When they picked up the garbage, a large dump truck pulled up to your driveway. One man walked alongside the truck and took the lid off your tin garbage can. He then hoisted that can up to another man who was standing in the truck’s large load compartment. He emptied your garbage out, basically at his feet, and tossed the can back to his compatriot at street level. He put your can’s lid back on and started walking alongside the now moving truck towards the next can down the street. I always thought that I’d hate to be the guy standing in all the garbage. Yep, that was really rudimentary.

How about handling rainwater? You dig a system of really large ditches. Each street had two types of ditches. The front of your house had a wide, deep ditch to handle rainwater, and a small but menacing rivulet of extremely black water lurked at the back end of everyone’s property. I didn’t know the source of this black water, but I did know that the green patch of grass in our backyard was above our septic tank. I can still see the septic tank guy, outfitted in heavy rubber gloves, pulling his long hose from his tanker on the street and plunging the hose end into my family’s effluent stored in that tank. I also thought, at the time, that’s another job I would not want to pursue.

Where the black water in everyone’s backyard came from is still a mystery to me, but we stayed away from it. Flies and dragonflies liked it, and it became a nice background to the iridescent colours of their wings and bodies. My father built a small wooden bridge across the back ditch into the yard behind us. Our elderly babysitter would cross that bridge every Thursday night to stay with us while my parents were at choir practice. The only time that I came into real contact with the dreaded ditch was with my brand-new bike. Trying to learn how to ride my new bike, I lost control in the backyard, snapped a new tree my dad had planted and barely jumped off before the bike ditched into the black stream. Several minutes of spray from the hose made the bike clean again. Bike lessons happened on the street from then on.

The large ditch that everyone had at the front of their house seemed to be part of a system created to take care of rainwater. Depending on the amount of rainfall received, these larger ditches could be quite full or contain just a small stream that cut a thin channel in the bottom. It was in this thin channel that we would look for small holes where the mouth was surrounded by a ring of excavated mud. If you carefully placed a stick down that hole, you might pull it out with a crayfish attached to the end. This ditch system hosted a series of great places and environments for kid exploration. The ditches around the park provided even more than insects, minnows and crayfish. If you timed it right, scouring the park ditches could put money in your pocket and candy in your mouth.

Thar’s Gold in Them Thar Ditches

During the spring and summer baseball season, the Walker Homesites Athletic Association would sell soft drinks and hot dogs to families who were attending the baseball games at the park. The pop was sold in glass bottles and could be returned to the booth after they were emptied. Human nature being what it is, I guess, a good number of the bottles ended up in the ditches that framed the perimeter of the park. Mixed in with the bottles purchased at the park were larger quart bottles brought from home and also deposited in the ditch. Critiquing this behaviour now leads me to two conclusions. First, some things never change. People threw their bottles away in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and now, in 2021, they throw their beer cans, beer bottles and pop cans along the sides of mostly rural roads surrounding our large cities. Take a drive on the country roads around London on any sunny Monday morning in any season and count the number of reflections off the cans that lay tossed among fields lining your route. The second conclusion is that a new industry was and still is created by this throw away behaviour. Take your empties into any beer store, on any day, at any time and you will be joined in line by an entrepreneur who has collected several hundred of the aforementioned cans and bottles from the country roadsides to cash in on their deposits. In 1957, when I first started playing baseball at the park, the kids in the neighbourhood were the deposit-collecting entrepreneurs of that time.

Two cents for a small bottle and five cents for a quart bottle was what the local convenience store paid for our scavenged containers. The best time to scour the ditches was after a weekend of baseball. At times, we had to look carefully among the reeds and weeds and long grass that hid the gold we were searching for. We never really received any actual money, in hand, for what we placed on the counter. It was almost like a barter system. I give you these bottles that I found and you give me the candy, hockey and baseball cards, marbles or fireworks that I desire. Yes, that’s right, even fireworks!

The convenience store stocked firecrackers of varying sizes throughout the summer, and there was no real age limit, that I could see, stating who could purchase them. I know I had two-inch firecrackers in my hands when I was eight years old. We weren’t interested in Roman candles or fireworks that lit up the night sky. We wanted to see what damage could be done to an empty box or a pile of dirt. Twin brothers, Cory and Cort, who were in my Grade 3 class, liked to see who could hold a two-inch cracker in their fingers and light it up. The twins always seemed to live a little on the edge, even at such a young age. Of course, once children began to lose their eyesight from firecracker misuse, more stringent rules were put in place. Most of the time, though, candy was the booty we claimed with our scavenged wealth.

The road to the many cavities that have been replaced by engineered crowns in my mouth was paved with the small paper bags that were full to the brim with the assorted penny candy that was always displayed at the counter of our local store. The penny to candy ratio was one cent to three pieces of something sweet. So bubble gum, black balls, red licorice strings, jawbreakers, etc., times three. Bring in enough bottles, and you left with a small brown bag that fit in the palm of your hand. The thing I always loved about this whole process was that I was always in charge. Even at seven and eight years old, I never had to ask for money or permission to do my shopping. The store was a couple of blocks east on Foster, so it was close, and if I was industrious enough it seemed that I always had a source of money. Think about it: If I found only five small pop bottles, that’s ten cents, which equals thirty pieces of candy. That fills a candy bag and equals a whole day to enjoy emptying it.

Swaying in the Branches

The western side of Walker Homesites Park bordered on the immense cornfield that I could never seem to see an end to in any direction. If you walked along this side of the park you would find one of the aforementioned pop-bottle-laden ditches lining it’s perimeter as well as an associate row of bushes and tall trees drawing on the moisture that collected in the deep furrow next to them. So if you were standing on the western edge of the park, you would see park, bushes and trees, ditch, farmers’ dirt access road, cornfield, in that order. Whether they had been planted or just grew naturally, the trees and assorted brush followed the whole length of this side of the park. One of the varieties of bushy plants that we called a haw bush produced a red fruit about the size of a small grape. Biting into one and making a ring around the outside skin usually produced a sour taste. You could try and relieve that sour taste by sucking on a pea pod (if peas had been substituted for