I might have dismissed the email, but the subject line caught my attention. “A Quick Past Memory,” it said. A fellow named Bryan Graham contacted me this past week to remind me that his dad and mine had known each other on the job 60 years ago. He explained that he’d tripped over my name in a military newsletter and decided to get in touch to tell me about our families’ connection.
“My father, Al Graham, was a district manager in Waterloo for the Globe and Mail in the mid-1950s,” Bryan explained.
Of course, since my father Alex had worked as a reporter and then columnist for the Globe back then, I took a bit more time reading his note.
“The Globe and Mail owned a property on the shores of Lake Erie with 12 wooden, very basic cottages and a small recreation building,” Bryan continued. “I’m confident our families spent a summer or two there together in the ’50s.”
He was absolutely right. I’m not sure how it happened, but the Toronto newspaper had acquired these cottages at Port Dover, on Lake Erie, and each summer Globe employees took turns – a week or two at a time – staying at the cottages as a summer respite. Bryan wrote about a number of specific memories. He recalled that none of the cottages by the lake had any refrigeration; so, the only way we kept perishables from spoiling was by storing them in an ice box.
“You may remember riding in the wooden wheel barrow with the blocks of ice being delivered to the cottage ice boxes,” he recalled.
I couldn’t remember the wheelbarrow rides, but I did remember the horseshoe pitches and lawn bowling greens that our parents used as distractions from the day-to-day pressures of working at a daily newspaper in Toronto. I remembered the wooden steps – about 150 of them – that led from the cottages down to the expansive beaches of Lake Erie. And our parents never had to worry about us in the water; we could walk for hundreds of yards into the lake and we’d still only be up to our waists in water.
What made all of this interaction with Bryan Graham even more curious, was that only weeks before, I had called the Port Dover Harbour Museum in search of photographs dating back to the Great War. Naturally, I chatted with the archivist at the museum. And we too shared Port Dover memories. She remembered the downtown bakery. And I said I remembered it too. In fact, I added quickly, I’ll tell you of an incident at the bakery that should probably have gotten my father and another Globe and Mail cottage pal of his – columnist George Bain – arrested.
“Arrested?” she repeated.
“Yup. Remember the peg just inside the bakery door that held numbers to determine when you’d be served? Well, one Saturday, Dad and George took me to the bakery to help them carry the week’s goodies of pastry, donuts, cookies and loaves of bread home. Once inside the bakery, which was packed, Dad and George took a number, got themselves served and then just before they left with their baked goods, they removed all the numbers from the hook, shuffled them, and replaced them.”
My friend the museum archivist burst out laughing and then shrieked at the thought of the chaos that must have resulted.
After the exchange of emails with Bryan Graham and the phone chat with the archivist, I figured that would be the last of my memories of Port Dover for a while. But then, following a talk I gave up near Huntsville this week, who should appear at the end of my talk? Bryan Graham. Well, we had to reminisce some more about what was clearly an indelible summer in our childhoods. At some point, over coffee, I asked Bryan if there was a lasting memory of those times in Port Dover.
“I remember walking with my dad past a main street store front,” he said. “There in the window was a beautiful, wooden model sailboat. It gleamed in the summer sun. And I never forgot it.”
I had a similarly iconic moment from those summers in Port Dover. “Every July, a carnival came while we were renting the cottages,” I told Bryan. “And the array of amusements always included something I’d never seen before – bumper cars! Well, I couldn’t get enough of them and I insisted my dad take me back again and again all week long.”
I’ve thought a lot about those simple and carefree moments I had that summer as a kid. It’s something every kid ought to have. As it is so often with childhood memories, Bryan’s golden model sailboat and my bumper car rides hardly seem significant. But isn’t it funny how they’ve stuck with us for a lifetime