Ladies & Gentlemen, step right up and prepare to be amazed…

Wes liked to script little performances.
It started when he would pretend to go to boy scouts (he was never actually in boy scouts) and then return in costume and try to convince the rest of us kids that he was Peter Pan. Then he would write short performances for the rest of us to act out for Grammy or any other unsuspecting relative who might visit. At some point in time, he determined that we could reach a larger audience and make some money while we were at it. We could put on our own little carnival for the neighborhood. There would of course be clown acts, skits, games, music, animals – the whole works. Wes wrote and directed the play, Laurie maybe coached Eric and David as proper clowns, Laurie, Marlene, Cousin Tommy and I were the band, we created home-made ring toss and beanbag toss games, Mary-Lou Hannigan brought her pony to give rides. Wes drew up posters to be delivered to all the neighbors houses – announcing the upcoming spectacle. The lawn between our house and Nanna’s became our performance stage, the small spruce tree being the backdrop, and behind the same tree was the “green room”. Chairs were set up in the shade under the maple tree near the road and we charged 25 cents admission. Individual games-of-skill were a nickel per try. After the show was over, we gleefully counted how much money we raked in. This happened for maybe three years running, until Helen Casoli – one of our neighbors up the street – determined that she could actually steal our idea and turn it into a town-wide charity fundraiser for Gerry Lewis’s muscular dystrophy cause – and held on the town hall lawns. We had gotten just that much older and maybe had started to outgrown hosting our own, but we were quite disturbed that she had “ripped us off and stolen our idea”. Of course we also got volunteered to help her pull it all off – manning booths, and setting up a slap-shot game where customers could shoot a puck off a piece of plexiglass and try to score off of a goalie from the brand new youth hockey league team. Eventually, we all (including Helen) outgrew hosting an all volunteer home-made carnival, but Wes never stopped scripting plays and even expanded into movie making with his fancy new 8mm movie camera. Even into his teen years he continued to coax us into some grand adventure movie to be filmed up in the woods, at Urann’s Pond, or the Hall’s Fields.





















(standing: Marlene, Laurie, Billy, Eric, Wes)
(sitting: David, Tommy, Donnie)

The Front Stairs

Very early on, the front stairs and the front room were separated by a wall, so that there was actually a front hall just large enough to have the stairs, a narrow storage space, and a doorway into the downstairs front room. I don’t recall ever using the front stairs until after Dad removed the dividing wall (then I remember being amazed at the whole process, now I wonder about how that was safely accomplished as it must have been a load-bearing wall). With the wall gone, making the front room more usable, we kids discovered how much fun the front stairs could be. We would use them to sneak down and spy on the grownups. We would take turns sliding down the banister (it was a kind of Russian Roulette game, never knowing who would be the unfortunate one to discover the firm hand of Dad or Nenna slapping their bottom at the bottom, as this activity was strictly forbidden). At Christmas time, the tree would be set up in place of the lamp table – OK, actually in place of half of the room. We loved super-sized trees that went to the ceiling and were as wide as they were tall (later when Aunkie stayed in the upstairs front room she put a small tree on the floor of her room and convinced the youngest of the grandchildren that it wasn’t her own tree, but was actually the top of the tree downstairs coming up through the floor). With a tree this large, the stairs were totally obscured from sight and again became a great hiding spot where we could spy on people who were in the room without ever coming lower than the top couple of steps. And the thrill of all small children – you could go up one set of stairs and come down the other, completing a full circle while never retracing your steps (it is always funny how fascinated and amazed little kids can be with this simple [?game?adventure?discovery?].

Rink Rat – 1973

I was playing in my final year of Youth Hockey eligibility (there used to be a level above Midgets called Juveniles – nowadays 17/18 year olds would play Junior Hockey). My W.H.Y.H. team usually had a game on Saturday nights from 9:00-10:00pm. At 11:00pm a private group of guys which included a few W.H. and Pembroke Coaches - Leo & Frank Runney, Tom Schmidt, Ray Larosee – skated in a pickup game which technically ended at 12:00, but because nobody had the ice-time afterwards, often went until 1:00am or later. Occasionally they would be short a few skaters and let a couple of us kids play with them so they could have two full lines per team. Before long, it became a regular thing and I (and sometimes Eric and/or David as well) would be sticking around after my team game to skate a “Double-Header”. By 1:30am just about everybody had had enough and gone home, but a few die-hards just loved the idea of having free open ice and would stick around – skating and stickhandling, practicing slapshots and backhanders, inventing 1-on-1 or 2-on-1 drills until sunrise. Maybe if we were lucky, somebody with a car and a few spare dollars had also stuck around and had made a donut run. Around 6:00am my team-mates would start returning for our regular morning practice hour and I’d sit down to rest a bit. From 6:30-7:30am we practiced, at 7:40 I would go out again to participate in the opening 15 minutes of skating drills with the Bantams, do it again at 8:50 with the Peewee’s and at 10:00 with the Squirts and once more at 11:10 with the Mites. At this point, having been in my skates and on the ice for the better part of the past 13-1/2 hours I would have to decide whether I was done or if I should stay around and help coach the Instructionals from 12:20-1:20. At either of the “I’m done” points, I would go home, eat lunch, go to bed, wake up for supper, and then call it an early night. On one occasion I opted to go dirtbike riding after lunch, but soon realized that my reflexes weren’t too sharp and recognized that I might be tempting fate and risking a foolish injury – so I decided that bed was indeed the better afternoon option.
Needless to say, I was in the best skating shape of my life in the spring of ’73.