Willie

Being born on a warm August morning under the stars of Leo, in a place nestled along the shore of beautiful Georgian Bay in southern Ontario, has, I suppose, in no small way played a part in my love for the winds of summer. I guess the melodic sounds of splashing water washing onto the rocky shores still sing in my mind, like some romantic song. Through the years I have borrowed from those sounds in creating my music.

I began to travel an interesting and entertaining pathway of time at just ten days old. When the day came for Mother and I to go home from the hospital where I was born, Daddy came, along with my older brothers and sisters, and took us to the big three-ring circus that was playing in our town. I sometimes wonder if that first look at the world outside left me with a yearning and a special love for show business and the people who are a part of this wonderful, gypsy way of life. Although I don't remember the sound of the ringmaster with his golden voice, introducing the acts, or the roar of the lions, tigers and elephants, or the cracking of the lion-tamer's whip, being just ten days old, and I can't recall the smell of the sawdust scattered on the ground under the big top, but I believe—in some kind of fairy-tale way—that wonderful circus day has influenced and led me on the interesting, winding pathways that I have walked.

My first recollection of life in this world, as I look back into the rearview mirror of time, is being an observant and sometimes imaginative little boy at the tender age of three, living in that pretty town in a little white house covered with a mixture of plaster and cement called roughcast. There were four rather small rooms in the house and eight people living there, Daddy, Mother, and us six children. I was the second youngest. Our baby sister Elizabeth was only a few months old. That was the fall of 1929, just at the time of the big stock market crash. The "roaring twenties" were down to their last whimper, and for most of the next decade we struggled through a cruel and merciless economic depression that engulfed the world as we knew it. Those years were known as the dirty thirties.

Daddy had bought the place for five hundred dollars by trading a horse in on it. It had a small barn, a garden, and there was a gully running between our place and the neighbours’. Daddy made arrangements for the garbage men to dump the ashes, cinders, and dry garbage in the ravine, to fill it up. There would be bottles, cans, and all kinds of interesting things among that garbage. They would bring it on certain days of the week in big wagons pulled by giant teams of horses. It was something to look forward to. This was also a great place to play. Fred—the neighbour boy next door—and I would spend hours in that gully finding all kinds of treasures.

Our house had no electricity, at first. Daddy had that put in the next year after we moved there. But we did have running water that came out of one tap over the kitchen sink. Besides the kitchen, there was a front room and two bedrooms upstairs. Mother did all the cooking on a wood-burning cookstove, both summer and winter. We had a table, an assortment of chairs, and a sideboard cupboard for the dishes. There was a trapdoor leading to the basement, where the vegetables and preserves were kept. It was cool in the basement; the milk sat on a ledge at the bottom of the stairs.

In the front room we had a small coal-burning stove and a large dining room table with matching chairs and buffet. There was a pullout couch, where my two older brothers and I slept. Our two older sisters slept together in one room upstairs, and our baby sister slept in Daddy and Mother's room. Although it may have been a bit crowded, and tempers would flare up from time to time, I would say that, for the most part, we got along real well. There was a lot of happiness in that little home.

We had no modern facilities, but a half-decent outhouse in back with two large holes, as I remember. I was always afraid of falling in, and it seemed a long way to the bottom, especially just after it was cleaned out. Our toilet paper was part of a catalogue hung by binder-twine on the inside of the door. The cracks between the old, dried-out pine boards were big enough so you could see what was going on outside in the daytime. After dark, one of my brothers or sisters would light the coal-oil lantern and come out with me. It was always kind of scary in that little back house at night, with those giant shadows dancing on the walls. My sister, Florence, would tell me ghostly stories, and in the eerie stillness of the night there would seem to be strange noises. The outhouse left a lasting impression on my mind, and to this very day, I am rather uneasy alone in the quiet darkness. And although I have never seen a real-live ghost, perhaps there have been times when they have seen me.

There was another intriguing thing about that old toilet out back. Every once in a while, when those mountains beneath the holes would get up near the top, a big wooden-wheeled wagon would come in the night, pulled by what seemed to me, as a child, a ghostly team of horses. This wagon was like a big wooden box with a top on it; there was a smoky old lantern that hung on the side, along with a couple of shovels. Then there were two strange men sitting up front on the seat of that wagon; one was white and one was black. They would drive this big old wagon around to the back and clean out the toilet. We called them scavengers. Even though we knew better, we pulled back the curtains to gawk at them. We could hear the clanging of their shovels as they worked out there by the light of their smoky old lantern. When the job was finished, they backed the team around and drove the old wagon out into the night. The next morning you could see the marks of the wagon wheels and the footprints of the horseshoes in the driveway, and once again the back house was cleaned out.