Radio Flyers, Five Star Whisky, and Life In the Sticks

My Great Grandfather was a hard man. One of those men in his 80's that could break you in half with his stoicism. Every lady on the street would receive a tip of the fedora, and every young punk would get a shake of the ivory handled cane. Not one of those kids would ever dare to say a word back to him.

He lived a long and varied life. He started down in Tennesee with his own hotel that sat right in the middle of the state line with Kentucky. Drifters would literally walk in the front door, rob the joint and walk out through the back and be in a different state, another jurisdiction, and out of the reach of the law. But unfortunately, not always out of the reach of Percy's shotgun. My Great Grandmother would only let him shoot rock salt. So no fatalities, just a lot of well seasoned derrieire's.

He finally gave up after a spell and packed up the family and headed to Chicago where he would find a man that would require his skills as a plumber. Prohibition was on and the man had visions of building these giant distilleries hidden inside warehouses around Chicago. Percy was more than happy to oblige, and so he joined the employ of one Alphonse Capone.

Things were going well, the money was flowing as steadily as the booze flowing from the stills. But my Great Grandmother, Helene, was concerned with the crime in the area. One day there was a horrible shooting next door to their apartment, and she told Percy that was it, they were moving to Canada. So that was how they remembered their immigration to Canada. The rest of us remembered it as the St. Valentine's Day massacre.

They settled into Toronto and Percy landed an honest job with the CPR until his retirement. They were a very close family and my Grandfather was an only child. So initially when Percy and Helene were getting older, they would all live together when my Grandfather got married and started his own family.

Percy was always strict, and in later years I would hear the stories of my father's punishments for walking across the front lawn on the way home from school. Percy would hand him a whisk broom and he would have to crawl across the front lawn erasing his steps, only then he would get his whipping. Of course my father being the man he is would exact his revenge on me years later, but that's another story.

Percy and Helene decided it was time to move on and settled into the small town of Cobourg, into a beautiful cottage like house that backed onto a forest. I loved visiting there as a child. Percy was never strict with the Great Grandchildren. He was a jovial old man by this point. My first job when we got to town was to fetch Percy his change purse so he could give me enough money to walk to town and get him a pouch of Borkum Riff pipe tobacco, and use the change to buy myself a toy. If he didn't have the money on him, he would simply pick up the phone and call the toy store. "Henry?, Percy here. My Great Grandson is coming to the store, please ensure he gets what he wants. Please have some tobacco ready for him, and put it on my account, i'll be by in a week or two." It's amazing the amount of respect that draws from a five year old.

It was around this time that Percy developed the right of passage for the boys in the family. It would be the touchstone of my families dysfunction for years to follow. At a certain age each boy would receive a brand new Radio Flyer wagon. But not just any Radio Flyer, yes it was the glossy deep red that even Ferrari has been trying to duplicate for years, but Percy customized them in his own way. Each wagon was completely adorned with Seagram's Five Star Whisky badges. Back then every bottle had a gold plastic star stuck to the side of it. Percy looked at the stars as some type of medal of honour. And even before I would strike off to town for his tobacco and my booty, I would be deputized a member of the Whiskytown sheriff's office. One gold star placed right over my heart. The wagons had them everywhere, even the wheels. He must have drank 40 bottles for every wagon. I have often dreamed over the years that the cliche' of falling off the wagon somehow had something to do with Percy and the customization of our Radio Flyers.

I loved the man. He had the classic winged back leather chair with his side table of pipes and the old style radio so he could listen to his treasured baseball broadcast as often as possible. You couldn't talk to Percy about spring, summer, fall, and winter. His only season was baseball season. He used to spring up between innings and with the vigor of a 20 year old jump onto the piano bench and hammer out a couple of tunes before the game started again. I used to just stare at him in awe.

When I was about seven, and right about the time Percy's heatlh started to fail, he took me out in the woods for a walk one fall day. He had walked with a cane for so long he kind of looked like Burgess Meredith playing the penguin in the old Batman series, and he always talked like W.C Fields. He told me he was going to teach me two lessons in life that day.

Firstly, he said, "don't ever live in a house that has five numbers in the address, it means that you live in the sticks and you've done nothing with your life." (Sorry people of Langley and Surrey, nothing personal). Odd words for a seven year old but they actually make sense to me today. And besides, I got to have a lot of fun with it in later years when my sister moved to Maple Ridge.

We continued to walk down the path and he asked me to pick up a stick. "Now break it boy" he said. Being the strapping seven year old I was, I snapped the stick, to no immediate response from Percy, we continued walking for a spell. Soon he asked me to pick up a lot of sticks, until I could hold them like a stack in my small hands. "Now break them boy" he said. What small amount of manhood I had at the time was soon lost, as I could barely bend the stack. Percy kneeled down beside me. "Now what have we learned?" he asked. I had no response but the innocent shrug of a child. "You have learned that if you stand alone, people can break you. If you stand together, you can never be broken." I don't think truer words have ever been spoken. I'm not really one for piercings or tattoo's, but I've often thought of having "Can't Break Me" tattooed on my back. The only thing that held me back was sort of this out of body dream where I see these medical students getting a giggle of looking at my cold lifeless body on a slab, with "Can't Break Me" written across my back. I would rather be entertaining in life, not death.

Percy died in 1979 at the age of 94. Helene died about ten years ago. When she died the retirement home sent out a metal footlocker that contained essentially the remains of their possessions. Crooked retirement home staff had stripped them of their valubles and pride. No one in the family was really interested in the contents of the box, save me, I thrive on history. Inside were Percy's selection of pipes, one of his fedora's, and a stack of ledgers. The ledgers? Turns out Percy fancied himself as a bit of a loan shark. Amazing numbers covering decades. What a guy! As I alluded to in my post yesterday, the smell of Borkums Riff can send me right back to that fall day. I love it when that happens. Oh and the piano? Turns out it was a player piano, Percy was a talentless hack just like myself.

Rest well Percy.