But Guy Burgess and Donald McLean turning up in the Soviet Union five years after they went missing jumps off the page at me. The Cold War would go on throughout my childhood and have a great impact on my me, my family, my country and my life. Spies and spy novels, James Bond and espionage were all a part of my future. Guy Burgess was a very bad man. The Soviets were the thieves who stole the secrets of the west. They stole the nuclear bomb. Spying especially in WWII would become a big interest as time went on and we all learned about the Enigma machine. Older, my friends and I as teens, would be reading Ian Fleming. Later we attended all the James Bond movies. As adults we bought the movies and watched over again. As young teens James Bond, Star Trek and the Beatles ruled.
Oklahoma was released that year and Roger’s and Hammerstein’s Carousel. Elvis Presley recorded Heartbreak Hotel and released a gold album. My older brother Ron loved Elvis Presley and sang his songs at home, memorizing words, sounding quite like Elvis at times. Ron had a lovely baritone tenor voice and would go on to sing in the church choir.
Doris Day recorded Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will be, Will be). My mother sang that around the home. I’ve got it firmly implanted in my brain, a song that comes to me at crossroads and other times. Doris Day was a favourite of my parents. Khrushchev attacked the cult of personality of Stalin. Morocco declared independence from France. Laurence Olivier and Shakespeare’s Richard III were in the news. The Broadway musical My Fair Lady opened in New York City. Later in life I’d see the movie. The first episode of As the World Turns is broadcast on the CBS television network. My father who liked to watch the ‘news’ and read the ‘news’ . Pakistan became the first Islamic Republic. We were Christians and I knew nothing of Islam, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Jainism or Buddhism growing up.
I remember the outside of the church from these early times. My mother, aunts and grandmother were all very Baptist and the Baptish Church was the centre of their social lives the whole time we were in Toronto. Later I’d remember sitting in church with my parents and going to Sunday school but not from those early Toronto years.
Grace Kelly married the Prince of Monaco and oddly I know this tidbit of history not from childhood but because it was a thing repeated through my life. In a peculiar way such bits of history show up in my memories. This one is under the ‘American actress’ and European Royalty category, I’d say. There were several of these in the news. Today it’s Meagan Markle and Prince William but Jackie Kennedy’s younger sister Lee Bouvier married the Polish prince Radziwill. Rita Hayworth married Prince Aly Khan a direct descendant of the Prophet Mohammed. The most famous for me was Wallis Simpson who King Edward VIII of England abdicated his throne for.
In the US The Southern Manifesto was signed beginning the desegregation of schools. Videotape was first developed. The first ‘snooze’ alarm was introduced by General Electric. The playwright Authur Miller appeared before the House UN-American Activities Committee. Marilyn Munroe married Authur Miller. The Lockheed U2 made its first reconnaissance flight over the Soviet Union. Egyptian leader Gamal Abdul Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. Elvis Presley appeared on the Ed Sullivan show.
I can see this in my mind but I don’t remember watching tv in Toronto. My recollection of tv in the home begins when we move to Winnipeg the next year. Yet Elvis Presley’s first appearance on Ed Sullivan showing only the upper half of his body and not his provocative hip movement is iconic. It was shown over and over again in my life.
Cecil B. DeMille’s epic film Ten Commandments starring Charlton Heston as Moses was released. Yogi Berra was playing baseball for the Brooklyn Dodgers when pitcher Don Larsen wins the games for the New York Yankees. As kids we’d collect baseball cards and trade these. Dad and Mom would take us to baseball games and I remember good times in the bleachers eating pop corn, drinking Coca Cola, the sunshine, blue sky, and lazy family days, Mom and Dad happy, everyone cheering. The white uniforms of the players and the ball caps. I had a ball cap as a little kid but would remember getting my first baseball glove a few years later when I was older and bigger and could be trusted to take care of sports equipment and not lose something so valuable.
The Hungarian Revolution broke out Oct. 23 when Hungarian attempted to leave the Warsaw Pact. The Soviet Union troops invaded Hungary. The Suez Crisis took place. The United Kingdom and France bombed Egypt to force it to reopen the Suez Canal. Israel entered the Sinai Peninsula pushing Egypt back towards the Suez.
The Amundsen Scott South Pole Station was established. Allen Ginsburg ,of the Beat Generation, has poetry is published in San Francisco.
Republican incumbent Dwight Eisenhower defeats Adlai Stevenson in the American election. Fidel Castro and Che Guevara take the yacht Granma with 82 men from Mexico to Cuba.
December 9 the Trans Canada Airlines Flight 810 crashed into Slesse Mountain near Chilliwack British Columbia. I’d later live in Slesse Park.
Mel Gibson, actor and movie producer was born that year aong with Tom Hanks, American Actor and Director. Sri Ravi Shankar was born that year as well, along with the American Boxer Sugar Ray Leonard and Kenny G the saxophonist. Theresa May, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom was born this year as well as Carrie Fisher, the actress who played Princess Leia in Star Wars. Dwight Yoakim, American Country singer, musician and actor was born this year along with American actress and model Bo Derek, forever famous for her No. 10 beach run.
A.A. Milne English author of Winnie the Pooh, the bear based on a Canadian bear, died in January. Hiram Bingham, the American Explorer and discoverer of Machu Picchu died. Walter de la Mare , English poet, short story writer died. Alfred Kinsey, American sex researcher died. Billy Bishop Canadian WWI flying ace died. I’d read all I could about Billy Bishop in later years and love the one man play, Billy Bishop goes to war.
Juan Ramon Jimenez got the Nobel prize for literature.
It seems amazing to me that all this was happening in the world. I certainly was living with my family in Toronto. I remember well my father and mother and brother and my mother’s father and mother and sisters. I remember friends and friends my Dad and Mom had.
The only events though that stick out in my mind are the little dog shivering under the street lamp. When I approached to pet and comfort it bit me. I remember that short haired grey dog. I remember that he was not vicious but afraid. I remember him running away because I cried out. I remember my mother and father coming then being taken to the hospital. All that summer I remember trips in the car to hospital.
But there’s also the other event when I stepped on a rusty nail in the construction site and it went through my fore foot. I think now it might have been someone else’s foot too. But when the dog bit me everyone was upset, angry at the ‘event’, not at me, and worried for my life. The rusty nail incident everyone is angry at me because I wasn’t supposed to play in the construction site. There’s the same worry too about my health. I’m given a tetanus shot I believe but then I’m not truly certain this happened when I was 4 because I don’t remember a construction site by old house then , whereas there was a construction site near a later house. We were definitely told not to play in that construction site when I was 6 or 7.
I remember the back yard in the Toronto home. I remember the garage. I remember bushes at the end of the street. The cul de sac boundaries of a child’s play area. I don’t remember my room or the inside of the house so much except that there was a boarder. I miss my brother because in later life we’d share our memories of childhood and together sort out bits that were absent. But it still seems strange that a whole year can pass and I can remember so little. Yet the dog bite remains crystal clear, I see the dog under the lamp at night shivering and anxious at my approach. I’m a very little guy and the dogs very little as well. But it’s thought that it had rabies and because it couldn’t be found there was no certain way of knowing. I believe I had treatment for rabies and that was the reason for the very serious trips to the doctors for most of that year.
We would have had family Christmas and New Years. We would have done all the stuff we did as a family day in and day out. I don’t remember that. The memory lays down the eventful memories. I suppose I needed to learn to that the injured can attack out of fear for all my later work. That lesson then and my understanding what followed stood me in good stead when I later worked with psychotic people and the dangerously insane. I was able to help so many hundreds by knowing how to approach them and engage them. A lesson I began learning with the dog. It’s a humble lesson. The approach of the insane can’t be ‘one up, one down’ like the military and courts use. It’s a slipping under the defences or slipping sideways through them. You can beat a crazy person down but they’re just out wait you and strike later like psychopaths and sociopaths do, seeking to attack when there in an advantage.
I think a lot of hurt people became that way, closed, paranoid, frightened and bullying because no one knew how to approach them when they were shaking and afraid standing under a lamp light watching a little boy approach with his hand out like he’d been taught. The dog must have been in such pain to bite me. Normally an animal will back off. But it stood there watching me shaking and shivering with what I gather was a fever. It may have bit me to warn me off. It wasn’t a very big bite and it ran away immediately. I think he was a boy dog. It could have happened when I was 3 or 4 years old but it’s the memory that remains most lucid before the later memories of leaving Toronto, my Dad bringing Sonny the Springer Spaniel home and the preparations for going west. That may have happened when I was 4 or 5. I began kindergarten when I came to Winnipeg. Usually Kindergarten begins when you turn 5.
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