Eulogies

Charlie

In Fond Memory of Charley Kilby

Before West Side Story and Grease turned them into soft hearted singers and dancers, before the Fonz turned them into loveable characters there were the toughs of the fifties. They were the post war rebels that ganged up, carried switchblades and brass knuckles, fought with baseball bats and bicycle chains and had wars on the streets of the cities. They were the Rebels Without a Cause and the delinquents in High School Confidential. James Dean and Marlon Brando portrayed them. Jerry Lee Lewis sang their songs.

Even Pembroke had its own rebel, Charley Kilby. He was a fixture on the downtown streets when I was growing up. Always in “uniform”, a pair of red tab, riveted Levi's rolled up at the cuffs and as tight as jeans got in those days, a white tee with a pack of smokes rolled up in a sleeve (and one fag bleeding smoke, stuck in the corner of his mouth), a black leather jacket with the collar turned up when the weather got cool and a duck tail oiled back into perfection with a pompadour on top. He was great.

 He never walked, he strolled, he sauntered swaying to his own beat at a casual pace that said “don't mess with me”. Mess probably isn't the word he would have used though. Us kids both feared and loved him. We'd often see him in the pool hall up opposite the O'brien Theatre, sometimes playing a game, sometimes just slouched against a wall watching the goings on. We of course all thought he was involved in some underworld adventure, had a moll somewhere waiting for him and was avoiding the cops. Probably he was just passing time. I have to say that for someone who looked like he'd give you the taste of a shiv if you wronged him he was good with us pests. We'd summon up the courage to go say hi, he'd grunt a reply and we'd stroll along with him past the Beamish store with the penny weigh scale and the nickel a ride mechanical horse outside, past Bailey's Sporting Goods with the giant pike hanging outside and on for a few more stores until he got tired of us and told us to scram. True to character he was pretty well monosyllabic when we did have a conversation. Questions were answered with yeah's or grunts or just a look that told you back off and you did. He wasn't a big or tall man but he had presence and was one of the characters that populated the streets of Pembroke in those perhaps not quite so innocent days.

I don't know what ever happened to Charley. Rumour was for a while he was doing serious time but nobody really knew for sure. If he's alive I hope he's enjoying his old age. If he's passed on I hope he's sitting on a lunch counter stool in that great 50's in the sky; the clacking of ivory balls in the background, Duane Eddy playing Rebel Rouser on the juke box, a smoke near at hand and a chick that looks like Mamie Van Doren coming in through the doors to meet him.

Clayton

 Television was at that in between stage back then. Not quite just a novelty, not quite totally ubiquitous. But owner or not, everyone knew and loved Lucy. My family had yet to succumb to TV, or was still saving, but either way we too loved Lucy and so once a week we'd trundle next door and spend a half hour with the neighbours watching Lucy and the gang get into and out of predicaments. 

The neighbours were the Petigrews and the two families, ours small, theirs large, would somehow cram into the darkened living room of a wartime house and together watch I Love Lucy. As wonderful as experiencing this new media was there was something even more wonderful about going to the Petigrews. That was Mr. Petigrew's ash tray. It was one of those shiny pedestal affairs but more than that, it plugged into the wall and hovering atop of it was a sleek, chrome airliner. In the darkened room, it's windows all lit up, I could almost hear the drone of the engines as it took well dressed adventurers to exotic destinations. Some times I'd be lucky enough to sit in the chair that was next to this marvel and my attention would be torn between the madcap antics of Lucy and the lure of that airplane and my imagination.

Below the airplane was a platform holding three round containers. One was the ashtray receptacle. You could rest your du maurier or Export A on this and when the ash piled up you'd press a plunger and the offending bits would be lowered and spun out of sight. Could anything ever be more sophisticated than that. 

I coveted Mr. Petigrew's ashtray and about twenty years later I thought of him and it and it's promise of adventure and exotica as I sat, sipping a drink at the Long Bar in Raffles Hotel in Singapore. The dreams of a boy sitting next to an ashtray in a darkened room had been more than fulfilled and I raised my glass and thought “Here's to you Clayton” as a Casablanca fan stirred the humid air overhead.

Kevin

Remembering a Childhood Friend, Kevin Donahue, 1949-2012

As kids, Kevin and I would often go to the Saturday matinee at the O'Brien Theatre. Then on the way home, if we had any money left we'd drop into the lunch counter in the Beamish store or perhaps go farther up the street to the lunch counter at O. Zanders Tobacco Shop and there, spend what we had left on treats. At either one of these we'd linger over our cokes and talk about whatever it is boys talk about, probably going over the highlights of the movie, how a bad guy got shot and fell off the roof  into the horse trough and how great it was that there was no kissin' until the end.

 One afternoon all we had left, after the movie and popcorn and drinks, was a dime between us, enough for one coke at the Beamish lunch counter. So in we went, sat on the red leatherette stools and drank our shared drink. As we sat there sipping the glass of coke we started to read the lunch menu posted above the grill. 

“If I had ten cents I'd get another coke.”

“If I had fifteen cents I'd get a plate of chips.”

“If I had a quarter I'd get ....” and on it went, each of us spending our imaginary money on would be food. 

“If I had sixty five cents I'd get the daily special.” We must have looked quite the pair, a couple of curly haired boys, probably with dirt on us from reliving the cowboy adventures of the movie in the back alleys of down town Pembroke or down around the boat houses by where the ferry docked and the winos hung out. 

As we were finishing, a couple of elderly women who had been sitting near by got up to leave and as they passed us they gave us a quarter each, enough for a coke and a plate of chips and told us to enjoy ourselves. Hallelujah, we'd struck gold, and latched onto a pretty neat scheme too.

After we got home we recounted to our mothers what had occurred and both of were told that it was a very kind thing the two women had done but we were never to do that again, ever...understand. We understood and that was our first and last go at larceny.

   One other time after another matinee we again romped through the back alleys of the town playing cowboys and Indians. Down town Pembroke was a boys delight in those days. There were old boat houses and train stations, a mill by the Muskrat River, stores with toy departments to explore, roofs to climb on to and then get shot off of and when all that was finished we could play under the wooden platform at the old CNR train station at the corner of Pembroke and Mackay Streets. There, with any luck we could find some change someone had dropped. Then it was onwards home. First however we had to swing on the gates of the fences along Mackay Street, zip over to Montaigne's and peek over the fence to see if we could see anyone in the pool and then rest for a bit on a bench in that little park on Mackay and Herbert Streets (the bench, by the way, is still there). 

This particular afternoon we must have lost all track of time because as we sat on the bench a car pulled up and a man yelled out the window, “You boys had better get home, the police are looking for you.”  Seems our mothers had reported us missing since we went to the show at noon and here it was after supper and we still out and about. So home we trotted where trouble was waiting for us but from then on we always made it home on time.