27th Street

As I was growing up in the 1960s (I was born in 1960), my parents ran a small business making aluminum windows  in the Junction near Dundas and Runnymede in Toronto. It was called Alumacraft. By that time business was pretty good and both my parents worked hard and worked a lot of hours. Their business grew mostly by word of mouth. They had all the work they could handle and the worked long hours.

During the summer break from school, when I was too young to be left alone, my parents would bring me to work with them. I would hang out at the shop and amuse myself however I could or I would be turned loose to play with the Junction kids in the lane-ways behind the shop.

It seemed normal at the time and I never felt I was in a dangerous place, but looking back, hanging out in a window factory was maybe not the safest daycare choice. I was never once injured there though, and it was a fantastic world for a kid to explore.

I loved watching my dad cut panes of glass. They had a device on which they rested the glass, positioned it for the right measurement, then cut it using a sliding device with a handle. I believe you had to squeeze a trigger and move the handle up and back across the pane of glass. Then you could gently snap off the off-cut. They had a metal garbage can beside the glass cutter, and the operator would smash any narrow off-cuts into the can by simply striking the glass against the edge of the can. Bang, bang, bang and the glass was in small pieces safely piling up in the can.

They kept me away from the radial arm saw area. That was the key job in the whole process – cutting the aluminum for the order. They had an old DeWalt saw and they lubricated the blades with a big stick of tallow. Cutting aluminum with a radial arm saw produces aluminum confetti, and my dad and Donny were always covered with it.

There was a big table in the centre of the shop with a wooden rail around it for putting together window sash. My mom did a lot of the assembly work, a job that was known as sashing. She would wrap a pane of glass with a rubber or plastic material called spline and then tap the aluminum onto the spline-covered glass with a mallet we called a wooden hammer. There were also a couple other machines around. I think they were punch-presses of some sort or another. Once the sash was made the windows would be assembled flat on the table.

There was a back room that consisted of a chaotic  office on one side and as screen-rolling area on the other. I was amazed at how fast my father or Donny could “roll screens”. They could have one assembled and rolled in a couple minutes. The aluminum frames for the screens would be assembled, and then held together with a couple of bangs on a metal point with a wooden hammer at the corners, simple but effective. A piece of screen cloth would be cut with a box-cutter such that it was bigger than the frame. A screen-rolling tool would be used to push the screen cloth into a groove all around, and to cut the screen to size. The same tool would be used again to secure the screen in place by rolling in round spline.

There were two diners in the area. One was June and Bills, on Runnymede right at the laneway that runs just behind the shop. It was an old-school 50s diner, and I was still a kid when they closed and were replaced by the Jumbo Burger that still exists there today. The other diner was east on Dundas half a block, beside Marsh’s Hardware. In the summers I was often sent to one or the other of them to get coffees for my parents and Donny and any assorted customers or Junction characters who often hung around the place.

Marsh’s Hardware was in fact run by a fellow named Marsh, and later by his son Kenny. I liked Marsh a lot. I recall he was a man with a rich sense of humour. Marsh had a peculiar talent. He could imitate the sound of a car experiencing a flat tire. I don’t remember now just what that sounded like but I remember being suitably impressed with this profound skill. These days it is Marsh’s Woodstoves. Marsh passed away many years ago, and I believe Kenny ran the place for a while. I heard he sold the business and moved back to the Maritimes.

There was another hardware store across the street from Alumacraft and closer to Runnymede, called Guffins. The sign said, Proprietor Syd Fink, I can remember Syd, and the folks who took over from him. It was one of these stores that had everything stacked and hanging around the store.

There was a drug store at the NE corner of Dundas and Runnymede. This was a significant building for us kids because of the fire escape behind it. The fire escape was held up by two metal poles and we used to climb the stairs to the landing, climb over the rail and slide down the pole like Batman sliding down to the Batcave. I sure Mom would not have approved if she knew we did that.

Up the street, near Keele, there was a place that gave music lessons. My sister took classes from Mrs. Gray and sometimes I would tag along and wait in the waiting room while my sister had her lesson. I can recall Mrs Grey singing, “sinc-co-pate, sinc-o-pate” as Susan played. Later I took some guitar lessons from a wonderful older fellow who smelled like cigars and who could play the guitar and sing old songs with lots of swing. The guitar never stuck for me though. I think I wanted to learn but wasn’t so keen on the disciplined practice part, so I got to a certain low level at which I could strum a bunch of chords and never progressed further. I didn’t really apply myself to learning an instrument until I was in my 40s when I decided I wanted to learn to play a button accordion. I thought stringed instruments just weren’t for me, but later when I started to mess with an oil can banjo, I realized I had found a stringed instrument I really loved to play.

The glove shop was across the street and a little east, and in the summers, I would go over to see Nanny. Just east of that, across a side-street, was Lynette’s Funeral Home. I recall Frank Lynette. He used to come into the shop to visit my dad and my dad would make a joke and say, “put away that measuring tape, Frankie, I’m not ready to go yet”. My dad told me stories about poker games over at Lynettes in the bad old days. My father loved poker and he loved betting horses, and at one point before he met my mom, I believe he was preoccupied with both.

Sometimes I would go with the Junction kids over to the railway tracks behind George Bell Arena. I don’t recall if the arena was there in those days, but that’s the spot we’d go.  It smelled bad there, as it was getting close to the stockyards.  There were regular freights. We liked to put pennies on the tracks and stand back as the engines ran them over. If you set the penny just right, the wheels would squish the penny, but it had to be on just the perfect spot on the track or else the penny would just fly off to the side.

Beside the shop there was for many years a vacant lot. When it rained there were big puddles in that lot and they stayed wet for days after a rain. We had a woodstove to heat the shop and there was a big bin of wooden off-cuts just outside the shop door, which were used to fuel the stove. I used them as building blocks, and I would build worlds out of blocks out in the lot on the edge of the puddles, which I imagined were vast lakes. Sometimes I would make little boats that I could sail across the lake and drift off into my own imaginary world for the afternoon.