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9 What Winters We Had — Heroics on the Hills

Today’s young drivers are thrilled and bored by accounts of heroic battles with snow during the greatly exaggerated and legendary winters of sixty years ago, but here goes, anyway. Weather forecasts then were much more hopeless than they are today, and blizzards struck without warning at peak traffic hours. It seemed that the storms always began at 4:00 p.m. so that every able-bodied boy and flirtatious girl in Central School could run to the foot of the hill there to watch the cars slide out of control. Roads weren’t salted then, and trucks with sand never arrived until after the emergency crews at the Board of Works had finished supper. So the five o’clock rush guaranteed bedlam on every hill in Galt. Central School Hill was the worst because of its sharp ascending curves.

Most cars in those days sported sets of chains on their rear-drive wheels to dig traction out of the ice. All police cars and fire trucks did. But there were always enough cars without chains to cause gridlock. Wheel chains were outlawed with the advent of snow tires and the realization that the chains were shredding the asphalt.

Anyway, the jams on the hills enabled schoolboys to demonstrate their new-found strength and chivalry. They would take hold of a car spinning its wheels and sliding sideways and, with pubescent roars, shoulder it up the hill. Whenever a boy lost his footing and fell face down in the slush, another would leap in to grab the fender. Girls would squeal. Boys in grades seven and eight, like the Mills brothers, Donald and Ray, and Billy Schultz performed feats of strength that risked landing them in the army. Tink Clark, just thirty-seven in grade eight, appeared to lift the rear ends of cars right off the ground.

Not many women drove cars then, but whenever one of them tackled the hill the boys would abandon the men they were pushing and rush to the lady’s aid, knocking one another down in their hurry to get there, Vart Vartanian leading the pack. After five the guys drifting home from the beer parlours joined and you would swear that some of them were actually pushing cars down the hill.

Reports from other hills, Concession Street and St. Andrews were favourites, arrived by runner. The mess there it seemed was always worse than on our hill. Fire trucks were colliding with police cars and ambulances.

One snowy afternoon there actually was a fire at the top of Central School Hill, and the firemen couldn’t get up through the jam. The fire was just over the fence from the schoolyard, on Bruce Street, in a little shed where a man with bulging eyes, a sort of hermit, fixed radios. The firemen didn’t have wireless communication in their trucks so there was a lot of shouting back and forth as to who was to do what and go where. Boys ran up and down the hill hollering contradictory rumours. There was an explosion. People were jumping out of windows.

At last Grenfell Davenport, running like a deer, ended the confusion. The fire was out, he hollered. He and a pack of boys had put it out with snowballs.