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Childhood

Charles Stuart Pachter was born prematurely at Toronto General Hospital on the night of December 30, 1942, during the Second World War. Charles has an older sister, Maida, born on April 13, 1941; a younger sister, Karen, born on November 20, 1946; as well as a younger brother, David, born on August 20, 1948.

Charles, age 2, 1944.

Charles’s name was an anglicized version of both of his deceased grandfathers’ names. One reason his parents may have decided on an English name was in honour of Bonnie Prince Charlie; another was because they thought Hitler might make it to Toronto. It was, after all, 1942, the year Jews were being deported to Auschwitz. Whatever the reason, the name stuck. The family has always referred to him, and continues to refer to him, as Charles; although, most of his friends have called him Charlie since high school.

Both of his grandfathers died in their fifties before he was born, but Charles was told that his maternal grandfather was scholarly, rebellious, and determinedly anti-religious — traits that Charles cherishes.

His grandmothers were feisty characters — hardworking, funny, and the source of much mirth with their broken English, picturesque phrases, and old country sensibilities. One winter, for example, his maternal grandmother, Eva, announced matter-of-factly, that the unseasonably warm weather was due to “a general toe.” After some linguistic sleuthing, the family determined what she meant was “a January thaw.” Another time, she came home from selling her wares in Port Credit and asked her kids what a “bleddehyoo” was. Wondering what she meant, they asked her to explain. She told them she had sold a black half-slip to a woman whose husband had come home drunk, and called her “a bloody whore.”

Wedding portrait of Sara and Harry Pachter, January 1937.

Charles’s parents, Sara and Harry Pachter, were both Canadian-born and grew up in Toronto during the Depression.

When one of Sara’s brothers died of tuberculosis in 1922, the family moved from Edmonton, where they had been living, to Toronto where a cousin had a shoe repair shop on Queen Street East. Sara’s father opened a cobbler’s shop at 768 Yonge Street, which later became the Loew’s Uptown Theatre, now long gone. Her mother, widowed at thirty-five with four children, became a door-to-door peddler of dry goods that she bought wholesale on Spadina Avenue and sold in Port Credit.

Harry was born on March 11, 1914, on Peter Street in downtown Toronto, just north of the present-day Rogers Centre. He attended Sir Charles G.D. Fraser School.

A cousin introduced Sara and Harry at a party in Toronto in 1936. They were married in January 1937. After their marriage they eventually moved to a flat at 499 Palmerston Boulevard, where Charles was born.

His parents weren’t particularly religious, and the house where he grew up, at 84 Chudleigh Avenue in north Toronto, was in a neighbourhood inhabited mostly by middle-class Anglicans. His childhood playmates were well-brought-up little WASP and Catholic boys and girls, with names like Johnny, Gail, Betty, and Jeannie.

Johnny Macfarlane, who would grow up to be John Macfarlane — the respected magazine and book publisher — was Charles’s next-door neighbour. Macfarlane lived there with his divorced mom and his grandmother, who, thinking she was a coloratura soprano, spent humid summer afternoons at her piano practising operatic scales. Johnny and Charles, both four at the time, used to stand outside under her window howling like little coyotes whenever she sang a scale, then they would collapse laughing until she poured a bucket of water over their heads to shoo them away.

“Charles was my favourite of all the kids I knew then,” recalled John.

Charles didn’t really grasp what being Jewish meant until he turned six, according to his long-time friend, Margaret Atwood. When he was four, his babysitter, Mrs. Rupert, a Baptist holy roller, taught him to pray and roll at the same time while chanting, “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” Not your typical Jewish prayer!

On Sunday evenings, after supper of peanut-butter-and-bacon sandwiches on brown bread at Johnny’s house next door, the two of them usually went to the basement of the local Catholic church to watch flickering black-and-white “Prince of Peace” movies, starring Jesus, dressed in a long white nightie with rope belt and sandals, his stringy hair parted down the middle, his aquiline nose highlighted by makeup. The kids would also sneak into the church where there were niches with statues of the Virgin Mary and the Annunciation. On the floor of the basement were little blue and red plastic chips, which they collected. For years Charles thought bingo was a Catholic ritual.

To this day he can still remember being bullied by a bunch of bigger kids when he was four and locked under Lawrence Park Collegiate stadium where concrete bleachers were being built. He will never forget the smell of the curing concrete, straw and mud, and the echo of dripping water in the pitch-black as he waited, terrified, to be rescued. Another time when he bragged to the other kids that Jesus was Jewish, he got beaten up and called “a dirty Jew.” He asked another babysitter, Mrs. Decker, if he was “a dirty Jew,” and she replied in her thick Scottish accent, “I wouldn’t know, dear, I’m not Jooweesh.”

One day he came home and asked his parents, “Why don’t we have a picture of the Baby Jesus in our house like all the other kids?” Another time he came home with a Gideon Bible he had signed in school, confessing that he was “a sinner in the eyes of Jesus Christ, our Lord.” On each occasion Sara looked at her husband and said, “Harry, say something!”

Feeling they should help their kids discover their Jewish identity, Harry and Sara decided to enrol five-year-old Charles and his older sister Maida in religious school at the Holy Blossom Temple because, as his father later admitted, theirs was the cheapest membership fee of the new synagogues being built in the then-suburbs around Eglinton and Bathurst. After being “consecrated,” Charles came home with drawings he had done of Jonah and the whale and Elijah riding a flaming chariot.

In fact, Charles’s artistic inclinations were evident from the time he was a baby. One night when his parents returned home from a movie, they found his distraught babysitter cleaning the wall beside his crib. Charles had gleefully used the contents of his diaper to create his first mural.

At age four he made a papier mâché duck from newspaper strips and flour paste, and he placed it beside the furnace to dry. When he awoke the next morning, he was traumatized to find that it had disappeared. Thinking it was a piece of trash, his mother had thrown it out. Charles was inconsolable and cried his eyes out, despite Sara telling him, “You can always make another one.”

The remarkable event that shaped his later life, and made him into a celebrity at age four, happened in the summer of 1947. His father’s sister, Aunt Ruth, heard on the radio that the National Film Board was looking for a kid to play a lost boy in Johnny at the Fair, a film about the Canadian National Exhibition. After six years of being used as a military supply base during World War II, the “Ex” was now being groomed to reopen. Ruth told Sara that the NFB was auditioning kids that very afternoon in a last-minute effort to find the right “Johnny.” Charles was soon on a streetcar with his mom, heading down to the CBC for a three-minute interview with the director, Jack Olsen. A precocious, fearless little kid, Charles picked his nose and did somersaults while the director sat behind a desk watching. Afterward, mother and son took a cab home.

Back at the house they found reporters and cameramen already on their front lawn, flashbulbs popping, and his mother was being asked for interviews by the media. A few days later the papers were full of stories with headlines like: “Boy Born Since CNE Closed Chosen For Role In ‘Ex’ Film” and “Impressionable Extrovert Wins Sonny Movie Role.” For the next two weeks Charles was awakened early each day, dressed in the same striped T-shirt and brown shorts, and driven down to the Ex in a Chrysler woodie wagon convertible. Let loose to roam the midway and the Exhibition buildings, he jumped on the rides, took a flight on a helicopter, ate taffy apples, tasted candy floss, and chewed gum while the director, camera crew, and press followed his every step.

It all seemed glamorous, a topsy-turvy world of clowns, bagpipers, tattoo artists, and bathing beauties vaunting the “World of Tomorrow,” and “Chemical Wonderland,” all accompanied by brassy 1940s band music. Overwhelmed at first, Charles soon began to take it in stride. He received a kiss from world champion skater Barbara Ann Scott, sat on the lap of heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis, and was told to climb the steps of the Bandshell to shake the hand of Prime Minister Mackenzie King. He also watched Elsie the Cow get milked, spoke to the French ambassador to Canada, laughed at comedian Stepin Fetchit, and met Quebecois woodsman Joe LaFlamme, who let Charles pet his tame moose, a moment later commemorated in Charles’s paintings.

Charles and his mother in a publicity photo for Johnny at the Fair, Toronto Telegram, August 1947.

Charles remembers a scene in the film in which he is led by a police officer to the lost children’s compound, locked up behind a high chicken-wire fence, while his parents and the film crew watch in the background.

The script required Charles to cry, so without warning Sara went over and swooshed a hunk of mud across his face. He burst into tears as the cameras rolled. A few moments later, she rushed back and swept him up in her arms, to his delight. The resulting scene in the film, of a tired, cranky, lost child being reunited with his anxious parents, is a triumph of illusion. His two magical weeks ended when the Ex finished its run, and he was sent back to mundane real life.

The following spring, Charles was awakened one evening by his very excited mother, who dressed him in a bow tie, a sweater knit by his Aunt Ruth, and itchy wool britches. He remembers vomiting from nerves before being whisked out into the night. When they arrived at the giant Shea’s Theatre, where Toronto’s City Hall now stands, he was interviewed in front of radio microphones shaped like fans, while Klieg lights blinded his eyes. Charles stood before a darkened audience for the “praymeere” (as he heard it pronounced) of a “Canada Carries On” presentation of Johnny at the Fair.

Charles shakes hands with Prime Minister Mackenzie King at the CNE, August 1947.

As Johnny, he was told to sign his name, which he had just learned to print, in people’s autograph books, both at the theatre and later at B’nai Brith Lodge meetings. Lorne Greene, who narrated the film, suggested to him that he enrol in his acting school. Charles was five by then and had the illusory impression that “Canadian” meant glamorous. His parents were delighted to receive a cheque for $101.75 from the National Film Board for services rendered. This classic bit of Canadian kitsch played as a short in theatres all over North America for several years thereafter, and it is currently viewable on YouTube. This was Charles’s first and only starring role, and one that left an indelible impression on the little boy.

Charles may have had a unique connection to the big screen, but he and his family had a relationship with the TV in their house that was typical of a 1950s family. Every Sunday night, the family gathered in front of their black and white TV to watch their favourite program, Lassie. The Pachters got a dog, too, which Charles named Leslie — that was what his grandmother called Lassie.

In one episode, a mean old lady named “Sara Dibbles” kidnapped Lassie, after which Charles decided to call his mom Dibbles. Finding she liked it, Sara started signing her letters with that name, and from that moment on she became Dibbles to friends and family.

At age 12, Charles sketched his dog Leslie, 1954.

Dibbles was indefatigable: she raised four kids, worked full-time as a travel agent and tour leader, and in her spare time was wardrobe mistress for shows with the Holy Blossom Temple Players, ironing the costumes backstage while Harry performed various roles in the plays. She was a firecracker, a cut-up, and a self-absorbed beauty. As travel agent for Fisher-Fremont Travel, she led tours to Israel a record-setting 166 times, in addition to thirty trips to China, Thailand, and Japan, and ten to Russia, every trip being “the best trip I ever took.”

In her office she told an older woman who was struggling to negotiate a stairway, “If you can’t get up these stairs, you’re not coming to Israel.” In Japan, a lady on the tour was still in mourning for her recently deceased husband, and didn’t want to get off the bus to visit a shrine. “You shouldn’t be on this tour. You’re going back to Toronto,” Dibbles told her, and she was promptly put on the next flight back.

When he was nine, Charles told her, “Mom, your problem is that you’re … uh … domineering.”

“I’M DOMINEERING?” she shouted. “I’ll give you such a DOMINEERING!”

Despite everything, Charles and Dibbles were close. He inherited his mother’s energy, and her sense of fun and adventure.

Charles’s father, Harry, who he always referred to as “Har,” tried his hand at many different businesses while Charles was growing up. After starting with a toy store where Charles obtained his first scooter, he then became a travelling salesman for a dress manufacturer, and later worked as a “customer’s man” at numerous stock brokerage offices. He ended up in a little office on Eglinton Avenue selling Israel bonds.

Harry had many pals with whom he played poker and went to hockey and baseball games. As president of B’nai Brith Eastern Canadian Council, he attended many conventions in the Catskills in Upstate New York with Dibbles. Har had a wonderful gift for telling jokes and stories, and was in great demand as an after-dinner speaker. He was also a Mason. Charles can remember watching his father and a fellow Mason one day in an elevator. Spotting Mason pins on each other’s lapels, Harry and the stranger immediately launched into an elaborate series of variations on a secret handshake that thoroughly mystified Charles.

Harry, who was an avid 8mm movie camera buff, recorded many highlights of his children’s lives in jerky reels. During the 1950s and 1960s, scene after scene showed the family walking out the front door of their home, the women dressed for the High Holidays in outlandish outfits such as fur stoles with animal snouts, to go to the Holy Blossom Temple across the street. Later, the family gathered, sharing screaming fits of laughter while reviewing the footage. There were rounds of birthday parties, candle-blowing, gooey cake with nickels wrapped in waxed paper; panning shots of little faces under paper hats peering out around the table, munching crustless chopped-egg sandwiches on brown bread; close-ups of Halloween loot being spread out on the living room floor, Dibbles nursing and bathing younger brother and sister, aunts and uncles jitterbugging on the front lawn, and four-year-olds playing in sand boxes, wrestling or smacking each other. Like father, like son, Charlie records a lot of what he does. On his computer he kept a diary of everything he did and everyone he met between May 1, 1989, and December 31, 1999. He also keeps copies of materials he has received, much of which can be found in the archives of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto.

The most dynamic personality among Charles’s relatives was his Auntie Annie, his mother’s petite, adventurous younger sister, who had gone down to Birmingham, Alabama, in the 1930s with a girlfriend, and had gotten married in a shotgun wedding to a sleazy character who was involved with drugs. Annie ended up being rescued by her grandmother and her older brother, who drove down to Alabama in an old Model T Ford, had the marriage annulled, and brought her home. Resembling Lana Turner, Annie was a classy dresser whose hair, whenever she visited the Pachters, always had a different colour. When she married boring Uncle Louie and gave him a daughter, the three of them moved to Las Vegas, where he became a croupier in a casino while she opened a Hudson automobile franchise.

She later divorced Louie, moved to New York, and managed the Park Royal Hotel on the Upper West Side near Central Park. As a teenager, Charles visited her several times and was taken to Broadway shows like The Pajama Game, Li’l Abner, Oklahoma, and Carousel. He later saw Ethel Merman in his favourite musical, Gypsy, at the O’Keefe Centre (now the Sony Centre) in Toronto in 1960. That show, based on the memoirs of Gypsy Rose Lee, left Charles with an enduring fascination with Ethel Merman, the brassy performer who reminded him of Dibbles, and whom he often imitates. He also knows all the songs by heart, which you will quickly discover if you ever visit him.

Annie also introduced him to the art galleries of Soho during the pop art era, took him to the Guggenheim and MOMA, and allowed him to see, for the first time, Matisse’s Dance and Picasso’s Guernica. This was probably the best time to be in New York, with jazz clubs on every corner, the Yankees regularly winning the World Series, and abstract expressionists like de Kooning, Pollock, and Rothko showing in the art galleries.

One day Auntie Annie phoned him from the apartment in her New York hotel and said, “902 died. She had a gorgeous couch. I’m sending it to you.” That’s how he inherited his favourite piece of living room furniture, the one on which he habitually meditates.

The Pachter house at 84 Chudleigh Ave was near the “reeveen” (as kids called it), which they had to cross to get to John Ross Robertson Junior Public School, where Charles spent Grades 1 to 4. The ravine was magical. During forays through forbidden pastures, Charles found strangely shaped wild pumpkins growing there in the fall, and he believed he alone knew where they were. His love of the ravine may well have nurtured his adult attachment to a farm in Oro-Medonte, a waterfront studio on Lake Simcoe, and a large studio retreat in a quiet laneway in downtown Orillia.

Lake Simcoe has always played a major role in Charles’s life. In the summers, when he was very young, his parents rented an old musty cottage on the south shore of the lake. The view west over the lake from the cottage was superb, allowing everyone to witness great sunsets and windswept waves.

Though it now seems like just another suburban area north of Toronto, in the 1950s the south shore of Lake Simcoe — Willow Beach, Filey Beach, Jackson’s Point — was, to Charles anyway, far-away cottage country. The wind coming off the lake was powerful, and when it was wavy and stormy, it felt more like an ocean. Fishing in that lake with his dad combined adventure and responsibility. There was so much to keep them busy — attending to worms, leeches, and hooks; unknotting fishing line; putting down and pulling up the anchor; stringing perch and bass; bailing out the wooden boat and pull-starting the motor, a Johnson 10-horse with a sinister-looking cowl. They almost never came home without a good catch, which his dad cleaned expertly as everyone sat around making faces. His mother would coat the fish fillets with egg and flour, fry them in butter, and serve them with fresh summer radishes and tomatoes.

Several times a day, the kids slid from the cottage lawn down a bum-worn, grassy hill to a sandy beach that had the cleanest, clearest water imaginable. Jumping in and out of the lake, they dared each other to see who could swim to the big rock — only ten yards out and where the water was not quite over their heads. Once in a while Charles would discover a chartreuse-green leech the size of a kitchen knife, or a pinkish-beige crayfish with wiggling antennae, or a huge bullfrog looking like it was blowing bubbles, or a beautiful empty mother-of-pearl clamshell. Sometimes a sinister-looking, half-decayed monster fish as long as his whole body washed up on shore, covered in frenzied flies and insects.

“A muskie, maybe a sturgeon,” said his dad.

Down the road were more cottages of rich people, built in the middle of long, landscaped, strip lots divided by high cedar hedges. There was Myn and Morris Sugar’s place, called Mynmor Gardens, with a rococo fountain you could see from the road, and there were the Applebaums with lots of Cadillacs parked in front. Almost everyone had a cottage with a name. When he asked what their cottage’s name was, his father replied “Kosta Lotta,” or “Machakada Sahapa,” which was the first syllable of the name of everyone in the family (i.e., MAida, CHArles, KAren, DAvid, SAra, HArry, PAchter). Often Har drove the family into Jackson’s Point where they walked around splitting and spitting out “shemeshkehs,” or sunflower seeds. There were also pumpkin seeds and pistachio nuts, whose red-dyed shells stained everyone’s lips.

Close by was the Tides Hotel, where some of their friends rented cabins and performed in hastily prepared summer skits. Dibbles would blacken her teeth with chocolate wrappers and put her hair up in pin curls to go out to one of these zany performances as a member of the Mafoofsky choir, made up of a group of friends who sang racy songs in pidgin English-Yiddish. For example: A boy in khaki ... a girl in khaki, underneath a khaki moo-o-oon. (“Kak kim oon” in Yiddish means “shit on that.”)

In later years they moved to another cottage, farther west along the lake near the government dock at Willow Beach, a few doors from Sedore’s general store, where kids hung out at the pinball machines while sucking on halves of strawberry, lime, or banana popsicles, the other halves stowed in shorts pockets. Charles didn’t like this cottage as much as the first cottage. It had slanted floors, dank bedrooms, and green beaverboard walls and mice and bats. And you had to cross the road, dodging cars, to get to the lake, which had hairy green algae attached to the rocks, and a stony bottom. It lacked the wilderness feel of the first cottage. Charles found out the next summer that the first cottage had been towed out onto the lake during the previous winter, and was sunk through a hole in the ice.

The second cottage was closer to Roches Point, where the very rich people lived on huge lakeside estates that bore names like “Windarra” and “South Wind,” with servants’ cottages behind manicured stone walls.

One family, the Cowans, had their own movie theatre, to which Charles once was invited for a birthday party. The rich FOOFs (Fine Old Ontario Families) — the Matthews, Oslers, Laidlaws — were unknown to the young parvenus. It wasn’t until some fifty years later that Charles was invited to a cocktail party at one of these summer palaces, where he was greeted by a neighbour who introduced him as “the artist who painted the queen on a moose.” It was then that he remembered wandering as a kid along the cedar-hedged roadway outside the forbidding gates, slapping mos­quitoes, and wondering who on earth was lucky enough to live there.

By 1950 the house on Chudleigh Avenue had become too small for the family of six. Wanting Maida and Charles to be closer to the Holy Blossom Temple religious school they were attending, Dibbles and Har bought a larger, mock-Tudor brick and stucco house at 83 Ava Road, across from the “Holy B,” as it was called. The neighbouring kids on Peveril Hill and Ava Road were quite different from the proper little Anglicans he had known on Chudleigh Avenue. These new kids were mostly Jewish, with names like Hushy (Harold), Moishy (Marvin), Gutman (Goody), and Gedalya (Gary), a far cry from the Jeannies, Johnnies, and Betties he’d known north of Eglinton.

The new house had diamond-paned leaded glass windows, a garage door that opened and closed automatically, and an unused attic that Charles transformed into a working studio where he spent the next two years painting. One day his sister Karen begged him to let her see the attic. He finally agreed and helped her up a ladder and through the trap door in the ceiling of his bedroom closet. Once she was up in the attic, he took the ladder away. She screamed, but eventually he brought the ladder back and let her down.

Alone in the attic he drew trees, still lifes, imaginary Middle Eastern cityscapes, and sketches of Centre Island.

If fine art was not a major focus in Charles’s family home, his parents still felt that the children should be exposed to the arts. His sisters had taken ballet and piano lessons, but his younger brother showed no particular interest in things cultural. Whatever their own interests, his siblings all felt that Charles got special treatment. At dinner, whenever Dibbles put a larger portion in front of him, they would point accusing fingers at the food and scream in unison, “FAVOURITE!” Everyone would then dissolve in laughter as his mother tried to defend herself by adding extra morsels to their skimpier allotments. This was a hilarious ritual, but underneath it there was a considerable amount of jealousy.

“The trouble with you,” Dibbles told Charles, “is that you think too much and you’re too smart for your own good.” When he told her he wanted to be an artist, she replied, “You want to paint? Paint the bridge chairs!”

Four Pachter children — Maida (rear), Karen, David, and Charles.

His widowed immigrant grandmother, Eva, who called him “Charl” because she thought Charles was plural, told him, “Go foist to university. After dat you’ll know if you still want to be an artist, but a doctor is better.” When he received an honorary doctorate from Brock University in 1996, he was able to tell an interviewer, “Now my mother can call me doctor.”[1]

Charles was also discovering that he enjoyed playing with words. The Pachters had a spotted black-and-white cat named Viveca, who had a mess of kittens, prompting twelve-year-old Charles to phone in an ad to the birth column of the Toronto Star. It read: “Katz, Viveca, is thrilled to announce the birth of quintuplets, at home, by natural childbirth. Mother and babies doing well. Father’s whereabouts unknown.” After the ad appeared, the papers called immediately, wanting to do interviews and take pictures, but Charles, the budding satirist, told them, “She’s resting after her ordeal and prefers to remain anonymous.”

Charles completed Grades 5 to 8 at John R. Wilcox Public School, and came in first in a public speaking contest. His Grade 5 teacher, Miss Dickson, told his parents that his work was satisfactory but “less talking would help.”

In the summer of 1953, his parents sent him to Camp Tamarack, a Jewish Boy Scout camp. After three weeks he wrote his parents:

Dear mom and dad,

I have just come back from swimming and I got a few bloodsuckers on me and now I have a few sores from them.… Last night I got sick in the stomach and was up all night.… I went to the bathroom and found out that I had diarea [sic]. Write soon.

Charles[2]

Along with the troubles that Charles outlined in his letter to his parents, he was also paddled by the old Scout Chief — a sort of initiation rite supposed by one and all to be an honour. Charles, however, thought it was weird.

He was told to climb the steep wooden stairs to the cabin of this old man who was held in awe by the rest of the camp. The Scout Chief promptly took a Ping-Pong paddle and whacked Charles on his bare butt a few times, taking an unnatural delight in his task, grunting as Charles grimaced.

Years later, at Camp Northland, Charles watched with nervous curiosity another example of a strange camp ceremony. In that incident he was witness to what was known as a “circle jerk” — six or eight boys sat around a campfire, displaying the newly discovered capabilities of their anatomical hoses to curious onlookers.

This experience caused Charles some unease. As is typical for adolescents, he experienced some anxiety associated with his emerging sexuality. Although by the time he reached puberty Charles had fooled around a little with girls, as he moved into his teens he found that he was less interested in them. In fact, he found that he wasn’t interested in many of the activities the rest of the boys of his age were engaging in.

As Charles grew, Dibbles often came to his bedroom door, concerned that her son wasn’t outside playing with the other kids or doing something useful like watering the garden. Charles came to realize he was not like the other kids.

“What will we do with him?” he heard his mom saying to his dad at the kitchen table from his vantage point on the stairs.

“Maybe we should give him some art lessons,” replied his father.

From that point on, while other little boys were outside in the street playing hockey or discovering girls, Charles was taking art lessons, music lessons, and drama lessons.