How Did I Get Here?

by Bruce McCall

  Our new home beat our hideously cramped Danforth Court apartment, by dint of its being a house with a basement. There was the smell of fresh paint, there were new hardwood parquet floors, new kitchen appliances, and the up-to-date 1903 convenience of a little pass-through cubby where the milkman left our daily orders until the refrigerator could be invented.

  Our house sat cheek by jowl in a semicircle of virtually identical little homes. A development recently bulldozed out of empty fields, it was an artificial neighborhood. In 1953, as in Danforth Court, my parents were a generation older than the young veterans just starting out who surrounded us. So babies and tots constituted ninety-nine percent of the kids, and I found no contemporaries. No traffic, human or otherwise, stirred here, in a daylong silence that gave me the creeps. Sitting on the front steps of our house over long summer afternoons in a vain attempt to make contact with human life, I lived smack in the center of the world’s first outdoor sensory-deprivation chamber.

  On the brink of our move to Windsor, I attempted to find a reason to hope for some positivity to emerge from an otherwise unpromising new environment. Desperation conjured the idea that a change of circumstances, new surroundings, new experiences, new friends, would miraculously smash the dreariness of our domestic life. Perhaps the move would jolt new energies, transforming our lives—and Mother’s. That hope was immediately dashed. Nothing changed. Mother stayed loyal to her own separate life. Alcohol was her friend, the only friend she needed. And she didn’t want or need to share. The emotional letdown of living with a mother who declined to be a mother killed my hope. Meanwhile, Dad’s role remained distant. He continued to almost belligerently maintain his hands-off relationship with us. Mike was the cherished firstborn, and Chris, as the last-born and a daughter, suffered Dad’s brusqueness less than the rest of us.

  The McCall family’s economic situation had been precarious for years. Dad’s income rose by a healthy increment with the move to Windsor, but there was still no money to replace our moth-eaten furniture, or to buy changes of outfits for Tom and Walt, or for vacations. We kids weren’t materially coddled. Somehow we clung to the belief that the McCalls had something that lifted us above mere money: a pedigree. Dribs and drabs of miscellaneous lore, and the impulse to mythologize, bolstered the case. Our ancestry harked back to noble Highland Scots—a book, The Scottish Clans and Their Tartans, placed us in the powerful MacDonald clan. We kids got, or manufactured, the impression that our name ranked us among the quality. McCalls had their own tartan and escutcheon.

  In reality, that book flattered virtually every Scots-related name, pioneering the fake-ancestry industry. Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of our claim to eminence was pure lowland bullshit, including the tartan and the escutcheon. But Dad and Mother did stand out ancestrally somewhat from most of their Simcoe forebears.

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  On my father’s side of the family, the Scottish emigrant and family patriarch, Donald McCall, loyal to George III and a veteran of British army skirmishes before 1776, had been brutally ousted from his Philadelphia home by a Yankee mob at the Revolutionary War’s end. He and a band of fellow refugees fetched up in British Nova Scotia. Awarded land grants in Upper Canada for their service to the king, Donald and a small party sailed from Nova Scotia and landed on the northern shore of Lake Erie. There they founded the Long Point Settlement (later Simcoe), more Scottish than bagpipes and haggis and Robbie Burns, and put down stakes not pulled up for a century and a half, when in 1947 Dad moved everyone and everything a hundred miles away to Toronto.

  Patriotism distinguished my forebears, even if great fortune was elusive. McCalls helped fight the Americans in the War of 1812. Fears of an American invasion kept Canadians living near the U.S. border jittery for decades: out of that hostility came the United Empire Loyalists, a mildly paranoid body of superpatriots, a sort of male-led counterpart to the Daughters of the American Revolution. A McCall was a boatman on the River Nile when General Kitchener headed an army en route to Khartoum to avenge the murder of General Charles “Chinese” Gordon. Grandfather Walt, father of my father, volunteered in 1900 for the Canadian Army contingent supporting Great Britain in the Boer War. (Just like Winston Churchill, he was captured.) Perhaps the gaudiest patriotic gesture of any McCall came from my father. Dad was thirty when Britain declared war on Germany. Too old for combat duty, he waived the exemptions available to him as a family man and sole breadwinner, and pestered bureaucrat friends in Ottawa until they relented. He was forthwith commissioned as a pilot officer in the Royal Canadian Air Force. His role would be that of a press liaison officer, writing propaganda for the home front and representing the air force as a PR man with various public events, including the filming and world premiere of morale-boosting Hollywood movie Captains of the Clouds. In 1943 he shipped overseas to join the Canadian Sixth Bomber Group, based in Yorkshire, where he wrote stories about air crews for home consumption. As time passed it became harder to bear the repeated tragedies of bright young men he had just interviewed taking off on bombing raids and never coming back, not to mention the passing of Chris Bartlett. Dad suffered a nervous collapse and by May 1944 was back home.

  My sympathy is still muted. The father of five kids (soon to be six) ages three to ten left his wife alone in Simcoe to raise us on a financial shoestring, with no help in running a demanding daily workload, stuck in a lonely existence in a one-horse town. In the diary he kept during his RCAF period, Squadron Leader Thomas Cameron McCall frequently fulminates about the war and its horrors, his screeds rising to patriotic heights. He somehow never wrestles with the most profound issue of all: how he arrived at the decision to march off to war, in a job almost anyone could perform, knowing that he had left his wife and family to fend for themselves. It was Mother who had the worse war.

  That first unbearably empty month in Windsor was ninety-eight percent content-free. Guilty about never having used my summers off from school to earn a little money, I found work in a shabby little side-street car wash. I was handed a hank of thin cloth and joined a gang of surly derelicts hosing down cars as they jerked along the line. The constant flow of freezing-cold water turned my hands red and numb. When the endless day was finally over I pocketed two dollars, enough to cover the cost of the bus ride home. I would end my summer’s employment with as much money as I’d begun it. The ennobling experience of work—at least this work—proved degrading. That evening I plotted to end my durance vile in Windsor. The next day I borrowed twenty dollars from Mother, left a deftly unapologetic note to Dad, and beat it via Greyhound back to Toronto.

  Six weeks of giddy independence awaited me. My friend Dave got me an usher’s job in a run-down neighborhood fleabag of a movie theater, the Allenby, that was stuck in a time warp: its marquee still proclaimed “Dish Nite every Wed.,” as it had since the Great Depression. The mixed aroma of stale popcorn and body odor clung to my skin for months, but I loved the Allenby. Twenty repeated viewings made me so familiar with the film High Noon that I could describe it, cut by cut, for years afterward. And I hung out with Dave, soaking up the joys of independence in the big city.

  It was, of course, too good to last. I dreaded the oncoming Labor Day. In late August, Dad phoned to summon me home. My plea to be allowed to stay in Toronto was halfhearted, if only because I knew I couldn’t convince Dad to let me stay. Perhaps he felt I was enjoying myself too much.

  Nothing had changed in my six-week absence. The household was still wreathed in a miasma of gloom. Dad snored away in his frequent naps on the living room chesterfield* after lunch and after work every weekday. We kids shamed the Last Mohican as we silently moved across the minefield that was the living room without waking him. By six in the evening, Mother was wobbling half-drunk around the kitchen preparing dinner. Every evening I expected servings of gastronomic horror to land on the table, but perhaps some stubborn pride inspired her: amazingly, she surprised me every time.


  Meanwhile, upstairs in our claustrophobic bedroom under precipitously slanting eaves, with space only for a tiny desk wedged between two single beds, Hugh and I transported ourselves to less troubled places. Books, drawing, and model-making, the time-honored pursuits of the isolated powerless, and tuning in to CBC Radio, supported the plunge into escape. Upstairs at 1793 Byng Road was a safe zone. Mother never visited. Dad rarely intruded, but whenever we heard his heavy tread on the stairs, Hugh and I knew we could expect no fun. His motives were invariably matters of gloomy necessity: to wearily explain that our monthly boarding payments were in arrears or that his recent—and sincere—memo “suggesting” that we chip in to buy a new TV for Grandfather Walt hadn’t drawn contributions from either of us. In-person chats, however, were rare. His usual method of contact consisted of frosty memos, crisply typed, carbon copies left on our beds to be found when we got home from work.

  Evenings downstairs presented the specter of Mother drunk and Dad evidently unaware of it. Certain television shows—Sid Caesar, Jackie Gleason, and Jack Benny—drew the whole family into the living room. This brief respite from censure and tension doubled the siblings’ pleasure and left us wondering why it couldn’t always be like this. The answer was that even attempting to raise the tragic issue of Mother’s alcoholism, routinely ignored while the family spirit deteriorated, would have collided with Dad’s edict that anything “serious” wasn’t serious unless he judged it so. Either through self-delusion or cowardice—it would have ruined his life if he’d faced reality—he didn’t treat Mother’s problem as a matter of urgency. Any attempt to even hint at trouble would only have stiffened his policy of blunting bad news. Dad won. He never did talk about it, even after she was gone.

  Back in Windsor and resigned to my dismal fate, I set out on the day after Labor Day to enroll myself in W. D. Lowe Vocational School. That sunny September day would deliver two interlocking dramas. Had I known what lay in store, I’d have stayed in bed; my fate was about to be sealed for years. I entered Lowe, a grim stone Tudor fortress in the style favored by school architects in every Canadian town, and sought out the guidance counselor. There would be paperwork and the usual formalities of transferring from one city’s school system to another. I explained my case and handed him my academic history, plus my last report card. He sat there at his desk and I could tell that he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  He finally spoke. “Lowe Vocational doesn’t have an art class,” he said. My heart sank. If I’d stopped to think, I’d have realized that the likelihood of an art class in that gritty little city was as realistic as finding a Rolls-Royce dealership in Coboconk. He continued. “Your high school record is . . . quite amazing. If you’re allowed to enroll here, your only choice will be a grade-eleven commercial class,” meaning I’d be primed for the life of a bank clerk. This represented another backward tumble into a den of scholastic lepers, the same limbo that had entrapped me years before, at Malvern Collegiate in Toronto. No thanks.

  By lunchtime I had trudged back home, burning with humiliated indignation. I had been an A student in Simcoe, I had entered my high school life avid to learn, expecting success. Avid to learn, yet it had all gone miserably wrong. I encountered a late-Victorian educational system populated by bored, tired, half-there teachers. School wasn’t the core reason, though: I was awash in the domestic turmoil of our household, guts churning with anxiety, a depressive genie on my shoulder, my self-regard in the dumpster. And no sign of hope. Cranked through the high school grinder, I was judged to be a dunce. Education’s summary verdict: Bruce McCall, age eighteen, is hereby officially classified as a dolt and should not be allowed to waste his teachers’ time for another school year. Out he goes. Period.

  Back at home I braced myself for the ritual harangue. Dad was there, having driven from his Chrysler office a mile away for lunch and a short nap. He was by now inured to my chronic underachievement and had clearly lost any faint hope that my losing streak would be snapped. I had failed again—and this time the defeat would force a new life plan. I deserved his contempt. Excuses? Even I couldn’t blame anyone but myself. I tried to suppress my anxiety at having to confess that my shot at formal education had just been euthanized. I had earned Dad’s ill will by upstaging him one time too many, expressing views contrary to his. And, to be candid, by being an irreverent pain in the ass. I girded myself and sputtered a quick one-liner that derived from wisdom I didn’t know was there until the words came out. I hadn’t failed high school, I trumpeted. High school had failed me.

  “That’s rotten,” Dad said, his voice relaxed, his demeanor calm. “Looks like you’ll be needing a job. Why don’t you call a fellow, Rudy, who runs a studio downtown. They’re looking for an apprentice.” Then, having discharged his paternal duty to guide his ne’er-do-well son toward gainful employment, he crushed the butt of another Lucky Strike and descended to napland. What a guy, I should have said. What I did say—to myself—was a baffled What the hell was that?

  It was a flabbergasting moment. Dad’s emotional temperament was a miracle of explosiveness, all the scarier for its unpredictability. Item: One day, Tambo, the family cat, leaped up with obvious hungry intent to the kitchen table where sat the Thanksgiving turkey. Dad happened to be nearby. His hysterical reaction registered a three out of ten on my mental Dad Dudgeon Meter. Item: One weekday afternoon a few months later, the entire family except for Dad clustered around the TV to watch Walt, invited as a guest on a local kids’ afternoon show, display a dozen of the more than fifty scale-model fire engines he had built—accurate to the tiniest detail—without plans, using cardboard, shoelaces, and whatever household scraps he could find. Dad arrived home in the middle of the show, and one glance at the screen propelled him to the gates of apoplexy. Furious, he bolted out of the house, banging the door behind him, therewith scoring a record eleven out of a possible ten on the Dad Dudgeon Meter.

  Walter had evidently committed some vile transgression, but he didn’t know what it was. Dad’s rage at what the rest of the family and the TV audience found praiseworthy still baffles me. Walt returned home to a reception better suited for a child molester than for a kid prodigy. With his father’s lifelong blend of indifference and contempt ratcheted up a notch or two, he banished himself to the safety of the fetid little bedroom he shared with twin brother Tom, secure in the belief that neither parent would show enough interest to intrude.

  Dad’s venom failed to deter Walt, who thereafter toiled in secret, like a Stalag Luft prisoner forging a passport. He clandestinely built a hundred more fire trucks (they were secreted under his bed) until he’d exhausted vintages and types to model. Walt loved fire trucks the way other fourteen-year-olds loved Davy Crockett. He would ultimately write several books of fire engine history and lore, universal go-to references today. He also edits the official newsletter of the fire buffs of America. Walt’s enthusiasm peaked, in 1971, when he bought his own fire engine: a 1927 Bickle-Seagrave pumper. He was driving the big red beast around town one day when the carburetor started belching fire. Quick-thinking Walter rolled his flaming Bickle-Seagrave into the nearest fire station (he knew the location of every fire hall in the county) to have the blaze extinguished.

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  Pick up any magazine of the 1940s and ’50s and you’ll be seduced by lavish four-color ads. Ad budgets were ballooning, and commercial art and editorial illustration were on a roll. In Pompeii in AD 79 nobody noticed the ominous signs on the horizon until disaster struck, and so it was with commercial art. Television was a beast that was increasingly hoovering up the available advertising dollars.

  In 1953, commercial illustration was ripe fruit ready to fall on another front, and on this one, all the money, all the talent in the world, couldn’t prevail. American life in the postwar era was in upheaval. New ideas, new directions were changing the mainstream. The energy that had gone to war came back; established entities collapsed under th
e unstoppable surge of the new. The war had sobered popular taste, and sophistication was edging out fantasy. Commercial art was about to be undone by the very artificiality that had flourished in the previous age. Because a skeptical postwar world wanted fresh means of expression, the commercial illustrator would soon be shunted aside, his heretofore valuable skills now disparaged as corny, old-fashioned and, in the pejorative sense, unbelievable.

  Windsor Advertising Artists was a small studio serving a single client, Chrysler of Canada, by handling Dodge and DeSoto advertising. Across the street, the Greenhow & Webster studio did likewise for the Chrysler and Plymouth brands. One key difference was that WAA delivered competent illustrations. The Dodge-DeSoto advertising agency, Ross Roy Inc., was located across the river in Detroit; the only aspect of advertising it didn’t handle was the artwork. This arrangement miffed both entities. Ross Roy people saw WAA as the undeserving beneficiaries of a political scheme: How could these hosers dare compare themselves with America’s best automobile illustrators, a few blocks away in midtown Detroit? Windsor Advertising Artists reciprocated the disdain: taking orders from know-it-all Yanks was humiliating. This strange arrangement was Canadian politics, writ awkwardly. It was meant to showcase Chrysler of Canada’s patriotism, allaying Canada Firsters’ gripes that this nominally Canadian enterprise was the timid handmaiden of its giant American parent. Which, together with Canadian Ford and General Motors of Canada, it certainly was.

  Switch the drawing boards for desks and Windsor Advertising Artists would be a modest insurance brokerage. (Although no insurance brokerage needed a back-room air compressor chugging all day to power the illustrators’ airbrushes.) Radios droned in every artist’s workspace. The pungent reek of benzine and rubber cement perfumed the atmosphere and probably corroded lungs, though six and a half years spent sitting five feet away from those benzine fumes did no physical damage to me.