The Vinyl Café Notebooks

by Stuart McLean

  “No.” said Orma. She hadn’t read the plaque. What did it say?

  Rob wouldn’t tell her.

  “You have to read it yourself,” he said.

  “Come on,” said Orma. “It’s pouring rain.”

  “Don’t leave town without reading the plaque,” said Rob.

  So on the way home Orma made her son drive her to the centre of town. She got out in the middle of that April storm, walked up to the bandshell and read the plaque. She felt tears well up in her eyes as she read it.

  In memory of Maynard Helmer, it read. This was his town. This was his corner. These were his people.

  Maynard’s mother died when he was young boy. He was raised by his father. Cy Helmer liked a drink. It was Cy who was “drunker than hell” that morning that Orma first met Maynard. When Cy died, one of Maynard’s cousins, Audrey Robinson, from Iroquois, agreed to look after Maynard. Audrey was not a wealthy woman. For years she and Maynard got by on what little she had and on her late husband’s army pension.

  A year before Maynard got sick, Audrey won the lottery. She had a half of a ticket that was worth $1.9 million.

  She bought a new house, and everything was going fine until Maynard got sick and went to hospital. His room in the hospital had everything: balloons, and flowers, and cards, and visitors. There were always visitors. Frank Morgan was there the day he died. He had gone to pick Maynard up in the morning. He was going to take him downtown so he could have coffee with the boys. Maynard was so excited he had woken up at five o’clock in the morning, but just as they were going for the car, he took a turn for the worse and they couldn’t go. He died around supper. That was 1990.

  There was a mob at Maynard’s funeral. Hundreds of people came.

  About a year later, Frank Morgan at the arena thought they should do something to remember Maynard. He went to Audrey, and she agreed. She took some of her lottery winnings and gave them to the village, and they built the bandshell at the corner of St. Lawrence and Main.

  There was a mob there the night it opened too. Frank Morgan was the master of ceremonies. The local Members of Parliament, both provincial and federal, were there. Shirley Fawcett cried. Lots of people cried.

  It has been there four years now, but it looks like it’s been there forever. And if you happen to be driving by Winchester on a Friday evening this summer, and you have some time to kill, I’m sure the people of the village wouldn’t mind if you stopped to have a look. They have a concert planned for the bandshell every Friday night of the summer. They start at eight o’clock, and sometimes there are as many as two hundred people out to listen. A lot of people bring lawn chairs with them. They put them down on the corner of Main and St. Lawrence, which used to be Maynard’s favourite corner, right there in the centre of the village where he could keep track of everything.

  1 August 1994

  MOTELS

  The roadside motel has fallen into disfavour these days and that is a shame. I am talking about the kind of place you can still stumble upon if you are prepared to give up the highway and the notion of making good time. You find them lingering on the edge of summer towns, with twenty rooms and a pinkand-green neon sign that buzzes and says Vacancy when you pull up, thank God. The kind of place that closes in the winter because the owners who live in the mysterious rooms behind the office go to Florida. When you check in they give you a key on a brown melamine key ring that says Room Six, but you park your car in front of Room Eight, because the spot in front of Room Six is already taken by a car with Michigan licence plates—a family of seven whom your kids will meet by the pool, and who, you will learn, are heading home from a wedding in some town that you won’t remember, but it must have been sunny there because their kids are all sunburned.

  That’s the kind of place I am missing.

  The kind of place you stay at when you are driving farther than any sane person would in a day, especially with a backseat full of kids, and you stay there partly because they have an outdoor pool but mostly because of the giant statue of the squirrel by the sign. And you were happy to stop, happy to send the kids to the motel office by themselves for ice and happy to sit at the picnic table by the poolside, with your beer, watching them do cannonballs.

  And later on, after they warm up, and you’ve eaten dinner at the place down the road (you’ll have the fried clams), everyone will watch TV together from the two beds, and the thought will cross your mind that this might just be the highlight of the entire vacation. There, at the motel on the edge of the highway with the statue of the giant squirrel, because all these years later, even though your parents took you to Stratford to see Shakespeare, and to the Canadian National Exhibition to see the butter sculpture, and to more museums than anyone could possibly be expected to care about, and to PEI and Nova Scotia, and the coast of Maine, and one summer to England, even after all that, the things you remember with the greatest fondness are those moments when dusk had settled, and you were in the back of the car hanging over the seat, and your father announced you should start looking for a place, and it was understood it would have a pool, and be within earshot of the highway, and for breakfast you would have cereal that came in one of those single-serving boxes you break open on the side and use as a bowl.

  And that’s just the beginning of it, because another thing about family car trips, along with a mother who can pull things out of her purse as if it was an Advent calendar, and goofy alphabet songs, and signs you hold up to other cars that say things like Honk if you think my dad needs a haircut, the other thing about hitting the road in July or August is that the family food rules tend to go right out the window.

  Roadside motels are only ever your destination if you are actually on the road. And what better way to be on the road than to find yourself on a summer evening, in an overpacked car, surrounded by the people you love.

  30 July 2006

  MEETING FAMOUS PEOPLE

  Sitting in the Halifax airport, eating a sandwich and with an hour to kill between planes, I heard an announcement that caught my attention. “Would Cindy Crawford please report to the information booth on the main floor.”

  Well now, I thought, putting my sandwich down and looking up from my magazine. What should I do about this? It’s not every day you have an opportunity to see a supermodel in the flesh. I wondered about my next step—should I really get up, leave the departure area and check this out? I had the time. As I wondered about what to do, I recalled another morning at another airport in Atlantic Canada—the morning I had gone into the men’s room and walked into a man the size of a furnace, realizing only when I got back to the departure lounge and looked around that I was sharing the airport with an army of big guys. I don’t know what the collective noun for a group of wrestlers is: a fall of wrestlers? A smash of wrestlers? A scream of wrestlers? Whatever the case, the Charlottetown departure lounge, not the largest lounge in the country, was chockablock with wrestlers. And it didn’t take me long to figure out that these weren’t just any wrestlers. These guys were the pride of the WWF: Rowdy Randy Piper, Hulk Hogan, Jake the Snake, all of them half asleep and waiting to be stuffed onto a plane to God knows what next stop along the road.

  At the time I was on tour myself, promoting my first collection of Vinyl Cafe stories. I was carrying a copy of the book with me that I was asking other authors to sign when we met at readings. I had all sorts of great signatures in my book, including actor Nick Nolte, who I had run into in the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Montreal.

  I love that book, and the memories it holds, and I have always regretted that I was too shy to ask Hulk Hogan to add his signature that morning. He looked so tired. I didn’t want to disturb him.

  But here I was, four years later, back in another East Coast airport, with a chance to snag Cindy Crawford. Of course, maybe it wasn’t the real Cindy Crawford. Maybe it was just a coincidence. Maybe it was someone with the same name. That can happen to a person.

  One Sunday morning, many summers ago, I hea
ded off on a bike ride in downtown Toronto and ended up pedalling along the Humber River Valley.

  There is a boat club down there, a kind of rundown and seedy club, or it was at the time, which would be the only kind of boat club I could imagine myself joining. I stopped and was admiring one boat, fantasizing about life on the water, when the owner’s head suddenly popped through the deck, like a water rat, followed by his body, a smile and an invitation to join him on board. He toured me around his boat proudly, and we exchanged pleasantries, and as I was climbing back onto the dock, I turned and held out my hand and said, “Thanks for the tour. My name is Stuart McLean.”

  He smiled, nodded, shook my hand and then, fixing me with his eyes, said, in a distinctly Scottish brogue, “Pleased to meet you, Stuart. My name is Ronald Macdonald.”

  I tried my best not to react. I tried not to blink. He was, maybe, sixty-five years old. I left him thinking how it was possible to go through an entire life with a perfectly normal name, and then one day, turn fifty and get hit from behind.

  I had a student once, at Ryerson University; his name was, still is, Peter Duck. He is a talented young reporter. Peter Duck’s grandfather lived the first twelve years of his life with the perfectly normal name Donald.

  So maybe the Cindy Crawford who was being paged to the information desk at the Halifax Airport was not Cindy Crawford the supermodel. Maybe she was a different, less glamorous Cindy Crawford. A Cindy, all things considered, whom I would probably be happier to know.

  Or maybe it was a joke. I read in a magazine that John Kennedy Junior’s friends, who were fond of teasing him about his perfect hair, once arranged for helmet head to be paged at some airport or other. According to the article, he answered the page.

  And the question now was whether I was going to answer the call for Cindy or, like I had when Hulk Hogan was in my grasp, let her slip away.

  I checked the departure board for the flights scheduled to leave in the next hour. Except for my flight to Toronto, they were all going to small towns. She’ll be on my flight, I reasoned. Where else could she be going?

  I think that was her in seat 3C, cleverly disguised as a middle-aged schoolteacher. In the end I let her sit there alone. She looked too tired to bother.

  26 September 1999

  MAXINE MONTGOMERY

  My friend Jill was flying west, on her way to Vancouver and not in a hurry. The kids were in camp, and Jill was in possession of the greatest thing anyone can possess during the dog days of summer. She had time on her hands.

  And that meant when she made her booking, Jill decided to save a bit of money. She chose the cheapest of the flights going west, the one that included the three-hour layover in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

  Not only would this flight save money, it meant she might also get to see the prairie. Jill hadn’t seen the prairie in years.

  Everything went as planned. Before she knew it, Jill had finished the first leg of her trip, cleared security and found herself standing in the John G. Diefenbaker International Airport—a modest place as these places go. Her luggage had been checked through to Vancouver. So Jill was footloose, with nothing to do but weigh her options. There seemed to be two. She could climb into a taxi and say, “To the prairie, my fine fellow, and make haste.” Or she could rent a car and see if she could find the great plains herself. It shouldn’t be hard. She figured she could choose a course, any course, hold it and she would get there eventually. Unsure which would be the most prudent course of action, Jill decided to seek advice. She turned to a woman who seemed to be there to answer just such a question—the friendly looking woman at the Saskatoon Shines booth. Jill smiled. The woman smiled back. And so, encouraged, Jill approached the booth and explained how she was between flights, and how she had hoped she could use the time to see the prairie.

  “I just want to stand in a field of wheat,” she said.

  Should she take a taxi or rent a car?

  Jill was talking to Maxine Montgomery, one of the managers at the Saskatoon Airport Authority, who just happened to be at the booth that morning. Wanting to stand in a field of wheat struck Maxine as a perfectly natural thing to do. She looked Jill over and said, “Can you drive standard?”

  Jill nodded yes.

  Maxine said, “Well then, why don’t you just take my car?”

  The next thing Jill knew, she was driving Maxine’s silver Acura under a big blue sky, sailing along past fields of canola and young green wheat, with sweet air drifting in the sunroof and Neil Young on the radio.

  Hearing about that made me almost as happy as it made her then.

  God bless Maxine Montgomery, I thought, for extending the unexpected kindness of a stranger. And God bless Jill, for taking the long way around.

  I don’t know who taught us to be in such a hurry these days. I don’t know why, or when, it became so important, when we are going from here to there, to do it as fast as humanly possible. It is a sorry state of affairs. You can’t blame the airlines. The airlines do their bit. They always offer a long way around. You can always go via Saskatoon, and usually, if you do, they charge you less for the privilege.

  It should be no surprise that I am in favour of the side roads. And the forgotten art of dawdling. So here’s to Maxine Montgomery. And here’s to the much-maligned layover. From now on I am going to do my best to incorporate a few into each and every day. So if you call to ask me over, you’ll know what I mean when I say it might take a while, that I am coming, but I am coming via Saskatoon.

  21 September 2008

  GANDER

  INTERNATIONAL

  AIRPORT

  Gander, Newfoundland, is the only town I know that was built as a result of an airport. Everywhere else, it happened the other way around. Everywhere else, the town came first. But not in Gander.

  They carved the Gander Airport out of the Newfoundland forest before there was a town, or even close to a town. The airport came in the 1930s. The town came two decades later.

  Today, Gander is a substantial little place. There is a Canadian Tire and a grocery store—as well stocked as the ones in the city where I live—and a Tim Hortons, of course. But no one would ever say Gander is a big city. The local phone book fills fewer than twenty pages. The town is still a chin-up away from ten thousand people.

  Yet there was a time when the Gander Airport was the largest airport in the world. Bigger than LaGuardia and Idlewild, bigger than Gatwick and Heathrow, and arguably more important than any of them.

  The runways at Gander are so big that they are still one of the alternate landing sites for the space shuttle. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I should back up a bit. I should begin where any storyteller worth his salt begins. I should begin at the beginning.

  In 1937, Gander was no more than mile 213 on the transisland railway, a milepost in the wilderness, in the middle of a rock, in the middle of the ocean—which doesn’t sound like a spot to build anything, let alone the largest airport in the world. But suddenly mile 213 found itself precisely at the centre of the world.

  If you draw a straight line from New York to London, you go right over Gander, and back in those days if you wanted to fly along that line, you needed a place to put down to refuel. So with an eye to the future they carved the airport out of the woods.

  And then, almost as if it was planned, the war came along. So they made the runways longer.

  It is hard to overstate the importance of the Gander airport to the war effort. The Allies would have won World War II without the Gander airport, but the war was shorter because of it.

  Pretty much everyone in Gander will tell you that Frank Tibbo knows more about the airport’s history than anyone else alive. I sat in his basement late one afternoon and he gave me a history lesson. During the war, twenty thousand fighters and heavy bombers, built in North America, were brought to Gander and flown across the Atlantic to the United Kingdom. At the beginning of the war, they were shipping planes by sea, said Frank, and losing as much as 80 percent of
the shipments to German U-boats. No one believed they could fly over; they didn’t have the range. Frank shook his head and told me that they hadn’t counted on the engineers who modified the fuel tanks, or the bush pilots and crop dusters who flew the planes. Often by dead reckoning. The first flight of seven Lockheed Hudsons left on 10 November 1940.

  What a story. They were supposed to leave the day before, but there was so much ice on the planes they couldn’t scrape it off. So they waited a day. There was only one real navigator among the seven planes. So instructions were simple: if you get separated, head for England. They did get separated. They hit bad weather. But they all made it.

  By the end of the war, planes flying out of Gander were guarding convoys, ferreting out submarines and, of course, being ferried to England not by the tens but by the hundreds every week.

  And then, when the war was over, the airport was right at the epicentre of civilian flight. If you were flying east from Paris, you might stop at Cairo, Constantinople or Karachi. You might even overnight at the world famous Raffles hotel in Singapore.

  If you were flying from New York to London, you put down in Gander. Virtually every plane that flew across the Atlantic stopped in. In 1956, which was the heyday of it all, approximately one hundred and fifty international flights put down at Gander airport every single day.

  And something remarkable happened. Someone, somewhere, realized that the international transit lounge at the Gander International Airport might be, probably would be, the only impression of Canada that thousands of people ever had.

  If Canada was going to make a good impression, this was her only chance.

  So they decided to build a showcase. They commissioned a lounge to end all lounges, with a geometric terrazzo floor from Italy, sleek mid-century modern furniture from the über design house Herman Miller. And a stunning seventy-two-foot mural—an ode to flight—painted on site. The artist, Kenneth Lochhead, from the Canadian prairies, used more than five hundred dozen eggs to temper his paint.