The Vinyl Café Notebooks

by Stuart McLean

  It was a remarkable room—an avant-guard snapshot of the future when it was designed and appointed, and today, a glorious snapshot of the past, because what is most remarkable of all is that the Gander Airport International Lounge has remained virtually untouched for fifty years.

  The New York Times Style Magazine was impressed enough to commission a feature about the lounge. In the glowing essay, the article quoted Alan C. Elder, curator at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, who said the lounge is “one of the most beautiful and most important Modernist rooms in the country. Maybe, the most important room.”

  I was born at the edge of the age of aviation, the era of airlines and airships, jet planes and rockets, the astonishment of flight defined my boyhood. And so when I read that article, I bought a ticket and took myself to Gander.

  I spent an afternoon at the airport, and here’s what I can add to Elder’s enthusiasm. I think the lounge is one of the most remarkable rooms I have ever been to in Canada, every bit as glorious as some of the grand railway hotels and stations this country is known for.

  And in better shape than most. The lounge feels as if they closed the doors in 1959 and only reopened them yesterday.

  And its history is almost as splendid as its design. Because if every plane that crossed the Atlantic put down there, so did every person.

  “Oh sure,” said Cynthia Goodyear, whom I met in the airport restaurant, and who has worked there, at various jobs, for twenty-seven years.

  “I have served all the presidents, from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush.”

  And to heck with the presidents, Cynthia has made tea for the Queen.

  “That’s right,” she said. “But she turned it down. She asked for coffee instead. Cream, no sugar.”

  Just about everyone in town has a story like that.

  “That’s true,” said Marilyn Stuckless, who was a teenager when Fidel Castro came through town and went tobogganing for the first, and probably only, time in his life.

  “There were a bunch of us on the hill opposite the Hotel Gander,” said Marilyn. “And these men came along. They were more tanned than us, that’s for sure. And excited too. They told us it was the first time they had seen snow.”

  Someone told me that when Fidel went down the hill on his borrowed toboggan, he had a cigar in his mouth.

  “I don’t remember a cigar,” said Marilyn. “But that was a long time ago.”

  A more innocent time. Before air travellers were shuffled through X-ray machines and cordoned off behind security glass. In those days you didn’t need a ticket to get into the lounge; you could just walk in, and on Sunday afternoons that’s what townsfolk would do. They would drive out to the airport and get an ice cream and hang out in the lounge and chat with Muhammad Ali. Everyone from that era has an autograph or two. If you had made it your life’s work to collect autographs in the Gander airport, if that was the only job you ever did, and you were good at it, you could have retired wealthy.

  The list of the people who went through the lounge reads like a social register of the twentieth century. Everyone thinks The Beatles’ first stop in North America was New York City. Everybody is wrong—their first stop was Gander. Jackie O stopped there. And so did Frank Sinatra, Winston Churchill, Nikita Khrushchev, Marlene Dietrich, Richard Nixon, Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Ingrid Bergman, Julia Roberts, Tom Cruise and John Travolta, who still drops in regularly on his own plane. Humphrey Bogart, Bob Hope, Tiger Woods, Woody Allen, Bruce Willis, Demi Moore, Rod Stewart, Clint Eastwood.

  “I know a lot of them personally,” said Cynthia. “Elizabeth Taylor always calls ahead and asks for our homemade bread. Vicente Fox orders two plates of lasagna.”

  “Bill Clinton loves our muffins,” said the man standing beside Cynthia. “I saw him stuff a few in his pocket on his way out.”

  The Gander International Airport is not as busy as it once was.

  A lot of the flights that land these days are private flights. Corporate planes. These days there are no more than five scheduled flights landing every day.

  As for international flights, today’s jets don’t need to refuel on their way back and forth to Europe. Eleven international flights put down in Gander the month I visited.

  These days the flights that do stop are often unscheduled.

  When they arrive, phones start ringing around town. And in this world where customer service is often an automated voice message, people in Gander tumble out of bed in the middle of the night and open up the gift shop and staff the restaurant and the duty free. They stand by, ready to serve.

  They are still rolling out the red carpet to people from all over the world in Gander, and they will roll it out at any hour of the day or night.

  That is how it all began during the war. And during the early days of transatlantic flight. And on September 11, 2001, when almost forty planes landed out of the blue. And everyone was cared for.

  Canadians like to see themselves as a nation that welcomes others.

  That is what they do in Gander.

  They have been doing it for years.

  In style.

  28 March 2010

  MY FAVOURITE

  PHOTOGRAPH

  Whenever I am in Victoria, British Columbia, and have time to spare, I drop in to visit my friend Jim Munro. Jim owns and operates Munro’s books on Government Street, in that beautiful old part of Victoria down by the water.

  Munro’s is a wonderful bookstore, one of the last great independent bookstores in the country, and for years and years, for decades, one of the best. It is certainly one of the best appointed; housed in a glorious old bank, Munro’s was big before the big chains arrived and made big the name of the game where bookstores are concerned. But it is not for its size, or its knowledgeable staff, or its well-stocked shelves that I like to visit Munro’s, although those would all be good reasons. Truth be told, there are other bookstores in Victoria that could fit that bill; there is a good Chapters down the street, and Bolen Books across town, and Renaissance Books on Bastion Square, which is as good a second-hand bookstore as you will find anywhere. In fact, if it’s bookstores you are looking for, Victoria is as good a place to go as anywhere.

  The thing is, it is not the books, or even Jim Munro’s always convivial welcome, that draws me to Munro’s. I like to go because, when I do, I can always pop into Jim’s office and spend a moment with my favourite photo in the country. It is a modestly framed colour snapshot, taken about thirty-five years ago, and it makes me happy every time I see it.

  “Ah,” says Jim, beaming, “you want to see the cruise picture.”

  In 1969 or 1970, somewhere back there, Jim’s friends Marvin and Mary Evans invited him to join them on a weekend sailing trip. They were going to sail up to Princess Louise Inlet and view the waterfalls.

  “It was a lovely weekend,” says Jim. “We talked, and relaxed, and had a lovely time.”

  Though he seems to flourish as a bookseller, I have always had the feeling that Jim would have been just as happy had he been born as one of the characters in The Wind in the Willows, so I have always imagined that a weekend mucking around on a boat, any boat, anywhere, would suit Jim just fine.

  “It was a lovely weekend,” says Jim again, gazing at the photo fondly.

  Then he points out the people in the picture and names them one by one.

  “That’s Marvin and Mary Evans on the left,” he says. “Marvin was a Unitarian Church minister. And that is their son, I forget his name, and that is me in the blazer and sailor’s cap, and that,” he says ...

  This is my favourite part, this is the part where he points at the tousled-haired blond boy.

  “That,” says Jim, still beaming, “is their son’s friend, who they brought along for the trip.”

  He is pointing at the teenage boy in the pink golf shirt and the plaid pants in the centre of the picture.

  “That,” says Jim, about to deliver the coup de grace, “is Bill Gates.”

  Jim c
alls his picture “My cruise with Bill Gates.”

  And what does he remember of the two boys? Just this. That they stayed below deck the entire time. “They sort of irked me,” says Jim. “They were sort of boring and nerdy. They weren’t at all interested in any of the scenery. All they did was sit below and talk.”

  And what did they talk about, Jim?

  “Computers,” says Jim. “And how they were going to start a computer company. And all of the things they would do with it.”

  Jim has never seen Bill Gates since.

  “He lives in Washington State,” he says. “He has a huge yacht. Sometimes I see it in the harbour.”

  Pause.

  “It is good to know that he has kept in touch with the sea.”

  Bill Gates is one of the world’s richest men. He seems to be working hard to do good with the money he has accumulated. That is a pleasing thing to see. But what pleases me more is to visit his picture in Jim Munro’s office every now and then, and be reminded that somewhere inside him is that fourteen-year-old tousled-haired boy doing what all fourteen-year-old boys should be doing: irritating adults and dreaming dreams beyond belief.

  2 May 2010

  ROGER WOODWARD

  AND NIAGARA FALLS

  When Charles Dickens saw Niagara Falls, he wrote that he seemed “to have been lifted from this earth, to be looking into Heaven.”

  Of all the things I know about Niagara Falls, there is one story that lifts me from this earth, one story that makes me think I have looked into heaven. It is the story of Roger Woodward, the seven-year-old boy who was, on 9 July 1960, in a small boat that capsized on the Niagara River, above the falls. Wearing nothing but a life jacket, seven-year-old Roger went over Niagara Falls—and lived.

  I think about Roger Woodward every time I visit the falls. Every time I stand on the observation deck and watch the hypnotically and impossibly black water roaring over the escarpment, I wonder about him and what it could have been like to be in that water.

  Last week it occurred to me that Roger Woodward would only be fifty-one years old today. And it occurred to me that if I really wanted to know what it would be like to go over the falls, I could ask him. And so I set off to find him.

  It turns out Roger Woodward lives in a small town outside of Huntsville, Alabama. He is semi-retired. When I got him on the phone, I introduced myself and asked if he minded talking about his remarkable adventure. Do you remember it? I asked.

  “I remember it like it was yesterday,” he said. “I remember everything.”

  In July 1960, Roger lived in a mobile home in Niagara Falls, New York. His father worked in construction, so the family lived where the jobs were. “We were very much a blue-collar family,” Roger told me. “We travelled from one place to the next, from one job to the next.”

  During that summer Roger’s father worked at the Robert Moses power plant as a carpenter.

  Roger told me that he has a sister.

  “Her name is Deanne,” he said. Deanne’s birthday is 5 July, and to celebrate her seventeenth birthday in 1960, a family friend, Jim Honeycutt, offered to take Roger and Deanne on a boat ride. Jim had a small aluminum fishing boat. There wasn’t room for Roger’s mother and father.

  The day of the ride, was a beautiful sunny day. Jim, Roger and Deanne set off down the Niagara River from well above the falls. Deanne was in the forward seat, Roger behind her in the middle. Jim was in the stern. There were two life jackets on board. Roger wore one of them. They tucked the other one under the front seat.

  Roger remembers moving peacefully down the river in that little silver boat, remembers passing under the Grand Island Bridge—which is only a mile upriver from the falls and which many see as the last point of safety. Roger had no idea of safety points, however. He didn’t even know they were anywhere near Niagara Falls. He didn’t understand that one mile ahead, the river he was travelling on would tumble over the falls. It would be a day later, after he had followed the water over the edge, before he understood that.

  So the little fishing boat passed under the Grand Island Bridge—the point of no return. Roger says he remembers the faces of people in other larger boats. He says he remembers thinking they looked concerned, probably because such a little boat was about to enter such a dangerous part of the river.

  Ahead of them Roger saw what looked like a small white island. It was, in fact, a shoal, a small piece of land peeking up from beneath the water. It was covered with thousands of seagulls.

  The little fishing boat hit the shoal. And suddenly there was no thrust from the propeller. Suddenly they were in trouble. The current was picking up and the boat had begun to drift, moving down the river, toward the falls. Jim yelled to Deanne to get her life jacket on. Then he took out the oars and tried to regain control of his boat. The water, however, was getting rough.

  The average flow of the Niagara River at Queenston is greater than the Fraser, the Columbia or the Nelson rivers. They were hit by one wave, then another. The boat flipped. It happened so quickly that Deanne had only managed to get one of the straps on her life jacket done up before she hit the water. Roger had his jacket done up, but it was an adult-sized life jacket, and he didn’t know how to swim. His head was throbbing—later doctors would tell him he had a concussion.

  And so it was in this state, Roger, seven years old, unable to swim and wearing nothing but a giant life jacket, Deanne, with her jacket halfway done up, and Jim, with nothing at all, hit the rapids. Within seconds they were separated. Roger wouldn’t see his sister for three days. He would never see Jim again.

  Roger still had no idea that he was heading toward Niagara Falls or that he was tumbling through some of the most powerful rapids in the world. His head was slammed against rocks, and he was sucked under the churning water and shot back out again like he was being blown out of a whale’s blowhole. He couldn’t see anything.

  His sister, Deanne, knew she had to swim with the current if she was going to reach the shore, and that’s what she started to do. She battled the strong water and the weight of her life jacket. It felt, she would later say, as if she was swimming through peanut butter.

  And just when she thought she couldn’t do it anymore, just when she thought she was over, she heard a voice. The voice belonged to John Hayes. John was on land, on Goat Island, the island that separates the American Falls from the Canadian Falls. John had seen the capsized fishing boat whisk by him. John knew that if there was a boat, then there must be people too. That’s when he spotted Deanne struggling to get to shore. Of all the people watching, John was the only one to take action. He ran down the riverbank to get himself in front of Deanne. Over the roar of the Niagara River, Deanne heard John’s deep, strong voice calling her, “Come to me, girl,” he called. “Come to me.”

  The falls were only a hundred feet away. His voice gave her strength. She could see John Hayes reaching out, extending his arm over the barrier that was protecting him from the water. John reaching for Deanne, and now Deanne reaching for John.

  But she was moving too fast, and they missed.

  Now John had to get ahead of her again. He had to get where he thought Deanne would be. And to get there, he had to outrun the powerful water that was carrying her along. He was running hard, but he was running out of land himself.

  He ran down the bank and got himself in position again, this time just feet in front of the big drop. He folded his upper body over the safety barrier and reached out just as Deanne came flying by. He reached way down, and she reached way up and she caught ... his thumb.

  They were feet from the falls, and he had her, but only her cold, wet, slippery hand. And all she had was his thumb.

  He didn’t want to pull too hard because he was terrified that if he did, she might have lost her grip. He screamed for help.

  John Quattrochi, a truck driver from New Jersey, ran to him. The two men reached down and pulled Deanne up by her life jacket.

  The first thing Deanne did was ask, “Wh
ere’s my brother?”

  And that’s when John looked out into the river and saw Roger Woodward’s seven-year-old head bobbing up and down like a tennis ball. John leaned down and whispered in Deanne’s ear. Deanne put her hands together in front of her heart.

  “What did he tell her?” I asked Roger over the phone.

  He said, “You need to say a little prayer for your brother. You need to say a prayer.”

  So Deanne put her hands together in front of her heart and began to pray, praying for Roger, who was still being thrown around by the rapids.

  Roger was panicked and terrified, unable to gain control of his own body in the paralyzing force of the river. He couldn’t see anything. And he still had no idea where he was. All he knew was that he was moving fast. All he knew was that he was out of control.

  If you have ever been to Niagara Falls, and stood, like I have, staring at the water, you know the Niagara River starts to flatten as it approaches the lip of the falls. Roger remembers that moment. He remembers when the rapids ended and the water smoothed.

  “I was finally able to catch my breath, he said. “I was able to look around and see where I was.”

  What Roger saw was that he was moving swiftly toward the edge of an abyss. He remembers looking at the shore. A crowd had gathered on the riverbank. He could see them watching him. And the panic and terror he had been feeling just seconds before turned into anger. Why, he wanted to know, weren’t they doing anything to help him?

  Then seven-year-old Roger Woodward looked ahead. And his anger turned to submission. He was at eye level with the falls, just feet from the lip. He still had no idea it was Niagara Falls in front of him. He couldn’t see the drop. He just knew he was approaching a void—a vast area of nothingness.

  And that’s when he realized that he was going to die.

  “What did you think about?” I asked.

  “I thought about my dog,” he said. “And about my parents. And my toys.” Roger says he remembers wondering what his parents would do with his toys when he died. He says he didn’t think of heaven or hell.