by Neil Young
Monday night was bingo night at our house. People from the neighborhood would come, and my mom would serve some good food. The grown-ups drank beer and got real loud, having a good time. One night, I had just learned the alphabet and went down from my bedroom and recited it for the first time in front of everybody. At the end, everyone cheered for me. What a great feeling! I really liked that approval. Pretty soon Easter came along with the big Easter egg hunt, then when we returned from Florida in the Monarch, it was the last time, probably early 1953. We didn’t stay very long in Omemee.
1954 Monarch Lucerne
CHAPTER THREE
or reasons unknown to me at the time, having to do with my parents’ marital problems, we left Omemee, where we had lived for years, and moved to Winnipeg, back where my mommy and daddy had come from originally. At that time, gas prices had risen to about twenty-nine cents per gallon. On the trip out there to Winnipeg, we put around 1,382 pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere with the Monarch, but we weren’t alone. In 1954, 58 million other registered motor vehicles drove a total of 557 billion miles.
When we arrived in Winnipeg, Mom and Dad were trying to get their marriage back together again. We lived on a little street called Hillcrest Avenue, at number 145, marking the first time I can remember having a street number on our house. I went to Nordale School there for the last couple of months of grade three, the new kid. I was always the new kid. I was used to that. I didn’t mind.
There was a store on the corner near our house where I saw a little sailboat in the window. I would go down and look at it every day. It reminded me of the freedom I felt while playing on the river or the lake back in Ontario. It grew on me until I knew I had to have it. In an early sign of the obsessions I would have later in life, I dreamt about it every night. When Christmas came, I didn’t get the sailboat, but I did get a Werlich bicycle from my grandpa Bill Ragland! It came in a big cardboard box and Daddy put it together with a screwdriver and some pliers, then I went out for my first ride. It was cold outside and the lawns still had some snow on them but the sidewalks and streets were bare. Soon, after riding on the street and falling a few times, I got the hang of it. With the wind flying through my hair, I was free! I cruised around the neighborhood, learning all the streets. I rode to school! I rode home. I rode everywhere I could. I really loved moving through the world with my hair blowing in the wind.
Every Thursday night there was a square dance at the community center, and I, at eight or nine years old, would go down there and try to do it. I was a fish out of water, not knowing any people and more importantly not knowing how to “do-si-do with the old left hand” as some guy called out instructions over a squeaky speaker while records were playing, but I did see some girls there and that was interesting. Fascinating, actually. Sometimes, when I got to dance with them, it was a thrill. I was really nervous and self-conscious, but I was having a good time. By the beginning of spring I was starting to know kids, making friends, and getting into the groove.
We used to ride to many places, my new friends and I. It seems we all got our bikes at the same time, and the freedom was infectious. There was a river, the Assiniboine, that flowed through town, and a natural trail (no cement or pavement) followed the banks going up and down through the trees and little canyons. It was called the Monkey Trail.
Created by the First Nations peoples centuries before when they first settled in Winnipeg, the trail was just like a roller coaster and we used to ride out there with lunch bags packed by our moms, eat lunch, ride some more, and then ride home. That would take a full day, and I remember getting home a few times after the streetlights came on and getting a real earful from my dad and mom. Of course, we could not call and check in from a pay phone, because that would not have been a good use of a dime. I probably did not have a dime anyway.
Pulling wagonloads of things around with my bike brought a new dimension to my bicycle riding experience. One day, I was out riding along pulling my wagon, and it hit a rock or something and I went flying! I landed on my head and was knocked out on the curb. I remember waking up on the road with some people I didn’t know looking down at me. I had a concussion, and it took a while to come back to my senses. The front wheel of my bike was all bent. It sure was a hell of a year there in Winnipeg, and it came to an end as suddenly as it started. We moved back to Ontario.
Back in Toronto, my dad had gotten a job working for the Globe and Mail, writing a daily human interest column on the front page of the second section that was maybe a little like this book. We got a new car, a 1954 Monarch Lucerne, a metallic-silver four-door sedan, and if it wasn’t brand-new, it was only a year old. The most fascinating aspect of this car is that, later on, absolutely no one remembered it except for me, and I remembered it very vividly. My brother, Bob, who has helped me remember a lot of things for this book, was pretty sure we never had the car. Perhaps I just imagined it. Perhaps not! It was real to me, and when I recently found a picture of it from my childhood that proved it existed, I was ecstatic. I had almost been ready to admit that it was just a figment of my imagination until I found this little photo.
1957 Mercury Turnpike Cruiser
CHAPTER FOUR
ecause of my upbringing in rural Canada, where the houses we lived in were in rural areas and were not numbered, it meant something special to me when we began living in houses with numbers on them; it meant I was in the big city. When we settled in Toronto, it was on another city street of houses with numbers called Rose Park Drive. I was in grade four and was going to Whitney Public School.
That year, we took a big family trip to New York City. It was my first time going there, and when we got on the New Jersey Turnpike, I saw the new 1955 Pontiacs with the two bars of chrome on their hoods. New cars always showed up first in the States, and for me it was exciting just to see them. I was always looking for the latest models and could name them all. In New York City, we went up to the top of the Empire State Building and I stood on my toes to see down over the ledge. There I was, with my chin on the cement, peering over the edge, down to the street below, where tiny yellow taxicabs jockeyed for position on ribbons of asphalt. It was almost a quarter mile down to the street from the top of the building. New York City was the biggest place I had ever seen in my life.
Back in Toronto, I got to know some kids, and as a way to meet more, I started a club that was called the St. Lawrence Committee. I had a bunch of cards and we all wrote the name “St. Lawrence Committee” and our own names on them. I got those cards from my dad’s study, where he wrote his daily column. These white, heavy-stock cards were three inches by four inches with blue lines on them, and they were very official looking. We were an exclusive club, and I was the president. When we would meet at recess, it felt good to belong to something.
Near the school was a store called Dot’s, where the kids all went to buy licorice candy and hang out. There was usually a car parked there that I particularly remember. It had big fins on it and a lot of chrome. I think it was a DeSoto Firedome or a Dodge Adventurer or something like that. Advertisements on TV called it the “Forward Look.” I was very impressed with that car and went back every day to see it. I would get some candy at Dot’s for a few cents and look at the car, imagining myself driving it and being so cool. It had a lot of push buttons and that was the new thing. Push buttons even changed gears, and I was quite impressed. I could not imagine how pushing a button could change a gear. The car was like a rocket ship. I was already obsessed with cars. The designs were fascinating to me. The power was interesting, but it was the styling that really caught my eye.
During my life, I have collected many cars and have had lots of experiences with every one of them. They were a major part of my life. I did not collect perfect cars, expensive cars, or exotic cars. No; I collected cars for their uniqueness, with little concern for their condition. Because of that, most of my cars were dirt cheap. The great majority of my proud collection was clunkers. I j
ust loved the way they looked and got a lot of joy from just observing them from every angle, as I considered their histories and the possible places they had traveled. They talked to me. And I talked to them.
I want to tell you two little car stories. My memory doesn’t always make sense, so I am not sure of the locations and times. Because new cars were always introduced late in the year preceding the year of the car, it must have been late 1956 at the earliest, since these stories are about cars from 1957. I remember this happening near Rose Park Drive in the area near the Whitney school, but I was not there in 1956. I was living somewhere else. So here is the first of my two stories, lost in time.
Walking home from school one day I took a different way and went down a new street with big maple trees and impressive brick houses, each one with a long driveway. I saw a car parked in front of one of the big houses. It was a convertible with really sharp fins and beautiful curves. I had never seen one like that before, and I walked over to view it right up close and read the writing on it to see what it was. It was an Eldorado. I was very impressed, having never seen one. I knew that it was one of the best Cadillacs ever made. Upon close inspection I could read the word Biarritz written in a stylish script in gold metal applied to the front fender. This was a car I had only heard of and had never seen! The epitome of Cadillac quality! I was knocked out with the beauty of the sculpted body, chrome, and glass, the lush leather seats with chrome medallions in the backrests, and the overall presence of this magnificent car. I looked at the license plate. “Michigan.” Of course it had to be an American who actually owned one of these. I vowed that someday I would be down in the States, living the life I dreamt of, heard about, and read about. That was where all the cool music came from, all the great cars. How did those people do that? I wanted to know.
And now I want to tell you the second story, lost in time as well.
I was at a friend’s house, playing with his Lionel trains down in his basement. He had started building a really big layout down there, with his dad working on it with him. It had a plywood foundation with a lot of hills, bridges, and curves. It was under construction and going to be really amazing. I don’t remember ever seeing it finished, but it left a mark on me. I can still see it clearly in my mind. I hope he and his dad finished that layout. As I was walking along on my way home from playing trains there, I noticed a stylish new car parked on the street. Walking up to it I saw that the electric rear window went up and down by pushing a button inside. I was very impressed with that feature, having never seen, or even imagined, anything like it. Also, there were little chrome ornaments on each fender with lights in them. This car was unreal. Looking at it further, I discovered it was a 1957 Mercury, a Canadian car with Ontario plates. I read the words Turnpike Cruiser on the side. I had never seen so many new and different features on any car. A spare tire, cloaked in shiny chrome, was located on the extended back bumper that hung way out over the back. It was huge. My mind was blown. It made an indelible impression on me that I can still feel. Why? It is part of me. New designs I have never seen before seem to stay with me forever.
While I was living on Rose Park Drive, I put my own design energy into making a submarine out of two-by-fours and nails. Near our house there was a park called Moore Park with a wading pool in the center of it. Even when it was filled with water it was not deep enough for swimming. That is where I tested my submarine. I designed the submarine based on aerodynamic principles I had learned with my airplane hand sticking out the side of Daddy’s car. Using a wooden two-by-four as the main body, I cut a downward-sloping, wedge-shaped front end onto it with a handsaw. The sub was about sixteen inches long. Pulling the submarine along on a string connected to the front end caused it to submerge and travel underwater. For stabilization I added a conning tower made of another two-by-four cut into a different pointed vertical shape, and cutting through the water, it straightened out the slight wobble I had noticed. My wooden submarine would pop up to the surface whenever I stopped pulling it forward. It had to be moving to stay submerged. I drove big nails into it to represent guns, and it looked increasingly formidable. In fact, it was so formidable that it was banned from the pool by the authorities. They viewed it as a dangerous weapon.
The Wing brothers, a couple of Chinese boys I kind of knew from school, lived across from Moore Park and had a band. That year, in 1955, I went to Mayfair, a yearly event that was held every spring in Rosedale Park, which was a lot bigger than Moore Park, and watched the Wing brothers play on a little stage. I watched the whole thing go down, thinking it was really cool. People clapped after the band played, and the guys were very happy. That was something special to me. I saw they were doing what they liked and that other people were clapping for them.
At Mayfair, after watching the Wing brothers and their band, I won a very ornate and colorful leather collar with marbles and studs on it by throwing tennis balls at a rubber rabbit. I decided to give it to the girl I particularly liked, Mary Ellen Blanche. I felt more than a little nervous, walking up to her house to ring the doorbell and give her the gift. She was very pretty with blondish-reddish hair and a light complexion, a lot like my wife Pegi looks now, come to think of it. Her mother came to the door, and when I asked if Mary Ellen was home, she said no, so I had to leave the gift with her. Years later I was told that maybe she might not have thought that a dog collar was a good gift. I still had a lot to learn about boys and girls, to say the very least. It’s the thought that counts, though.
It was around this time that I saw my mom and dad have a big fight, and Mommy was screaming at Daddy and he hit her. I don’t know what they were fighting about and I guess I wasn’t supposed to be there. Later Daddy said that my mother was hysterical and that’s why he had hit her. Up to that point I had only heard the word hysterical associated with laughter. I really didn’t like what I had seen, and I spent a lot of time during the following days in the basement with my little secondhand Lionel steam engine. Down there below the house on the cement floor, where I was in my own world with my electric train, the furnace, and the musty-smelling water pipes. I forgot about everything else.
It was a little damp in the basement, and sometimes I got a shock when I touched certain things. Bare feet did not work. One hanging lightbulb illuminated my little train set. I would sit on the floor and experiment with the transformer, holding the train and watching the wheels spinning and throwing sparks. That was the beginning of my long relationship with electricity.
1956 Volkswagen
CHAPTER FIVE
n the summer of 1955, when I was nine years old, our family moved again; close to Pickering, Ontario, about thirty miles from Toronto, and into a new clapboard bungalow my mom and dad had purchased on Brock Road. My dad later wrote that this move was to be a new start for my family, referring to the problems that had been brewing in our house back in Toronto. My mom single-handedly painted the entire outside of the house a beautiful white. She painted everything inside the house as well. She really loved the place, and planted some trees in the front field that eventually became a lawn that Bob and I mowed with a gasoline-powered mower. My mother poured her love into that house, making it look great and doing everything she could to make it feel like a good home. I realize now, she was trying everything she could to make our little family work.
Once we settled in, I entered grade five at Brock Road Public School, a one-hundred-year-old stone schoolhouse with two classrooms—grades one through four in one room and five through eight in the other.
Some cars were known as “bombs” back then, when they were customized and “souped-up.” There was a guy who had a cool bomb on Brock Road in 1955. He used to stop at Middleton’s confectionery store across from our old stone schoolhouse and buy cigarettes, which he would roll up in his T-shirt sleeve, like the movie star James Dean. His bomb had blue lights under it and it made a low rumbling sound. He always left it running, and when he got in it to pull out onto the road, he c
rowded up by the steering wheel with his elbow out the window so you could see the cigarette pack rolled up on his sleeve. His posture was very different from a normal driver like Daddy.
At Middleton’s confectionery store, bubble gum cards were big, with Elvis having his own line of cards. I remember this guy and his car well because I would go in to buy a five-cent pack of gum and cards and he was in there a lot. He and guys like him were known as “hard rocks” or just “rocks.” His hair was greased back and came down on his forehead a little, and it came together in the back with a DA (duck’s ass) or ducktail. His bomb was so cool. It had no door handles. I wondered how he got in and out and locked it and everything without any door handles. I would watch him outside Middleton’s and still couldn’t figure it out. It was a 1950 Monarch, maybe a 1949, because it was a little different from my dad’s 1951. As he drove away looking so cool, his two exhausts made that low rumble, unless he was in a hurry and stepped on it, then it got really loud like a machine gun. Daddy’s old Monarch did not do that at all. The rock’s bomb really had a lot of attitude.
We had a gang of boys, maybe four or five of us, who walked home from school together every day. The gang did not include my two best friends, Chuck Bent and Reggie Taylor. Chuck lived up a side road behind the school, right near an old railroad bridge, in a big house full of kids, and Reggie lived the opposite way from me on Brock Road, about a mile past the school. The gang of boys walking in the direction of my house must have looked like a scene from Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer, scrubby-looking youngsters, ready to go fishing or investigating. A gang unified by scruffy hair and curious faces, always intent on some goal.
