The
Squamidian Report – March 24 / 12
Issue #513
Including:
The Ontarion
Hi All,
That was cool how so many of you knew that the original band who did the ‘Whiter Shade of Pale’ song was Procul Harum. I for one, did not recall that name and really have almost no memory of the original version. Mind you, it was way before my time so I can’t be expected to remember them. Or maybe I just didn’t have a radio at my disposal at the time. The only radio in my parents house way back then would have been tuned to CBC, with the tuner knob welded there so no one could change it to a different station. I did have a couple of friends who had cars, or at least access to cars, and those cars would have had radios tuned to the local rock station in Kitchener. Saturday nights would have been dedicated to cruising up and down King Street along with every other group of kids who owned or had use of a car. The resulting traffic jams created a grid-lock that forced everyone to just inch their way along if traffic was moving at all. Very much like a scene out of that American Graffiti movie. Every car radio would have been tuned to that station. I think it was 570 or 1490 am or some such thing, but I’m not sure. The whole idea of ‘cruising the drag’ was to see and be seen. When you saw someone you knew, you stuck your head out the window and yelled at them. What you yelled was dependant on whether you liked them or not.
You could usually tell the status of each driver by their car. Kids who had borrowed the family car would be driving some sort of boring barge, but at least they were out there driving. Kids who were still in school but owned their own car would usually be driving a beat up old clunker, or some sort of older model sports car. Kids who were out of school and had landed jobs at the places that paid well, such as Bud Automotive, would be driving muscle cars. Everyone wanted their ride to be loud, but the kids in the borrowed cars couldn’t really do much about it. The clunkers tended to be loud because their muffles either leaked our had rotted right out. The muscle cars often had after market exhausts that were the kind of loud that was a status symbol for the owner.
If you needed gas, you had to head out the highway to find an open station. The in-town stations all closed at 6 in those days. It was only the gas stations out #8 toward Preston that stayed open all night, or at least until 11pm. And you often found yourself needing gas. It was not uncommon to ‘cruise the drag’ for 5 or 6 hours and you usually started off with not much more than fumes in the tank. For whatever reason, the Waterloo drag was not very popular. Everyone would head up King as far as the railway tracks, and then turn around in the Tin Roof parking lot. That was unless they decided to head for Sonny’s restaurant which was way out the top end of Waterloo. At least I think that was Sonny’s out there. Greg could correct me if I’m wrong. I was usually a passenger and didn’t pay much attention to those details. The other destinations for the hungry hoards where the A&W out Highland Rd where they had young girls as car-hops who scooted out to each car on roller skates, and the Dairy Queen down on Ottawa St. It was always fun to try to avoid returning you big glass A&W root beer mug. Tim Hortons had not yet built a presence in the KW area. When they did come in and set up stores, one of the first was on the same plaza as the DQ, that Zehrs plaza on Ottawa just north of King. It attracted a different crowd of people than those who went to the burger joints. Perhaps it was because Hortons stayed open all night, but their customers seemed to be less innocent, seedier, or perhaps a bit harder than the usual ‘kids’ back then. At least in the middle of the night on a given Saturday night. If you walked into the Ottawa Hortons back then, it would have been full of heavy smokers smoking heavily and nursing their coffees. The only difference between a hotel beverage room and Hortons was coffee instead of beer. I never liked those places. You couldn’t eat the donuts, they smelled like smoke and tasted like cigarette ashes.
But, if I did hear that song back then on the radio, performed by the original artists, it would have been over a radio in one of my buddies’ cars, as we cruised the drag on a Saturday night. If it were a summer Saturday night, all the windows would have been cranked down and all but the driver would have been hanging out, (no seat belts back then) hooting and hollering and having a great time. If it were a winter Saturday night, we’d have all been busy scraping the insides of the car windows, because most of the cars were clunkers that could not put out enough heat or air through the defrost system to even pretend to keep the windshield clear, let alone any of the side windows.
1967 was before I had my own ‘wheels’, and when I did finally get a set of wheels, it was 2, not 4, and 2 wheeled vehicles didn’t have radios back then.
doug
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THE ONTARION REPORT
Hello everyone!
Well, it’s August 15th and …………OOPS! No it’s not, it’s March 24th but you’d never know it if you didn’t look at the calendar! Geeze it’s amazing out there, what with motorcycles and convertibles, people in shorts and tee shirts and I even saw an older woman with a “Real Dark Summer Tan” wearing a bikini while sweeping her driveway on McGarry Dr here in Kitchener on Thursday afternoon! I doubt she got that tan during this warm spell but this weather is sure to help her keep it after she obviously worked on it all winter somewhere in Florida! She was so tanned that I thought she was wearing her bikini over a dark brown sweater and slacks! LOL! I’ve seen the same woman out other years in similar get-ups and I’d say she’s approximately 80 years old! She’s either 80 years old or she’s 45 and been spending her entire life laying on a beach cooking her skin! Either way, she looks like she could use a good plastic surgeon to tighten up the thousands of wrinkles in her saggy skin! She’s as thin as a rake but she’s wrinkled like a prune from years of sunbathing! She’s probably in her 40’s and over baked! Oh well, as long as she’s happy, who am I to judge!
We’re in the middle of real warm snap for sure around here! I heard today that as of Thursday March 22, we officially broke a heat record set back in 1921. The temp reached 27.5 C and the previous record was set 91 years ago today at 25.6 C. What an amazing record that was to break! It’s just been beautiful here in Southern Ontario and it’s supposed to continue for a while yet. They say it’s going to cool off somewhat but still be higher than normal temps for this time of year. I’m lovin’ it for sure! In fact, I noticed today that our grass needs to be cut so I guess I’ll be pulling out the lawn mower in the next day or so! I’ll have to make a run to the gas station to pick up some fresh gas. I put the last of it into my leaf blower last week so I could blow the winter leaf fall off the front lawn. It’s going to hurt when I have to fill that big red Jerry can with high test at $1.56/8 per litre! Thank goodness my Jeep runs on regular! That only costs me $80.00 to fill up once a week if I’m lucky! I’ve gone from 325 kms per tank in the cold winter weather to an impressive 425 km/tank in the good weather! That works out to be an adjustment from 14.6 mpg in winter to 19.15 mpg in the good weather. That of course is mileage for around town. On the highway it improves to about 24mpg. I do find however that now that I’m retired, I don’t put on near as many miles/km in a year as I used to. I’ve gone from about 30,000km per year to approximately 20,000 so the fuel bill has improved! I hope the cost of gas doesn’t go as crazy as they say this summer or I’ll be walking a lot more! LOL!
Anyway, that’s it for this week folks!
Thanks for tuning in and I’ll look forward to talking to you all again next week in The Ontarion Report!
Bye for now… Greg
PS: Something To Think About>
“She was only a whiskey maker but he loved her still!”
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Have a good one..
the doug
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