As *spoon* as Arch comes back from vacation Hepcat will still be Hepcat.

8 8

I very clearly remember the day in the fall of 1963 that I bought Atom 9 at the Canadian National Institute for the Blind newstand at the Covent Garden Market building in downtown London. I remember passing the police station comic in hand while walking home to my house in the Old South London neighbourhood.

The excitement at my house otherwise that day was my sister modelling the dress that she was going to wear to her high school prom! Where they found her a swain for the prom I'm not sure....

I very clearly remember the day in the fall of 1963 that I bought Atom 9 at the Canadian National Institute for the Blind newstand at the Covent Garden Market building in downtown London. I remember passing the police station comic in hand while walking home to my house in the Old South London neighbourhood.

 

Is this Atom #9 your Original copy ?

I very clearly remember the day in the fall of 1963 that I bought Atom 9 at the Canadian National Institute for the Blind newstand at the Covent Garden Market building in downtown London.

Fall 1963? November 22?

I very clearly remember the day in the fall of 1963 that I bought Atom 9 at the Canadian National Institute for the Blind newstand at the Covent Garden Market building in downtown London. I remember passing the police station comic in hand while walking home to my house in the Old South London neighbourhood.

 

 

Is this Atom #9 your Original copy ?

No, my originals are long gone. I sold a pile of them to a used book store in the summer of 1965 for three or four cents each!

I very clearly remember the day in the fall of 1963 that I bought Atom 9 at the Canadian National Institute for the Blind newstand at the Covent Garden Market building in downtown London.

 

 

Fall 1963? November 22?

I see from Mike's Amazing World of DC Comics that Atom 9 theoretically hit newsstands on 22 August 1963 in the States and therefore perhaps a week later in Canada. I believe the school year had already started when I bought the issue, so it could very well have been in late September or even early October when I made the purchase.

I was thirteen years old and about to start grade nine fifty years ago early this month. My father made a decision that summer which would end up having lifelong consequences for me. He had determined that it would be a good idea to pack me off to St. Anthony's, a boarding school for Lithuanian boys run by Franciscan Fathers in Kennebunkport, Maine.

And so it was in the early afternoon on the Saturday before Labour Day that with suitcase packed I was driven by one of my father's drinking buddies the eighteen miles or so to Talbotville south of London on Highway 3 to board the Greyhound bus en route from Detroit to Buffalo. (Yes, my father and his buddy were already well over refreshed but why would that have prevented them driving those few miles to Talbotville?)

Now I'm sure that most parents these days would be horrified at the thought of an unaccompanied thirteen year old taking the dog even from London to Talbotville but helicopter parents didn't exist in those days and my father thought that at the age of thirteen I was fully capable of making the right transfers and arriving in Kennebunkport some time the next day. And I was.

The thought of journeying across the northeastern part of the United States filled me with excitement! Any apprehension I felt was mostly about the school year ahead. I thought my home town of London (population 154,000), was just a sleepy backwater compared to those exotic, happening U.S. cities through which I'd be passing. As you can imagine though the trip through Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Utica, Schenectady, Troy, Albany, Worcester and Boston was anything but fun. While it was an adventure it was also an ordeal. There were stopovers at Buffalo, Rochester (or Syracuse) and Albany with transfers required at Buffalo(?) and Albany. I was introduced to the wonders offered by "big city" U.S. bus stations, dinettes, newsstands, Coke or better yet Pepsi machines that dispensed not ten ounce glass bottles but cans(wow!) and even cologne spray dispensing machines in men's washrooms with exotic scents such as Brut, English Leather, British Sterling and Jade East! (The latter I regarded as the most exotic men's cologne available until well into my college years. I stocked up on Jade East aftershave on a trip to New Orleans 32 years ago and I still have a couple of bottles in my medicine cabinet!)

Along the way I selected some reading materials at the newsstands. These included a Batman title and the following:

I also picked up a Mad magazine and a Man from U.N.C.L.E. paperback:

Awesome stickers!

I was absolutely fascinated by THRUSH! It sounded like my kind of organization.

My small stack of comics was after a few weeks confiscated as potentially bad for my moral character in a locker check by the priests at the school! I bought no more until Xmas. For one thing we were only rarely allowed off the monastery grounds. For another we weren't supposed to have any money.

On the way I met up with other boys journeying to Kennebunkport as well and by the time we got to Boston at about 5 AM on Sunday there must have been at least half a dozen of us. There was a stopover of several hours in Boston before our connection to Maine and the older fellows (very sophisticated sixteen year olds who bought Playboy instead of Mad magazine) suggested we get breakfast at an all-night diner across the street. You can imagine the clientele that an all-night diner by the bus station in Boston attracted. The waitress was middle-aged and built like the proverbial brick house. I'm sure she thought she was hot and she probably was by the standards of her customers. Nonetheless, I ordered bacon and eggs over easy to which she snapped "Toast or English?" Getting a confused look from me in response, she immediately ordered the English. This being a big sophisticated U.S. city I wasn't sure what was in store for me. It turned out to be an English muffin clearly toasted some hours previously because it was as tough as hard tack. Certainly not a good first impression of Brit cuisine.

Incidentally, when I returned to Boston on a trip with a buddy to see Fenway Park in 1988, I ventured back to that big city bus station in Boston. To my adult eyes, it was tiny, drab and entirely uninteresting. And the Pepsi machine I had found so fascinating and the diner across the street were both gone.

In the end the rest of the boys and I arrived in Wells or Kennebunk, Maine with no real misadventures. I can't remember how we got to Kennebunkport from there, although we may have been met at the bus station by representatives from St. Anthony's.

It turned out to be my last day of freedom until Thanksgiving Day. I used it to explore the extensive and spectacular wooded grounds of the monastery along the Kennebunk River:

The bas relief sculpture behind the altar was done by my uncle.

The stained glass windows above were done by my uncle.

The bas relief sculpture above is also my uncle's work. It originally adorned the side of the Vatican Pavilion at the 1964-65 New York World's Fair. It was moved to the Kennebunkport monastery grounds following the completion of the fair.

And the lovely village of Kennebunkport (both Edmund Muskie's hometown and the site of the Bush family's summer ocean front residence):

Not that I was at all impressed with the natural beauty of my surroundings at the time. Nor was I really interested in the famous clam shack at the draw bridge in Kennebunkport. I was more interested in the dairy bar! That though is where I learned that a soda in Maine was not a concoction of soda water, ice cream and syrup; it was just plain ordinary pop such as Coke, root beer or ginger ale. Bummer!

As it turned out though, St. Anthony's was where a lot of Lithuanian parents sent problem kids. So it was full of toughs and delinquents from Chicago and other American big cities from the northeastern part of the United States. (Admittedly the second largest contingent of students was from Toronto and Hamilton.) Interesting that because basketball is in the very genes of Lithuanians, St. Anthony's with an enrollment of only 115 or so students fielded a basketball team that finished in first place among "mid size" high schools in eastern Maine in the 1965-66 season. I in no way, shape or form fit in with all the grease boot wearing hoods with slicked back hair who liked to brag about their gang fights with "niggers" back home (greatly overstated now I'm sure).

The highlight of the first semester was the expulsions that were announced at the start of December. The halls were for weeks buzzing with rumours of who could stay and who would go. The Franciscans were serious about not compromising St. Anthony's high academic standards and close to fifteen students were expelled including the sixth man on the basketball team, a little hard-rock from Chicago who could always be counted on to give the team a spark when it needed one because he could literally control a game with his ball handling skills. I saw him celebrating his expulsion that day in the junior dorm by packing up while smoking a cigar. Smoking was of course strictly prohibited inside the school.

I'd paid no attention to my clothing up until that point, but I quickly "learned" how unfashionable, awkward, weak and ugly I truly was. Only one avenue was left for me. I could nonetheless apply myself to my studies and demonstrate that I was the smartest, and I did with the top standing in my class of fifty or so. The disciplined study habits I developed that year at St. Anthony's served me in good stead all the way through high school and well into university.

I doubt though whether my grades earned me marks with my fellow classmates. There were though two billiard tables in the rec room. I gravitated to those tables instead of to the TV room during my free time. By the end of the school year there were only two or three students in the whole school who could beat me at pool. My proudest moment was when Mr. Lord, one of the outside teachers and a young bachelor, brought his girlfriend into the school to show her where he taught. Well I beat him at a game of pool with his girlfriend watching! Now that impressed every kid at the school! "Hey, Hepcat beat Lord at pool right in front of his girlfriend!"

A couple of the Franciscan priests who taught at the school ended up being transferred to the Lithuanian parish in Toronto in the 1970's. Father Eugene who had been my first year Latin and third year Lithuanian teacher was one of them. Now for decades I'd been harbouring the fantasy of meeting up again with some of those students from St. Anthony's because I believed that I was now in a position physically to be the one sneering at them. When some six years ago I told Father Eugene of my lingering anger/resentment toward many of the students after all these years, he replied "Forgive them, Hepcat, forgive them." Very sensible advice of course. Father Eugene died a couple of years ago. Very sad. Since the death of my last uncle in 1999, he was about the only adult whose counsel I might heed.

Here are photos I just took of some of my CFL player photo pages that were included in the Weekend Magazine supplement to Saturday newspapers from 1957-59:

And here are a couple of shots of the CFL player photo pages I have that were included in the 1958 Star Weekly Magazine weekend supplement:

These were a great feature in those bygone days when coloured pictures of sports stars were seldom found.

Mackie's, a Port Stanley tradition since 1911!

 

So I was back in Port Stanley last weekend and I did of course stop in at Mackie's. Since we were soon heading to the Belmont Diner for their $9.95 Thanksgiving buffet, I was very moderate. I ordered only Orangeade, French fries and popcorn. I must say that the popcorn in particular was delicious, lightly buttered and well salted. It was in fact the best popcorn I can remember having. Highly recommended!

Here are scans of twelve of my favourite Murphy Anderson covers from my collection:

Scout will have completed her rigorous five month Halloween cat training program on Friday.

I'm a bit concerned that she won't be ready to fill Styx's shoes come Saturday. It's been tough to keep her focused on her studies. Rather than doing her homework she likes to goof off with Cowboy and Ace:

Ace has been a particularly bad influence since he keeps taking her to the track:

Scout made sure all was in readiness earlier today. Here she is making sure we'd included everything in the boys' bag:

And the girls' bag:

She noticed that we'd forgotten to put the big Halloween lollipop in the bags!

Here she is inspecting the front porch:

Across the street:

And relaxing with a quick snack before the rush of little tricksters:

Please vote for my "I Get the Point" video presentation in the Ultimate CFL Fan Contest!

I Get the Point!

Here are my top twelve Carmine Infantino covers from my collection in alphabetical and then chronological order:

Here are scans of a baker's dozen of the top Gil Kane covers from my collection:

So the 103rd Grey Cup Game will be played between the Edmonton Eskimos and the Ottawa RedBlacks this Sunday with the kickoff scheduled shortly after 6:30 PM Eastern Standard Time in that most quintessentially Canadian city of them all, Winnipeg:

We of course have our own unique brand of football in Canada. In fact, it's one of the very few games worldwide that are exclusively played within one country's borders. And we've been doing it a long time here in Canada. The Toronto Argonauts date back to 1873, the Hamilton Tigers (now Tiger-Cats) date back to 1883 and the Regina (now Saskatchewan) Roughriders date back to 1910. (In comparison the NFL's origins date back to only 1920.) We've been playing it so long that our football is an ingrained part of our national identity. It's one of the things that makes our country unique.

Meanwhile the Grey Cup itself was first awarded in 1909 and is one of the very oldest sports trophies in North America, older I believe than any American sports trophy. As a result the Grey Cup Game has earned its place as part of our cultural heritage. The Grey Cup Festival is a very Canadian tradition.

As a Canadian I take pride in the unique aspects of our cultural heritage. In fact I'm very proud to be radically Canadian. That's why I've gotten a Radically Canadian patch sewn onto every single one of the 35 CFL jerseys I have in the house. Here are a few pictures:

Montreal Alouettes

Toronto Argonauts

Winnipeg Blue Bombers

Edmonton Eskimos

British Columbia Lions

Calgary Stampeders

Hamilton Tiger-Cats

Saskatchewan Roughriders

Well with the Grey Cup Game being held in Winnipeg on Sunday, this is as good a time as any to review the career accomplishments of Bud Grant, the man to whom a bronze statue was unveiled outside Winnipeg's Investors Group Field in October 2014. Here are some excerpts from Bud's simply phenomenal career:

1. He had poliomyelitis as a kid. He accordingly took up sports to help strengthen his leg muscles!

2. He lettered in three sports at the University of Minnesota - football, basketball and baseball! Twice he was All Big-Ten in football.

3. He was drafted in the first round by the Philadelphia Eagles in 1950. But he was also drafted in the fourth round by the Minneapolis Lakers though! He chose basketball and played 35 games for the Lakers in the latter part of the 1949-50 season. He stayed with the Lakers for one more season in 1950-51.

4. He then realized he would never achieve much in the NBA. He elected to switch to football and joined the Philadelphia Eagles for the 1951 season. He played defensive end that season leading the Eagles in sacks.

5. He switched to wide receiver for the 1952 season and was second in the NFL in receiving yards with 997! He then thought he merited a healthy salary increase. The Eagles disagreed and told Grant to take it or leave it. He opted to leave it, and instead signed with the Winnipeg Blue Bombers for more money.

6. He played both defensive back and offensive end for the Blue Bombers for the next four seasons leading the W.I.F.U. in pass receptions and being named an all-star in 1953, 1954 and 1956.

7. In 1957 he was named the head coach of the Blue Bombers at the age of 29! When later asked how long it took his former teammates to realize that he was now the boss, he replied "About five minutes."

8. He coached the Blue Bombers to a Grey Cup berth that very first year in 1957 and then again in 1958, 1959, 1961, 1962 and 1965 with the Blue Bombers emerging triumphant in 1958, 1959, 1961 and 1962. Ironically all six of those Blue Bomber Grey Cup games were against the Hamilton Tiger-Cats.

9. The custom of Blue Bomber linemen playing games in sub-zero November temperatures with bare arms against their similarly bare armed rivals with the Edmonton Eskimos may have originated during Bud Grant's tenure in the fifties. Simple intimidation "What, you call this cold?" Those were the days when the Western final was a best of three game affair played over the course of eight days. Football players were tough in those days.

10. He was offered the job of head coach of the Minnesota Vikings in 1961. He turned it down at the time, but relented and accepted the position in 1967.

11. He then engineered a very rare trade between teams in the separate leagues when he acquired QB Joe Kapp from the British Columbia Lions in exchange for Canadian WR Jim Young. Young would go on to earn the appellate "Dirty Thirty" with the Lions and was inducted into the Canadian Football Hall of Fame after retirement.

12. He wouldn't allow heaters along the Viking sidelines during games. He wanted his players to stay focused on winning the game and not warming up by the heaters. When you saw the Vikings standing like ice giants along the sideline in their purple cloaks while the other team huddled miserably by their heaters, it was pretty obvious which team would win the game!

13. When many players took to celebrating TDs with outlandish antics in the end zone in the late seventies, Viking players did not. When a reporter asked Bud whether there was a team rule prohibiting such celebrations, his reply was "No, there's no such rule. They just better not."

14. Bud Grant didn't like to see players fidgeting during the national anthem. He thought that standing respectfully at attention would earn not just the respect of the fans but also of the players on the other team. He accordingly had giant defensive end and former National Guardsmen Carl Eller lead his Viking teammates in national anthem practices.

15. The player Bud Grant considered to be the best he ever coached in either league was Leo Lewis who played halfback for the Blue Bombers between the years 1955 and 1966. Leo had rushed for 8861 yards with a remarkable average of 6.6 yards per carry. You can therefore imagine Bud's astonishment in 1981 when he was told that a fellow named Leo Lewis had walked into the Vikings' training camp asking for a tryout. The applicant was the son (nephew?) of the Leo Lewis Bud had coached in Winnipeg. Leo Lewis III not only made the roster that year but played for the Vikings as a WR and PR until 1991.

16. Bud Grant had a fear of flying. His Blue Bombers (and of course Vikings) always flew to their games though. "The players sleep more restfully in a hotel than they do on a train. I don't matter." was his explanation. 'Nuff said.

Here are some scans of CFL cards from my collection featuring Bud Grant:

1954 Blue Ribbon

1963 CFL Coins

1964 Nalley's CFL Coins

So fifty years ago this month I was in ninth grade at a Franciscan Fathers operated boarding school in Kennebunkport, Maine named St. Anthony's.

Normally we St. Anthony's students were not permitted off the monastery grounds and because of this we weren't supposed to have any spending money. All we had was the weekly allowance set out by our parents that was kept in trust by the monks. This could only be applied at the school store (a glorified closet) once a week early Saturday evenings for school supplies and candy (Mmmmm, Sugar Daddys!). I think my weekly allowance was a whopping $0.50 or $0.75. No comics let alone men's mags were available in the school store though.

Cigarettes though could be bought with one's allowance given written parental permission. I recall one time our 275(?) pound shot-putter, a local boy named Chester, had gotten his cigarettes. One of the other upper classmen, another local boy, put his arm around Chester with the words "Chester old buddy, have I ever told you what a great friend you are?" To which Chester replied "Why is it that everybody turns queer on me whenever I have cigarettes?" To which his affectionate buddy replied "That's because you've got such f...ing big tits, Chester!" The memory of that exchange still makes me smile every time.

But fifty years ago on a Saturday around Thanksgiving we the students of St. Anthony's were released onto the streets of Portland, Maine for the day! We reached Portland in mid-morning and were to gather at the assembly point around 6:30 PM for the trip back to Kennebunkport. This was quite the treat since we were given $2 each (Wow!) to finance our meals and other activities. I believe this was done to give the couple who worked as cooks for the school the day off to spend with their families.

So there I was at the age of thirteen let loose on the streets of a big exotic U.S. city! Well it had to be big, didn't it? There were warships in the harbour. Try to find those in Canada! (Actually my home town of London's population of 162,000 was substantially larger than Portland's.) The first thing I did was track down a hobby shop. It was on the second or third floor of an old building and had an elevator with an honest-to-goodness elevator operator! The fellow made a snarky remark to me about hurrying up, as if he was pressed for time or something. Clearly he just hated what his job involved. The hobby shop had the most impressive selection of model kits I'd ever seen to that point. This of course cemented my impression that this was a big sophisticated U.S. city. The staff in the store was no more gracious than the elevator operator though.

Despite their stock, the store didn't have the Monogram Super Fuzz kit I was trying to find. I'd seen a compelling ad for the Monogram Fred Flypogger kits in DC comics a few months previously:

There was a hobby room at St. Anthony's where that school year I built and painted three other model kits that were advertised in the pages of DC comics or Boys' Life magazine, an Aurora Mummy, an Aurora Bride of Frankenstein and a Revell "Big Daddy" Roth Angel Fink.

Leaving the hobby shop empty handed, I decided to get some lunch. Lo and behold I discovered a spanking new fast food pizza parlour that served not just individual sized pizzas but Pepsi! There was no pop sold at the St. Anthony's store and we got a bottle of Coke just once or twice a month with hamburgers on Sunday evenings after a supplemental rosary service or something in the chapel. (We always had some sort of fun meal on Sunday evenings.) I was a Pepsi loyalist at the time though so this pizza parlour was just the ticket!

Now I think I'd only sampled pizza once or twice before in my life, probably just a mushroom slice for $0.20 at Cicero's Pizza stand at the Western Fair in London:

I of course had never had enough money for pizzas in grade school and my traditional old-country parents would never have ordered out for such a thing . By the time I was in college of course my father would happily participate in any pizza I brought home! I ended up ordering the $0.55 or so individual cheese pizza plus a Pepsi in the restaurant. It was delicious, but small, so I ordered a second one!

I spent the rest of the day exploring downtown Portland and the back streets that might have interesting cigar stores with newsstands. You see I'd been very much impressed by those ads trumpeting the return of the Spectre and I wanted to find one of those issues of Showcase!

I failed. Nor did I stumble across the current Green Lantern or Flash issue because I don't remember buying even a single comic. I probably saw only Superman, Batman, Marvel, Harvey, Archie and Gold Key titles, none of which caught my fancy. I would have scanned the stands for the latest Creepy and Drag Cartoons magazines as well but I remember only returning empty handed.

What I do remember is a convenience store/cigar store on a side street had some interesting lighters with pictures of bare breasted women on them. Another example of U.S. big city sophistication not found in my home town of London of course! By this point I probably didn't have sufficient remaining funds to buy a lighter, which of course I didn't need anyway since I didn't smoke. Pity. It would have been a nice memento of that trip to a sophisticated U.S. big city though. I'd undoubtedly still treasure that lighter today.

Hep,

I have really enjoyed reading all your posts above.

Just thought I would mention that. That they are all appreciated.

Sincerely,

MusterMark

Thank you!

So growing up as a youngster I was generally required to attend supplemental Lithuanian language classes Saturdays between 4:00 and 5:30 PM during the school year. These classes were in the basement of St. Peter's elementary school just north of downtown London on Richmond Street by the cathedral. Dreadfully inconvenient to be sure.

There was a silver lining though. I'd be given $0.50 or so to go see a movie downtown prior to classes plus bus fare there and back. But St. Peter's was only about a mile and a half away from where we lived in Old South London. So I could walk there anyway. The bus fare I could then spend otherwise!

Sometimes I would indeed take in a movie. But often I'd elect to deploy my cash in other ways.

The first temptation was a pinball machine at a diner that was right across from the Wishing Well Beverages bottling plant on Richmond Street which was on the southern edge of the downtown area about halfway to St. Peter's. I believe that it was this Gottlieb Sweet Hearts machine released in 1963:

After a few games I'd head further downtown and check out the magazine stand at the United Cigar Store at Richmond and Dundas Street, London's main intersection. I bought many a comic from that newsstand. I'd then head east along Dundas Street a couple of blocks to the News Depot which had a much more impressive selection of magazines, comics and other offerings to tempt a young fellow. I still remember buying and strongly associate these comics with the News Depot:

But the News Depot was also one of the relatively few stores in London that stocked Krun-Chee Potato Chips which sometimes offered a premium coin free inside such as these Fighting Warship coins:

Or these 1963 Canadian Football coins:

I mean wow! What else can I say? I wanted everything so badly but my funds were very limited so I had to choose wisely and carefully.