We All Gotta Be From Somewhere

Interesting comments to the last post.  I know we all have our favourite places.  I'd go Lake Placid in a heartbeat (summer not winter).  Weather it's Memphis or Nashville or New Orleans we have special cities and special memories. I recall that Les Nesman from WKRP used to vacation in Omaha Nebraska.

I like the stories about where people came from and the guts it took to make the move.  Like Deb coming in from down east with 55 dollars and suit case.

I came to Toronto in the 70's with a band.  We lived in a big old rooming house on Avenue Road.  Shared bathrooms, doubling up on bedrooms to save money, Everybody chipped in for groceries except the lead guitar player. He still owes me 25 bucks.  

The band had the third floor.  On the second floor we had a printer from the provincial government who would stage a food fight in the kitchen at least once a month, a drag queen and his boyfriend and Dixie and wife from Trinidad.  I had never met anyone from Trinidad before.  Within a few months Dixie had us converted to his kind of cooking.  Some of the best food I ever had.  Spicey as hell but damn good.

It was a monster move and a huge culture shock for a kid who grew up in St.Catharines.  Certainly not as far away as the east coast and I guess if everything had bottomed out for me mom and dad would have taken me back so it's not like I was on some Indiana Jones type of adventure.  But being young and stupid I looked at it like an adventure.  'Course it got to the point where I needed some kind of a future so I hustled a student loan and got accepted at a community college.

One day I walked into the Gas Works down on Yonge St. and I hear..."hey Hodgie"...It was Big Les, a guy I played football with in high school. He was the real deal.  6 foot 4 and 220 pounds of muscle.  He was the bouncer.  He looked at the bartender, pointed to me and said "this guy doesn't pay for nutn', it's on me".  We talked for a bit and he said "yea but atleast we go out".  Not a shot at St. Catharines but he and I both knew there wasn't going to be a whole for us to do down there.  Last I heard he had moved to Alaska.  That's stretching the adventure a little far for me.  

For a long time most of the people I worked with in broadcasting weren't born in Toronto.  When you ran into someone new you'd say, "where you from" because you knew they weren't from the GTA and I was always amazed at the number of people you'd run into from the east coast. 

I spent most of my life in Toronto living in the Mt. Pleasant, Davisville, Eglinton area.  Every time I drive through it, it still feels like home. St. Catharines is my real home town but I did more growing up during my time in Toronto than I did down on the penninsula. 

I guess we were all scared as hell when we made the move but I'd be willing to be most of us are still here.