Back to school. That was pretty well the only thing on my mind in those long, lazy days of August. In September, we’d be back at school. I know that’s not a particularly insightful comment as I suspect every other Leaside kid was thinking the very same thing and were willing those dog days of summer to pass more slowly.
But it does take me back to my time at Leaside High School. I believe it was September 1975 when I was headed into Grade 11. At the time, my twin brother and I were doing a lot of babysitting in the neighbourhood. Word travels fast among local families when you can make it through several different babysitting gigs without the basement flooding, the police being called – or worse, the fire department – and the kids surviving and sometimes even giving you good reviews. Somehow, I’d managed to make the grade, and so I was busy many Friday and Saturday nights. One family lived at the end of Cameron just steps away from the big double hill in Talbot Park that provided a natural grandstand for the LHS football field.
But this is not a babysitting story, although it does involve the station wagon of a family for which I occasionally babysat. I remember early in the school year in 1975 – let’s say it was September since this is my September column – I happened to be sitting in the cafeteria that at the time, looked out on the football field. (I’m not certain the configuration remains the same today.) So, there I was, between classes, minding my own business, when I happened to look through the windows and saw the station wagon belonging to one of my babysitting clients (I don’t think I called them clients back then) parked at the foot of Cameron Crescent. If memory serves me well–and it occasionally does – the father who had driven me home the previous Friday night after babysitting, was washing the car.
As my eyes lingered, for some inexplicable reason – still undetermined – the station wagon started moving all on its own. All of a sudden, the car was backing up towards the entrance to the park and the top of the aforementioned double hill. It picked up speed, jumped the curb, and then hurtled backwards down the steep hill. And did I mention that no one was at the wheel? But the father was running behind it as fast as he could. On his face was a look that effectively conveyed both panic and terror in equal measures.
When the station wagon hit the bottom of the hill, you might think it would have stopped. Nope. Instead, it bottomed out in a cloud of dirt and grass just before the running track, and then carried on, still backwards, all the way across the football field, up the slight incline before finally coming to rest after gently bumping the wall of the high school itself. It looked to me like the station wagon had suffered a bit of suspension damage in its hair-raising but ultimately unsuccessful escape attempt. It listed to the left as the owner drove it slowly into the school parking lot before heading back towards home up along Hanna Road.
I will never forget just how surreal it was to see a station wagon screaming backwards down the same hill that I often tobogganed. Now that I think of it, it is possible that it wasn’t the station wagon that was screaming but the owner racing after it. The image remains locked in my memory nearly 50 years later. Fortunately, not a soul was anywhere in the danger zone that morning, and there were no injuries of any kind, except perhaps the owner’s bruised ego for allowing such a calamity.
I do remember trying to explain to friends and classmates what had just transpired outside the walls of the cafeteria, but after the station wagon limped back home, the only indication of the mishap was some torn up grass at the foot of the hill. I had a hard time persuading others that it really happened. But it surely did, in Talbot Park, one quiet morning in September of 1975, and yes, in Leaside.
