Ronald M. Helmer

Rookie

By: Ron M. Helmer

I suppose boys in their early teens always have had some sort of genetic urge to form clubs; I think they call them 'gangs' now. Al, Bob, Tiny and I decided to have a secret society with our headquarters in the attic of Al's garage. We were going to call the group the 'Hawks' but we spilled the grey paint when we were drawing up the constitution so we changed the name for the sake of convenience to 'The Grey Seals'. We acted secretively for a couple of days and had a number of the other boys apply for membership but felt constrained to reject them because of constitutional regulations.

Al and I were reminiscing about the adventures of our older brothers one night and concluded that we would have more fun if we changed our name to 'The Four Bananas' and followed at least one of the traditional customs they had established. This consisted of weekly meetings held in rotation at members' houses. There was very little on the agendum at these meetings originally but the food eating protocol was unvarying. Lengthwise slices of bread were buttered, spread with peanut butter and then layered with similar lengthwise slices of banana. Liquid nourishment was limited to capped quart-sized bottles of Big Orange, Big Lemon or Big Lime (eleven cents a bottle in the good old days!)

The large bottles of carbonated beverage were not uncapped and poured into a glass for drinking. Instead, a nail was driven through the cap and the beverage sucked out in a timely fashion. Since these meetings took place in the evening only a couple of hours after the evening meal, the preparation of banana sandwiches was motivated more by ritual than by hunger. Those with a greater thirst than others tended to finish their bottle sooner than the other guzzlers. One of the early finishers found that by turning the tap to its minimum a thin stream of tap water could be directed into the empty bottle. After a quick rinse the bottle could be filled and the water used for additional drinking.

On the other hand, a bored individual found that in addition to drinking the water, he could, what else, squirt it in someone else's face! Al returned to the meeting table with his bottle of clear drinking water, looking placid but secretly awaiting an excuse to test out his putative new weapon. It was not long before Tiny contradicted a statement Al made and the inevitable resulted. He raised the bottle and slashed it in Tiny's direction, much after the fashion of a dry fly fisherman casting his line. Most of the thrown water stitched itself down the front of Tiny's clothing although a small portion flew over his head and struck the kitchen wall.

Tiny responded after his intial shock but, unfortunately, he had not finished his 'Big Lime' and, as a result, Al received a stitching of good unused carbonated beverage in his face and down the front of his garments. I immediately sucked down the rest of my 'Big Lemon' and headed for the kitchen tap. Bob sat stunned, complaining that he would be in big trouble when his mother came home. But his complaints had just begun!

Ironically, Bob actually filled his bottle and joined in, so long as the free-for-all was confined to the kitchen, but as soon as it escalated to the point where the participants were racing from room to room he became serious again. I had just taken a long-range shot at Al in the living room and saw a long series of water marks appear on the plaster ceiling above him.

'Jeez, I'm really gonna get it!' Bob said glumly when the excitement had died down. He was sitting at the kitchen table again with his head in his hands.

'Cheer up, pal!' I said. 'It was only tap water. It will have dried up and be practically invisible by the time your folks get home.'

'It's the 'practically' part that bothers me,' he said, 'I've got a feeling that Tiny never got around to rinsing out his bottle.'

'Don't worry,' Tiny said, 'I'm sure all the 'Big Lime' was on Al, at least I'm pretty sure!'

'Great!' Bob said. 'I'm pretty sure I feel much better!' Humour from Bob? Incredible! General laughter ensued. Presumably I was right about the signs of the event disappearing because we never heard about it again. Or else Bob had a very understanding mother! Or else they were just renting the house and didn't give a damn!

I don't remember when we decided to do something constructive or whose idea it was but a decision was made to print and sell a newspaper. Once the decision to proceed had been made we were required to choose which persons would be responsible for each department. When Bob said he thought his Dad would be able to print the paper on the Gestetner at his office Bob was immediately appointed Managing Editor. Al was appointed Sports Editor; I was made responsible for all artwork, front covers and cartoons. Tiny was Jokes Editor. In the event it was difficult to tell which was which; the Chief Editor's submissions were borderline laughable; Al should never have been allowed to type his own copy and my cartoons were so arcane that they required explanation. Tiny's jokes were either rarely funny or occasionally not understandable. But we were 'staff' and therefore inviolable. There were 'Special' editions at Easter and on the occasion of the Royal visit to Calgary in the Spring of 1939, as Al says 'to drum up the patriotic enthusiasm of the poor bastards who were going to get killed at Dieppe and Normandy!' At Easter I did a special front page of Easter Lilies which was roundly praised by two or three of my fellow journalists.

The reproduction of the Royal Crown on the occasion of the Royal Visit was magnificent according to me and one other of the journalistic group.

On the great day we were herded down to the roadway approximately a block east of Sacred Heart Church and allowed to sit on the kerb for about an hour before the 'Royal Presence' arrived. We stood up and yelled appropriately as they passed and (failing to know in reality how lucky we were) would have joined up immediately had we been old enough.

The incredibly exciting part of the exercise was the letter we received from the King's secretary acknowledging with thanks for the 'Special Edition' we had sent to the Palace 'sucking up' to royalty. The letter from Lascelles was passed around by the mothers until its final resting place is no longer known.

The first edition did not have a masthead but a special message from the Managing Editor assured all purchasers that suggestions would be considered. The ultimate winner was Paul O'Byrne. From that time on the paper was known as the 'Scarboro Rookie'. He was the lucky winner of a month's free subscription to the newspaper. What bounty! Obviously we were somewhat undecided about the paper's longevity. But a month's free subscrition to the paper! What a windfall! At three cents a copy--a 12 cent value!

Each Friday night we would appear at Bob's house with the Gestetner type-ups and go with his Dad to his office in the Lancaster Building. Cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth his Dad would patiently run off the required number of copies of the latest edition and we would head back to Bob's house. There, sitting around the kitchen table once again, we would collate and staple the 'hot news'.

Early Saturday morning we would convene once again at Bob's house and collect our quota of papers. In the first edition we erred on the side of conservatism and printed only two hundred papers. That was only fifty each for the creative moguls. We managed to sell all but one hundred papers. Fabulous! At three cents each we had grossed three dollars. When we deducted our time and the cost of the Gestetner paper and Bob's Dad's gasoline we had netted in excess of one dollar! What bounty! as Bob Cratchit would have said.

Al and I still laugh about one of our customers who listened carefully to our sales pitch and then pondered our information carefully.

'Okay, wait here a minute,' he said, and hustled off toward the interior of his house. He returned in about five minutes with three pennies.

'I'm taking it this time,' he said, ' but I don't want you to make a habit of it!'

We were so shocked that we couldn't think of an appropriate response. Was the man so poverty-stricken that he couln't afford to spend three cents a week? Maybe he just wanted to have snotty-nosed children stop bothering him on Saturday mornings. If that were the case why didn't he give us a dollar and have us leave a copy in his letter box every week for thirty-four weeks? Maybe he was just a miserable old prick!

As the official art director of the weekly I felt constrained to draw a panel cartoon for each edition. My popular hero was 'Goopy, the Master Detective'. The fact that he did very little if any detecting was inconsequential. One cartoon I remember featured the great man inviting his friend for a ride in his new automobile. Naturally he has wrecked the car by the fourth panel.

'Wow, that was some ride!' says his friend.

'That was nothing,' Goopy responds, 'you should be with me some time when I'm alone!' Yuk! Yuk! Yuk! Great humour, what?

Al recalled a Goopy cartoon in which Goopy (bowler hat on as usual) is standing in a room with a friend.

'This party is really boring!' says the friend.

'Sorry you're not enjoying it,' says Goopy in the next panel.

'Right! Let's get out of this firetrap!'

'Sorry, I can't leave just yet!' says Goopy.

'Why not?

'Because I'm the host!' Yuk! Yuk! Yuk!

We were delirious with joy when we got a full-page advertisement from Burns & Co. for their fertilizer. I think we charged them $3.00!

Once a month our mother would send us down to the barber shop on the south side of Seventeenth Avenue a few shops west of Fourteenth Street. I think our haircuts cost fifteen cents; adult's haircuts cost thirty-five cents. There were a nunber of old boys who spent several hours a day sitting in the chairs ranged around the walls of the two-chair barber shop talking politics and telling bad jokes.

Naturally we solicited Mr. Beaver to place an ad in our prestigious publication and he finally agreed to a quarter of a page provided we included the 'poem' which had been written some time in the past by Mr. E.T. Davey, our butter and egg man from across Seventeenth Avenue who was an habitué of Beaver's.

Beaver's Barber Shop , the pioneer,
Over a quarter century station (sic) here;
Led then and is leading still,
Always did and alway will.

—E.T. Davey

Perhaps not on a level with Lord Byron or John Keats but who the hell ever heard of them anyway?

Jimmy was not very comfortable going home after the sun had set; I guess you could say he was afraid of the dark. There was a vacant lot across the lane directly behind Bob's house. If one traversed the vacant lot he was immediately directly across the street from Jimmy's house. It was difficult to imagine what sort of horrific monsters could lie in wait to messily devour little boys in such a short journey but scotophobia exists, according to psychiatrists. As a result, if Jimmy had to go home after dark we were required to 'talk' him home.

'How's it going, Jimmy? Everything okay?

'Yeah, going okay!'

'Would you like us to sing a song?'

'Yeah, okay!'

'What song would you like?' And so on until we would hear the distant cry 'It's okay, I'm home now!'

I chose a different plan. Every Friday night when our stapling was finished I headed for the dark back lane. I would then walk a block and a half down a back alley that would have terrified Jimmy. I didn't feel all that secure myself. Just about every home had a garage backing up against the alley and at least a third of the doors had been left open. The pitch black interiors could easily have hidden horrible creatures of every description crouched and waiting to pounce on little boys passing by. By the time I had finished half of the journey my anal sphincter was puckered up tighter than a bear's ass in fly time. I thought of it as a test of personal courage and adamantly refused to use the well-lighted front street. I received an actual rush of euphoria when I came to the front of our house.

We made an oversight, or should I say several oversights, when we published the 'Rookie'; the same oversight for which I chewed out my secretary years later. She was circumspect about writing the month and the day of the month on any document we were required to save but overlooked adding the year. You can imagine my frustration years later (she spent twenty-five years with me) when I was trying to determine the year a particular document was executed. Our alert board at the 'Rookie' not only overlooked the year, they also overlooked the month and the date. Careful study of the papers has, however, led me to conclude from a comment by our esteemed editor-in-chief that the King and Queen were in Calgary on the twenty-sixth of May, 1939. This, the tenth issue, seems to have been the final twitch in the life of the 'Scarboro Rookie'. I would be remiss if I didn't include in this reminiscence a few of the items from the "Rookie" over which we have giggled through the years.

It seems that the editorial board was marginally parochial, preoccupied with sports and local events, the latter concentrating on community affairs. Consider, for instance, the headline story for the first issue:

Ray Heimbecker of the Scarboro district was the grand winner at the local Jimmie Allen Air Races. His plane flew one minute and fifty-seven seconds. In an interview with one of our reporters (I love the 'one of our reporters' line) he says, Quote:- 'It was a good day except for the twenty mile per hour gale that blew in from the west. It was a discouraging sight to see models wrecked by the wind. The Commissionaire can't get me now, thanks to the Premier Cycle Works, who donated the prize of a light and generator. I take this opportuneity (sic) in thanking the British-American Oil Company for the wonderful silver cup and the gold watch.'"

Pretty heavy stuff, that! As Churchill was worrying about 'The Gathering Storm' and Hitler was finalizing his plans to invade Poland, Belgium and the Low Countries, we were writing headlines about the Jimmie Allen Air Show. Bully for us! But to be fair, Bobby wasn't Churchill , was he?

In the same left hand column of the first page and below the leader was the following:

The left hand column on the first page had a total of 38 lines of print; of these, 34 were hyphenated. It looks like we were very much in need of a competent typesetter!

Here's a classic item from the second issue:

(The 'non-item' was in fact redundant because the front page carried the paper's banner!)

In the event that you question my claim of the editorial board's parochialism I refer you to the following 'rivetting' headlines:

To show you that humour never dies I conclude this chapter by offering you an eclectic selection of Tiny's jokes.

Doris: 'When is your sister thinking of getting married?'
Ben: 'Constantly!'

Sam: 'A fool can ask more questions than a wise man can answer.'
Joe: 'Oh! That accounts for my Christmas mark.'

Dora: 'Do you know any stories?'
Art: 'Well, not of a parlour nature.'
Dora: 'Let's go out in the kitchen!'

Mr. Campbell: 'Name a liquid that won't freeze.'
Allan King: 'Hot water.'

Miss Allison: 'You can't sleep in my class!'
Tynan: 'I could if you wouldn't talk so loud!'

I don't remember there being a formal decision by a meeting of somber directors to wind up the company or a funeral of any kind; it seems that 'The Scarboro Rookie' was like an old soldier, it just faded away!

— The End —