1958 Trip of a Lifetime.

January 28, 2025.

Well OK, I was only thir­teen, but growing up on a farm in North­ern Ont­ario, my prev­ious travel high­lights were to the Kiwanis Music Fest­ival in Coch­rane, and travels with my aunt to Tor­onto and Sud­bury the year before. So, to date, this was my trip of a lifetime. It was a real coming of age experience for me seeing the big city lights compared to my life so far. The picture above (or right), from the 1957 Kiwanis Music Festival in Cochrane shows, left to right, George Bosnick, Eero Laakso, Tom Walls, Lee Larstone, Gordie Lussier and Ernie Bies. This was about the same time as the trip to Toronto.

We had moved into Hearst from the farm in 1957 and my friend Jonathan Turner offered to split his Toronto Daily Star paper route with me. We both lived on Prince Street and he gave me the west end of town which included the trailer park out where the Hospital is now. The Toronto Star was about twice the size it is today, ran about fifty pages and sold for five cents. The Star Weekly Magazine cost an additional fifteen cents. The papers came by bus so were always a day, sometimes two days late. It was a great adventure to pedal my bike all over town delivering this day-old news. Prince Street provided a couple of long straight runs on the sidewalk and I would race home at full speed, as fast as I could pedal, from 15^th Street to my home at 7^th. There were ditches at each cross-street with wooden bridges. One day, as I was approaching the 10^th Street crossing at full speed, I realized, too late, that some mischievous kids had removed the bridge. I had no choice but to try an Evel Knievel jump across the ditch. I did pretty well until I hit the hard road about 15 feet away and my handlebar gave way sending me tumbling across the gravel. Serge Morissette, who lived nearby, was first on the scene. He asked if I was hurt, denying any knowledge of the missing bridge. Bruised and scraped up a bit, I managed to limp home where my father straightened out my bike for the next day's run. This was just another skirmish in the ongoing battle between the French and the English boys in small town Northern Ontario, but that's another story.

My commission was two cents per paper. Originally, I had about 25 customers, so fifty cents a day was big money to a thirteen-year-old kid. When you consider that the Saturday matinee at the Royal Theatre cost fifteen cents and a coke and a bag of chips were only five cents each, I was in the money.

Unfortunately, my money man­age­ment skills were very poor, and, living the life of Riley, treating my friends to shoe-string potato chips and cream pies at the Star Café, I was spending more than I earned. I had to send money to the Toronto Star rep­re­sent­ative every three months and before long I had created a Ponzi scheme where I was collecting next month's sub­scrip­tion fees from customers to pay last month's bill. Over time this created a financing problem requiring me to continue delivering papers all through High School before I was finally able to pay off my debt.

But I digress. The highlight of my paper boy career was a free trip to Toronto with many new experiences and a chance to see my then-beloved Toronto Maple Leafs.

I could win this trip just by signing up ten new customers and retaining them for thirteen weeks at a special rate of forty cents per week. In addition, the new customer received a booklet of thirteen coupons, each worth fifteen cents, so their cost was twenty-five cents for six papers a week. The newspaper business has always operated on advertising revenue which is enhanced by paid circulation. The revenue from subscription drives like this did not even pay for the papers being delivered but the advertising rates went up as circulation increased.

Before long, my sister Anne, some of her friends and a few neighbours agreed to invest a total of $3.25 to help me win this trip. Jonathan Turner and Billy Lussier, who delivered the Star Weekly, also won the trip. Three boys from Hearst joined carriers from all over Ontario with a total of seventy-two carriers gathering in Toronto for a weekend packed full of activities. the highlight being an NHL game in the hockey shrine, Maple Leaf Gardens.

Travel: We had to wear Toronto Star identification badges on our outer clothing in case we got separated from the group. We boarded the C.N.R. train in Hearst, de­part­ing at 6:20 a.m. on Friday March 21st, and arriving in Cochrane four hours later. With a seven-and-a-half-hour layover in Cochrane we were able to visit some of the places we had seen in our music festival days, especially the famous Classic Tea Room. We left Cochrane at six p.m. and were joined along the way by several other carriers. A Toronto Star representative chaperoned us and on arriving at the Toronto Union Station at 8:10 the next morning, we were taken across the street to the Royal York Hotel for breakfast.

The trip home was even longer, leaving Toronto the next day at 5:30 p.m. on Sunday, March 23^rd, an­oth­er all-nighter, ar­riv­ing in Cochrane at 8:05 the next morning, this time, after a forty-minute stop and a two-hour trip to Kap­us­kas­ing, we were faced with another eight-hour layover. Luckily my brother John was working there, at the time, for the Spruce Falls Pulp and Paper Company. He spent the day with me, letting me rest in his room and treating me to lunch at his favorite eatery, John's Restaurant.

We had been given $13.00 for meals on the train and in Cochrane and Kap­us­kas­ing by the district traveler from the Toronto Star. My sister Olga gave me some extra change and said I had to tip the porters.

The Royal York: This was the fanciest hotel I had ever seen in my young life, a step up from the Oba Hotel that I had stayed at on my way home from Sudbury three months earlier. Traveling with my brother Rudy in December 1957 we had to overnight in Oba where we dined on cold wieners, bread and warm Pepsi. Three months later I was at the Royal York, a Canadian Pacific hotel boasting 1600 rooms, at the time, the largest hotel in the British Commonwealth and dining in private dining room number nine.

Toronto: Many activities were jammed into the weekend. We visited Gus Ryder's pool where he had trained long distance swimmer Marilyn Bell. As a sixteen-year-old high school student in 1954, she was the first person to swim across Lake Ontario.

I had many first-time exper­ien­ces, such as riding the subway, visiting the Toronto Star plant, seeing the city from the top of the CIBC Bank Building, which at the time was the tallest building in the British Commonwealth.

We took the Ferry to Toronto Centre Island where we went to the Island airport and boarded a Trans-Canada Air Lines Vicount for a sight-seeing trip over the city.

"Hello Canada and Hockey Fans in the United States": These were the first words we all heard when we gathered around the radio at home to listen to the Saturday night hockey games. We met the man behind the words as Foster Hewitt was the guest speaker at our banquet.

Thirty-five years earlier, as an eighteen-year-old with the Star radio station, CFCA, Foster Hewitt was assigned to do the first-ever broadcast of a hockey game from the Mutual Street Arena. The game was between the Parkdale and Kitchener clubs of the OHA senior league. Who knew that it would launch the iconic voice of hockey and a more than 40-year career as a broadcaster.

Another special guest at the banquet was Gerry James. He was a rare two sport pro­fes­sional athlete, playing hockey for the Toronto Maple Leafs and foot­ball for the Winnipeg Blue Bombers.

In the "orig­inal six" era of the NHL, there were two major rival­ries. You either cheered for the Toronto Maple Leafs or the Mont­real Can­ad­iens. We were treated to hockey heaven on Sat­urday night March 22, 1958 when we were taken to the famous Maple Leaf Gardens to see my then-beloved Toronto Maple Leafs play the New York Rangers. The Maple Leafs had not become the powerhouse team of the 60s and were languishing in last place. The pictures I had taken from my $3.00 nose-bleed seats showed how far away we were, but we were there.

They fell 7-0 to the Rangers but that did not dampen the excitement at seeing my first NHL game.

Almost seventy years later, when I look at the mementos from that trip, I still feel the excitement of all those new experiences. It created a life-long need to explore the world beyond my early life on the farm.

Toronto Star carriers boarding the TCA Vicount for the sight-seeing flight – Jonathan Turner, Ernie Bies and Billy Lussier from Hearst.