Fads and Then Some

My arrival in North America managed to coincide fortuitously with the brief but widespread Davy Crockett Craze. All over the continent young boys felt an overwhelming urge to wear buckskins, coonskin hats and moccasins while carrying flintlock rifles and Bowie knives. The cause was a three part Walt Disney series which ran on consecutive Sunday nights about “the king of the wild frontier” which started in the backwoods of Tennessee and worked its way down the Mississippi River to a suitably heroic ending in Texas at the ill-fated Alamo mission. Fess Parker and Buddy Ebsen (as Davy Crockett and his sidekick George Russell) were our heroes of the moment. So long as I didn’t open my mouth to betray my British accent I fit in swimmingly. I don’t think I actually had any fringed buckskins but I did have a pair of moccasins, a faux coonskin hat, a fake powder horn and a plastic musket. All my acquaintances looked exactly the same as I did (more or less … some managed to finagle their parents into taking the buckskin plunge).

            While most of the boys were immersed in this epic historical tableau, their female numbers were becoming obsessed with Elvis Presley … they all came to school sporting Elvis binders emblazoned with vivid fan shots of The King’s sneering visage. I never cared too much for Elvis … still don’t.

            Once Davy, George Russell, Colonel Travis, Thimblerig (the Mississippi gambler who had been picked up along the way) and Jim Bowie had all bitten the dust (and gone on to become the stuff of legend) at the Alamo, the fad slowly worked itself out. I wonder whatever happened to all those muskets and coonskin hats?

            While waiting impatiently for the next fad to get underway (I was never very competent at hula hoops) I chanced to see John Huston’s film of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. Soon after as I was returning from an expedition in the Don Valley I came upon something stupendous — a discarded white metal object (I always took it for a vase but who keeps flowers in a metal container?) that looked almost exactly like Captain Ahab’s prosthetic leg in the movie. I seized it and took it home (wondering what I might say about it should I meet anyone I knew). I squeezed my foot into it — it was perfect — but something was missing. A harpoon. It just so happened that we were going to the Swains’ in Guelph that weekend. Len Swain was very handy and had a well-stocked workshop in his basement. He asked if there was anything he could make for me and without hesitation I said, “A harpoon please, Uncle Len.” So Len set about making my dream come true with a long piece of dowel, a plywood “blade” and some electrical tape. Can’t remember if Len added the rope or if that was the doing of my father and I once we returned to Don Mills. I was now all set with my peg leg and a hearty harpoon … any whales that had the temerity to show themselves in my part of the world didn’t stand a chance.

            Nobody at Norman Ingram Memorial Public School had any idea what plots were being hatched in their midst. Eventually my parents took me to Wasaga Beach for some lakeside fun. I arrived with my harpoon and peg leg and starting scouring the horizon for telltale cetacean spouts. I must have seen one (or at least had a whiff of land where there be no land) for Dad had to retrieve me from the lake where I was hurling my harpoon out and reeling it back in with the rope. He threatened to never bring me there again if I insisted on bringing my Moby-Dick props.

            I was briefly excited to learn that a good friend of my parents worked for a whaling company but my crest fell when it was revealed that he was their accountant.

            So ended this phase of my childhood though Moby-Dick was bound to roil again from time to time as you will see.

            I also had a Bowie knife at some point … Dad’s old hunting knife … though I managed to lose it in a muddy stream (much to my father’s consternation).


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