Living on the Corner
My sister and I moved with our parents in 1953 from our house at 287 Indian Rd. to an apartment on the third floor above a store on the southwest corner of Boustead and Roncesvalles Ave. At the time, the store was used as a church by an evangelical sect – “Holy Rollers” as my mom called them.
Every few days, my mother carried dirty clothes, sheets and towels in a basket down four flights of stairs to the basement, where she used an old wringer washing machine to do the laundry. The basement was dusty and had a dirt floor. If the church upstairs was in session, the congregation stamped its collective feet during the service, raining dust from the rafters onto the wet laundry and driving my mom nuts.
My bedroom window overlooked Roncesvalles. I’d look out at the streetcars chundering along the tracks and, in the afternoons, watch a dark blue Toronto Star truck pull up to the intersection of Roncesvalles and Dundas, outside the bank. A kid in a T-shirt standing on a running board at the back of the truck reached inside and pulled out a bundle of newspapers, dropped them on the curb and leapt back onto the running board as the truck sped north. I wanted that kid’s job when I grew up.
My dad occasionally took me just north of our building to a pharmacy where he bought me a MelOrol ice cream, a small cylinder about as round as a flashlight, wrapped in paper, that the pharmacist inserted into a cone. (Dunn’s Pharmacy was just to the north at 484 Roncesvalles.)
The Triangle-shaped Building
Across the street from our building, to the south, where Ritchie Ave. meets Roncesvalles, a real estate company called Menary & Son occupied a triangular-shaped building. John Menary had helped my mom over the years to buy and sell houses and would help her again a few years later when she made her get-away from my dad and moved to Etobicoke.
