The Bald-Headed Eagle

My family moved to 76 Glendonwynne Rd. in 1954 on the same day that Hurricane Hazel blasted Toronto.

Our home overlooked Norma Cres., a quiet dead-end street where the neighbourhood children played in the summertime. One of the kids who lived at the end of the street, David Bythell, taught me how to ride his bike and eventually sold it to my parents so they could give it to me for my fifth birthday. As an adult, David became a proficient player of the carillon bells and moved to Ottawa to become the resident musician in the Peace Tower on Parliament Hill.

Vacant lots were a playground

On the south side of Norma Cres., near the end of the street, a developer had torn down two houses, intending to replace them with two more modern homes. We spent a lot of time playing in the vacant lots, which overlooked a ravine and a couple of backyards, on Birchview Cres. at the bottom. We got a great kick out of standing at the edge of the ravine and trying to throw clods of dirt as far as those backyards. Sometimes we even hit one of the houses. It became even more exciting when the owner of one of the houses stormed into his backyard and yelled up the hill at us to stop breaking his windows and filling his yard with dirt balls. We nicknamed him the Bald-Headed Eagle.

For a few days we just yelled back at him, since he had no chance of climbing up the edge of the ravine to chase us. But one day the Bald-Headed Eagle called the police, who arrived as we were hurling dirt missiles into his yard. The police ordered all of us to stop, and then they recorded all of our names in a book. I figured I was going to prison, but the police didn’t even tell our parents.

New neighbours moved in

The developer finally built two houses on the vacant lots, one of which he sold to an architect named Mr. Ross, who took me one Sunday with his son to Fort York to watch the Trooping of the Colours. The developer sold the other house to Clyde Gilmour, the CBC broadcaster, whose daughter Janie became a friend of mine for a while until we moved away from the neighbourhood.