Parkdale Drama

On Friday or Saturday nights, we were often called to the Elm Grove Tavern at 1249 Queen St. West. It was not a high-class place. It had a men’s only room and a separate “Ladies and Escorts” room. At closing time, when the Men’s Room emptied, you had pitched battles. Everybody picked a side: the Newfoundlanders on one, the guys from New Brunswick on the other.

In the ’80s, Parkdale had many big houses that had been split up into individual rooms. Studio apartments.

One day, a young woman from Owen Sound had just rented a basement room on Cowan Ave. She decided to have a shower. She was a large woman. The shower stall was a $99 special made out of sheet metal, not attached to the wall by anything except plastic piping. She lost her balance and she and the shower stall fell over onto the floor. She couldn’t get out. Water was going everywhere. There was nobody else home.

Finally, somebody came through the side door. They heard muffled screaming from the basement. The person looked down and saw several feet of water. Dispatch phoned Randy and me to respond to a possible drowning in the basement at 162 Cowan Ave.

The firefighters stood up the shower stall and got her out. Now they had this young woman from Owen Sound out of the basement, nude and freaking. They were trying to put a blanket around her when a short man, about 75 years old, came chugging up the driveway.

He yelled, “My house! What you do to my house?”

He dropped down with a heart attack. We took him to the hospital, not the young woman. I never found out if he survived.