I’m starting to realize
that my quest to revive the Lost Art of Letter Writing was actually a way of
rediscovering the camaraderie that seems to have slipped between the cracks
amidst the crush of High Technology. The number of people who bother to write
back (of the hundreds of pieces I’ve sent out) can probably be counted on the
fingers of one hand. More often than not I get an e-mail or a message on
Facebook thanking me for sending them something. Sometimes with excuses for why they
can’t write back. At least I’m not to blame for the extinction of letter
writing and it isn’t just the lack of teaching cursive writing that has done it
in. Technology has made people lazy.
So I’m going to go back in
time to discover where things went horribly wrong. I won’t bother with my early
childhood in England. My memory of those years is shaky at best.
Don
Mills … Here are three
things I remember doing with other people: (a) science experiments (we actually
thought we’d discovered a new way of producing plastic at one point); (b)
baseball … softball with the kids at my school and hardball with an organized
team; (c) met Tony Quarrington in grade six and it wasn’t long before we were
producing small magazines (in four colours sometimes … not process colours
though) on his father’s Gestetner printer and pedaling them from door to door
to the apartment dwellers of Don Mills. Tony mostly did the writing and I
mostly made the pictures. Alas nothing has surfaced from this period. Apart
from this with others we explored the Don Valley (the parkway hadn’t been built
yet) and a deserted barn on Lawrence Avenue. Tony and I also entertained the
neighbourhood children (including Dan Hill apparently) with puppets and our
wide array of voices.
Scarborough … This suburb seemed to be just
getting rolling when we arrived in 1959 or 1960. It didn’t take long to find
boys to play ice and road hockey with (I was better at the latter because I was
less scared of being hit with a tennis ball than with a rock hard puck … besides
I wasn’t all that great as a skater having come to it at a much later age than
my contemporaries. At some point the folk music period kicked in and I bought a
used guitar and learned some chords … then the Beatles and Stones happened and
my father took me downtown to a pawn shop where I bought my first electric
guitar. Didn’t take me long to find kindred spirits and I became a bass player
(never actually owned a bass) for a series of bands (Clintstones, Sunsets, A-Go
Go Set) playing in basements, youth centres and strip mall dance studios.
Somewhere in there I used to play war games with Robert Dick and Richard Percy
(usually with plastic model ships which we’d built and painted ourselves). Was
Arts & Crafts head at Camp Ogama for a couple of summers and formed a band
with Myles Cohen and a couple of other senior boys. Phil Ennis and I got into
all kinds of trouble though Phil probably took the cake when he brought a Nazi
flag to a Jewish camp and placed it over his bed. But that’s another blog or
chapter in my memoir. By 1965 I had started at the Ontario College of Art. This
also coincided with my weekendly trips to Yorkville Village to catch people
like Gordie Lightfoot, Phil Ochs and Tim Hardin. Met many good friends at OCA
including my wife-to-be and my last year was spent working with a number of
other students (including some from third year) on the school yearbook (aka The
1969 OCA Bag) which was actually a box containing a game (board, money, dice,
markers, etc), some posters (including a horoscope chart), a record(!), and (a
near afterthought!) a yearbook.
North
Toronto … Got married
and my first (post-OCA) job at McClelland and Stewart. Always felt M&S
spoiled one from working anywhere else. We had too much fun. Somehow we got the
annual list done despite parties, department listening sessions (Pink Floyd’s
Dark Side of the Moon was a favourite) and even at least one musical session in
a field (Don Fernley, David Berry and me) … and then there was the Group of
Fifty Eight with its Olympic Chair Race, Simulated Motorcycle Experience and
Ashley Collective. This all ground to a halt when I became Art Director with
just three people working with me (the department had seven people back in
1969) — Bob, Jim and Rene. We didn’t have time to party. I started my own
company in 1977 and did a ton of work for Edmonton’s Mel Hurtig which
culminated in The Canadian Encyclopedia in 1985 (done with just two assistants
— Harrison Shannon and Martha Staigys). Also did the Alberta Heritage Learning
Resources Project for the Alberta Government in 1979. I continued to work with
Hurtig Publishers until Mel sold the company to … McClelland and Stewart. In
the early 1980s we started what became Don Vallee and the Parkways … a mostly
seven piece band though sometimes a quartet (The Partial Parkways). We
practiced much more than we ever played and one day a band member asked the
leading question, “What exactly are we practicing for?” Didn’t really have an
answer so the Parkways disbanded. One time we even had a three piece horn
section playing in our drummer’s furnace room. Once work became few and far
between I got involved with a church drama group … apart from painting sets,
designing programs, tickets and posters I was usually in the plays … even
played Bill Sykes in Oliver and in 2000 Clive Mason and I actually wrote a play
(you’ll have to read the memoir for details). I illustrated a few books in the
90s (including astrology guides for dogs and cats).
The
Internets … I wonder
how much of the preceding would never have happened if we’d had access to the
Internet and social media? I designed a series of textbooks all on my own in the first couple
of years of the new millennium but extricated myself from that and worked on
some personal projects (none of which have yet to be published). I found the
camaraderie was pretty good on a couple of message boards I was on but all good
things have to come to an end. Facebook. What can I say? Have met some friends
who like the same kind of music that I do. Including folks from those two
defunct message boards. But there are too many trolls and unsavory types
waiting to pounce on you if you offer an opinion that deviates from their way
of thinking. I’ve even had to block a few people … something I never came close
to doing until Facebook. Instead of job offers I now get people phishing for
bank information and ladies offering to send me photographs of themselves
(because they liked my Facebook profile). Uh huh. I don’t think so. Enough of
this blather….
