My first glimpse of North Bay was from this hotelYou can click on any of these pictures to enlarge them
Downtown North Bay 1955 - Click any Picture to Enlarge 
When I was in the first grade in 1954- 55, my family moved from Byron near London Ontario (where I was born) to North Bay some 350 miles away. My dad, a salesman in London with Fruehauf Trailers had sold everything including our house to purchase a 50% partnership in a White Truck Distributorship up north. Nearby Elloit Lake was a buzz with the recent discovery of uranium and was experiencing phenomenal growth. Trucks were needed for the mining operation. These mines subsequently closed a few years later, devastating the new truck market, causing the White Truck Distributorship to falter because it was probably grossly underfinanced. In those days the sales agreements through Commercial Credit were “without recourse” (this would apparently never be the case nowadays) meaning the dealership was responsible for the loan and could only attempt to repossess when the truckers couldn’t pay. Rather than give their trucks back, the broke owners would burn them or run them into the bush with water in the engine blocks where they would freeze and be rendered worthless. When the partner (a Mr. Davies) ran off with the money that was left, it completely wiped out our savings and returned my father to the ranks of a salesman again. I have been leery of business partnerships ever since.
For me the relocation seemed like the end of the world and really in some ways it was. I remember bringing kids home from my new school to look at our RCA Townsman 21 television set. Turning it on produced only a roaring, hissing noise and a dynamic image of a blinding snowstorm. You see, there was no television station in North Bay at the time but the kids were still very curious to see anything about the new technology.Click any Picture to Enlarge
The main lodge at Torbay in West Ferris. No Club Med!
When we arrived in the great white north, we settled into a cottage on the beach and I mean right on the beach at Torbay Lodge in West Ferris, 2 miles from the city of North Bay. Sand would track in everywhere so my mom kept a broom by the door of the long, skinny cottage. After the summer of 55 when the tourists left for home, there was more selection in residences and we moved twice, ending up less than a block away in a house right in the parking lot of a huge Chinese restaurant the Golden Dragon. The restaurant would seat several hundred and contained seven dining rooms. The Chinese cook staff knew me as “Teem” although I remember eating there only once. The restaurant also had a caged bear in the rear by the beach to entice tourists I suppose. They fed it the leftovers from the restaurant. I can still remember the stink of Chinese food mixed with bear shit rotting in the summer sun. Even then as a kid, I wondered how this helped in their marketing but I guess it reduced their garbage bill.
McCluskey's was next door south across Banner Ave. Lake in the background. Our house to the right (not shown)
Because we were now reduced to near poverty, we rented the house from people known to me only as “the Stovers”. Originally, and before we arrived, there was a Trading Post tourist business right in front of our house. It was gone when we moved in. I think the entire two storey structure was moved and re-established about 500 yards south, past the Torbay Lodge because I remember it next to my friend Sonny Thomas' place in Torbay. Next door (south of us) was O.K. McCluskey’s Drug Store where my sister and I would go after dinner to get a Cherry Blossom or a Drumstick for dessert. Needing money and probably because our property was zoned commercial, my mom was able to secure a Post Office Substation and have it installed right in the front hall of the house. I remember it to be Federal Government Postal Substation SS#1 Site #6. Mom was sworn in and became the postmaster.
The Bay Post was gone when we moved into the "Stover House" behind.
The Bay Post is still in front of our house in this picture. It was moved I think.
If you knew my mother, then you know that she never had a dishonest bone in her body. A graduate of Westervelt College in London in the thirties, she was a capable and diligent office manager. One time McCluskey came to the Post Office to drop off a large carton of flyers. He paid the appropriate fee to have them included with everyone’s mail on a certain day in order to promote a special sale at his Drug Store. Several weeks later my mother was horrified when she saw the “special sale’ next door and realized that she had forgotten to distribute the flyers. We were sworn to secrecy on penalty of death as she took the box of flyers in the trunk of the car to the end of a dead end road, dug a hole and buried them in the dense forest, miles from home. It was probably out near the rocky hills where she used to pick blueberries.
North Bay had the first federally owned airport in Canada. It was also part of the NORAD and SAGE systems employing Avro CF100’s and Bomarc Missiles. I had a friend named George Morrell whose father was a CF100 pilot. I wonder where George is now?
One time my cousin Lynn and her family was visiting from Kitchener and they were staying at Sunset Park less than a mile away in a rented cottage which included an 18 foot cedar strip boat and oars. Lynn and I rowed around the bay for a while but to make things a little more interesting I decided to try out my uncle Tom’s 5hp Johnson outboard motor that was in the cottage by the icebox. The parents were away and since I was a fairly experienced boater for ten, I assured Lynn that it would be OK. I don’t know if I didn’t do up the clamps that hold the motor to the boat or if they somehow came loose, but I can still remember seeing that green machine lift off the stern of the boat and go suddenly silent as it disappeared into the calm water of the bay. When we rowed back to the spot, we could see the motor through the clear water, lying about ten feet down.
Fearing certain death, we somehow managed to snag it with the anchor and haul it back on board and we rowed back to shore. The motor refused to start, in fact the flywheel refused to even turn. Panic! What now? We lugged the motor past Watt’s Variety Store, past Pirie’s Grocery Store to Horton’s Shell Service Station. Mr. Horton, who I had never meant before seemed to detect our anxiousness. I explained that my uncle didn’t know I had “borrowed” his motor. He methodically removed the cover of the motor and the spark plug. After pulling it over a few times, he cleaned the sparkplug in a sandblaster and put it back together. I can’t tell you the relief I felt when the motor burst to life. Of course in those days, a dime was a big deal to me, so our method of recompense was somewhat limited. Mr. Horton knew and somehow anticipated my financial situation because he told us the repair would be no charge. That little bit of goodwill backfired on him because, rather than encouraging everyone I knew to go to Horton’s Shell, I was so embarrassed, I never saw him again. I learned later that Mr. Gerry Horton was the brother of the legendary NHL star Tim Horton and Tim Horton doughnut fame.
Things were certainly different back then in the fifties. Nowadays parents would be thrown in jail for not watching their kids more closely. I was basically free to boat, swim and roam the forest on my own or with my other pre-teen friends. Back then, people thought nothing of throwing garbage out the window of their cars or throwing beer or pop bottles in the lake (as long as you filled them with water so a boat wouldn’t hit them) I look back fondly at the years I spent up north and although we as a family didn’t have much money, we were never went hungry and I had a great time! With both parents working, I was on my own even more than the others. We were very resourceful and independent little guys. We would ride the bus on our own to downtown and go to the Capital Theatre. Vernie Mills was a paperboy for the North Bay Nugget newspaper and I helped him with his route lots of times because I had nothing else to do. The whole beach strip was a tourist area and was dotted with rental cabins, motels and the usual bars and shops. Part of our daily route was through the rental cabins and motels offering our extra papers for sale. In those days our currency was still pinned to the price of gold but US money was only worth 85 or 90¢ on the dollar so we were not too interested in taking it. We tried to charge 10¢ for every nickel paper and that peed off the Americans but it was good profit.
Other sources of income were discarded pop and beer bottles for 2¢each. Also I learned how some kids would put chewing gum in the coin return of the payphone and retrieve dimes later. Watt’s Variety had a pinball machine that actually returned money. Later they changed it to return tokens for candy etc. I never smoked back then but Vernie showed me how you could find half smoked cigars and relight them. I still can’t stand the smell of a cigar!
The card says Billington, but the Walsh's owned it when I lived there
As I mentioned, my dad was a salesman nearly all his life. He worked for numerous companies and was always looking for that “big deal”. Parts of the 1949 play Death Of A Salesman by American playwright Arthur Miller, had more than a casual meaning to me. Losing all his money was hard on my dad. The northern lifestyle catered to his drinking and he was well known at the local watering holes. More than once, I waited in the car in the parking lot of the Lakeview Inn when I needed to get my dad to do something with me. Don’t get me wrong, it was not devastating like some people’s addictions to alcohol but it did unavoidably change how I viewed the world I suppose.
One time my dad got suckered in to a part ownership of a dilapidated old charter boat called the Pickerel Queen. I believe his partner was a Mr. Goldman or Golding. Likely an aquaintance he met at the Lakeview Inn. Yeah, Jim Golding I think his name was. Officer Golding was a game warden and I remember him coming to our house one evening. Mr. Golding showed me his service pistol and let me hold it. It was the first time I’d ever seen a real handgun, although we used BB pistols to shoot frogs in the bush and I always had toy cap guns. I don’t know how much money my dad lost on that one, but I never ever saw the boat leave its slip on the LaVase River at Champlain Park. A loser I’m sure.
This picture shows the North Bay gate. One year there were so many stinking Mayflies (shadflies) covering the buildings and the streets that a dump truck skidded on the little bugs and demolished one of the columns. When our family moved away to Toronto in 1962, there was still only one column standing. I read that the gate has been reconstructed and now stands in nearby Lee Park
The Chief Commanda was owned by the Ontario Northland Railway and was used to deliver freight, mail and passengers all around Lake Nippissing and the French River. I remember it being as large as any ocean cruise ship. Obviously, we see things differently than the eyes of a young boy. Rumour had it that it was badly designed and it was so top heavy that it had to carry tons of concrete in its bilge to keep it from capsizing in a storm.
We often rented cedar strip boats from the Wharrams at Campinocity beside Parks Creek. (we used to call it Wharram's Creek) The Wharram girls (Charlene was my age) had the use of a huge 35hp (biggest motor around) and this could be the same one. I think they were related to Kenny Wharram the NHL star who would be in his early twenties at the time. We had our own 5hp motor and would use a rented boat to go to the favorite spots like Sunset Point. Walleye fishing is always done at dusk to dark and most often we would catch our limit. I remember coming back with 90 good sized pickerel. (American tourists called them walleyes) Sometimes I would snooze up in the bow among the life preservers and they’d wake me up to drive the boat home usually with five or six beer drinkers on board. I was among the first of the designated drivers I guess. My mom would sit near the bow using the flashlight to see and be seen. Drinking beer and fishing was synonymous back then so you’d have to watch for “deadheads” (floating beer bottles) as you navigated home.
Speaking of Sunset Point, I found this picture which clearly shows the rocky outcropping which was really an anomaly since the shoreline is composed entirely of sand beaches for miles in either direction. It was a favorite spot for picnics and romantic encounters for the older teenagers with cars. One time Vernie and I and some other boys were playing on the point when we began hearing the ricochet of bullets glancing off the water, some buzzing by our heads and spattering nearby boulders. There was obviously some unwise person shooting at the point from a long distance. I doubt if the person shooting could even see us. We knew it was quite a distance because we could not hear the bang of the bullet as it left the rifle. As if it was a common occurrence, we simply moved to the lee side of the point and continued our playing. I think we found some old, large porcelain urinals that were lying on their backs maybe from a hotel fire many years ago. We used to sit in them and pretend they were cars or boats..
You can see Sunset Point in the background from our beach. I think the bullets came from this distance.
The white cottage at the far right was where we lived in 1955
That was over 50 years ago so you can imagine how thrilled I was to find some old postcards on the internet of my old home town from grade one to grade seven. What are the chances of finding actual pictures of your house when you were six years old?
The main lodge at Torbay in West Ferris. No Club Med!
When we arrived in the great white north, we settled into a cottage on the beach and I mean right on the beach at Torbay Lodge in West Ferris, 2 miles from the city of North Bay. Sand would track in everywhere so my mom kept a broom by the door of the long, skinny cottage. After the summer of 55 when the tourists left for home, there was more selection in residences and we moved twice, ending up less than a block away in a house right in the parking lot of a huge Chinese restaurant the Golden Dragon. The restaurant would seat several hundred and contained seven dining rooms. The Chinese cook staff knew me as “Teem” although I remember eating there only once. The restaurant also had a caged bear in the rear by the beach to entice tourists I suppose. They fed it the leftovers from the restaurant. I can still remember the stink of Chinese food mixed with bear shit rotting in the summer sun. Even then as a kid, I wondered how this helped in their marketing but I guess it reduced their garbage bill.
McCluskey's was next door south across Banner Ave. Lake in the background. Our house to the right (not shown)Because we were now reduced to near poverty, we rented the house from people known to me only as “the Stovers”. Originally, and before we arrived, there was a Trading Post tourist business right in front of our house. It was gone when we moved in. I think the entire two storey structure was moved and re-established about 500 yards south, past the Torbay Lodge because I remember it next to my friend Sonny Thomas' place in Torbay. Next door (south of us) was O.K. McCluskey’s Drug Store where my sister and I would go after dinner to get a Cherry Blossom or a Drumstick for dessert. Needing money and probably because our property was zoned commercial, my mom was able to secure a Post Office Substation and have it installed right in the front hall of the house. I remember it to be Federal Government Postal Substation SS#1 Site #6. Mom was sworn in and became the postmaster.
The Bay Post was gone when we moved into the "Stover House" behind.
I think this building must have been moved a block south from where we lived
.
Across the street I had a friend named Vernon Mills. My sister Pat played with Vernie's sister Kathy. His back yard was a dense vast forest stretching for miles to the easterly city bypass which was under construction at the time. We were always warned not to play with blasting caps. "Don't Touch Them" was a movie with New York Giant's Willy Mays that was shown at school. The caps were used to detonate dynamite at the bypass through the rocks. The forest is now a subdivision but in those days we would play in the bush all summer. Although large, the forest was bounded on all sides by roads so you could never really get permanently lost.
The Bay Post is still in front of our house in this picture. It was moved I think.If you knew my mother, then you know that she never had a dishonest bone in her body. A graduate of Westervelt College in London in the thirties, she was a capable and diligent office manager. One time McCluskey came to the Post Office to drop off a large carton of flyers. He paid the appropriate fee to have them included with everyone’s mail on a certain day in order to promote a special sale at his Drug Store. Several weeks later my mother was horrified when she saw the “special sale’ next door and realized that she had forgotten to distribute the flyers. We were sworn to secrecy on penalty of death as she took the box of flyers in the trunk of the car to the end of a dead end road, dug a hole and buried them in the dense forest, miles from home. It was probably out near the rocky hills where she used to pick blueberries.
North Bay had the first federally owned airport in Canada. It was also part of the NORAD and SAGE systems employing Avro CF100’s and Bomarc Missiles. I had a friend named George Morrell whose father was a CF100 pilot. I wonder where George is now?
One time my cousin Lynn and her family was visiting from Kitchener and they were staying at Sunset Park less than a mile away in a rented cottage which included an 18 foot cedar strip boat and oars. Lynn and I rowed around the bay for a while but to make things a little more interesting I decided to try out my uncle Tom’s 5hp Johnson outboard motor that was in the cottage by the icebox. The parents were away and since I was a fairly experienced boater for ten, I assured Lynn that it would be OK. I don’t know if I didn’t do up the clamps that hold the motor to the boat or if they somehow came loose, but I can still remember seeing that green machine lift off the stern of the boat and go suddenly silent as it disappeared into the calm water of the bay. When we rowed back to the spot, we could see the motor through the clear water, lying about ten feet down.
Fearing certain death, we somehow managed to snag it with the anchor and haul it back on board and we rowed back to shore. The motor refused to start, in fact the flywheel refused to even turn. Panic! What now? We lugged the motor past Watt’s Variety Store, past Pirie’s Grocery Store to Horton’s Shell Service Station. Mr. Horton, who I had never meant before seemed to detect our anxiousness. I explained that my uncle didn’t know I had “borrowed” his motor. He methodically removed the cover of the motor and the spark plug. After pulling it over a few times, he cleaned the sparkplug in a sandblaster and put it back together. I can’t tell you the relief I felt when the motor burst to life. Of course in those days, a dime was a big deal to me, so our method of recompense was somewhat limited. Mr. Horton knew and somehow anticipated my financial situation because he told us the repair would be no charge. That little bit of goodwill backfired on him because, rather than encouraging everyone I knew to go to Horton’s Shell, I was so embarrassed, I never saw him again. I learned later that Mr. Gerry Horton was the brother of the legendary NHL star Tim Horton and Tim Horton doughnut fame. 
Things were certainly different back then in the fifties. Nowadays parents would be thrown in jail for not watching their kids more closely. I was basically free to boat, swim and roam the forest on my own or with my other pre-teen friends. Back then, people thought nothing of throwing garbage out the window of their cars or throwing beer or pop bottles in the lake (as long as you filled them with water so a boat wouldn’t hit them) I look back fondly at the years I spent up north and although we as a family didn’t have much money, we were never went hungry and I had a great time! With both parents working, I was on my own even more than the others. We were very resourceful and independent little guys. We would ride the bus on our own to downtown and go to the Capital Theatre. Vernie Mills was a paperboy for the North Bay Nugget newspaper and I helped him with his route lots of times because I had nothing else to do. The whole beach strip was a tourist area and was dotted with rental cabins, motels and the usual bars and shops. Part of our daily route was through the rental cabins and motels offering our extra papers for sale. In those days our currency was still pinned to the price of gold but US money was only worth 85 or 90¢ on the dollar so we were not too interested in taking it. We tried to charge 10¢ for every nickel paper and that peed off the Americans but it was good profit.
Other sources of income were discarded pop and beer bottles for 2¢each. Also I learned how some kids would put chewing gum in the coin return of the payphone and retrieve dimes later. Watt’s Variety had a pinball machine that actually returned money. Later they changed it to return tokens for candy etc. I never smoked back then but Vernie showed me how you could find half smoked cigars and relight them. I still can’t stand the smell of a cigar!
The card says Billington, but the Walsh's owned it when I lived there
As I mentioned, my dad was a salesman nearly all his life. He worked for numerous companies and was always looking for that “big deal”. Parts of the 1949 play Death Of A Salesman by American playwright Arthur Miller, had more than a casual meaning to me. Losing all his money was hard on my dad. The northern lifestyle catered to his drinking and he was well known at the local watering holes. More than once, I waited in the car in the parking lot of the Lakeview Inn when I needed to get my dad to do something with me. Don’t get me wrong, it was not devastating like some people’s addictions to alcohol but it did unavoidably change how I viewed the world I suppose.
One time my dad got suckered in to a part ownership of a dilapidated old charter boat called the Pickerel Queen. I believe his partner was a Mr. Goldman or Golding. Likely an aquaintance he met at the Lakeview Inn. Yeah, Jim Golding I think his name was. Officer Golding was a game warden and I remember him coming to our house one evening. Mr. Golding showed me his service pistol and let me hold it. It was the first time I’d ever seen a real handgun, although we used BB pistols to shoot frogs in the bush and I always had toy cap guns. I don’t know how much money my dad lost on that one, but I never ever saw the boat leave its slip on the LaVase River at Champlain Park. A loser I’m sure.
This picture shows the North Bay gate. One year there were so many stinking Mayflies (shadflies) covering the buildings and the streets that a dump truck skidded on the little bugs and demolished one of the columns. When our family moved away to Toronto in 1962, there was still only one column standing. I read that the gate has been reconstructed and now stands in nearby Lee Park
The Chief Commanda was owned by the Ontario Northland Railway and was used to deliver freight, mail and passengers all around Lake Nippissing and the French River. I remember it being as large as any ocean cruise ship. Obviously, we see things differently than the eyes of a young boy. Rumour had it that it was badly designed and it was so top heavy that it had to carry tons of concrete in its bilge to keep it from capsizing in a storm.
We often rented cedar strip boats from the Wharrams at Campinocity beside Parks Creek. (we used to call it Wharram's Creek) The Wharram girls (Charlene was my age) had the use of a huge 35hp (biggest motor around) and this could be the same one. I think they were related to Kenny Wharram the NHL star who would be in his early twenties at the time. We had our own 5hp motor and would use a rented boat to go to the favorite spots like Sunset Point. Walleye fishing is always done at dusk to dark and most often we would catch our limit. I remember coming back with 90 good sized pickerel. (American tourists called them walleyes) Sometimes I would snooze up in the bow among the life preservers and they’d wake me up to drive the boat home usually with five or six beer drinkers on board. I was among the first of the designated drivers I guess. My mom would sit near the bow using the flashlight to see and be seen. Drinking beer and fishing was synonymous back then so you’d have to watch for “deadheads” (floating beer bottles) as you navigated home.
Speaking of Sunset Point, I found this picture which clearly shows the rocky outcropping which was really an anomaly since the shoreline is composed entirely of sand beaches for miles in either direction. It was a favorite spot for picnics and romantic encounters for the older teenagers with cars. One time Vernie and I and some other boys were playing on the point when we began hearing the ricochet of bullets glancing off the water, some buzzing by our heads and spattering nearby boulders. There was obviously some unwise person shooting at the point from a long distance. I doubt if the person shooting could even see us. We knew it was quite a distance because we could not hear the bang of the bullet as it left the rifle. As if it was a common occurrence, we simply moved to the lee side of the point and continued our playing. I think we found some old, large porcelain urinals that were lying on their backs maybe from a hotel fire many years ago. We used to sit in them and pretend they were cars or boats.
You can see Sunset Point in the background from our beach. I think the bullets came from this distance.Another time on a very windy day I fell into the lake at the Sunset Point. I would have surely drowned because the huge waves made it impossible to climb up on the rocks and the breakers were swamping my efforts to stay afloat. One of the boys reached out with his fishing pole. I held on to the end and it gave me just enough help to climb back out.
.Still another time I was off the Point with an 18 foot Giesler cedar strip and our 5hp motor (same old Johnson - my uncle Tom gave it to my dad) These large rental boats were underpowered with our little 5hp when it was windy. I was out there with someone else but I can’t remember who. Could have been my younger sister or my cousin. The wind and breakers were pushing us nearer and nearer to the point and even on “wide open” we were not making any headway. Lake Nippising is a shallow lake with and average depth of only 15 feet, so it is notorious for whipping up quickly and it has killed many unwary fishermen, not familiar with the lake. Fearing I’d run out of gas, I turned sideways to the breakers and somehow shot away from the rocks without capsizing. Not bad for a nine or ten year old eh? I never told my parents.
.That was three times I could have been killed at Sunset Point. Not a romantic spot for me!
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The adventures I had in North Bay appear to be well etched into my distant memory and finding these pictures on the internet allowed the memories to re-emerge after over 50 years. It would be interesting to return some day although I doubt I’d recognize anything.
.
The adventures I had in North Bay appear to be well etched into my distant memory and finding these pictures on the internet allowed the memories to re-emerge after over 50 years. It would be interesting to return some day although I doubt I’d recognize anything.
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