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ISBN 1-894838-09-2 - 200 pp - 6 x 9 - pb
- $19.95 CAD
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AN EXCERPT FROM ISLAND
SKETCHBOOK
Non-fiction by Frank Ledwell
Illustrations by Danny Ledwell
From the section "What We Knew at SDU,"
a memoir of life at Saint Dunstan's University in Charlottetown,
Prince Edward Island
High Jinks
“Punchboard” Gavin’s intentions
were honourable enough. He had worked for several years to pay his
way through college, so was older than everyone except the Veterans.
But he couldn't leave well enough alone, and, besides, he was a
notorious tightwad. To supplement his savings he engaged in selling
chances on punchboards (the predecessors of today’s scratch-and-win
lottery tickets). He seemed to be doing well with it in his own
residence, Memorial Hall. Then what he thought fair game were the
unsuspecting Freshmen on the stairwell between the first and second
floors of Dalton Hall. The treatment for undesirables was scroofing,
involving a hard rubbing on the scalp with the second knuckles of
the closed fist. It burned and pained. Scroofing was followed by
blackballing with a liberal application of black shoe polish to
the privates. Scroofing was liberally administered as peer punishment,
but “Punchboard” Gavin was one of only three to be blackballed
in ten years. Gavin’s punchboard was relegated to the garbage.
He himself never again returned to Dalton Hall.
Many of the high jinks were of the boys-will-be-boys
variety. “Dom” Donnelly was very bright academically,
but was otherwise pretty stunned. He came in for a share of the
practical jokes, the most exciting tying a mouse down the leg of
his pajamas hanging in his closet. When he donned his pyjamas, everyone
discovered how literally scared he was of mice, and all were amazed
at the mess he made of his underwear in trying to escape.
Hallowe'en was a special time for creative endeavour.
The corridors in Memorial Hall were hard, slippery tile, and when
watered down were like ice. Not a congenial range for a steer. A
steer, nonetheless, was led in on a halter and let loose on the
wet floor. That poor steer was like Mr. Winkle on skates. But as
Pius Callaghan used to report on hockey dust-ups in his sports column
in the Guardian: “Cooler heads prevailed.” The more
conscientious residents, sensitive to cruelty to animals, subdued
the steer and led him back to his barn.
In the 1890s, St. Dunstan’s erected a large
outdoor handball alley. It had three courts, and the open building
stood about twenty-five feet tall and was sixty feet long with a
court floor of approximately thirty-five feet. It was an impressive
structure and was built relatively adjacent to the college’s
barns, the central housing for its large farm. A young man from
Quebec City who came to study philosophy asked me what this structure
was. I said, “Oh, they’re our elephant stalls. We use
elephants to do our heavy farm work,” never expecting him
to believe me. He did. A couple of days later, he inquired how we
got the elephants here. “We load them at the railway siding.”
St. Dunstan’s had a train stop and a siding at the time. The
story had a happy ending when Paget (for that was his name) wrote
home to his father, a professor at Laval, to tell him of this wondrous
sight, and his father wrote back to tell him he had been taken.
Big Bill Pendergast, a gentle giant of a man, was
a heavy sleeper. He spent most afternoons in the sack in his room
at the far end of third floor Dalton Hall. The room at the opposite
end of the corridor was vacant. Several able-bodied colleagues transported
him, bed and all, from his room to the other while Bill slept peacefully
throughout the cartage. Hours later, when he awakened, he simply
took bed, mattress and all, under one arm and went back to his room,
where he crawled back in and resumed his siesta.
Meanwhile, St. Dunstan’s High School, offering
Grades Ten, Eleven, and Twelve to students at a time when only three
other institutions offered those final years, had a gentlemanly,
but quite naive, teacher. He was an SDU grad named Joe MacIsaac,
better known to his students as “Wooden Joe.” At the
beginning of each year, in establishing the class enrollment, he
would invariably come to his principal with this problem. He would
present the list as his students had signed it and complain, “The
list has 27 names and there are only 25 in the class.” He
would be genuinely perplexed. A cursory glance by the principal
identified two names of notorious characters in downtown Charlottetown,
Nick Reid and Rupe MacKay. It took Wooden Joe three years to catch
on that his students were getting the upper hand on him in the very
first class.
The college had a night-watchman, Jerome Blacquiere,
who was thought to be quite ancient. His job called for Jerome to
walk through each of the buildings in the middle of the night, presumably
to check for fires. If you weren’t awakened by his slow shuffling
down the corridors, the smell of his kerosene lantern was enough
to awaken you. The buildings themselves were in total darkness,
the switchbox being shut off at the 11 o’clock curfew. Old
Jerome met his nemesis on the first floor of Memorial Hall. About
once a month as he entered the corridor he was greeted by two white-sheeted
ghosts in the persons of Hoot Driscoll and Pete Sullivan. Jerome’s
shuffle would turn into a run as he retreated the building. Hoot
and Pete never, as I recall, identified themselves to him.
These were the days before central heating in the
buildings. The Main Building and Dalton Hall had huge, old-style
coal-fired furnaces in their basements. The Main Building had a
dirt cellar, supporting walls of brick; Dalton Hall was finished
in concrete. But those facts are incidental to the story. The fireman
in the Main Building was the obscure Lou Monaghan. Like Boo Radley
in To Kill a Mockingbird, he was never seen in the daylight and
only rarely at night. Students watched from their windows at night
to see his shadow leave his basement lair. They would then holler
from their windows, “Dirty Old Lou,” and could see him
shake his dark fist at them in the air. They were grateful, however,
next morning when the heating pipes awakened them, knocking and
banging after a cold heatless night. Assurance that Dirty Lou was
stoking up his furnace, sending steam coursing through the ancient
heating system.
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