Interviewer: ...what would you call this that I 'm sitting on? Speaker: Chesterfield. Interviewer: Chesterfield right, yeah. And that 's a Canadianism, because most people call it a couch. Speaker: Or sofa in The-States. Interviewer: Or sofa in The- States. So you do call it a chesterfield? Speaker: We call it a chesterfield. Yeah.

Everyone's really chill and nice and I'm friends with the boss.

Because I collect dragon statues, and I have a lot of little chintzy ones from the dollar store that people see and go, "Oh you collect these, so I bought eight of them for you, they are a set, they cost eight dollars."

Yes. Well, if you, if you wanted to buy a house and like us, your first house, young family, living on a pretty ruddy tight budget, you, you had to. You couldn 't afford anything else. So again our street was choc-a-bloc full of young families, young children and um, actually that whole area was.

Well, we never really hung out with those people very much. We knew them, but they went to a different school, so you had your little clan here, right?

It had a little uh cone-shaped section built out on one corner of it and it was a three level apartment building. It was kind-of fun. It had the old ah, ah auger electric power system, coal fire, hot water system and the- had a coal bin in- in the basement where ah they brought the fuel in and dumped it in the window and filled up this coal bin and- and then the heating had to be stoked and shoveled and the ashes taken out of this coal furnace daily by the superintendent of the building.

Just nasty. You-know and- there was a- I played in a- in a couple kind-of crooner-bands and Italians really like that kind of music. Like the Louis- Primas, the-Rat-Pack kind of stuff.

Speaker: Could I get off of school- like, from having to go to school 'til you're sixteen, see? And they- Board-of-Education sent her a nice letter back, "Certainly, if he's gainfully employed and learning a trade, that's fine and dandy with us," you-know, so- so I never got any high-school or nothing, just grade- eight and that, but anyways I- Speaker 2: It hasn't held you back at all.

... she says, "Oh that looks secure," and everything like that, you-know. So anyways, that was fine and dandy.

There's a Second- Cup place there. Okay. That's fine and dandy with me, as- I guess- I- it looks the Chinese people run it. I got nothing against the Chinese people eh? So, they have an area there that's- they've got tables and chairs and everything like that, and Lorraine goes into Zeller's there ...

But um, yeah so well got a house, nice house, loved it. I guess it all kind-of started with, I got the nice room, 'cause I found the house, so I got- I got first dibs, I got the nice room.

So they turned them into lecture halls for us. So it wasn 't the fanciest of digs. We took some lectures on U-of-T campus. Our, our anatomy classes were in the medical anatomy building so that we actually worked on cadavers and-so-on-and-so-forth. Oh yeah. Well to learn the anatomy you had to.

No, his half-brother. His half-brother 's there. "Oh, so where 's- where," you-know, type-of-thing, find out he 's gone to the east- east coast to visit his father. Okay. I 'm just here to you-know, to look over the digs because I told- I told him I was gonna be here at this time to re-- review the tenancy type-of-thing and look over the- the digs and see you-know.

They didn 't- I mean they didn 't really leave the neighbourhood type-of-thing. They just moved over here to bigger digs.

I can barely remember her actually. I always remember going to her house. They were really poor, you-know, back 'round the dirty thirties and all-that-stuff. They lived in an attic...

Interviewer: You had an aptitude for art. Speaker: So I had- they found that- they believed I had an aptitude for art, and I do. Um, so the teacher went through the board and got special dispensation to send- to a school that had- the only school that had at that kin-- a art course, an art class, and that was Burnhamthorpe-Collegiate so they said, "Fine," because no other high-school in the area has this course and your teacher says that you should.

... they said, "Okay fine, you can go to Burnhamthorpe-Collegiate." It meant taking two buses and having to get up earlier to go to school but because it was the only Collegiate that had the courses that were required, fine, you had special dispensation to go, and so I went to Burnhamthorpe, and then from there, Burnhamthorpe sent me to Sheraton-College.

So if we 're sitting there watching some T-V, he 'd be like, "Stop dog-fucking. Do some work!" He uses that term like if you 're not doing anything and you 're just like shooting the shit but then yeah he 'll bother us all the time.

Interviewer: So what were you talking about you're- double cohort? Speaker: Yeah, and I was talking about the double cohorts and they were saying like, "Oh yeah, I think they're going-to raise the standard-." No, she said- she didn't say, "I think," she said, "Yeah, they're going to raise the stan-- the accep-- the number of people they're going to accept for each programme.

Speaker: I'm more like, humanities, and not really sciences and stuff, so, it wasn't really- I didn't really enjoy it, and plus it made fast-tracking a lot more difficult. Like I had decided in grade nine that I was going to do it, because- Interviewer: The whole double-cohort thing? Speaker: Yeah, I had heard about the double-cohort, so I was-like, "You-know what? It would just be easier." And I knew I could do it so it wasn't that big a deal. But um, like I didn't have time to- 'cause they- in later years, you had to take- they- they gave more prerequisites ...