High School in Toronto, 1930s, by Grandguy

From MemoryArchive

Who: Grandguy
What: High School 
When: 1930s
Where: Toronto Ont Can

According to those who should know, whatever happens to us, whatever we experience, our memory of it starts to change immediately, in small microscopic ways early on, but as the years go by the memories are changed dramatically, great chunks removed, substitutions made so that in many cases the memory we hold bears little relation to the actual event. I recently read, in a book about WW2, that the view of what really was going on changes after the event because we know the outcome.

A small child is asked what was the best part of school, and he replied that it was recess! Well, the best part of High School for me was lunch. The school I attended was in Toronto and was located on Greenwood Avenue, just north of "The Danforth". The Danforth is miles long and is lined on both sides with stores, and at lunch we would head down to a particular bakery, four of us, and by pooling ten cents each we were able to buy half of a warm-out-of-the-oven meat pastie (they were ten cents each), four cream buns (at two for a nickel), and that left ten cents for a package of ten cigarettes, well, it was something like that, I seem to remember that we only bought a five cent package of cigarettes, which meant one cigarette apiece and a squabble over the fifth one! A couple of doors from the bakery was a used magazine store. Stacks and stacks of used magazines, a nickel apiece and you could trade them in at two for one, and the proprietor made his money by selling the more recent trade-ins, which were displayed in the window, for eight cents, I believe. These are not the magazines that we have now, these were the birthing vehicle for many of the great authors of adventure and Science Fiction. "Amazing Stories", "Astounding Stories", "G8 And His Battle Aces", the latter were stories of fliers in WW1.