the winter the newscasts give the number of seconds in which exposed flesh will freeze. Movies and stories about climbing Everest present the windy, freezing “death zone” near the top as a serious problem, but this is what Winnipeggers deal with for weeks on end every year. We Winnipeggers are tough. We walk in the freezing cold because we have what it takes to survive in Winnipeg, we prepare and we wear the proper clothing. We embrace the cold because that’s the type of people we are.
Not everybody is strong enough to handle Winnipeg. Its only hill is artificial, a park created on top of an old garbage dump that is a great place to toboggan in the winter. Winnipeg has amazing summers, but they last for only a few very short months. The freeze-thaw cycle is so intense that the roads are continually destroyed by potholes that form when the ground warms again in spring. Winnipeg’s mosquitos are so bad that even in these enlightened times most people are in favor of aggressive chemical fogging, if only to allow us to kid ourselves into believing that the problem isn’t as bad as it really is. And as for things to do in The Peg, a prominent professional football player once said that the city was a nice place to live but that he needed to be traded away because he could only take his kids to the zoo so many times after he’d run out of things to do with them.
But Winnipeg was a fantastic place to be a kid. With its long winters and outdoor natural ice to play on, it was an especially amazing place to be a young hockey player. Like all who grew up there, I am a proud Winnipegger, and we share a secret world with knowing references to the special ties that 7-11s, Slurpees, The Guess Who, BTO, socials, Neil Young, “going to the lake,” Sals, orbit, K-tel, the BDI, bumper shining, garbage mitts, and Sylvia Kuzyk all have to our city. A fatwa on any non-Pegger who may ever speak ill of my hometown.
I see a lot of myself in Winnipeg. It’s the place where I grew up, where I first went to school, where I learned who I was, where I became a young boy with big dreams, where I learned to laugh and play. It’s the place I have in my mind when I look back on my life, the place where, as Garrison Keillor says, everybody was good-looking and above-average. And I have so many good memories of Winnipeg, of my house, my school, my friends, my little corner of the world where nothing went wrong, where all of us kids rode our bikes to the park around the corner, where we went down by Sturgeon Creek back before it was dammed and played in the mud, where we played in the snow, where we set up our pick-up baseball games and the older kids taught us younger ones how to properly taunt the batter. It is that place we all have in our memories when life was perfect and we were kings, that we know we were a part of yet never really existed.
I grew up in Winnipeg and I love it so much, but I don’t live there anymore. I love it from afar now because what happened there makes it very difficult for me to return. I want to go home. I make plans time and again to go back. But I can’t just click my heels together and make it all better because the storm, well, when it blew, it blew hard, and Dorothy sure wasn’t in Kansas anymore.
MY PARENTS BOTH grew up in Saskatchewan. My mom, Patricia, came from a farm family that eventually acquired some property outside of the town of Pense. My dad, Michael, was from a family of athletes who, after leaving Ireland and landing in Montreal, made their way west to Regina, leaving behind a good portion of the clan in the jails of what is now known as Thunder Bay. After marrying in Regina, my parents set out for the relatively bright lights and big city of Winnipeg just in time to have me.
Eventually we became a normal suburban family of five. I was the eldest of three children; my sister, Dawn, was born a year after me; and my brother, Doug, was born a year after that. We lived in a modest bungalow built the year I was born in a modest baby-boomer subdivision where the streets all had alliterative names: Amarynth, Alcott, Antoine, Alguire. It was decidedly upper-lower-middle class, but back then nobody really knew how the rich lived because, unlike today, we had only a small television window into their world, and we didn’t know anybody rich, so we never thought we were doing without. My parents were entirely average, and there was absolutely nothing that would have caused anybody to give them a second look. That was just fine by them and fine by us kids as well.
My dad dropped out of high school after Grade Eight and then immediately took a job loading and unloading trucks with the Regina branch of Northern Electric Distributing. Eventually he moved up the ranks and became a salesman of electrical supplies to contractors. He stayed with Northern Electric and its distribution subsidiary Nedco until he retired. Think about that. He dropped out of school, never went to high school, took a menial job, and stayed with the company virtually forever. The thing is, I’m pretty sure that he hated every minute of his job from the day he started until just before the end, when he was finally given the chance to manage other people. He excelled at that. All his working life he had been a square peg in a round hole until it was almost too late. He was a large man with a soft smile. People liked him. He was gentle and kind-hearted, and yet he understood how to get things done and was firm when necessary. Turns out he had a great touch with people and was an amazing manager, a leader, somebody people wanted to perform for, somebody who was both liked and respected and who people didn’t want to let down.
Despite having only a Grade Eight education, he was far smarter than many people I went to school with or later worked with. And that is something I have always carried with me. It’s always a fifty-fifty chance whether the people leading the meeting are any smarter than the people who will come in hours later to clean up the offices after them. I’ve seen this firsthand over and over again during my career. But I went to school and worked with many who seemed to view themselves as better than others. No one should ever presume they are smarter or know more than anybody else. No one.
My mom was a high school graduate and thus the educated one in the family. She went on to work as a lab technician, earning a certificate but never completing a university degree. She was naturally bright and had been very attractive in her day, though the title of Miss Pense, Saskatchewan, which she earned one year at the town’s summer fair, may not have been the most hotly contested pageant. Her sense of humor showed itself every once in a while, but for the most part she carried with her a darkness that suggested she had seen a bit too much of the world to ever be truly happy. She never seemed to be present in the moment but instead always had her eye on something that could or was about to go wrong. Picnics were always on the verge of being infested by bugs, candy was just about to be choked on, rain was just about ready to fall.
Our family struggled financially. Mom and Dad hid it very well, but I would sometimes take phone messages from collection agencies and would see bills that were long overdue. We were by no means destitute and always had the basics, but I know that it must have been tough for my parents. I remember having to get up from the old beaten-up piano I loved so much so that it could be taken away and sold for money we needed to get me a new pair of skates. And, when I finally became a lawyer and applied for a credit card, I was initially refused because Amex thought I was my father, who had numerous unpaid debts.
Sports had been a way of life for the Gilhooly family for several generations. My grandfather and great-uncles played professional football and hockey. My father grew up playing hockey in the Regina Pats organization, right beside future NHL stars like Bill Hicke and Red Berenson. One of my dad’s favorite possessions was a team picture from when he was an assistant captain. He has blood all down the front of his jersey and is smiling, just behind a young Berenson, whom he protected. In short, my dad followed in the Gilhooly tradition and loved my mom, hockey, and the Saskatchewan Roughriders, although not necessarily in that order.
So it was not surprising that I started skating just before my fourth birthday and was participating in local organized hockey by the time I was five. I started my hockey life as a very large forward. I was so big for my age that I stuck out in the crowd. At the local park I was once mistaken for being a somewhat slow pre-teen when in fact I was only five or six. I was a very good skater, given my early start, and that combination of size and ability was a recipe for a disaster in the early 1970s, when kids of all ages, shapes, and sizes were still body-checking each other. And that’s where the story really begins, when I became a goalie not by choice but as a result of an incident at an outdoor rink that showed both the good and the bad in my father.
We played most of our hockey at