It is amazing what one comes up with while rummaging around memory’s dust box. I have been following the stories about Hamilton possibly getting a franchise in the National Hockey League again, when I was suddenly transported back to a time of cold winter evenings, hot roasted peanuts for five cents a bag, Friday night hockey, and young love. Back before the war, that’s the Second War, smarty pants.

My Dad worked at the long-dead Hamilton Herald newspaper and he reported on the games played by the Hamilton Tigers in the Ontario Hockey Association. This was Senior A hockey, just a step down from the NHL, so the hockey was very good, but that wasn’t the big attraction for me. The evening started with Dad and me striking out from our home in the west end and after a transfer, we boarded the Barton Street streetcar and headed for the site of the game, a chilly old barn called the Barton Street Arena.

It wasn’t a great distance from the house, but the trip was delayed somewhat by a practice much favored by young men of that time. Whenever the streetcar stopped to take on passengers, young fellows standing on the sidewalk would yank down the pole connecting the vehicle to the power lines overhead, thus rendering the streetcar incapable of further progress. The conductor would climb out to re-attach the pole, and in his absence the bunch of layabouts would swarm aboard the untended machine and settle in for a free ride to the hockey match.

Miscreants and all we eventually arrived at our destination and that’s when my highlight of the evening occurred, because standing by the front door was a small army of street vendors, each of them with a push cart loaded with hot roasted peanuts in the shell. They cost five cents a bag and they were worth every penny.

The bags warmed your hands as you made your way to your seat in the ice-cold arena, and once the game began and Dad gave the OK, you began the blissful experience of nestling in beside him and eating the peanuts after cracking their shells.

I recall one night at the old arena when Dad got his own shell cracked during a game, when the home side was locked in battle with the hated Port Colborne Sailors. Suddenly a puck whizzed off the ice and smacked poor old Pop just above his right eye. Blood poured, people shouted and bags of peanuts, many with the contents still in them, were dropped on the floor and trampled underfoot. Eventually order was restored, my father was patched up and play resumed once I returned the puck to the referee. I wanted to keep it as a souvenir but the referee threatened to hit the Tigers with a delay of game penalty so I handed it over.

A few years later I discovered that the Barton Street Arena allowed public skating every Saturday afternoon for boys and girls 14 years and younger. This discovery came as a thunderbolt to me because in the mores of the time it meant I could actually encircle my arm around the waist of an actual person of the opposite sex without some authority figure, usually my older sister, telling my mother, who would tell my father as soon as her agonized gasps had ceased and she was able to smooth her apron. Dad would then usher me into the basement and warn me that if I continued such behavior with members of the opposite sex, I would go blind, and when he ended his stern exhortations, we all gathered in the dining room and yodeled for half an hour.

Ignoring my father’s words, the next Saturday I was spinning around the ice arm in arm with the beauteous Esther O’Connor to the tune of I’ll be With You in Apple Blossom Time, which was the only record possessed by arena management. Round and round we went with the music playing and nervously murmured suggestions of going for a cup of hot chocolate later being accepted, when my skate hit a rut and down I went, dragging Esther along with me. To her dismay she discovered she had torn a hole in the knee of her brand new and very first pair of silk stockings and to my dismay she announced she never wanted to see me again.