Too Close to the Falls

too close to the falls

Copyright ©
ECW PRESS
, 1999

Published by
ECW PRESS
2120 Queen Street East, Suite 200, Toronto, Ontario,
M4E 1E2

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the prior written permission of
ECW PRESS
.

CANADIAN CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Gildiner, Catherine Ann
Too close to the falls

ISBN 1-55022-396-8

1. Gildiner, Catherine Ann — Childhood and youth. 2. Lewiston (N.Y.) — Social conditions. 3. Women psychologists — Ontario — Toronto — Biography. I. Title

BF109.G54A3 1999    150'.92    c99–931986–85

Cover and text design by Tania Craan
Edited for the press by Michael Holmes
Layout by Mary Bowness

Photo credits:
Cover
: National Gallery of Canada; cover author photo: Karen Levy;
page 21
: Museum of Radio and Television;
page 41
: Niagara Falls Public Library;
page 79
:
Niagara Falls: A Pictorial Journey
, photo by Margaret Dunn, Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society;
page 155
:
Marilyn Monroe and the Making of Niagara
, photo by Dr. Thomas H. Morton, Courtesy of The Maid of the Mist Steamboat Company;
page 221
: Loren Greene;
page 235
: Louis Armstrong House & Archives, Queens College, New York;
page 301
:
Niagara Falls: A Pictorial Journey
, Margaret Dunn.

Third edition. Ninth printing.

The publication of
Too Close to the Falls
has been generously supported by The Canada Council, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program.
Canada

CATHERINE GILDINER

To Helen McLean

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in
.

— Graham Greene,
The Power and the Glory

Over half a century ago I grew up in Lewiston, a small town in western New York, a few miles north of Niagara Falls on the Canadian border. As the Falls can be seen from the Canadian and American sides from different perspectives, so can Lewiston. It is a sleepy town, protected from the rest of the world geographically,
nestled at the bottom of the steep shale Niagara Escarpment on one side and the Niagara River on the other. The river's appearance, however, is deceptive. While it seems calm, rarely making waves, it has deadly whirlpools swirling on its surface which can suck anything into their vortices in seconds.

My father, a pharmacist, owned a drugstore in the nearby honeymoon capital of Niagara Falls. My mother, a math teacher by training rather than inclination, was an active participant in the historical society. Lewiston actually had a few historical claims to fame, which my mother eagerly hyped. The word
cocktail
was invented there, Charles Dickens stayed overnight at the Frontier House, the local inn, and Lafayette gave a speech from a balcony on the main street. Our home, which had thirteen trees in the yard that were planted when there were thirteen states, was used to billet soldiers in the War of 1812. It was called into action by history yet again for the Underground Railroad to smuggle slaves across the Niagara River to freedom in Canada.

My parents longed for a child for many years; however, when they were not blessed, they gracefully settled into an orderly life of community service. Then I unexpectedly arrived, the only child of suddenly bewildered older, conservative, devoutly Catholic parents.

I seem to have been “born eccentric” — a phrase my mother uttered frequently as a way of absolving herself of responsibility. By today's standards I would have been labelled with attention deficit disorder, a hyperactive child born with some adrenal problem that made her more prone to rough-and-tumble play than was normal for a girl. Fortunately I was born fifty years ago and simply called “busy” and “bossy,” the possessor of an Irish temper.

I was at the hub of the town because I worked in my father's drugstore from the age of four. This was not exploitive child labour but rather what the town pediatrician prescribed. When my mother explained to him that I had gone over the top of the playground swings making a 360-degree loop and had been knocked unconscious twice, had to be removed from a cherry tree the previous summer by the fire department, done Ed Sullivan imitations for money at Helms's Dry Goods Store, all before I'd hit kindergarten, Dr. Laughton dutifully wrote down all this information, laid down his clipboard with certainty, and said that I had worms and needed Fletcher's Castoria. His fallback position (in case when I was dewormed no hyperactive worms crept from any orifice) was for me to burn off my energy by working at manual labour in my father's store. He explained that we all had metronomes inside our bodies and mine was simply ticking faster than most; I had to do more work than others to burn it off.

Being in the full-time workforce at four gave me a unique perspective on life, and I was exposed to situations I later realized were unusual for a child. For over ten years I never once had a meal at home, and that included Christmas. I worked and went to restaurants and delivered everything from band-aids to morphine in the Niagara Frontier. I had to tell people whether makeup looked good or bad, point out what cough medicines had sedatives, count and bottle pills. I also had to sound as though I knew what I was talking about in order to pull it off. I was surrounded by adults, and my peer group became my co-workers at the store.

My father worked behind a counter which had a glass separating it from the rest of the store. He and the other pharmacists
wore starched white shirts which buttoned on the side with “McCLURE'S DRUGS” monogrammed in red above the pocket. The rest of us wore plastic ink guards in our breast pockets which had printed in script letters “McClure's has free delivery.” (The word
delivery
had wheels and a forward slant.) I worked there full-time when I was four and five and I suspected that when I went to school the next year I would work a split shift from 6:00 to 9:00 a.m. and then again after school until closing time at 10:00 p.m. Of course I would always work full-time on Saturday and Sunday when my mother did her important work with the historical board. I restocked the candy and makeup counters, loaded the newspaper racks, and replenished the supplies of magazines and comics. I read the comics aloud in different voices, jumped out of the pay-phone booth as Superman and acted out Brenda Starr “in her ruthless search for truth,” and every morning at 6:00 a.m. I equipped the outdoor newsstand of blue wood with its tiered layers with the
Niagara Falls Gazette
.

My parents were removed from the hurly-burly of my everyday existence. My father was my employer, and I called him “boss,” which is what everyone else called him. My mother provided no rules nor did she ever make a meal, nor did I have brothers or sisters to offer me any normal childlike role models. While other four-year-olds spent their time behind fences at home with their moms and dads, stuck in their own backyards making pretend cakes in hot metal sandboxes or going to stagnant events like girls' birthday parties where you sat motionless as the birthday girl opened
her
presents and then you waited in line to stick a pin into a wall while blindfolded, hoping it would hit the rear end of a jackass, I was out doing really exciting work. I spent my
time in the workforce delivering prescriptions with Roy, my co-worker.

One thing about a drugstore: it's a great leveller. Everyone from the rich to the poor needs prescriptions and it was my job to deliver them. Roy, the driver, and I, the assistant who read the road maps and prescription labels, were dogged as we plowed through snowstorms and ice jams to make our deliveries. The job took us into mansions on the Niagara Escarpment, to the home of Dupont, who invented nylon, to deliver hypodermic needles to a new doctor on the block, Dr. Jonas Salk, an upstart who thought he had a cure for polio, to Marilyn Monroe on the set of
Niagara
, to the poor Indians on the Tuscarora reservation, and to Warty, who lived in a refrigerator box in the town dump. The people we delivered to felt like my “family,” and my soulmate in this experience was Roy.

He was different from my father, the other pharmacists, and Irene, the salmon-frocked cosmetician. He was always in a good mood and laughed at all the things I found funny and never told me to “calm down.” He made chestnuts into jewels, bottle tops into art, music into part of our joy together, and he always saw the comedy in tragedy.

He never put off a good time, yet he always got his work done. To me that was amazing, a stunning high-wire act done without a net. He effortlessly jumped into the skin of whomever he was addressing. He made each life we entered, no matter where it was pinned on the social hierarchy, seem not only plausible, but inevitable, even enviable.

Every town has its elaborate social hierarchy and cast of characters. Maybe all children are fascinated by the idiosyncratic,
those who have difficulty walking the tightrope of acceptable behaviour in a small town where the social stratification is so explicit and the rules feel so inviolable. Those who opt out of the social order are as terrifying as they are enviable. Maybe I identified with these people because I was trying, even at four, to work out how and why
I
was different. Whatever the reasons, my interest in whatever it took to be different, or to be the same, began early and has persisted. They say architects always played with Lego. Well, I'm a psychologist who was always interested in what the social psychologists refer to as “individual differences,” or the statisticians refer to as “the extremes of the bell curve,” or what we colloquially refer to as “the edge.”