Family Life — Music Vs. Kids
The Legend of Orm Part 2
We are the children of Frances and Ormiston Heffernan. In the order in which we were born, we are Patrick 1952, Michael 1953, Mary 1960, and Jane 1962.
I could easily write a hundred pages about my remarkable family. If I’m alive and kicking for a few more years, I might just do that.
Me, Dad, and Pat — Christmas Dinner 1959 — Mum is taking the picture
A Language All His Own
We recently compiled a long list of Dad’s original sayings. I gave two examples in the last post. Here are a few more:
When confronted with a new situation or surprised by a new fact, he would say, “Well, I’ll be a dirty glass of circus lemonade!”
When someone showed up that he hadn’t seen in a while, he’d say, “You never know what’s going to crawl out of the woodwork.”
Here’s one that everyone except me thought was hilarious. Dad would lightly kick me in the butt and, with a German accent, say, “Just in case!”
These next ones were baffling: “Mox-nix-else in de grossera” and “Dona veda loco mo” We had no idea what either of them meant. Still don’t.
The Story Resumes
The Merv Hymes band was holding its own, but it worked only a few days a week. With fourteen people and the venue dividing up the take, which was primarily just the dance hall’s cover charge, it was hardly lucrative—in other words, it didn’t pay the rent or feed the cat.
So, during the week, Dad worked as a clerk at Burns Foods in Kitchener, making just enough money to pay the taxes and utilities on the house his Mother had left him. Between that and the band, he overextended himself and, in 1946, came down with what he later described as “dissipation,” a euphemism for “partied the f**k out.”
My Mother, Frances Kelly, was a nurse at St. Mary’s Hospital, where he was admitted. She was one of several nurses working the floor he was on. Towards the end of the week, as he was recuperating, he casually mentioned that a home-cooked meal would be nice. She volunteered, and the rhythms of life roll on.
They married in 1949. She became pregnant with Pat in late 1951 and then again with me in the early spring of 1953. Dad continued playing in the band, hoping that his career would take off someday.
From Shakespeare To Burlesque
With a growing family and money getting tighter, Burn’s Foods offered him a promotion to sales executive in 1955. It should have seemed like a godsend, but there was a catch. He had to transfer to Montreal.
That meant leaving behind the band he loved. The organization he had taken from a meeting of four wanna-bes in a downtown Kitchener diner to a successful fourteen-piece jazz-dance band, a dream he worked his ass off to become a reality, would have to go on without him….
It must have been heart-breaking, but he was sensible enough to understand the odds against a full-time musician supporting a family. He later unabashedly admitted that he shed tears as he sat alone listening to his band’s recordings.
It couldn’t have been easy for my Mother, either. She came from a large, closely knit Irish Catholic family. Her parents and most of her seven siblings lived in Stratford, Ontario, which, in those days, was a twelve-hour drive from Montreal.
Dad bought a house in Pointe-Claire, about fifteen kilometers from Montreal. The town was French Canadian, but the new subdivision built on its north side, where we lived, was populated almost entirely by English-speaking people from Ontario.
This had to have greatly eased the transition for my parents. To his credit, though, Dad, with much enthusiasm, immersed himself in Quebec culture. He learned enough of the language to get by and started playing in a band with a French Canadian trumpet player named Herb Picard. In his off time, Dad was also a professional clown, still the showman, helping launch shopping centers and car dealerships.
Back To Ontario — Not Everyone Was Pleased
In the fall of 1959, my Mother pregnant with Mary, Dad was transfered to Toronto. He would take the train back to Pointe-Claire every weekend until he found a house for us just west of Toronto in an idyllic but remote subdivision along side the Credit River Valley. In mid-February 1960, after a horrendous twenty-hour journey in which a blizzard forced us to stop at a motel until it abated, two adults, a couple of kids, and one pissed-off cat arrived in Erindale Woodlands, our new home. `