Author: Jim Hagarty

By Jim Hagarty

You can go ahead and ban the use of cellphones by the drivers of motor vehicles if you like. You’ll get no argument from me.

However, when it comes to this issue, it may be that there are also other driver distractions that need to be tackled.

I’ll admit I’ve spoken on my “cell” while speeding along down the highway, but I’ve never once, when doing so, had a sudden urge to hurl myself out the driver’s door into the path of other vehicles. And yet, that’s what I almost did the day my baseball cap started to move on its own on top of my head while I was guiding my old bucket of bolts in and out of downtown traffic. This was very unnerving because when I first became aware of this unexpected super-cranial activity taking place under my cap, I didn’t know if it was a hamster, a hummingbird or a hermit crab that was causing all this commotion. It’s hard to drive carefully when the member of some other species is rollerskating across the patch of skin holding in your frontal lobe. A frantic struggle ensued as cap was hoisted and search begun for the head-dancing hitchhiker. Before long, an earwig showed up, but not before my car did a few weird tricks on the road and scared the life and other things out of a couple of pedestrians.

The one irony is that, hair-challenged as I am, I had always vowed never to sport a wig on my head, not knowing that one day a wig of the ear variety would take up temporary residence up there. (NEWS BULLETIN: The Worst Pun Of The Year Award Committee has named a winner.)

And while the bylaw restricting the presence of tapdancing earwigs on drivers is being prepared, perhaps we need to go all the way and ban the bumblebee and the mosquito from the inside of cars and trucks too.

Back in my cigarette smoking days, a lit one, from time to time, would tumble from my lips and fall between my legs, disappearing under my backside as I was driving down the road. This too used to result in my doing a fairly agitated version of the Highland fling while trying to keep my rear end from being scorched. Parked in a driveway, this might not have seemed so serious; roaring down the road was always a poor time to pick to do a modern-day re-staging of the cow jumping over the moon. Or the moon jumping over the … (ah, forget it!).

The authorities are getting some statistics together, now, on the numbers of accidents being caused by drivers on cellphones. But my guess is we have no idea how many are brought about by people with critters in their caps, butts under their bums (huh?) or overturned bags of french fries at their feet.

A hermetically sealed driver’s cabin or special suit patterned after an astronaut’s gear are our only rational solutions to this considerable problem.

No Phone! No Food! No Fun!

Let that be our new safety motto.

And may I add a fourth:

No Fanny Furnaces!

And a fifth:

No Furtive Follicle Freeloaders!

By Jim Hagarty

A man plays many roles in his life.

I once roamed the halls of businesses and institutions as a man of some worth. I hired people. I fired people. I stood before rooms full of people and delivered lectures.

But that is all behind me now.

These days, as best I can figure, my position in the scheme of things is Doorman to the Cats. I open doors they cannot open, close doors behind them. Then reopen the doors I just closed once they realize I just closed the doors behind them.

It doesn’t pay much. I don’t get any applause. No one has handed me an award lately.

But somebody’s gotta open those goddamned doors. Seems like that someone is me.

I am very good at it. Except for those rare occasions when the tail is not yet quite through the doorway before I close the door. Those occurrence are always merely accidental, you understand.

We have two cats. They are brothers. Mario and Luigi. Mario can let himself out the back door screen door, leading to calls from the human inhabitants, when we hear the door slam behind him, “Mario has left the building.” Luigi can’t let himself out that door. But he can somehow let himself in, an art Mario has yet to master.

As long as we have them, I guess, there will always be work for The Doorman.

By Jim Hagarty

At the end of an average day
A man thinks, as he settles in bed,
“What did I accomplish today?
“What things could I have done instead?”

Some days, he achieved quite a bit
And other days, not very much.
Some days he did little but sit.
And some days he had Midas’ Touch.

But whether he did much or not
Reflection at bedtime will show
He probably took his best shot
And needs to let all the rest go.

Cause whether or not he achieved
Anything either great or too small
At bedtime, he is finally relieved,
To remember that he tried at all.

Each day has a rhythm, it seems,
That is set by some otherworld fate.
Today we were denied our dreams,
Tomorrow we’ll do something great.

By Jim Hagarty

A hat trick in hockey occurs when a player scores three goals in one game.

For the feat to qualify as a true hat trick, those three goals need to be back to back to back, with no goals scored by the players’ teammates in between. True hat tricks are so hard to come by, modern hockey recognizes three goals in a game, in whatever order and uninterrupted or not, as the real deal.

The term hat trick started in hockey’s early days when a team owner started presenting a hat to any player who could score those elusive three goals.

Gordie Howe had a few hat tricks in his day. But he was an all-round, aggressive player, and eventually, he inspired what became known at the “Gordie Howe Hat Trick.”

A Gordie Howe Hat Trick occurred when a player got a goal, an assist and a penalty for fighting.

When you went into a corner to get the puck and looked up to see Gordie Howe about to join you, you started saying your prayers. He became known for being super efficient with his elbows.

Gordie Howe left it all on the ice, every game. Sometimes, the result was a player rolling on his back, clutching a broken nose.

Yet somehow, he was never known as a goon. Or particularly dirty.

Just very, very tough. He never needed to look around him for a team enforcer to finish off his fights for him.

By Jim Hagarty

A friend of mine was a longtime committed member of our local Rotary Club.

Once a year, the club hosted a “sportsman’s” dinner to honour local athletes. A noted national athlete and often more than one were brought in each year to address the lavish banquet. It often fell to my friend to drive to Toronto to pick up the star athlete at the airport. He met many interesting people this way.

One year, one of the stars he picked up was Gordie Howe. Like me, my friend had always idolized the hockey star, a man who many still believe was the greatest hockey player ever. But my friend had another friend who was probably even more of a Howe fan than either one of us. She worshipped the ice he skated on.

On their way back to Stratford from the airport, my friend asked Mr. Hockey if he would mind playing a prank on his friend, the woman who idolized him. Howe immediately agreed.

My friend drove to the woman’s house and he and Gordie Howe walked up to her front door. Kevin tried the doorknob; it was unlocked. So he and Howe walked in and stood in the entranceway. (I realize, as I write this now, how badly this could have gone.)

“Hey, would you like to meet Gordie Howe?” Kevin yelled to the seemingly empty house. “I have him right here.”

From upstairs, the woman yelled down with a bunch of derisive comments directed in fun at Kevin. He called back that Howe was, in fact, standing in her house at that moment.

Finally, to end the farce and get rid of Kevin, the woman came bounding down her steps only to find her hero standing at the bottom of them.

I forget the outcome of the encounter but the woman had just been given a family story for her grandkids and beyond.

By Jim Hagarty
Renowned Terrible Limericker

I once owned an old beat up car
That went fast, but not very far.
It was ugly as sin
For the shape it was in
But nicer than some new cars are.

By Jim Hagarty

Gordie Howe’s aging parents, farmers from Floral, Saskatchewan, were proud of their famous son’s amazing successes.

But through all the years of his ascent from farm boy, to teenage star in Cambridge, Ontario, to NHL superstar with the Detroit Red Wings, they had never seen their son play a professional game of hockey. In those days, there were no NHL hockey teams in Western Canada, Gordie was not making a lot of money, though he was a star, and in that day and age, to get on a plane and fly somewhere to a hockey game was not a simple thing.

To mark a milestone, the Detroit Red Wings decided to honour Gordie Howe before a game one night in Detroit. He skated out onto the ice to wild applause. At centre ice was a big lump of a package, all wrapped up with ribbons, bows and paper. Gordie skated towards the object, not knowing what it was.

Suddenly, the passenger doors of the brand new car the Red Wings had bought their star opened up and out stepped his Mom and Dad.

Gordie Howe was a classy human being.

He inspired others to be classy too.

By Jim Hagarty

A boy needs an idol growing up.

Mine was Gordie Howe.

My best friend and I were dedicated Detroit Red Wings fans and could find, in Howe, no better hero. Even though we grew up on farms in Ontario, and should have cheered for the Toronto Maple Leafs, my friend had a cousin who played for the Red Wings so we had no choice to cheer for the red and white and by extension, to despise the blue and white.

In the day and age of only six NHL teams, our chances of ever seeing Gordie Howe live and up close were slim to none. We never got to go to any games.

Though hockey always dominated our interests, as we grew up, other things came along. The Beatles, girls, cars, girls and girls. Also, girls.

Our hometown was a small place, five miles away, called Mitchell. Over the years, through connections, the town’s vibrant hockey system (which gave the world its first superstar, Howie Morenz), developed a relationship with the minor hockey system in Detroit. One year, Mitchell players travelled to the Motor City for a tournament. The next year, the Detroit kids came to our town.

In 1968, when my friend and I were 17, the local newspaper carried a story which said several Detroit teams would be coming to Mitchell that winter. Of special interest was the fact that Gordie Howe’s sons, Mark and Marty, would be playing on one of those teams. But the story made the point of saying that Gordie would not be able to see his sons play that day.

We debated going to the game, but ended up there anyway. The stands in the small arena were filled, so we stood by the boards near the entrance and watched with noses pressed against the glass. There were Mark and Marty, scooting around the ice. Pretty cool.

When we approached the boards, we had to split up. There was another fan standing between us. We didn’t pay much mind to that. Eventually, that person walked away, but the space between us remained and a man soon filled it.

It took a few minutes for it to dawn on us, but the crowd seemed to be looking our way and we didn’t know why. Finally, we looked up to discover that Gordie Howe was standing between us, watching his sons.

We whipped out our high school student cards. He signed them. We were too star struck to talk to him. Soon, someone escorted him to a heated viewing area above the ice. We followed him there, sat a couple of rows back.

We continued following him throughout the rest of his amazing career and for all the days after.

Yes, he was a hockey star, but more than that, he was the kind of man we wanted to be.

My friend kept up his intense passion for Howe longer than I did. He attended a game and saw him play. And over the years, both of us followed every newspaper story, every magazine photospread, every TV show that highlighted our hero.

A few years ago, Gordie Howe was in the Toronto area at a promotional event. The company had advertised, “Come out and meet Mr. Hockey.” My friend, now in his 60s, went to the event and was told where to go in the building to meet our hero. He found the room. Gordie was standing in there alone.

My friend and Gordie Howe chatted for 15 minutes. Howe was impressed at how much my friend knew about him.

He only knew the half of it.

I had practised writing his autograph for hours. I could have been passing bad cheques in his name this last 50 years. We had hockey cards and hockey coins that bore his image. We could recite all his hockey statistics by heart. We knew his biography better than our own.

And we knew the song by heart that was recorded and played on the radio: “Gordie Howe is the Greatest of them All.”

He was the greatest of them all.

A very good hockey player too.

By Jim Hagarty
Here is another song from When the Day is Over, a CD by my friend and singer-songwriter Caroline Danowski Burchill. It’s Gonna Take Time was the first song Caroline ever wrote over her career as a recording artist and frequent performer. Her CD is available for purchase in the Corner Store.

It’s Gonna Take Time by Caroline Danowski Burchill