When Dave Cook was a kid growing up on the Sixth Line in Malton, attending Elmbank Public School and living on what is now part of Pearson International Airport, he and his friends loved to visit a nearby farm to sneak in and build hay forts in the barn.
The sheep farm was located behind a store on Sixth Line owned and operated by Jack Wales.
One day when he and his playmates were working on another hay-room masterpiece, they "got a little sassy" with the "old man" who owned the place.
A short chase ensued, as the crime blotter might say.
Cook and his mates outran the old man and thought nothing much about it. Even when his Dad explained to the young lad that he had been in a race with one Alan Byron Morris, better known as Teddy Morris in his playing days when he won three Grey Cups as the star running back with the Argos, the significance didn't really register on Cook.
Morris and his backfield mate Tommy Burns made the end run a weapon to be feared in the late 1930s. When the storied Morris career ended, Toronto Star sports writer Red Burnett called Morris, "one of the greatest little men in the history of Canadian football."
The story of Teddy Morris' amazing career in the CFL and his vain holdout against American imports ("Ladies could play better than Americans," the Mississauga and CFL Hall-of-Famer was once famously quoted as saying) is just one of the historical vignettes that Cook highlights in his third volume of local history, called Fading History, Vol. 1.
Many of the stories, such as Morris', the history of the Avro Arrow, Orenda Engines, the building of the Lancaster and the storied past of the Toronto Golf Club will be familiar to those with a passing interest in Mississauga's past. But several others shine the light of recognition on long-forgotten dusty corners.
The Applewood Acres resident — a former radio broadcaster, Mississauga News reporter and Ward 7 City councillor who accidentally found a new career writing about local history, — starts in his own boyhood backyard to spin his yarns.
Malton , not far from Cook's boyhood home, was once the home of the British Commonwealth Air Training Base, where about half the airmen who participated in World War II were trained.
Later, part of the base would be transformed to become the site of the ground-breaking Workmen's Compensation Board Hospital, a far-ahead-of-its-time facility where those injured on the job would be rehabilitated and send back to work. Cook remembers selling newspapers in the lobby of the hospital as a kid.
There are also intriguing sidelights on the flying saucer secretly built at Avro in the early 1950s and now located at the US Army Transportation Museum in Fort Eustis, Va.; on the long-forgotten Aug. 23, 1949 crash of naval pilots practising for the CNE show near the Compensation Board Hospital (broadcaster Patrick Watson's brother Clifford was one of the pilot victims); and the amazing story of Bobby Cunningham Sr., the former Mississaugua Golf and Country Club and St. George's pro whose outstanding career deserves to be a lot more celebrated.
My personal favourite among the stories though, focusses on the Dixie Music Fair, which brought musicals and other summer entertainment to the big tent near the site of what is now the Dixie Value Mall in the late 1950s. Cook has unearthed playbills of all of the shows attended by up to 2,000 people, which include many "stars" whose names you know longer recognize.
Among the names you will know are Eve Arden, Gretchen Wyler, Hans Conried, Roddy McDowall, Red Buttons, Dorothy Collins and James Garner.
It was Stage West outdoors before there was any Stage West indoors.
Believe it or not, according to the playbill, acerbic American comedian Lenny Bruce made his Canadian premier at the Dixie Music Fair. Opening for him, by the way, was the Don Thompson all-star jazz group, the same multi-instrumental genius who is still one of the country's best.
As Mississaugans, we owe a debt of gratitude to the Dave Cooks and Kathleen Hicks' who take the time to write down the memories the rest of us all chat and wonder about.
Cook reserves a special note of thanks for another former City councillor, Terry Butt, who once again has pitched in financially to make Fading History something other than a shadow of an idea.
Cook will be selling the book for $20 and signing copies Sat. May 3 at 7 p.m. at St. John's Dixie Anglican Church at Cawthra Rd. and Dundas St. E.