Did Coleridge Avenue SHRINK?

When Peter O'Donnell and I talked the other day, we both commented on our recent trips down Coleridge Avenue for nostalgia purposes. My youngest son, Ryan, had never seen the place where I had grown up, so we decided to take a drive down the street and, like Peter, I was shocked at how much smaller the street looked. When we were kids, Coleridge was huge! There were wide open spaces on the road for playing hockey, buzz off, riding our bikes and playing "Giant Step". Now, Coleridge is completely full of cars and there is little, if any, space to play. Of course, in our day it really wasn't a hazard to play out on the street because there were few cars that travelled down our street, let alone park there.

We had so much fun on the street! All the kids loved to play together and I can never really remember any arguments or worse, fights. Sure, sometimes we changed our "best friends" but we never let go of our old friends. There were very few people who moved away from Coleridge too. It seemed a curosity when someone actually moved into a house. I remember when Julie Silver moved in to 109 Coleridge. She was so shy that first day when she started school and thankfully, she was in my class. Not knowing she was my neighbour, I introduced myself to her and we walked home together. After that, we were simply inseparable.

I remember always being the first kid to get out of the house in the morning. Everyone else was allowed to sleep in during the summer and the weekends but my mother made me get up at 10:20am every morning, whether I needed it or not. What a strange time - not 10:00 or 10:30 - it was 10:20! I would sit on the curb of the street until the other kids started drifting out closer to noon.

I remember too, going to Linda and Yvonne Archibald's house in the mornings. Their beautiful mom, Margo (or Aunt Margo as I called her) would make them coffee and toast. I can still remember the smell of that coffee! I also remember Aunt Margo teaching us some French. She had come to Canada from Belgium just after World War 2 where she met and married George Archibald. Margo Archibald had been a beauty queen in her native Belgium and I could totally understand why because she was a stunning beauty.

It was a horrible shock when Margot Archibald was misdiagnosed by our family doctor, Dr. Bill Henderson, who told her she was pregnant. In fact, she had a tumor and died of cancer some time later. She was so young to die such a horrific death. Linda and Yvonne were very young too, just 17 and 11 respectively. Not long after Margo's death, George died too, leaving the girls without any parents at all. Yvonne went to live with relatives and Linda tried to make it on her own as a newlywed and with a baby to take care of. She did her best but couldn't manage to hold on to the house.

Dr. Bill Henderson was the same doctor who prescribed an overdose of medication to little Christine Archibald which killed her. We had all been led to believe Chrissy had choked to death during the night but I could never believe it for some reason. A couple of years ago, I contacted the Aunt of the girls and she was the one who told me that Chrissy was basically murdered with an overdose.

This is the same family doctor that I had as a child too. I can't believe it when I think back to when I was the same age as Chrissy when she died, just 5 years old, because Dr. Henderson actually removed my tonsils at my home on the kitchen table! I think now that he must have had a few screws loose to do what he did to Chrissy and my Aunt Margo, then to operate on me in the far from sterile surroundings of my kitchen! He never would have been allowed to practice medicine in this day and age.

Coleridge - how big it seemed back then and oh, how it has shrunk in size now. At least the memories of Coleridge remain large in my mind.