SAM THE RECORD MAN'S SIGN

I HAVE A DREAM (HOME)

I have a great place for Ryerson and its president Sheldon Levy to shove Sam's sign.
No, I don't mean there, although it's tempting because the university is cheating on a deal.
Levy says he had many discussions with Sam about the sign and Sam never mentioned preserving it.
Bullroar! His family and friends know how much he loved that sign that shouted his name to Toronto like a carny in a brazen bellow.
I spoke with Sam by the hour for decades. On everything from Sunday Shopping and street people freezing in the lane behind the store to dumb aldermen who didn't know the streets.. He was proud of that sign. And Sam, a showman turned music icon, loved to flaunt the neon sizzle around his famous business that nurtured so many future stars whom he helped when they were unknown and penniless..
There is a connection between Sam Sniderman and Ryerson that is being missed. Everyone knows just how close he was to countless Ryerson students after he moved in 1961 to just a block away from St. James Square. Not only did he receive an honourary degree from Ryerson, his close friend Janet had been a dean at Ryerson.
So when they came to Canon Derwyn Shea's home on that lovely stretch above Grenadier Pond, and after he delivered a barrage of friendly insults about what I was doing wrong, the talk over dinner was full of Ryerson and the CNE.
Shea and I had been CNE presidents and Sam, who had been a member of the two boards at the Ex - the one that is the landlord and the one that runs the fair - disagreed with much of what was going on at the Ex. For starters, he thought there should be no admission and we could make our money off food and the Midway.
Sam, bless him, was never bashful about giving his opinion. "You know, Downing," he would say, "you guys just don't know how to run things." And we all would laugh,
So there is my justification for a new home for the two great LPs in 800 neon lights that spun in all their glory above the Sam names at his mecca for anyone who cared about records in the Greater Toronto Area. Mount it at the Ex. Certainly not as busy as Yonge St., the main street of T.O.,  and for that matter, the country, but when you start with the 1.4 million who attend Canada's largest fair, and add the people who go to the Winter Fair, Boat, Sportsmen's and various trade shows, you have a lot of  traffic through  Heritage Court, that huge lovely yellow room south of the Coliseum in the west end of the Direct Energy Centre.
The university bought Sam's building in 2008 after his business fell on evil times due to electronic change and the shifting pattern in stealing rather than buying music.
The idea was that the rowdy colouful sign/front would be kept and hung again on what the university built there. Ryerson says it spent $150,000 dismantling the signs but then everything fell into a limbo not lit by ideas or honouring a contract.
So I propose that the university's former chancellor, David Crombie, use all his expertise as a former mayor, lover of city history, friend of Sam's and lover of the Ex, to hammer out a deal between Ryerson and Exhibition Place where the university restores the sign and pays to have it mounted on the south wall of Heritage Court.
In fact, about a dozen years ago, we had a plan to mount there the neon sign from the Flyer, the famous demolished wooden CNE roller-coaster.. We even had a Flyer car that could have been part of the display. The letters are 84" high, 48" wide and 10" deep. So it wasn't as if it would have filled the wall, but Arlene Campbell, the official directly in charge of the Centre, didn't like the idea.
There is an interesting relationship between the two signs because Sniderman was key in saving the Flyer sign. After all, he cared deeply about Toronto's past and was willing to put his money where his mouth was, something that many, especially councillors, would never do.
If the Ex is ruled out as a home, there are plenty of empty walls at the Metro Convention Centre. I am sure the chairman of that board, Walter Oster, who displayed his love for the past in the wonderful marine items he accumulated in his waterfront seafood restaurants before it closed, would be a sympathetic audience.
Ryerson is talking about sinking plaques in the sidewalk at that corner to remember the store and the man. Levy says the Student Learning Centre being built there doesn't have a suitable facade to which the sign could be attached.. But then that's to be expected from the Ryerson of today that isn't that proud of its history back when Sam arrived  on its scene.
H.H. Kerr, the first principal (he preferred the Scottish title to president) had a dream of the Ryerson campus extending from Yonge to Jarvis. Having a building right on main streets was one of his expansion goals. Dr. Kerr would be so proud of what his baby was accomplishing in new facilities.
I remember him talking about it at length when I interviewed him by the day at his Rosedale apartment for the official history of Ryerson. The university commissioned it from me, accepted the manuscript and paid me, but then never published it because it was perceived as reminding the university community that Ryerson had started so humbly, it constantly was called just a trade school.
I am rewriting and updating the manuscript and just finished the chapter where Sam The Record Man arrived to crush the business at the A and A store just to the north that was the unofficial Ryerson book store.
Of course Sam was famous for his records even before he came to Yonge. The family had a store on a curve of College called Sniderman's Music Hall. Sixty years ago I heard about an LP from Stan Kenton and his Innovations in Modern Music and after school took a trolley coach and two streetcars from Weston to buy the record from Sam who was already ebullient in his trade.
This city is filled with people who remember their first trek to Sam with fondness, flipping through the bins of 78s and 45s and 33s where it was obvious you came for the music, not the decor.
Hanging Sam's sign at the Ex where he was such a fixture for decades would be an honourable compromise for the university. They should pay every cent for refurbishing and mounting, and while we're at it, let them pay for fixing the Flyer sign and mounting it too.
Then there actually would be heritage in Heritage Court. In honour of Sam. A solution that would be welcomed by tens of thousands.

ENTRANCING MY BLUE HERON

after
MUSIC HAS CHARMS TO SOOTHE THE SAVAGE BREAST

I'm sure that the Great Blue Heron that stands as still as a statue when it isn't looking suspiciously up the Trent and pooping on my point is now the great great great descendant of the one that came with the cottage on Burnt Point when I bought it several decades ago.

To me it's the same bird. I greet it in the spring with quiet appreciation and then almost take it for granted. But when it lands close to me, we stare at each other and I admire it more than it admires me.
It gave me a magic moment the other day.
Years ago my son Mark went to Bay Bloor Radio (which sells wonderful but costly stuff) and bought me two outdoor speakers that look like rocks. Wonderful sound. I can really crank up the music through them if some jerk fisherman is in his ninth hour of fishing within feet of my shore.  Or when the neighbour's son brings a noisy pack to howl at the moon and play unmusical nonsense at 2 a.m.
The other day, the Toronto classical station which is relentless in promoting the Znaimer Zoomer empire, and Moses' wife, played one of the greatest songs in opera.
I stopped to listen, as I always do, because it is like the heavens opened and angels are serenading mere mortals.
Georges Bizet is scorned by some and his creation of The Pearl Singers may now be remembered mainly for  one musical soliloquy. I refer, of course, to "au fonds du temple saint" when the tenor and the baritone discover that they are in love with the same woman.
The hair stands up on my neck when Jussi Bjorling, the tenor known as the Swedish Caruso, and the great Robert Merill, sing that duet.  It almost makes the so-called "new" 96.3 FM classical station okay despite the incessant propaganda.
Then I noticed that the heron had moved from the very point, where it makes the manure spreaders known as Canada geese look constipated, to a little landing on the side that my son Brett built for his sons Matthew and Mikey for fishing,  We call it M and M Point. The heron wanted to be closer to the speakers. And there it stood listening to every gorgeous note.
It stayed for a few more pieces, listening intently but without the concentration it had given Bizet as interpreted by Bjorling and Merill. Then the mood was snapped by some Zoomer promotion and it flapped heavily away, looking like it was flying backwards, sounding like a rusty hinge.
Yet it does come back, not enough of course. My heron doesn't like the "modern" afternoon drive show music on CBC FM that much but the classics it loves, But then the world has paused for that particular duet every time it's played.
As I've written, I keep a radio playing in the boat house in a vain attempt to stop beavers from turning it into their lodge. Doesn't work. Even rap fails, and that can kill cockroaches. It was four centuries ago that the phrase was coined that "music has charms to soothe the savage breast." It certainly works for me, and the heron, but not, damn it, for beaver.
It is one of my joys of nature that herons and loons in my stretch of the Trent have now been free for generations of idiots who would chase them in their boats. You certainly seem to be able to get closer. I have been swimming around the point and been ignored by a pair of loons who are so busy diving and munching that they don't bother to keep their distance.
I was golfing with my Plewes cousins recently at Pinestone Resort near Haliburton when a very large heron stood near a creek where of course I had driven my ball, It reluctantly moved, even though there were men around swinging shiny clubs. Maybe it figured out we didn't know how to use them.
At St. Pete's Beach in Florida, some cold days there can be more herons near the pool than Snow Birds.
My oldest son John Henry and I went to the Galapagos Islands a decades or so ago at great cost and difficulty. Of course we were entranced by the Boobys (those are sea birds, not blondes) and the giant tortoises. After all, there still may be a tortoise around that Charles Darwin rode because no one knows how long they live.
I returned filled with stories and loaded with film, the digital snapshots not yet having been invented to ruin real photography. It was a busy Friday at the Sun so I didn't notice just how Associate Editor Glen Woodcock was displaying my column and pictures.
So I opened my Sunday Sun at breakfast with the same anticipation as our readers and discovered that  one of the main pictures in my spread was of a Great Blue Heron standing on a point being hammered by Pacific waves.
I phoned Woodcock to grumble mildly that I had flown out to the middle of a giant ocean to visit a famous nature sanctuary and he used a shot of a bird that I could have photographed at my cottage.
It was a great picture, Glen said. And it was. But then it's hard to take a bad one of a heron, the largest of the wading birds of North America, which is now more common than when I was a boy a century or two ago.
                                                          ................
I was telling my musical heron story to one of the best dermatologists around, Dr. Franklynne Vincent, after she told me about her birding visit to South America, including, of course, Machu Pichu.
(Vincent rescued me from the deep bedsores given me by the evil care at St. Joseph's in Toronto, which never even bothered to reply when I told hundreds of thousands readers in the Toronto Sun that it was arguably among the worst hospital in Canada.)
Then Vicent one-upped me, which would please my friends who listen to my anecdotes. She and her  husband, the avid birder,  have had a macaw for 10 years which rides around on Vincent's shouder. In the morning before she starts her hectic day, the macaw gets vocally agitated if she doesn't turn on that classical station and let it listen, to the music that is, not the endless Zoomer plugs.
Doubt if I can get the heron to do that.

BEWARE OF ZEALOTS ON ROB FORD

LET'S DRINK TO REALITY

The skies were a trifle gloomy on the first day of the CNE air show but the spirits were high in the VIP enclosure on the waterfront. Of course I  mean that we were a happy crowd, not that we were consuming to the extent that the Toronto Star would notice.
The beer and pop were cold and free and the roast beef and sausages were delicious. And no I didn't notice when I chatted with David Onley, the lieutenant-governor with whom I worked decades ago to shoot down an incredible mag-lev experiment on which Queen's Park lost a fortune, whether there was a drink beside him. ( I don't think there was) meaning despite 50 years of journalism I would never be hired by the Star.
My son Mark was busy telling one of the world's most popular astronaut, Chris Hadfield, that he loved the song Hadfield sang in space while he dazzled everyone with his PR savvy and good humour. No, I don't know if Hadfield had a drink and whether Mark was working on a beer or a Diet Coke. So I guess I haven't learned quite how to be a reporter today.
Around us where Canada's military leaders wearing more stripes on their shoulders than a herd of zebras. Didn't look to see if they were holding drinks. As for the fighter pilots in their flight suits, appraising the passing planes with a cold stare, I assume they weren't drinking but, sorry, I really didn't look.
My point, of course, is unless someone is falling down drunk and endangering others, I don't give a damn. You are free to guzzle pop or beer or rum in front of me and I really don't pay much attention. After all, I have been surrounded by drinkers my entire working career.
It didn't start that way.  There was my Baptist youth when I won a gold medal for oratory from the Women's Christian Temperance Union. I listened to the tales of my grandfather who quit as a foreman in the Bols Distillery in Amsterdam when he was "born again." When he told of the stunts be pulled before he quit drinking, he sounded almost whistful about getting the billy goat so hammered it kept running at the wall until it knocked itself out.
When my fellow students were busy in the beer halls of Yonge Street, I was standing on the carpet as the Ryerson student president as the university principal made it plain that he thought any booze around students was evil and I just better do a better job of patrolling the habits of my rebellious subjects (?).
My first weeks at the Toronto Telegram were as part of a five-person crew on the Rewrite Desk. At noon three of them took me to the old Savarin Restaurant on Bay. It had a great buffet which we never saw. We spend lunch buying in turn trays of beer. When I returned to the old office at Bay and Melinda. I was expected to type copy fast enough so that the editors didn't have heart attacks. Quickly I learned how to pace myself around draft beer so that my fingers didn't get stuck between the keys.
I spent my life in newspapers surrounded by free booze. I learned that practically everyone around me had a drink or three in them but that was the way of this world. Big John Bassett and Paul Godfrey both tried as publishers to stop drinking durlng lunch. In Bassett's case, he scrapped the plan an hour after he personally pinned up the edict when he met his Editor returning from lunch smelling like a brewery.
Public attitudes have changed, but some of it is hypocritical.
I remember we used to run cartoons about the RIDE program (of which I am the godfather, but that's another story) which today would be considered insensitive, and MADD (founded by a chap who never lost a relative to a drunk driver, but liked the cause) would probably stage demonstrations in front of the offending newspaper. And yes, in case you wonder, I do hate drunk drivers.
 I come to the question of whether Rob Ford was overly refreshed at a dinner or at the Danforth street party from a cynical point-of-view. First of all, what the hell does it matter if anyone has several beers over an evening if they're not driving? And I would hope that our mayor and other major politicians occasionally chase the demons of their job by relaxing with some drinks.
My main reservation about these stupid drinking sightings is that most observers don't have a clue about anyone's drinking. As a rum-and-Diet-Coke man, I have gone months at events with an open bar where what I drink is big glasses of Coke and lots of ice and lemon slices but no booze. I often explain that quietly to bartenders at the start of the evening, so I don't have to repeat it every time. Some people thought I drank so much that the bartenders recognized me
I recall as a daily Sun columnist when some jerk phoned to report that Paul Godfrey, then the able head of the regional council, had been drunk in a box at the Jays game. Are you sure, I kept asking?
He said he would swear on a stack of Bibles. I told him to leave Bibles out of it because I knew he was a liar because not only does Godfrey not drink, alcohol is almost a poison to him.
I remember someone grumbling about the behaviour of Monte Kwinter, one of the best Liberal MPPs and urban insiders that this city has ever seen. I told him Kwinter only drank water. He never has had tea or coffee or beer or anything other than a few Diet Cokes which he stopped years ago after he was in hospital and disliked the taste of one that his wife had smuggled in.
I hate those "don't drink and drive" campaigns because it turns tens of thousands each night into hypocrites. Surely all those peopler around me at fundraising dinners and countless restaurants are not all taking cabs
What we need is responsible drinking campaigns, not prohibitionists. You can have several drinks over matching hours and not be a crazed law breaker.
The problem with Ford is that he probably looks like he's a drunk when he's sleeping peacefully. When it comes to his weight and clothes, I have walked a marathon in his shoes. I used to be as heavy as the mayor but I'm now 80 pounds lighter and know a few things about buying shirts that don't have collars that immediately stick in the air. A dress shirt is the most important unit in how a man dresses and it is easy and not that costly to have them tailor-made. You also can get reasonable tailoring so that you don't  look like the suit is two sizes too small and your shirt buttons are about to become missiles.
You look at the mayor spilling out of his clothes with a red sweaty face and you know he's a grand target for the Star or anyone else who wants to say he was drunk or sniffing suspicious substances.
What bugs the activists and the Star and the gLiberals is that he stays popular because of his conservative attitudes.
I was at a marvelous wedding reception the other night at Islington Golf Club where the room was filled with successful, confident people, many of them in finance. At my table, Mary and I sat with three couples whom we didn't know. Someone brought up the mayor. I said I thought it was unfortunate that he was so inept and clownish when I liked his striving to cut taxes. The others were annoyed that I didn't give him A+ because they were willing to accept him totally, and to hell with warts and damning pictures and alleged vodka mickeys.
No wonder the Star stock is down.

CYCLISTS ARE FREELOADERS

 GETTING A FREE RIDE ON GAS TAXES

I was trying to make a turn at University and College to deliver Mary to a hospital appointment but cyclists were buzzing all around me and sneaking through a red light and living up to their rep as road anarchists.
Just another day in the traffic chaos of downtown which grows worse every week, especially when there is construction on every block.
Plenty of time in the resulting traffic jam to recall an interesting article by a chap named Peter Shawn Taylor in the summer edition of Canadian Business. I have never heard of Taylor but he certainly knows how to think outside the box, a cliche phrase that I dislike but seems to fit here.
Taylor is in favour of road tolls, which I hate. They're just an awkward means to raise some money while employing a lot of dubious bureaucrats and expensive computer equipment.
A sub headline on his article caught my eye: "Tolls are a fair, free-market fix for gridlock - and a great way to make Prius drivers pay their share."
Another block of type illustrating the column read: "A Prius takes up just as much of the road - and causes just as much rush-hour congestion - as a gas burner, but pays a fraction of the gas tax.  How is that fair?"
Of course it isn't. Governments soak motorists through horrendous gas taxes which used to be collected just for roads and road maintainance but became such a golden gush that they use our road taxes for every service that they struggle to deliver.
 Building cars that use less fuel is a good way to go - although often when you consider the additional purchase costs they are not as much of a bargain as they seem - but they still use the same roads as the rest of us do, and we pay more for the privilege.

But Taylor, and good for him, prompted me to think as well of those freeloaders on our roads, the cyclists. I'm not talking about kids or pleasure riders but those who hurtle regularly down streets and sidewalks and x-walks  and through stop signs to work or on deliveries, often trying to copy Lance Armstrong in their gear and their expensive bikes.
Since cyclists insist on having safe space around them, and that is only reasonable, they use up almost as much space as a car but the problem comes with their speed which is generally slower except for the maniacs. Two or three cyclists riding along a city block effectively close one lane to a greater number of cars and trucks. One cyclist certainly has as much impact on rushhour traffic as one vehicle, but it's the motorist and the municipal taxpayer who have to pay for every inch of asphalt while the rogue cyclists thumb their noses at the Establishment..
So the question isn't just why we are using tax money to provide special bike lanes for them, it is why we are not expecting adult cyclists to pay a bit towards the roads that we build and maintain through expensive taxes on our homes and our fuels.
So we enter a red-tape world that I hate, but we're talking about annual bike licences for adults, which would be useful for revenue and to reduce theft. We're talking about real fines for blatantly breaking traffic laws and not having a licence. And we're talking about banning cyclists from major roads during the morning and evening rushhours which lately seem to run from 7 to 7.
The fashion in government is for user pay. The lefties in government aren't big fans of that. They want others to pay. The 10-speed socialists would hate the idea of any fees or new rules for bikes since they are the great shield for cyclists on the grounds that environmentalists vote for them.
But there is no disputing the basic fact that the socialists love to ignore. Private vehicles move all goods and most Torontonians to works and play. Drivers pay the most for the roads while subsidizing the TTC riders which don't pay the complete cost of their ride. And cyclists pay zip while cursing The Man for not fixing more potholes and not providing more bike lanes which effectively reduce the road space available for the cars that move most of the people.
It's not fare.

BEAVERS ARE PESTS NOT TO BE WORSHIPPED

COME HIT A BEAVER WITH ME

I think I hold the unique status as the only living man to hit a beaver over the head with a whippletree.
As a kid reporter, I was warned never to write that something was unique or the first of its kind. The world is a big place and has seen a lot of firsts.
But I'm pretty sure there aren't many who will try to take this unique title away from me. After all, there may be too many damn beaver around (even in Toronto parks) but there aren't a lot of whippletrees  these days.
If that blow doesn't strike you as remarkable, I have also hit the same beaver (I think) with an orange 100' extension cord. Should have used the cord to strangle it but I didn't want to get chomped. After all, beaver attacks certainly aren't unique.
In case you're baffled about the first weapon, a whippletree is the swing bar in front of the horses to which the harness traces and tongue of the carriage or wagon are connected.  I have used one for years because I hang flower pots from the big iron rings at either end and use the big centre ring to hang the floral contraption on the boathouse or in a tree. My late brother-in-law, Gordon Long, was a great collector of antique agricultural implements and farm odds and ends, and snapped this one up at a sale because there aren't many whippletrees left. (I just love writing that word.)
I have often written about my running battle with beaver at Burnt Point north of Campbellford on the Trent River. It literally is fought with tooth and claw, those damn big buckteeth of the beaver on the one side, and and barbed wire, fencing, noxious spices, guns, extension cords and whippletrees on my side. My last blog/column was on Nov. 11, 2012, titled To Hell With Beavers. (Come to think of it, that would never happen because Satan would be afraid that all the beaver dams would put out the hellfire.)
The score is about 15 trees and countless bushes on the beaver side, and maybe a wounding on my side, but with my eyesight I doubt it.
Now I used to love beaver. I grew up an eternity ago reading the wonderful tales of Grey Owl and his Ojibwe comrades when he raised beaver babies and generally sang a siren song for conservationists.
It seemed a simpler time. The Mounties were national heroes who always got their man and could sing like Nelson Eddy, and senators didn't cheat on expenses (or so we thought.)
 Then I discovered that Grey Owl was a phoney, not an native but an Englishman who dreamed up a colourful history where not even the dates were real.
He wasn't the last to write great stories about animals which may have had more than a tinge of exaggeration. Farley Mowat certainly has done a wonderful job of that without pretending to be a native, just from Newfoundland.
About the time I discovered that the RCMP were just another bunch of cops in nice uniforms, I also had discovered a multitude of evidence about the great gulf between city and country when it came to nature.
I  discovered that farmers have a much tougher attitude towards beaver that flood their fields and cut down useful trees, and the deer who cut up their crops with their hoofs, and the assorted vermin that eat their vegetables, than city folk who have this romantic view of the animal world and even, for some stupid reason, think any animal is equal to a human.
More than thirty years ago, the local Burnt Point beaver clan sounded the opening gun in the campaign against me by chomping down a wonderful stand of three silver birches and just leaving them screwing up the waterfront. Each year there are more fatalities, despite every stratagem I can employ.
Since a pair of beaver have taken to living in my boathouse (but never together), I have taken to playing music 24-7  there on a radio with the idea that might drive them away, I figured the incessant promotion of Moses Znaimer and his family on the new classical FM station (it seems to have been new for a century) would annoy them as much as it does me (just the classics please, not the Boomer crap.)
 It would keep them away for a few weeks but then they would return. So I played rock 'n' roll, which doesn't have a lasting preventive effect either.
So I tried the CBC. My son Mark was doing the impossible and straightening up the boathouse when the big male swam in and sat in the wet slip listening, apparently, to the CBC news. Seems the news annoyed him after a few minutes as much as it usually does me so it left, probably in protest.

A month ago, I figured we had driven the beaver away for good. So I wasn't careful when I went into the boathouse gloom and started fiddling at the workbench. ( In the past, I have actually stepped on the big male thinking it was a discarded rug.)
This time, to my surprise, a beaver moved near my feet, I backed to the door (you always give animals an escape route) and bumped into the whippletree.
What the hell, I thought. So I hit it over the head with it. It was like hitting a boulder with a dandelion.
It swam off. It returned a few weeks later, a sneaky surprise. When it moved in the dark and then rushed towards me. I reached behind me, couldn't find the whippletree, but came up with the extension cord. So I walloped it with that, while letting out war whoops that Grey Owl would have appreciated around the camp fire.
The neighbours don't laugh at me anymore because they have lost too many trees, and then there is the problem for them of sawing up the branches and trunks so they can drive down the humble road.
I know of a trapper that the OPP used when the cops had a beaver problem behind their Orillia headquarters. I also know where the beaver lodge is located right across the Northumberland Narrows. Back in the 1930s when Grey Owl was spinning his tall tales, a farmer would just take a stick of dynamite out of the cache in the barn that he used for blowing up stumps and stick one in the lodge.
But we're more civilized today, especially in the cities where beaver are right up there on the national pedestal with that other wonderful Canadian icon, the flying manure spreaders known as the Canada goose.
All I say is to know them is not to love them. Maybe I should try rap music on the boathouse radio. Surely even the Canadian symbol can't stand that, not knowing that in this politically correct time, we aren't allowed to criticize ethnic culture, or destructive animals either.

TOO BIG FOR THE ROADS

 TOO FAT, TOO LONG, TOO STUPID

Do you ever feel like an insect on one of the 400 superroads when you drive along a wall of obese tractor trailers?
Do you ever have to squeeze into your driveway past the lawn care guy who bought a long pickup and a  longer trailer so he can't park in front of his customer without hanging over driveways because the combo is wider than the lawn?
Do you ever fume in a traffic jam because another 18-wheeler has rolled over on a curve like a hippo bathing in a jungle river?
Do you ever wonder why the province allows tractor trailers so big that they can't make an ordinary turn on a downtown street?
If you have, you live in the Province of Ontario where the transportation experts boast about the low accident rate compared to the rest of Canada primarily because ordinary motorists are so intimidated by truckers that we try to keep as far away from them as possible.
I don't blame the drivers themselves. They have to drive the rigs that the boss gives them. And the boss, trying to reduce labour costs, tries to cram as much stuff as possible into the biggest trailer that he can find.
I blame the transportation ministry. I blame the police who allow the obvious infractions around them when truck rigs are bigger than the law allows.
The trucking industry has always hankered after the infamous truck trains of central Australia which are really more train than truck.
So the trucking industry has kept pushing the envelope on size so now we have big dump trucks rumbling along that have an enormous connection to a second trailer. They resemble tanks more than they do a truck for sand or gravel.

It's astounding how just about every business that moves on tires has always tried to cheat on size. Even the TTC. I was startled long ago at a commission meeting to find the commissioners were plotting how to get city council to change the law so the latest buses they had bought were legal. On yes, our transit guys bought buses that were longer and wider than regs allowed.
I raised this many years later at a Ontario Safety League meeting where I was a director and two men there who had spent many years in transit laughed knowledgeably about the incident and sort of hinted that it wasn't the only time that it had happened with the TTC.
A few years ago I was trying to get my Toyoto serviced in the eastend but found that I couldn't get close to the service door because of this enormous car carrier that sprawled from the showroom out into the street. I said to the driver that obviously the carrier was too big for that delivery, and probably broke the law too. He said he made regular delivers there and I was the only one in five years who had mentioned  the rig's size.
It wasn't just at the OSL board that I raised my concerns. (The OSL is a volunteer advisory body to the government that is nearly a century old.) I used to write editorials and features for the CAA magazine, which I think has gone downhill to being more a travel mag that one really devoted to the concerns of  motorists. I also often wrote about motoring issues as a Toronto Sun columnist.
I find it astounding that even as traffic has increased on every street in Toronto, so has the size of every form of truck.
Once upon a time, urban planners envisioned a Southern Ontario where freight trains carried most of the stuff between cities. Any big tractor trailers that moved between cities would offload in suburban depots and smaller vehicles would carry the material the rest of the way.
Sounded great on paper but the big trucking outfits figured why use two vehicles and two drivers if one of each could do the job. So to hell with the rest of us!  Then we got just-in-time delivery where factories didn't bother building storage space but were brought their parts and material by a steady stream of rolling warehouses that were made as large as possible.
The latest trick for companies delivering shingles or brick or block by long flatbeds is to hang the little tractor off the back. Which just adds to the hazard, And I would say so even if Mary had not driven down a side street a couple of years ago where a big flatbed was delivering shingles and was parked on an angle out from the curb. She clipped a corner, for $6,000 damage, The driver was on the lawn. He argued that since he hadn't been in the cab, he wouldn't given even his name. He certainly didn't apologize for taking up most of the road. The insurance company didn't even blink at my story. I guess it happens too often, and we all pay higher premiums as a result.
I think it's time to get back to basics, to ignore the good roads and trucking lobbies that contriibute campaign funds to all the right MPPs, and have a commission into vehicle size. If the private motorist does nothing, those tractor trailers will keep getting longer and bigger until more of us, like some of the people I know, feel that' it's safer to stay off the 400 series of truckways.

LET'S ALL BRAKE THE LAWS

I KNOW WHEN I"M BEAT

Let's copycat most cyclists and ignore stop signs. It will save us time by making for quicker trips and will help the environment and our cars.
Let's just roll our cars through stop signs if we see no one is coming. And if traffic is really bad, we could just switch to the sidewalks or cross with pedestrians at the lights.
I drove from the Humber to downtown at 7.45 a.m. and found that thanks to the police ticketing offenders, few parked car were blocking a lane of traffic, just one or two cyclists in each block.
My trip was swift. All the drivers around me were rushhour hardened so there was no dawdling and no stupid quick moves. Can't say the same for cyclists who whizzed by on both sides of the car at lights and swayed towards passing cars occasionally like a cow heading for the barn.
The cyclists were a pretty sight. No, I'm not talking about that Star picture showing a nude cyclist. As a veteran of bike hikes, that sight caused parts of my body to seek refuge inside.
No, I'm saying that cyclists are so much more distinctive and flamboyant than those drivers hunkered down morosely behind the wheel,
Some the other morning wore so much gear, I figured they had taken a wrong turn in a tour in France or Italy. There were even flowing pretty skirts fluttering in the breeze beneath purses, bags and baskets which jutted out at alarming angles as traffic squeezed by.
And no one was shouting curses at drivers. But then it was early and I guess they weren't warmed up yet.
I was driving down one of those endless side streets the other evening where the neighbourhoods have persuaded City Hall to put a stop sign at every intersection and to heck with the increase in air pollution. A pleasant older man was riding one of those old clunkers that I used to have before either gears were invented or I didn't have the money to buy them. It really didn't matter to him how slow the bike was because he kept up to me easily since he never stopped at six stop signs.
Ironically, the area south of Bloor just west of the Humber has been blessed in recent months by a cop of Asian heritage who hides in hedges and jumps out at any motorist who doesn't stop his wheels from turning even if there is no car in sight.
He caught two of my sons and many neighbours. I didn't know really what to think since it annoys me how many drivers in this area just cruise through stop signs. Not as many as the cyclists, but enough.
So why don't we save ourselves and the air and zealous cops a lot of grief and just abandon these silly bylaws that are already ignored by so many. Just let pedestrians run through traffic. Let cyclists belt along sidewalks and through stop signs. Allow motorists to only brake avoid collisions.
Let's have a relaxed attitude towards this scofflawism. What's that, you say? You think we would have a Wild West when it came to traffic. But we have that already. We could stop it from increasing by doubling or trippling the fines for accidents and all the other crushed-metal incidents that will happen when drivers start acting like cyclists.
Come down like the Hammer of Thor on any idiot who can't handle the easier laws and cracks up or rams someone. The rest of the time, just ignore the signs as if you were some innocent kid back on a tricycle before you grew up and were expected to obey all the rules. Silly thought!