A smorgasbord of Ottawa boomer memories

Capital Recollections,
A Baby Boomer Growing Up in Ottawa,
by Bruce MacGregor

Burnstown Publishing House, 2019. Available for $20 at Perfect Books on Elgin Street, online at burnstownpublishing.com or by contacting the author at brucefm@hotmail.com.

Review by Dave O’Malley

If, like me, you grew up in Ottawa in the first two decades following the Second World War, you rode the outermost ripples of the great Baby Boom, the sons and daughters of men and women who had just suffered through two of the most socially destructive periods in modern history – the Great Depression and the Second World War. Their sense of justice and discipline, careful husbanding of money and honourable work ethic were the foundations of our lives, but we made our own way in a rapidly changing world, questioning many of our parents’ fundamental beliefs – at least, that’s what we thought.

Members of our generation, from Victoria to St. John’s, breathed the same air of hope and possibility, lay awake under the same threat of nuclear holocaust, bopped to the same rockin’ beat and were swept away by the same social changes. You might think that these broad strokes of mutual DNA would be the meat and potatoes of dinner talk when baby boomers get together. But you would be wrong.

What truly excites us baby boomers at cocktail parties and reunions are not the wider nationally shared experiences, the social upheavals of those distant times or the impacts our generation had on following generations, but rather the particular minutiae of our everyday lives in whatever community we grew up in – the way we liked to wear our socks back in the day, the American TV westerns we loved to watch, the toys we cherished or the vomit-inducing rides we gravitated to at the local fair.

In Capital Recollections, A Baby Boomer Growing Up in Ottawa, author Bruce MacGregor delivers up a smorgasbord of tasty slices of pre-teen and teenage life in Ottawa in the ’50s and ’60s – from Cradle League hockey at the old “Aud” and dancing at the Oak Door to “skurfing” at Confederation Square and the mythical gang rumbles between the “Yohawks and the Squirrels.” MacGregor walks us through his own personal story from his arrival in Ottawa at age five until graduating from Rideau High School in 1965, dividing the narrative not chronologically, but by topic: Dating, The Cottage, Television, Sports, Movies and so on.

MacGregor is a bit of an Ottawa baby boomer icon himself – an outstanding Rideau High School athlete and front man for the long-lived and popular rock cover band Bruce and The Burgers. Many late-cohort boomers of the Glebe and some of our own children remember him fondly as Mr. MacGregor, an English teacher at Glebe Collegiate Institute.

His book is only 100 pages long, but every one of them is packed with trivia, memories and recollections that will take you right back to your desert-boot wearing, 45-spinning, hair-peroxiding adolescence. The numerous photos are also strangely familiar, even though they depict his personal childhood and high-school experiences. We all have family albums with similar snapshots of ourselves wearing Cub Scout or baseball uniforms, dressed uncomfortably for church or riding our tricycles on a sunny afternoon in those halcyon days. It may be MacGregor’s wonderful life, but it feels eerily like your own.

We all have the same fading recollections of the events, places, music and fashions of this remarkable period but it took MacGregor to step up and put it all down. His relentless pursuit of the ephemera and touchstones of a baby boomer life in Ottawa rolls up much of what we haven’t thought about in years and all of what we have. He strings these pearls together without much introspection though, but as someone once said, “Quantity has a quality all its own.” By the time you get to the end of this book, you will feel immersed in your own adolescence, with memories confirmed and images restored to life.

I can only hope that our children will someday find a chronicler like MacGregor who will dish up the fun-to-remember nuggets of their own Ottawa childhoods, the era of My Little Pony, disco-bowling, BeaverTails, Doc Martens, DeLoreans and Ace of Base.

If you are looking for some underlying meaning behind all this Ottawa boomer trivia, some existential theory as to how we got from there to here or how all this informed our world view or emotional stability, you will be disappointed. There’s nothing profound about this book, but if you want to smile every minute and say to yourself, “Ha… I was just talking about that,” or “I haven’t thought about that in years,” then MacGregor’s book will provide you with an enjoyable evening’s read.

Dave O’Malley is founder, creative director and president of Aerographics in the Glebe.