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1. Beginnings

Gordon Ross Mackay—the second syllable of the surname pronounced to rhyme with why—came into the world on December 21, 1931, at Misericordia Hospital in Winnipeg, Manitoba. His father, Cameron Mackay, was the youngest of three children of the Reverend Hector Mackay of the Methodist Church in Strathclair, a town in Manitoba’s southwest corner. The Reverend Hector ran his children the same way he ran his church, with a strict and rigorous hand. Ross’s mother, Rose, came from gentler, more benevolent stock. Her father, William Campbell, farmed a spread of land just outside Strathclair, and served as an elder in the Reverend Mackay’s church. Severe as the Reverend may have been, he was no fool, and he thoughtfully identified Rose’s dad’s status in the community. “Bill,” Reverend Mackay said, “is one of the few among us who can be called a good man.”

Rose inherited much of her father’s instinctively fine nature. She grew into a young woman just short of beautiful; she was winsome, petite and shapely, blessed with uncommon patience and kindness. Cameron was tall and handsome, a modish dresser by 1930’s Manitoba standards. As everybody in town who could carry a tune was aware, Cameron was musically gifted to the most sophisticated degree. With his looks and talent, Cameron was the town’s prize catch. Like the other girls in Strathclair, Rose couldn’t resist such an all-round treasure of a guy.

Rose and Cameron began their attachment in Strathclair’s high school and swore themselves to a future together. But first for both of them, there came preparation to enter the larger world ahead. Rose enrolled in the nurse’s training course at Misericordia Hospital. Cameron allowed his musical talent to carry him to more adventurous destinations, studying first at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto, then at the famous Julliard School in New York City.

In his studies, Cameron played piano, tuba, and bass, thrilling viscerally to the deep resonance of the bass violin, which he took up as his featured instrument. He loved to play works by Brahms and Beethoven, and later, in what would become his trademark piece, he adored the witty and melodic Lieutenant Kijé by the Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev. Written first in 1934 for a movie sound track, it was recast by Prokofiev as an orchestral piece, opus 60, which blossomed into the composer’s most often-played work. Cameron took to it so passionately because Prokofiev loaded on passages that kept any bassist wary, flying through difficult key changes, dealing with areas where it was tricky just to stay in tune. Cameron recorded himself playing opus 60’s bass parts, then he listened to playbacks, picking up and correcting the flaws in his rendition. He practiced opus 60 all his musical life, fanatically set on getting it exactly right.

Cameron and Rose were married on December 19, 1929, eight weeks after Rose’s graduation from Misericordia and seven weeks into the Great Depression of the 1930s. On the day of the young couple’s first anniversary, Cameron was on the road, in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, playing across the Prairies in a dance band; it was the only job he could land in those hard times that brought in a reasonable pay cheque. He was in Regina in the same band on the day Ross was born. A year later, Cameron moved his little family to Toronto where a far broader range of bass opportunities was available. Above all, Cameron yearned to put himself on the path to a career that emphasized Brahms and Beethoven rather than four-beats-to-the-bar dance rhythms.

In 1937, learning by way of the bassist grapevine that the Toronto Symphony was losing a bass player to retirement, Cameron manipulated his connections to line up an audition. Rehearsing like a fiend, he worked on his bow articulations, on his repertoire, on his tone, pitch, and vibrato. On the big day, Cameron unfolded his talents for the orchestra’s conductor, the formidable Sir Ernest MacMillan, easily the most celebrated Canadian-born man of classical music in the country. Cameron remained unfazed in the presence of the great maestro, and that day, when he left Massey Hall where the audition took place, Cameron knew he had nailed the gig. He held a chair in the orchestra’s bass section from then until his death, serving as the principal bassist over the last dozen years. So reliable as a member of the ensemble was Cameron that the orchestra eventually named him its personnel manager, the musician in charge of herding his fellow musicians to performances and rehearsals on time and fit to play.

The permanent role with the Toronto Symphony solidified Cameron’s reputation in classical circles around town. Still, a financial hurdle remained in the late 1930s and the early 1940s; the remuneration for the prestigious position he now held amounted to such peanuts, a paltry twenty-two dollars a week over a season of twenty weeks, that Cameron needed to scramble for other bass vacancies in and out of town to bolster his income. Over the years, he played with the Hart House Orchestra, the CBC Symphony and with the symphony orchestras of Baltimore and Pittsburgh. The jobs out of town took Cameron away from home for weeks at a time.

It was in 1936 that Cameron, Rose, and little Ross settled into a Lilliputian-sized apartment over a variety store at 380A Bloor Street West in mid-town Toronto. Everything about the apartment was in miniature: a combination living room-dining room, a kitchenette, and two bedrooms. The view out the front window was of Bloor streetcars rumbling past every five minutes from early morning until midnight. The apartment shared the second floor with an even-smaller apartment, and, at the end of the hall, Dr. Sami Schumacher’s dentist’s office contributed the floor’s all-pervasive odour of dental anesthetic. Ross called this humble space his home until he was twenty-six. Rose never lived anywhere else.

Not long after the move to 380A, Rose went looking for a job and found one a block and a half from the apartment. She signed on as the nurse-secretary to Dr. Douglas Bastow, a family practitioner with an office in the apartment building above the Owl Drugstore at the northwest corner of Bloor and Spadina. The secretarial half of Rose’s duties kept her in the office until seven or eight most nights, tending to the billings and the appointment books. Ross was growing up a bright and good-looking kid but super rambunctious, and with his mother off at work, with his father busy at Toronto Symphony concerts and rehearsals or out of town on American assignments, Ross got into mischief. By the time he turned eleven, alone in the apartment, he was sneaking his mother’s cigarettes, sipping her beer and turning up the radio to high volume whenever a disc jockey on the CBC station played big band recordings. Ross was crazy about jazz, later going particularly nuts over bebop, the music created by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.

Poor Rose, the loving mother, scurried back and forth between Dr. Bastow’s office and the apartment. She forbade the smokes and alcohol, and apologized to the Steiners in the apartment next door for the racket on Ross’s radio. Rose worshipped her handsome young son. She felt amazement at his natural intelligence. She was certain in her heart of hearts that he was destined for a future in some lofty calling, a profession, medicine perhaps. But sometimes she despaired that he would even make it out of his childhood neighbourhood in one piece.

The apartment’s location placed it squarely among the working class where the kids Ross caught on with were hard-minded, quick-fisted little boys. They were early into theft, booze, fights, girls, and fleeing from the cops. In this company, Ross picked his spots. The booze eventually became more than okay with him, and so did the girls (the older teen-aged Ross bragged to his sex-mad high school friends how he lost his virginity to a neighbourhood whore when he was twelve). As for the rest of the juvenile delinquencies, Ross adopted the role of the gang jokester. Rather than fight or shoplift, he cracked wise. The other kids not only accepted Ross as a laugh-maker, they cheered him on, encouraging his loud-mouthed gags.

Alas for Ross’s teachers at Huron Public School where he attended classes from kindergarten through grade eight, Ross brought his persona as a jokester into the classrooms. He wouldn’t keep quiet during lessons. He called out one-liners, made the other kids giggle, and put his personality at the centre of the show. Teachers banished Ross to the cloakroom at the back of the room as much to regain control of the class as to discipline Ross. What gave the situation an awkward and somewhat baffling cast for the staff was that at exam time, Ross topped the class without so much as cracking a book.

Routinely, from grade one to grade eight, Ross’s report cards showed A’s and B+’s across the board in all the academic subjects (“Spelling,” “Oral Language,” “Natural Sciences,” “Numbers Work,” “Printing or Writing,” “Health Habits”). According to the report cards, Ross’s performance collapsed in just a single category: “Conduct.” For that, teachers rated him either D (“Below Average”) or E (“Unsatisfactory”) on every report card through his entire Huron career.

On a spring afternoon when Ross was twelve, he and two other neighbourhood kids slipped a couple of bucks to a homeless man outside the wine store at Spadina Avenue and College Street. The homeless guy’s role was to buy two bottles of Catawba wine for the boys and spend the leftover change on a purchase for himself. Clutching the two bottles, the three kids dashed gleefully through the streets north and west to Christie Pits.

The Pits was one of Ross’s playgrounds, a spectacularly sized Bloor Street park dominated by two diamonds that serious baseball people looked after. Ross played on a ball team organized by the do-gooder Lizzie’s organization, which put together baseball and basketball leagues to keep inner city boys distracted from delinquencies. Not unexpectedly, the athletic Ross drew assignments to the baseball skill positions, a lot of shortstop every game, a couple of innings on the pitcher’s mound.

On the afternoon of the Catawba wine episode, Ross and his friends settled themselves on the side of the steep hill that sloped into the park. Then they drank deeply from the Catawba bottles. It didn’t take long for Ross to get drunk, a sensation he found himself instantly crazy about. He had been aware for a while, maybe a year, of a dark numbness that sometimes settled over him, a deep melancholy that he was powerless to resist. But all of this, the numbness and the melancholy, came loose when he drank the wine. He felt free and buoyant. He stood up on the side of the Christie Pits hill and unleashed a long whooping holler of joy.

A couple of hours later, he threw up in the bathroom at home. He reeled with dizziness, couldn’t bear the thought of eating his dinner that night, and felt a killer of a headache coming on. But the next week, not at all driven to sobriety by the prospect of re-experiencing the sickness and the hangover, Ross got another bottle of Catawba, just one for himself. He drank some of it, not the whole bottle in a single go, only enough tastes to once more experience the relief and clarity that alcohol brought on. Ross hustled another bottle the following week, and before long, he hooked up with neighbourhood boys who had the same predilections for booze. Whenever anybody had the money for a trip to the wine store, they drank together after school. Sometimes on weekends, they got rip-roaring drunk.

At every stage of his life, in grade school, high school, university, law school, the practice of law, Ross drank more than anybody he hung out with. He drank more surreptitiously too, drawing pulls of whiskey in the mornings and afternoons as a regular habit by the time he reached law school. Ross didn’t proclaim his attachment to alcohol to everyone around him, but he handed himself a nickname when he was feeling relaxed among his drinking companions. He said he was “the boss drunk.” It was a title he held on to for more than three decades.

Ross’s dad, Cameron, had an eye for beautiful young women. On his freelance job with the Pittsburgh Symphony, his attention fell on the gorgeous blond harpist. A declaration of love soon followed, and when the much-younger harpist returned Cameron’s affection, he swore to divorce Rose, marry the harpist and move her to Toronto. At that crucial stage, the harpist’s shocked parents weighed in, persuading their daughter not to waste her bright musical future in a foreign backwater. Cameron’s timing spelled romantic disaster. Simultaneously the harpist dumped him, and he broke Rose’s heart with a confession of the Pittsburgh affair. Cameron moved out of 380A Bloor at Christmas when Ross was eleven. The young boy was firm about which side his affections fell on in the years that followed the marital split and the ultimate divorce. Not forgiving his father for the transgression, Ross remained forever his mother’s boy.

Ross’s reaction didn’t turn Cameron into an absentee father. He made a habit of showing up at the apartment first thing on many weekday mornings to rouse his son for school, knowing that Rose was a sucker for tales Ross spun in order to avoid classes. Cameron stayed on the lookout for all possible means of contributing to Ross’s development. When he turned sixteen, Cameron arranged a job two or three nights a week in the hat check room at the beautiful art deco Eaton Auditorium on College Street. The job kept Ross in spending money for all the years until his call to the bar. In return, Ross was at best grudging in his thanks for his father’s thoughtfulness. For the most part, he kept Cameron at an emotional distance, making a habit of calling him, not “Dad,” but “Cam.”

Bill McClelland was klutzy, uncoordinated, and a few pounds overweight. He loved sports, but played them awkwardly. It was Ross’s athleticism that first appealed to Bill, a fellow member of grade eight at Huron School. Bill McClelland became the first and only Huron boy from the middle class whom Ross befriended. Bill’s father worked downtown in the head office of the Dominion Bank, and the family, which included Bill’s three older teenage sisters, lived on a gracious street called Admiral Road in the well-to-do neighbourhood east of the school (Ross and the tough kids resided in the much-less-substantial west).

When Bill brought Ross to the Admiral house, they played touch football with other kids on the street and cribbage alone indoors. Ross’s style was take-no-prisoners at all games, even a pastime as tame as cribbage. In the boys’ matches, if Bill so much as nudged a cribbage peg after presenting his hand, he could expect Ross to swoop down and claim any points Bill neglected to claim first. This was Ross’s style in the McClelland house. When one of Bill’s sisters came into the room, Ross made a pass. The girls shrieked with laughter at this younger kid with the precocious sexuality.

At 380A Bloor, in all the times Ross invited Bill over, Bill never laid eyes on Ross’s father and met his mother just once in the grade eight year. An observant boy, and a kind one too, Bill found the apartment a bleak place. Ross took a try at offering Bill smokes and one of his mother’s bottles of beer. Bill didn’t want to lose Ross’s friendship, but his parents had warned Bill away from nicotine and alcohol until he was older, and Bill was not about to break his family’s rules. Ross produced for Bill one more example of sinful adult living, sliding out from under his mattress a cache of pornographic photographs. This was titillation that Bill couldn’t ignore even though he felt shocked to his core. Not even life with three sisters prepared him for the photos. Every time Bill spent a couple of hours in Ross’s apartment, he decided his friend lived in an atmosphere that was desolate and dangerous.

Huron’s principal, Mr. Hart, was a pot-bellied, balding man who dressed in a small collection of aging and shiny suits. Amiable with his students, ever alert to their academic strengths and weaknesses, Mr. Hart sized up Ross in the grade eight math class, which Mr. Hart taught. He couldn’t help registering that, while most students needed to be patiently guided through the intricate concepts involved in maths, Ross grasped them instantly, intuitively it would seem. Mr. Hart was blown away. He consulted with the dedicated Miss McClure who served as the school’s secretary and taught all the grade eight subjects apart from maths. She assured Mr. Hart of Ross’s success and confidence in her classes. Except deportment, Miss McClure pointed out, a subject Ross continued to flunk. Mr. Hart’s attitude on the deportment issue was that with a little more growing up, a dash more maturity, Ross would get himself under control. With the issue settled in Mr. Hart’s mind, he decided to act on a plan that would be momentous for Ross’s future.

It was Mr. Hart’s conviction that, for high school, Ross should take the exams to get into the University of Toronto Schools. UTS was the city’s high school for smart boys, conveniently located in the three-storey brick and terracotta building down the street from Huron School at the southeast corner of Spadina and Bloor. Founded in 1910 and funded by the University of Toronto and the provincial government’s Department of Education, UTS was set up to teach the city’s brightest students (boys only until the school went co-ed in 1973). The school hired superior teachers to handle the instructions, outfitted the classrooms with the most up-to-date lab equipment, and generally laid on every academic advantage.

From the time of the school’s opening, when parents around the city got wind of this marvelous new high school with elevated standards, they deluged the school with applications for their sons. The school was small, just 420 students, and from the beginning, UTS needed to put entrance exams in place as the only means to separate the truly brainy kids from the flocks of wannabe scholars.

By the mid-1940s, about seven hundred boys were writing the exams to win one of the ninety places available in grade nine (or First Form, as UTS labeled it). The numbers meant that the odds were ferocious—about one in eight—that an individual boy, Ross Mackay for example, would win a spot in First Form. But Mr. Hart was putting his money on Ross.

When Mr. Hart broke news of his plan to Ross’s mother, Rose was thrilled. Just imagine her son mingling with boys who were sure to be well mannered, ambitious and headed somewhere grand in life. Some of this would surely rub off on Ross. Rose was convinced that UTS promised a glorious future for her son. But Rose had a crucial question for Mr. Hart.

Was this going to cost the earth in fees?

UTS’s tuition, Mr. Hart revealed, amounted to seventy dollars per academic year, payable in two installments.

Not so overwhelming, Rose said. With Cameron pitching in, she could swing the seventy bucks.

That year, Mr. Hart made the same UTS suggestion to the parents of another Huron boy.

The second boy was Bill McClelland.

On the morning of the last Saturday in May 1945, Ross, Bill and seven hundred other boys gathered nervously in the classrooms at UTS. They wrote exams in English Composition, Mathematics, and British History. Each boy also sat for a short oral quiz, answering a series of questions on current events from one of the UTS teachers (or “masters,” as UTS called them). Who was Cordell Hull? Ross was asked. The American Secretary of State, he answered. Karl Doenitz? The German admiral who surrendered the Nazis to the Allies at the end of the Second War. Vyacheslov Molotov? First Deputy Premier in the Soviet government. Ross knew the answers. So did Bill.

The results of the exams arrived by mail at each applicant’s home on the Saturday three weeks later. The thirty boys who scored highest were admitted to Form 1A, the second thirty to Form 1B, and the third thirty to Form 1C.

Ross won admittance to 1C. Bill was taken for the same class.

Rose was ecstatic. Bill and his parents felt proud. Only Ross seemed to be of two minds about UTS. The line he adopted to explain his reluctance was built on the regrets he felt about deserting the company of his tough young Huron friends and joining what he was sure would be a bunch of stuck-up UTS snobs.

2. The School For Smart Boys

UTS students were expected to be earnest, meticulous, calm, and tractable. Almost to a boy, the new First Formers in the autumn of 1945, coming as they did from families who lived in Moore Park, the Kingsway, Lawrence Park, and other neighbourhoods bordering on upper middle class, had no trouble meeting the expectations. Ross was the exception.

He had grown accustomed to busting behaviour barriers at Huron School, and he kept on shooting off his mouth during the troublesome first UTS year. He retailed noisy stories featuring himself, sex, alcohol, and his roughneck neighbourhood pals. As at Huron, Ross wouldn’t shut up.

Bill McClelland decided a one-person intervention was called for. Taking Ross aside, boy to boy, old Huron School partners, Bill pointed out that the Huron manner of carrying one’s self didn’t cut it at this high school for smart boys. A UTS guy’s role in the system was to bear down on his lessons, never give a pass to homework, and behave in a manner that showed he knew the rules of young adulthood. Bill told Ross it was time he got the message.

Ross snapped back at Bill, jeering, telling Bill in a slew of swear words to mind his own business. Bill persisted in his try at doing a reform job on Ross. Both guys shouted, Ross louder than Bill. Other boys in the class couldn’t help noticing.

“If Ross Mackay and Bill McClelland don’t stop their little arguments, which are steadily multiplying,” the student who contributed 1C’s entry in the school yearbook earnestly warned in print, “a tragedy of some sort is very liable to happen sooner or later.”

Ross responded by stepping up his anti-McClelland campaign. He stuffed Bill in his locker, threatening to confine his classmate while classes proceeded with him inexplicably AWOL. He gave Bill such a hard time that Bill backed off his connection to Ross altogether, making friends among more conventional students. There was no shortage of down-the-middle types at UTS.

Bill still fretted over Ross’s free-form approach to the UTS culture. Bill was a boy who took into consideration such entities as motive and adjustment. In his much later post-UTS years, he earned a PhD in psychology, and shaped a career that peaked as head of the Department of Psychology at the University of Western Ontario.

Looking back at his flop of an attempt to talk Ross into line in their first year at UTS, Bill said, as a psychologist, his first clinical failure came with Ross Mackay.

At the beginning of second year, Ross took a hard right turn. Gone, virtually overnight, was his obstreperous persona around UTS. It was goodbye in substantial degree to the loudmouth bragging. Ross didn’t so much knuckle down as dial back. This new Ross still wouldn’t have been mistaken for a typically grinding UTS student, and he didn’t swear off drinking, sex, and weekends with rowdy old pals. But in classes, he brought into play the exacting focus that had impressed Mr. Hart in the Huron School math class. In this suddenly more concentrated version of himself, Ross’s UTS exam marks, on the down side of mediocre in first year, sparkled on the same high level as everybody else’s in second year.

Had he taken to heart Bill McClelland’s first year lecture? Bill didn’t inquire at the time, not wanting to risk another confinement in his locker. It was eventually Bill’s conclusion that Ross simply realized it was a waste of energy to yearn for a return to the street habits of the Huron School crowd. Better to adjust and move along for the rest of his UTS years. Ross had smartened up.

In his second UTS year, Ross made best friends with a classmate named Donnie Fawcett, a sweet-natured boy who was unquestionably the school’s most accomplished athlete. Precociously starring from his early UTS years at quarterback on the school’s senior football team and at point guard on the senior basketball team, Donnie was better at any game involving a ball than anybody his age in the school, maybe in the city (he later filled the same leading football and basketball roles at the University of Toronto). Donnie was dark haired, slight, and wiry, quick on his feet, evasive, and fearless. He had exceptionally long arms and big hands, which gave him the right physical equipment to throw footballs and basketballs with uncommon zip and accuracy.

Donnie hooked up with Ross a couple of times a week, late in the day, after school and after sports practice. They’d shoot some pool at Uptown Billiards on Yonge Street just south of Bloor, then catch a streetcar to a dance. There was no shortage of places for Toronto teenagers with itchy feet to cut loose with their most dazzling terpsichorean moves. But Ross and Donnie’s favourite dances were the productions at the Balmy Beach Canoe Club in the east end, at the farthest reaches of the long Queen Street streetcar line. Nestled on the Lake Ontario beach a short stroll south of Queen, the club occupied a two-story wooden building with a balcony on the second floor. From the outside, it had the appearance of an oversized summer cottage; inside, it was spacious and romantic, a place to dance of the kind that inspired song lyrics evoking dreamy interludes.

Shimmering and incandescent as the beautifully dressed teenagers looked while they whirled around the floor, the Canoe Club was a place of inviolable rules and strictures. Girls without dates gathered in the centre of the room, the dancers floating around them, moving counterclockwise. Unaccompanied guys stood against one wall on the side close to the main door. The music played, fifteen sets over the course of the evening, three records per set, and as the melodies filled the hall, the single guys made their picks of the girls in the middle. This could lead to a humiliating process for the guys. If a boy crossed through the dancing couples to ask the girl of his dreams to dance and she turned him away, he had no choice except to retreat through the dancers, back to his spot against the wall, everybody in the room smirking at the poor chump’s rejection. Or, just as mortifying for guys, certain sets were designated as “tag sets,” meaning that if a guy dancing with a gorgeous girl was tapped on the shoulder by another guy, the first guy was bound by the unspoken rules to surrender the gorgeous girl and return to the wall. What the other people in the hall would have observed was that the gorgeous girl was likely to have sent up a hand signal begging to be tapped out of the arms of the unaware dope she began the set with.

In this competitive atmosphere, Donnie never knew Ross to encounter rejection. Not a single time did a girl in the middle of the floor, asked by Ross for a dance, send him slinking back to a spot along the wall. Never did a girl in Ross’s arms signal for rescue during a tag set. What made Ross’s success super rare was his refusal to dance in the Balmy Beach style. Out in the Beach, in their dance hall, everybody took long steps, swooping and gliding to the music, a mode that was close to a waltz. That wasn’t Ross’s style. No waltz-like moves for him. He favoured short steps, his movements precise and compact. Donnie warned Ross that the Beach people, an insular bunch, weren’t likely to permit Ross’s departure from the norm at their place. But Donnie was wrong. The Beach girls never insisted that Ross surrender his short steps, never asked him to go long like everybody else, never begged for a waltz. Ross was too much a gift of a guy for a girl, even a Beach girl, to lose over a little matter of dance styles.

At UTS, Ross and Donnie were at the core of a small group of boys who ate their lunches at Ross’s mother’s apartment. This was regarded by everybody else at the school as a bold adventure. The rest of the student body ate in the cramped and steamy cafeteria in the basement; forty-five cents for a hot meal, which usually involved greasy hamburger, plus Jello in pastel shades for dessert.

The seven or eight guys who carried their brown-bagged lunches from home and ate them at Ross’s place counted, among the group, the school’s top athletes, the sharp dressers, the boys who were relaxed with girls and scored big in social situations. As entertainment at their off-the-school-premises lunches, the guys told one another about their best “exploits.” That was Donnie Fawcett’s noun, standing for recent successes in sports or with girls. Ross told the most detailed girl stories. His catchword was “lace,” when he talked about girls’ underwear. Bras, slips, garter belts, panties. They were lace, and Ross described his probings inside the lace, peeling away each piece. When Ross told his lace stories, everybody in the room could hardly breathe.

Donnie had a phrase to describe Ross’s standing in the room. He was “the king without acting kingly.” The other guys marveled at Ross for never bad-mouthing other students. A person could be a jerk, and everybody in the school knew he was a jerk, but Ross had nothing to say behind the guy’s back. It was a piece of refinement that won Ross points for honour.

The boys in the apartment’s lunch group developed a giddy little chant they broke into when Ross arrived at his locker before morning classes:

“Here’s to Mackay | He’s a good guy.

Here’s to Ross | He’s the boss.”

In Ross’s last UTS year, the basketball coach paid him the compliment of naming Ross along with Donnie as co-captains of the senior team. As by far the best player in the school, Donnie was a natural choice. In Ross’s case, it was his smarts at the game that got him chosen. He was the first on the team to grasp the intricacies of a new play. He operated on the floor at a certain level of talent, higher than most though far below Donnie’s elevated status, and he could be counted on to hit that level in every game. Donnie said that most players tried too hard to be stars on the floor, but Ross was different. Stardom didn’t matter to him nearly as much as consistency in his performance.

That year’s senior team won the championship in a league with private prep schools, but its most amazing single victory came in an exhibition game against Nichols School of Buffalo, New York. Nichols was a private boys’ academy of 570 students, and as Americans, they were expected to dominate the Canadians in basketball, which they did for decades. Then came the miraculous upset in the UTS gym in a convincing 28-19 game. It was a historic victory, thrilling, never to be anticipated in UTS’s sporting history, a triumph largely engineered by the co-captains, Ross and Donnie.

In the late afternoon of the win over Nichols, UTS threw a dance in the gym for the visiting players. Ross showed up at the event with a gorgeous blonde whose family lived on Forest Hill Road in one of the city’s plushier neighbourhoods. UTS’s Head Master (the school’s term for Principal) was baffled by the pairing, a girl obviously belonging to a moneyed family matched with a boy the Head Master knew to be from a plebeian background. The Head Master was named W. Brock MacMurray, “The Brock,” to the students, a distinguished looking man with a shock of white hair, an invariable dark blue pinstriped suit, and a commitment to impeccable standards around the school, particularly in matters of student morality.

Donnie, who was a MacMurray favourite, knew that The Brock couldn’t fathom Ross. On the one hand, in The Brock’s reading, the boy had an insouciant air about him; on the other hand, during Ross’s entire time at the school, The Brock had never caught him in anything that crossed the boundary of proper conduct. The date with the blond was typical; it looked somehow suspect to The Brock, but what was the boy doing that was so wrong? Nothing that The Brock could put his finger on as a punishable offence. Mr. MacMurry had no trouble developing a sense of the other students in the school, but not the Mackay boy. Virtually alone in the entire student body, Ross perplexed The Brock.

Donnie often slept over at Ross’s place. So did some of the other boys in the lunch group, but Donnie was the most consistent and regular guest. At least a couple of times during each visit, Mrs. Mackay would ruffle Ross’s hair and say, “Oh, Ross, I wish you were more like Donnie.”

What Rose was getting at with her “more like Donnie” comments was the future. It was clear to Rose that Donnie, as well as the other boys Ross brought to the apartment, had their post-UTS years all figured out. They knew what professions they were aiming toward; it was almost always a “profession” and not a mere “occupation.” They had doped out the specifics of their educations leading to the professions of their choice. As far as Rose could make out, Ross hadn’t a clue what to do with his next few years even though his mother nagged him about taking up a “profession.”

At first, Rose hoped it would be medicine that Ross grabbed on to, but when Ross showed nothing much beyond bemusement for science’s tricks in UTS’s physics and chemistry classes, she gave up her vision of Dr. Ross Mackay. Law would make a strong second choice, though she kept coming back to the example offered by Donnie Fawcett. He wasn’t headed for law or medicine, but he was such a lovely boy, so generous and disciplined and organized, so in control of his life at UTS and in what he planned for himself next in life. Why wasn’t Ross more like that?

Donnie set his sights on a life in education. Inspired by the masters at UTS, Donnie would be a teacher. Remarkably, six years after he graduated from UTS, he was back at the school, teaching Phys Ed and coaching the senior football and basketball teams. Donnie held the job for his entire professional life, the beloved Mr. Chips character of UTS, though this Mr. Chips could still throw a spiral forty yards into the hands of a streaking wide receiver.

Like Donnie, Ross’s other UTS lunch friends lived the futures they planned for themselves as teenagers. One of them, George deVeber, fixed early on medicine, and as a surgeon in his adult years, he pioneered the treatment of kidney disease, founding the first chronic dialysis program in Ontario and the first kidney transplant program. Bill Finlayson, another eager beaver medicine-oriented kid, developed a high-class obstetric and gynecology practice in Bristol, Massachusetts. Two of the UTS guys saw law as their route. George Plaxton built a thriving practice in corporate and commercial law in London, Ontario. Mike Gee specialized in legal issues in the investment business; as a guy also inclined toward civic politics, Mike was elected to several terms on Toronto’s City Council.

Rose’s line, “Oh, Ross, I wish you were more like Donnie,” could have easily been, and sometimes was, “Oh Ross, I wish you were more like George, or Mike, or Bill.” All Rose wanted was a small sign of ambition from Ross. Was it too much to ask? Maybe it was, the way Ross kidded his mother, gently mocking her fixation on his future. Maybe Ross was too much caught up in the tease he laid on Rose.

Finally, in the spring of 1950, Ross’s mother now feeling herself inching toward helplessness, Ross offered Rose a snippet of satisfaction. He told his mother he’d got it into his head he might make a not-bad lawyer. Rose glowed. It was all she asked, a show of future prospects from her son.

But there were mixed signals in Ross’s announcement. Or, more accurately, Ross withheld from his mother the real meaning of his ambition. Rose expected that Ross had in mind a future that included a grand Bay Street law firm, a regular pay cheque with several zeros in the sum, a beautiful wife, dutiful children, and a home in a prosperous neighbourhood. But what Ross was talking about was a practice in criminal law, defending people much like his old Huron School friends with their criminal ways of turning a buck. Ross saw a purpose in such a personal role. It sounded exiting to him. The part about a large pay cheque, a wife and family, and a swell home didn’t enter into Ross’s vision of the future, but when he was around his mother, he kept his mouth shut about that.