In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

There’s a paradox lodged in the very idea of writing about how a particular place shaped one’s pop cultural proclivities. At least there is for me. The comforts I derived from things like movies, TV , comics, radio, and records ran in deliberate opposition to particularity. I came to love pop culture because it didn’t matter where I was. What I cherished was how it erased geography. By the time my family arrived in St. Catharines in October 1970, I was newly turned thirteen and had already moved some ten times. The why of it doesn’t really matter—lest, of course, you think my parents were on the lam and they weren’t—but the net result for me was a decidedly overdeveloped fondness for anything that offered both distraction and stability in an otherwise constantly changing domestic environment. With regard to root cause, my own full tilt toward pop cultural pursuits is simply explained: I chased them because they could be caught anywhere. So, while I can’t recall the particular quirk of timing that brought my family from London, Ontario, to St. Catharines on the day of my thirteenth birthday—although I’m sure the reasons weren’t nearly as personal as I probably had suspected—I do remember what things concerned me the most, apart from the reasonable pubescent dread of a new school. I was worried about what shows would be available on local TV; how many movie theatres were in town; where to get regular supplies of magazines, paperback books, and records, and—most despairingly—whether there would be anyone within the city limits who shared my love of horror comics. I needed to know this xiii FOREWORD | Reflections on Everyday Life in Niagara GEOFF PEVERE place was just like every other place I’d ever lived. At least in the ways that most mattered. Already prone to extreme affinities—by thirteen, I’d begun collections of comics, LPs, magazines, paperbacks, museum brochures, MADs, and Peanuts strips clipped from the newspaper—I found myself in an especially acute funk because I’d been compelled to arrive in the Garden City without my comics. (Really: how could anything bloom without them?) Offered a choice by my mother to keep either the comic or paperback collection, I opted for the latter in what must have seemed at the time a gesture of sorts toward maturity. Needless to say, I almost immediately regretted the decision and sunk into a pimply funk that intermittently manifested itself throughout most of my adolescence. Some of my adulthood too. Come to think of it nearly forty years on I can still get pissed about those comics. Things came around, though, at least in the way that most mattered. School sucked, of course, but other things fell into place promisingly. The St. Catharines Standard, bless its soul, had the most extensive daily comics section I’d ever seen: a full page consisting of two full columns of strips, including such essentials as B.C., Pogo, Beetle Bailey, and the magisterial Peanuts. I discovered a St. Paul Street cinema called the Palace (later sectioned off into the Towne I and II), which featured weekly discount double-bill fare like House of Dark Shadows and Count Yorga, Vampire. Just doors away was a used book store at which I quickly stocked up on second-hand Ian Fleming James Bond paperbacks, and just around the corner from that was Christopher ’s Smoke Shop, an excellent emporium in which to find such crucial reading material as Eerie, Creepy, and Famous Monsters of Filmland. Records of both the single and album variety were to be had at the Sam the Record Man outlet at the then still-unroofed Pen Centre shopping mall, as were the weekly CHUM-AM Top 40 music charts and required rock reading like Rolling Stone, Creem, and Circus. TV and radio proved similarly reassuring. Because of its situation smack at the axis of the Golden Horseshoe, St. Catharines was a veritable repository of broadcasting bounty. TV beamed in from Buffalo, Erie, and Pittsburgh stateside, and from Toronto, Kitchener, and Hamilton. The latter was where the remarkable CHCH was based, a TV station that somehow managed to acquire broadcasting rights to movies that had played theatrically only a year or two before. At a time when movies customarily dropped out of sight for up to three or four years before resurfacing on prime time TV , CHCH was nothing short of a fall...

Share