My stepfather's brother, Charles Nichols, was the editor of the old Toronto Telegram newspaper. My interest in reading began with Ian Fleming's James Bond novels and Charles sent me copies of the newspaper with excerpts from a then new Bond novel. Anyhow, my mother and I were driving to Woodstock, Ontario and stopped to visit Charles at his Yorkville home in Toronto around 1968. Everything was run down. We sat in the backyard, the grass uncut, and for supper he brought out a tureen of lukewarm soup; there was a butter dish and my mother whispered to me that the butter was rancid. Then Charles recounted that as a reporter he had visited Hitler's bunker at the end of the War and that there were Christmas cards for Hitler lying on the bunker's floor. Then he commented that he wasn't too impressed with hippies, they annoyed him; he said they hadn't earned their beards. What would he think of today's hipsters? These two comments of his have stayed with me all of these years. It was a rather strained visit made more so because when we prepared to leave our car wouldn't start and we had to stay the night. I remember paint peeling from the ceiling in the upstairs bedroom where I slept that night.
