My parents didn’t give me shit about homework. My mother couldn’t read or write. My dad was busy with bootlegging.
BERNIE GUINDON on his early education
The Guindon family home on Simcoe Street South was in the centre of Oshawa’s old southern immigrant neighbourhood. It was much poorer than the northern, suburban area that later attracted Toronto’s commuting class. Directly across the street from the Guindons’ rented house was the Simcoe Street elementary school, and students there quickly made it clear they didn’t want Catholics—who they called “Cat-lickers”—on their playground. “I used to go across the street and fight all of the Protestants,” Bernie Guindon said. “I was a ‘cat-licker.’ I fought a lot of the big guys. I did good. I held my own. That’s how I got into boxing.”
At the Holy Cross Catholic Elementary School just up the street, Guindon was constantly in trouble for fighting, talking and not doing his homework. Jack was better behaved, but he fell behind too. Jack had lost about two years of schooling because of his leg operations, and neither parent was pushing the boys to catch up. “My parents didn’t give me shit about homework,” Guindon said. “My mother couldn’t read or write. My dad was busy with bootlegging.”
Guindon’s lack of academic production led him frequently to the principal’s office, where a nun he nicknamed “Dirty Gertie” cut an imposing figure with a leather strap in hand. “That strap looked pretty goddamned big. I used to have welts on my hands all of the time.”
In class Bernie listened to a priest say God knew everything past, present and future. That didn’t settle much in Guindon’s mind. He raised his hand and asked, “If God knows all of this, then he already knows if I’m going to heaven or hell, and if I’m going to hell, why would he want anything to do with me?”
The bright spot in Guindon’s days came after school, when he boxed at the Simcoe Hall Boys’ Club on Simcoe Street South. He often tried to drag Jack along and sometimes he succeeded. Their parents weren’t home after school, and young Bernie had plenty of aggression to vent. “At that time, I never thought about boxing,” Jack said. “I went to the Y and took up bodybuilding, which I should have stuck to. Bernie wanted me to get into the boxing. I was his sparring partner. Oh boy.”
Experienced boxers taught Guindon a lesson his father began years before: if you’re in a fight, it’s vastly preferable to give out the punches than receive them. “When you’re young, you’re not that vicious. When I first started, I used to do a lot of playing around. As you got a little older, you knew the guys are out there to hurt you. It’s no longer a fun game.”
His father enjoyed watching Bernie fight, although he didn’t praise him. “He thought I was pretty lucky, pretty good.” His mother cheered him on. “Whenever she had the opportunity, she’d come watch, if it was around town. She didn’t mind me boxing. She knew it kept me out of shit.”
Shit still came at home, where the fighting was never fun and no one cheered. But by the age of fifteen, Bernie could fight back. “I slapped him for beating my mother once. I gave him a shot in the head. He left shortly after that.”
The same year that his father moved out, Bernie was expelled for truancy, which gave him more time to train. He was now in his third year of boxing and starting to make a name for himself, headlining boxing cards at places like the Avalon dance hall on King Street West. He ran up an amateur record of twelve wins and no losses and was clearly a kid to watch. For all of its brutality, boxing offers a basic fairness that appealed to him. It doesn’t matter, once you step into the ring, whether you’re rich and snooty or poor white trash from the wrong side of the tracks. All that matters is what you do with your fists. “The thing in boxing is the better man wins.”
His mother found a boyfriend who liked motorcycles. He took Guindon for a ride. “It was unbelievable. He asked me if I wanted to drive. I said yes, so he sidesaddles the bike and makes me change positions without even stopping.” Guindon was hooked and soon bought a 1948 Matchless G80.
He began hanging around the newly formed Golden Hawks Motorcycle Club. Clubs were a new and exhilarating thing in the 1950s, especially after Marlon Brando and Lee Marvin appeared as bikers in the movie The Wild One. The Hawks were the largest bike club in the province east of Toronto, with several Korean War and World War II veterans in their ranks. When they admitted seventeen-year-old Guindon as a full member, his initiation consisted of chugging a bottle of red wine, something he found particularly unpleasant. The parade of drunks through his family’s living room had already killed any notion that drinking was glamorous, and he soon quit drinking altogether.
Guindon was quickly promoted to Hawks road captain, which put him in charge of mapping out runs and making sure no one got lost or in trouble on the way to events. When they rode together smoothly as a group, the Hawks were impossible to ignore. Individually, members of the club might be forgettable, but everything changed when they rode down the highway together in a tight, loud formation, like a fighter squadron. They felt free and dangerous and it was intoxicating. “It gave you a sense of power, when you were in a pack. You could hear the rumble. You could hear it for a long ways. They knew you were coming.”
At the start of a run, Guindon loved to growl, “Come on, you criminals.” It was his responsibility to make sure the bikes assumed a proper formation, neither too close nor too far apart, as they raced along at over sixty miles an hour. Colliding at a high speed wouldn’t be just embarrassing, someone could die. “I’d run a few off the road. They’re not just fucking things up for themselves. There’s going to be a major accident and I don’t want to be one of them.” Guindon was promoted again, to sergeant-at-arms, which put him in charge of discipline. He kept order at meetings and made sure everyone paid their dues.
He wore a helmet back then, even though they didn’t become mandatory in Ontario until 1969. It wasn’t for the safety. He used helmets as a government-approved punch enhancer. At first he wore a small one, called a “half casket,” which didn’t go down over the ears and doubled as a nice, light boxing glove during a rumble with a rival club. He then shifted to a full helmet when he realized he could punch even harder with more helmet. “They’re even better. You’ve got more plastic to hit them with.”
Guindon still lived in Oshawa with his mother, but he worked at the BIA gas station at the corner of Simcoe and Gibb Streets, which was owned by former motorcycle racer Monty Cranfield. As Guindon dashed back and forth, filling cars, he caught the eye of a new girl in the neighbourhood. Suzanne Blais, who went by the nickname “Nicky,” and her mother had moved from Toronto in August 1958, settling into an apartment building looking over the gas station.
Suzanne was three years younger and liked something about how Guindon looked as he handled the pumps. She was smitten by his slim build, kind smile and “gorgeous eyes.”
“Who’s that cute guy pumping gas?” she asked her mother.
“I don’t know. Why don’t you ask him?”
The next day, on her way to school, Suzanne walked up to the stranger.
“I don’t need gas, but I would love to know your name.”
“I’m Bernie, and you are…?”
“Suzanne.”
He asked where she lived and she pointed to the apartment building.
“Up there.”
He said he hadn’t seen her before. The conversation shifted to school and she said she went to Holy Cross. That was his old school, he told her. He could tell by her accent that she was French and said he was French too. They had so many things in common, Suzanne noted, as her interest increased. It didn’t escape her notice that several other girls enjoyed stopping by the pumps to speak with Bernie, as well.
That night, Suzanne told her mother his name and that he was French. Her mother wanted to get in touch with his parents because she only knew a few French-speaking people in the area.
This is a guy I would really like to know forever, Suzanne thought that night.
She arrived in Guindon’s life with a tangled back story that rivalled his own. Suzanne’s parents had grown up two farms away from each other in Quebec, but after Suzanne was conceived, her father left his wife for a woman named Alma. Her mother vowed she would never let him see their baby girl. In time, Suzanne’s estranged father married Alma but still pined for time with his daughter.
Suzanne later heard stories of how her father would park at the end of her grandparents’ laneway at their farm in Saint-Eugène, Quebec, in hopes of catching a glimpse of Suzanne. Her grandfather kept a rifle close at hand and made it clear that there would be no safe drive up his laneway. “He said, ‘You cannot see Suzanne because my daughter made that rule,’ ” Suzanne recalled. “ ‘You went with Alma. You’re out of the picture.’ ”
Her father died in 1954, never resolving the anger that split his family. “I never met him,” Suzanne said.
In time, Suzanne’s mother decided her girl should learn English, the language she associated with business and success. Hearing she could find a job at the General Motors plant in Oshawa, she and Suzanne packed up and left for English-speaking Ontario.
Around this time, Bernie’s mother loaned him five hundred dollars to buy a dark blue 1949 MG convertible with a white cloth top. He would pay her back, bit by bit, and it didn’t escape him that her loan was a grand gesture of love. “She had to work on her knees. Scraping floors and washing floors.” Suzanne loved the convertible too and was thrilled when he took her to the movies and bowling. “I’ll always be your protector,” he told her. “You can call on me any time.”
When Suzanne’s mother was unable to land a job at GM, she took a job steaming sweaters in Toronto. Suzanne decided to drop out of school to help pay the bills. In May 1959, she called Guindon and asked if he would drive them to Toronto so they could look for an apartment. “He helped us out with no hesitation, more than once,” Suzanne said. “By this time, Bernie and I had become quite close, and I wanted to stay in Oshawa.”
The teenagers planned to meet one evening in Toronto and go for dinner, but Bernie didn’t show up. Suzanne got tired of waiting and went on to the restaurant herself. He didn’t appear there either and she ate alone.
Bernie wrote her a letter, dated January 24, 1960, explaining that one of the MG’s headlights had gone out and he had needed to get back to Oshawa before dark. He suggested that Suzanne take a bus out to Oshawa so they could get together, and that he could drop by her home in Toronto with his good friend Vince Barrese.
Dear Nicky how are you coming along. I received your letter while I was watching TV…So I decided to write my first letter to a girl. Vince and I went to see if you were home and your Mother told us to go to the Pacific. We went there and you were not there so we went back to your apt. and your mother wasn’t there so we decided that we would take off home. It was getting dark out so we wanted to make it home fast. I’ll try to get up there as soon as possible maybe within two-weeks or less…I hope you will give me something when I go up there. If you would like…come to Oshawa…I wouldn’t mind at all. I would be very pleased. I hope you’ll write me back as soon as possible and tell me if she wants Vince to come and if you made up your mind to come to Oshawa. I hope youl’ forgive my writing. I know it’s sloppy but I can’t help it
Boyfriend
Bernie
XXXXXXXXXXX I am waiting for some soon.
Money was tight and Suzanne couldn’t afford the trip to Oshawa. By the next time she saw Guindon, both of their lives had changed in large ways.