It was the last winter of the Second World War. The first week of February 1945. Far away in Europe, the Nazi war machine was crumbling; the Soviets were closing in on Berlin; the Americans would soon be crossing the Rhine. The war would be over in just a few months. The Big Three — Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin — were already at Yalta, meeting to decide what the world would look like when the fighting was finally done.
Scott Young was one of the people doing that fighting. He was a reporter by trade — he would eventually author dozens of books and co-host Hockey Night in Canada for a while. He first went to Europe to cover the war for the Canadian Press. His dispatches were published in newspapers all over Canada. But he soon joined the Royal Canadian Navy instead, serving as a communications officer.
The war was taking a toll, though; Young was suffering from chronic fatigue and losing weight at an alarming rate. So, he was sent back to Canada for tests. That meant he would get to make a brief visit home to Toronto, where he could spend a little time with his wife, Rassy, and their toddler, Bob.
When he got home, he found the city covered in snow. That winter was a terrible winter — one of the worst in the entire recorded history of Toronto. One infamous blizzard in December killed twenty-one people: one died in an overturned streetcar on Queen Street, more than a dozen suffered fatal heart attacks from shovelling half a metre of snow. All winter long, the temperature barely ever climbed above freezing, so the snow just kept piling up as the blizzards kept coming. By the time Young came home at the beginning of February, Toronto had already seen more than a metre and a half of snow.
There was yet another big storm coming. As the city braced itself for the blizzard, the Youngs spent the day visiting with friends who lived in a little house near Eglinton Avenue and Mount Pleasant. It was far on the outskirts of the city back then; a long way from downtown in the days before the subway. And so, as the storm descended, the Youngs decided to stay over. They dragged a mattress downstairs and set it up on the dining room floor.
Scott Young wrote about that night in his memoir: “I remember the street in Toronto, the wild February blizzard through which only the hardiest moved, on skis, sliding downtown through otherwise empty streets to otherwise empty offices.”
The Youngs’ love story wouldn’t last forever. In the coming years, they would often fight; she drank, he had affairs. In the end, he fell in love with another woman and Rassy discovered their letters. Scott took their sons to an Italian restaurant on King Street and told them their parents were getting divorced. But on that stormy winter night in 1945, they were happy. A young wife and her new husband home on leave from the war.
“We were just past our middle twenties,” Young remembered, “and had been apart for most of the previous year.… We were healthy young people, much in love, apart too much. It was a small house and when we made love that night, we tried to be fairly quiet, and perhaps were.”
Nine months later, the war was over; peace had finally come. Scott Young was back home again. When Rassy went into labour, a neighbour drove them down to the fancy new wing of the Toronto General Hospital. It was early in the morning of a warm November day when the baby came. They named him Neil.
He would grow up to become one of the most famous rock stars in the world.