To understand Reggie, it helps to understand the place where he grew up.

Souris is a small town at the eastern end of Prince Edward Island, Canada’s smallest province. During Reggie’s childhood, its population was roughly 1,500 people. It was the kind of place where almost everything was within walking distance and where people tended to know one another—and often one another’s families.

The Wikipedia article on Souris, Prince Edward Island provides a general history of the town. What follows is something more personal: the Souris that Reggie and our family knew during his formative years.

The map also shows something important about the town. From Souris, a ferry crosses the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the Magdalen Islands in Quebec. The ferry terminal and the harbour were directly in front of the neighbourhood where Reggie grew up. Ships, fishing boats, transport trucks and travellers were therefore part of the landscape of his childhood.

His Home

Reggie grew up at 35 Breakwater Street, overlooking the ferry terminal and Souris Harbour. In milder weather it was a beautiful view of the water and harbour activity. In winter, it could become a landscape of snow and ice.

Our grandfather lived next door. Nearby were his barn and a small building that had originally been my aunt’s childhood playhouse. During Reggie’s high-school years, he made that building his own. Officially we called it “the Shed,” although I have since been told that some people knew it as “the Animal House.”

The Shed would become an important part of Reggie’s teenage years.

Our uncle lived on the property on the other side of us, and directly behind the houses were a series of potato warehouses. My grandfather had owned much of this property and operated a successful potato business, R.S. MacDonald and Sons. If I remember correctly, the farming operation eventually encompassed about 1,500 acres of potatoes.

As children, we spent a great deal of time playing in and around those warehouses.

And one small piece of family trivia: before our house at 35 Breakwater Street was built, the property was a cabbage field.

Commerce and Industry

ouris has traditionally depended heavily on farming, fishing, government services and the businesses that support them. Its protected harbour also made it an important fishing port and the home of the ferry service to the Magdalen Islands.

Our father had experience in both potato farming and lobster fishing, although fishing was his passion. He began setting lobster traps before and after school when he was about ten years old, using a small dory to reach them in the harbour.

Years of that kind of work may explain the enormous forearms he retained throughout his life. When my wife first met him, she described them as his “Popeye arms.”

The Souris of Reggie’s childhood was more compact than the town is today. We walked almost everywhere.

Main Street contained most of the businesses we regularly encountered: Leroy MacDonald’s gas station, Hazelton’s Grocery Store, MacPhee’s Grocery Store, the pool hall, Post Office, Winterhalder’s store, Larter’s Drug Store, Chaisson’s Restaurant, the Co-op, Poole’s Grocery, the Legion, Irving and Esso stations, and, in earlier years, Mama Jacques at the beach.

Hazelton’s particularly sticks in my memory because its owner, Spurgeon “Spurg” Hazelton, was always very nice to us—and his cooking was excellent.

There was also Kentucky Fried Chicken, which would eventually acquire a place of its own in Reggie’s story because of the number of pranks he pulled there.

Businesses came and went, but there was never a great deal of shopping or commercial entertainment. If you wanted much more, you went to Charlottetown.

Culture

Souris had a small cinema that everyone knew as the Show Hall, run by Claude Richards. If my memory is correct, it stopped showing movies sometime in the 1980s. The building was eventually revived with a greater emphasis on arts and live performance.

Otherwise, experiencing much in the way of theatre or entertainment generally meant travelling to Charlottetown, perhaps to see a movie or, much less frequently for us, a performance at the Confederation Centre.

Television wasn’t exactly an unlimited source of entertainment either.

We had two channels: CBC and CTV.

Cable television did not reach us because extending the infrastructure to a small community like Souris was considered too expensive.

One consolation was the British comedy shown on CBC. Reggie and I both loved programs such as Monty Python, The Two Ronnies and Benny Hill, among others. That kind of humour undoubtedly appealed to—and probably encouraged—Reggie’s own rather twisted sense of humour.

Finding Your Own Entertainment

There weren’t endless organized activities available to young people in Souris.

If you were heavily involved in sports, there was plenty to occupy your time. Reggie wasn’t.

Instead, he spent a great deal of time outdoors, hanging around with friends, exploring the town and riding his motocross bike. As he grew older, some of the ways he and his friends found to entertain themselves became considerably less innocent.

That is part of why Souris matters to this archive.

The Shed, the harbour, the ferry terminal, Main Street, the potato warehouses and the businesses around town aren’t simply background scenery. Many of them appear again in Reggie’s stories.

This was the small world in which Reggie grew up—and the place from which much of his larger story began.