By Dennis Thompsett
Oh it's always been a strange place, our Mudtown. A place of edges. The edge of the land before the water. The edge of the flats before the cliffs. The northernmost edge of the city. The tattered edge of respectabilty. The tightrope edge of poverty. A working-class community always on the edge, living paycheck to paycheck, huddled under the brooding cliffs, between the Devil and the deep blue Bay.
I last lived in Mudtown when I was about eight years old, way back in 1958, before my parents moved up to the East Hill, yet I still vividly remember the place, the people and the possibilities for getting into mischief.
My brother and I liberated pop bottles from the Pepsi plant on Third Avenue and cashed them in at Marie's store - because back in those days, crime did pay.
There's always been a debate about why it was called Mudtown in the first place. Some say it was originally a racist reference to the many black people who settled there. Others claim it was because 3rd avenue down there was the last road in the city to be paved, so it was always muddy track. And still others swear that, because it was at the base of the cliffs, whenever it rained, mud would slide down the hill. When we moved up on the hill, we lived right along the top of the escarpment on 5th avenue and our toilet went down a crevasse and came out below the cliffs. So I know for a fact that there was a lot more than just mud sliding down those hills.
For whatever reason, however, it has always been called Mudtown, and always will be, although the city fathers have never liked the name. In fact, in 1907, the politically correct downtown sponsored a big contest to re-christen Mudtown and the snazzy name that won was Northcliffe.
Which is why, in 1922, when the Division Street United Church built a small chapel in Mudtown, they called it the Northcliffe Mission Church. Now whether it was built to keep black people and the poor Mudtown Muggles out of their fine new stone church down at Amen Corners, or if it really was a sincere bit of community outreach to make worship more convenient for the people of Mudtown, we'll never know.
But today that Northcliffe Mission Church is the only building still standing that once incorporated the oh-so respectable Northcliffe name. And it illustrates the fact that. like a movie monster, Mudtown just will not die, as that building is now, ironically, called Mudtown Pottery.
But where does Mudtown really start?
When I was a kid that border was said to be "as far away from where you lived as possible, because no-one wanted to be associated in any way with Mudtown."
The purists maintain that Mudtown officially starts at the little Northcliffe Mission Church. The middle-of-the-roaders claim it starts at 18th Street, where the long steps used to come down from the top of the hill that men used to go to work at Keenan's and the Table Factory.
And the anything goes, expansion team theorists insists it starts at the Catholic Hill (15th Street).
Paul Strimas - who lived between 15th Street and 18th - claims he was a Mudtown kid no matter where the border was. He remembers Mudtown as a true community, where everyone knew everyone else and doors were always open. So you might come downstairs in the morning and find a neighbour in the kitchen, hiding from a spouse or from the police, or just with a fresh case of beer, hoping to get a party started.
And even if there were fistfights or harsh words uttered in the heat of the moment, as there often were, all was forgiven on the weekend over a backyard BBQ - of good old fried baloney - the dependable, economic construction material that built every poor kid in Owen Sound.
But north of the Northcliffe Mission Church and south of that corner by the Malleable hill where the train tracks used to cross the road, you were sort of stuck. There was no debate. You were in Greater Metropolitan Mudtown whether you liked it or not.
The city didn't even provide a school bus for Mudtown kids out there, so they were given special tokens and got to ride the city bus for free into Strathcona school every day.
Otherwise it was a long slog into town. Mudtown kid John Brown remembers piling up his wagon with pop bottles and hauling them all the way into Marie Simpson's store between 17th and 18th Street on 3rd Avenue, to cash them in.
Other kids claimed they jumped on the Dayliner for a free ride into town when it slowed down to make the turn at the bottom of the Malleable Hill.
Joe Robison, who lived out there at the bottom of the Malleable Hill, said that train woke him up every morning and that it was going way too fast for anybody to jump on.
Me and my brother used to put .22 bullets on the tracks out there and when the Dayliner came along it would set them off. The train would always stop so someone aboard could see what was going on, then would start up again.
Maybe that's when those Mudtown kids jumped on? I don't know - we were always in hiding, giggling like maniacs, when that train stopped.
But being way out in the Mudtown boonies had its advantages too. There were no end of old deserted factories out there on the shore, like the old stove foundry, to explore and break the windows out of. And deserted sandy beaches behind those factories for all-summer swimming and hanging out.
My first ever date was with a Mudtown girl - there's none like her today - and even though she pushed the ejection button on me after a couple of dates, I still remember her fondly. For summer fun, other Mudtown girls took over an old rowboat behind the Stove Foundry, decorated it with flowers, and took it on "maiden voyages" up and down the shore, like Cleopatra on her barge, giving the ordinary people a rare chance to see real Mudtown princesses.
Mudtown kids like John Brown learned lessons that no one else learned, too. One being, that if you wanted to play ice hockey, you had to bring an axe and a bucket. You chopped a hole in the ice and brought up water to make a smooth rink, then came back when it froze and played midnight hockey under the stars.
Mudtown has always had very good memories for me, whether I lived down there or whether I lived right above the cliffs and went down to go swimming or fishing at Russels, or was just gleefully rolling tires down on Mudtown houses from on high.
I tried to talk to as many Mudtown kids as I could find for this article, but a lot of the people I knew and grew up with have learned their lessons and passed on already. But even though your voices are silent now, guys, whenever I think of those happy days down in Mudtown, I'll remember your names and your faces and your unquenchable Mudtown spirits:
Glen Hillyer
Jimmy Jones
Margie Jones
Audie Morton
Jim Morton
Leo Couture
Jim Tompkins
Joe Hillyer
Jim Wayner
Donny Miller
Denny Miller
Mudtown eh? It's always been a place of edges. Some sharp as a happy memory. Some dull as an old heartache.
Dennis Thompsett was born and raised in Owen Sound and lives in Las Vegas.