third post

• My father died in 1973.
• There was always a special kind of closeness between Wayne and his grandparents. After my father died, Wayne was even closer to his grandma-my mother, Mary.
• Wayne's grandma told him that if you were hairy that means you are going to be an awfully rich person. she was sure of that, but she was also pratical.
• When Wayne was 5 years old he told her that some day he was going to have a car. From that day on she started putting a little of her pension money aside. In fact, she buried it. And by the time Wayne was 16, she was ready. "I'm going to buy you a car," she told him. "I've got the money buried." Wayne thanked her but couldn't let her do that.
• A year later when Wayne turned pro, he bought a car of his own, a new Pontiac Trans-Am that he got in Indianapolis, and he drove it to the farm.
• The farm wasn't just a hockey place. It was the kind of growing -up place city kids might dream of.
• Wayne had been fooling around with a lacrose stick, bouncing a ball, and trying fancy stick-work, like that kind of thing, and when the ball got away and went crashing through the farmhouse window. His grandfather wasn't all that upset. After all, boys will be boys.
• Now, my father mad his own wine in the basement.
• I guess our back yard is a little bit famous. Just about every book or story on Wayne's life gets around to it: the rink I made in the yard behind the little house on Varadi Ave. in Brantford where Wayne learned to skate and Walter Gretzky built a hockey star.
• I flooded the yard the first time in the winter of 1965 and I've done it every year since. It hasn't always been easy. One day the sprinkler on the hose broke when i was flooding. Someone had to go to Canadian Tire and ask the salesman where he kept his lawn sprinklers. It was December.
• The second winter we had the rink and I tried to get Wayne registered in minor hockey. He was 5 years old, he was living on the ice and he was bugging me. But in those days, minor hockey in Brantford started with 10 year-olds. There was no place for Wayne to play. Boy, was he disappointed. The following year, a few weeks before the 1967-68 season, we saw a notice in the paper: open tryouts for the major novie team. Just come to the civic centre.
• A man named Dick Martin, who became Wayne's first coach, ignored his size and age, he only looked at his skating, and signed him up.
• When we first movied into the house on Varadi Ave. it had 3 bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen and a bathroom and covered 900 sqaure feet. Plenty of room for a huband, wife and a 7 month old baby. Then, overnight it seemed, there were 7 of us and the house wasn't big anymore.
• In the fall of 1982, we extended the kitchen and dining room and bath upstairs, which gave us more breathing space.