Lurch and the Winter Carnival

From my previous posts it would be easy to get the impression that I didn't like it at St. Paul's High... Nothing could be further from the truth. It was a truly unique place - never a dull moment... It was the "best and the brightest" running amok :-) Definitely one of the best times of my life...

One of the more unusual characters was an 18 year old freshman nicknamed "Lurch". He was 6'6" and was what we called "not too swift"... What he lacked in "swiftness" he made up for with raw strength. One day he got irritated at John Doig, picked him up and shoved him into the wall outside the classroom so hard it opened up a gap between the wall and ceiling... Now, to fully appreciate that you need to know that Doig was the starting center / nose tackle on the varsity football team...

BTW - I'm pretty sure it was Lurch who whacked me in the head with the snow shovel... It was one of those "Three Stooges" bits... I was behind Lurch when he turned around holding the shovel. I didn't get knocked out but I'm pretty sure it caused (yet another) a concussion so I'm a bit hazy on the details...

Then one day Peter Paolucci decided to wrestle Lurch. It was during lunch in the corner of the gym. (This was before Peter and I became friends.) I have no idea why he did that. It wasn't like a "grudge match" or anything. But (as best as I can recall) it went on for close to 40 minutes... Lurch outweighed Peter by a good 80 lbs and was tossing him around like a rag doll - and Peter was laughing during most of it... Unreal...
So - whereas my reputation was established by getting knocked out in 15 seconds, Peter's was established by holding his own against the strongest guy in school for 40 minutes... Nobody messed with him after that. And the next school year I heard one of our classmates warning a new student not to fight him because they probably wouldn't last long enough to hurt him...

OK - I called this post "Lurch and the Winter Carnival" because neither topic is long enough to merit a full post and Lurch got lost during the Winter Carnival snowshoe race :-) So, that's the segue :-)

School winter carnivals may be commonplace in the northern regions, but the one at St. Paul's in the winter of 66/67 was my first.
First, there was a snow sculpture contest - most of the "artwork" had taken days to create and was quite imposing. I remember a 10 foot tall dinosaur, and Snoopy on his doghouse (way larger than life). Yeah - there was a lot of snow to work with...
Then there were snowmobile races on the football field... Heck - I'd never even seen a snowmobile until I got to Winnipeg and it seemed like half the kids in school owned one :-)
And after dark there was the snowshoe race through the nearby woods. They set up signs to mark the course but I guess Lurch missed one...
But the real highlight of the evening (for me, anyway) was the broomball game between Sacred Heart and St. Mary's... The girls were issued brooms and sent out onto the hockey rink in their street shoes and outfits (typically short skirts and fur jackets) to try and "sweep" a rubber ball into the opposing goal...
But they mostly just ended up in piles sliding across the rink. And watching them try to get back up was almost as entertaining as watching them pile up :-) Yeah - it was memorable... I remember wondering what possessed those girls to voluntarily do that - I suspect it was just the depth of the rivalry between the schools. They were downright vicious with those brooms...

Yeah - it was good times :-)