By Doreen Marion Gee

My childhood memories are a virtual slideshow of weird and eccentric characters that inhabited mid-century James Bay. In the fifties and sixties, the neighbourhood was a much different place than it is now. Menzies Street was lined with small businesses manned by people right out of the Twilight Zone. Now the sun sets over a much different skyline. The business sector has morphed exponentially.

Fifty years ago, an old cobbler ran a shoe repair shop on Menzies. When you entered his store, he would stumble over a club foot, scowl and be ready for a fight. He was stone deaf. We'd yell out our needed repairs and he'd scream right back at us. We had our own post office on the corner of Simcoe and Menzies, where the bank now stands. The ill-tempered postmistress was in a perpetual bad mood and lashed out at everyone. We'd buy our stamps and run like hell. But, I loved Peacey's Drugstore at 202 Menzies. My sister and I would spend hours breathing in the heady mix of perfumes and chemicals. Locals got their hair poofed at the James Bay Beauty Parlor. In the sixties they had a torture instrument called the "Permanent Wave Machine."

The original "Don" of Don's Food Market was a real character. Always cracking jokes, he kept a stern eye on our fingers in the candy section. Menzies Street in the fifties bristled with quirky little stores like the James Bay Barber Shop and James Bay Cleaners and Dyers.

The most dramatic transformation has been at the location of James Bay Square. I remember a time when it was raw farmland. My mother was overjoyed when it finally grew a Safeway Store! Over the years, the Mall was built with new apartments, businesses and Thrifty Foods. Besides the sheer increase in James Bay retailers over the decades, other interesting changes have been in both the type and size of many businesses and the addition of whole new franchises. Many of the small "mom and pop" stores have disappeared with the advent of bigger outlets from national chains like Pharmasave. TransGlobal is changing the face of property management.

James Bay has become part of the coffee revolution with an influx of java huts, like Serious Coffee. Amazingly, our community has kept the mellow warmth of an old British village with many small and unique establishments like James Bay Coffee and Books.

Brian Dale has been a keen observer of the local scene for about twenty years. Dale laughs when he recalls Rita, his housekeeper friend from the 1980's. She would constantly infuriate her elderly boss by buying the most expensive meats at a butcher shop run by Mr. Mosley in the Parliament Mews Mall. The shop closed and Rita left the country. Dale points out the great changes since the eighties in the types of businesses in James Bay. He mentions the surge in health practitioners and fitness facilities for our aging population. He is concerned that big business is taking over, and he wants the small traditional stores as permanent fixtures.

Dale thinks we need a revival of the history of James Bay and he wants the locals to get involved. "I want to ask all the Beacon readers out there to send in their own ideas and memories and old photos to the Beacon about changes in James Bay over the years. Perhaps the Beacon will publish put them.”.

James Bay has evolved during the past fifty years into a more sophisticated community. But the area is defined by its past and all the unconventional characters who greeted people in their shops in bygone days. Sometimes when I walk down Menzies, I smell shoe leather and catch a glare from someone in a window. Then I know that I am home.