Orr: My Story

onePARRY SOUNDIt would have been around 7:30 A.M., maybe 7:45 if Mom had let me sleep in. I’d hear her say, “Bobby, it’s time to get up,” and then the morning would begin. Most days started off the same at the Orr house back then. Dad would be up and at it early, and off to work at the CIL plant. Mom would usually have some breakfast waiting for us, but other times we’d make our own. Then it would be out the door and off to school. We walked to Victory Elementary, because there was no one to give you a ride, and there wasn’t a school bus to pick you up. It was a decent hike whether we went straight up Bowes Street or took a shortcut through the woods. But in wintertime, the snow got pretty deep, so we usually stayed on the sidewalk. I walked that route so many times, I could probably make my way to my old school blindfolded even today. I might as well have been blindfolded then, for all I stopped to look around. I suppose I was like any other kid, never content to be just in one place. I was always on my way to somewhere else. That meant one of two places. If it wasn’t school, it was the water. I was the kind of kid who was always on the move. In a town like Parry Sound, there was always something to keep us busy. In the warm weather, whether it was after school or on the weekend, I never missed a chance to grab my fishing rod and head across the road directly in front of our house, the road that followed the river. There, I could slip down an embankment and in seconds have my line in the water, imagining that some monster fish would be waiting to take the bait. It might have been only for a few minutes, but it always made my day. While I never hated school, I loved to fish. It’s funny what you remember. I don’t recall much from my geography classes, but I clearly remember what it was like to be sitting on the shore of the Seguin River, waiting to see what I could pull from the water. I loved it, and that enjoyment has lasted my entire life. During the long winter months, I would sit at my school desk and that big clock on the classroom wall would take more and more of my attention as the afternoon started to wind down. I couldn’t wait to be dismissed so I could get through the front door of that school once all my books had been put away. I understood that soon enough I would have on a pair of skates and all would be well—as long as there was enough daylight to see the puck. The routine of my daily life as a kid was pretty simple. One way or another, it always seemed to lead me in the direction of a body of water, regardless of the time of year. The only question was whether the water would be frozen solid for hockey or open and flowing for fish. If you want to answer questions about where you have ended up in this world, it is important to understand first where you came from and where you have been. It’s kind of like framing a cherished photograph. Where someone is born and raised serves as the border for many of the events and incidents that will play out in any particular picture. The place where it all begins for any of us puts everything else into context. For me, home was Parry Sound, Ontario, a small town nestled along the shores of Georgian Bay. I suppose Parry Sound was the same kind of small town you would have found all across Canada at that time. By that I mean it was a safe place, generally very quiet, and a great place to be a kid. Parry Sound is a few hours north of Toronto, far enough north that there is still a lot of bush and water for kids to explore and enjoy, and a lot of space. It had a small-town flavor. When I was growing up, the permanent population might have been around five thousand people during fall, winter, and spring. But come July and August, I’d guess that those numbers swelled maybe ten times over with cottagers and tourists. The nearby lakes and waterways, and the thirty thousand islands that dot the coast of Georgian Bay, have always been irresistible during the summer months. Still, despite the annual migration of vacationers, it was a tight-knit community where people knew everybody else’s children and kept an eye on them. If someone got into trouble, the word spread quickly, and sooner or later a brother or sister, mother or father would know all the details of your problem. As a result, most of us realized early in life that it was best not to get in trouble unless you wanted it to be a topic of conversation around town. It is no surprise to me that my grandfather Robert Orr chose a place like Parry Sound when he immigrated from Ballymena, Ireland. The community he came to was quaint and small and had many of the characteristics you might find in a tiny Irish town. It was here that he met and married my grandmother Elsie. My father, Doug, was their third child. In 1943, he married my mother, whose maiden name was Arva Steele, and they decided to continue the family tradition by settling down in Parry Sound. My parents would have five children: Patricia, Ronnie, myself (the middle child), Penny, and Doug Jr. I can vaguely remember living in a house on Tower Hill, and my most vivid memory of that location was the black-and-white television set in the living room. That would have been in the 1950s, so our programming selections were pretty limited. I can still picture all of us sitting on the floor eagerly watching the test pattern until it was time to go to bed. I suppose you could assume from that description that it didn’t take a whole lot to entertain the Orr kids. But my clearest memories of home and family begin with the old house at 24 Great North Road. It was always filled with family and friends, and years later, when I set up my own company, I called it Great North Road in homage to that long-ago place where my life took shape. As you drive into Parry Sound coming down the big hill on Bowes Street, you will find Great North Road on your left, just before the bridge that leads into the center of town. The road twists and turns to follow the Seguin River. Our home was across the street from the water, just a few houses down from the bridge. The old homestead was no palace, by any means. The floors, for example, weren’t quite level. In fact, anything left on the floor would eventually end up on the other side of the room. On one occasion, my older sister, Pat, had to stay home because she was ill, and when I went up to check on her, she had a unique problem. Our mother, deciding to play it safe, had placed an empty pail at the side of Pat’s bed, just in case it was needed in a hurry. Because of the pitch of the floor, the pail would slowly slide away from the bed. It meant that poor Pat had to keep dragging herself out from under the covers to go bring it back. (My contribution to her care was to put a heavy book behind the pail to keep it from moving.)I remember that during the long Northern Ontario winters, the house could get terribly cold. If you wanted to watch anything on the television set for any length of time, you would have to dress as if you were heading outside. (By the time we moved to Great North Road, we had viewing options far more interesting than the test pattern, so keeping warm while we watched was more of a priority.) We had a big living room in that house, yet the only day of the year all of us actually sat down in it was Christmas Day. We just didn’t have the money to heat it the rest of the time. And when I say parts of the house went unheated, I don’t mean it was merely cool. I mean it was literally freezing. On the coldest days, frost would accumulate on the light switches. We used to have to flick off little pieces of ice before we could turn on the lights. Of course, winter would inevitably give way to spring, and in our home that always produced a minor irritation for everyone. The house was built into a ridge of granite, and as the warmer spring temperatures arrived, the melting ice and snow would run down the face of the rock and stream in through the kitchen door. Perhaps Dad just decided it wasn’t worth the time to fix the problem. But I remember that water coming through the door year after year. No, the old place wasn’t much to look at. Years later, after I’d started to become pretty well known, I was standing in front of the house when a father dropped by with his son wanting to say hello to me. The little guy looked up at our place, leaned over toward his dad, and whispered something into his ear. But he spoke just loud enough for me to hear him ask, “Does Bobby Orr really live here?” It was no palace, to be sure, but it was home, and it was all we needed. In fact, that house had something to do with the way I learned to play hockey. I was obsessed with the game, just like the kids around me, and I was always looking for ways to get better at it. Firing pucks at your garage door is probably something that young hockey players have always done. But we didn’t have a driveway, so I’d open the door and shoot right through. The granite rock face that channeled the spring runoff into our kitchen provided the back wall of the garage—the rock had been left exposed because nobody ever saw a need to build a wall to hide it. Young hockey players tend to leave a trail of destruction in their wake as they perfect their marksmanship, but I can safely say that, despite firing thousands of pucks, I never put a dent in that granite. I would use weighted pucks that I created by coring out the rubber and adding melted lead. The heavier pucks were far more difficult to shoot. The idea was that if I could handle heavy pucks, the lighter ones would seem easy in comparison once I got on the ice. I had managed to scrounge up a couple of pieces of plywood, and would lean one of them up against the rock cut, and that would be my net. The other one I’d lay on the floor in the doorway of the garage so I had a smooth surface to shoot from. It was almost as good as shooting off a sheet of ice, and the plywood allowed me to really let fly with those weighted disks. The garage had a light, so even with dusk approaching I could still practice. Trust me, I shot a lot of pucks at that makeshift plywood net during those years when I was a youngster.Our house was located next to a couple of sets of train tracks. The ones just on the other side of the road were so close that at times you’d have thought the trains were passing right through our living room. The other set of tracks was up higher, located on a trestle that ran across the river just down the street from us. With two sets of tracks in the neighborhood, there was usually some kind of train traffic regardless of the time of day. It’s funny how you get to a point when the noise of those trains doesn’t even register with you. I guess it would be like living at a busy intersection with cars and trucks coming and going all the time. It was all just a part of living at 24 Great North Road. There was another place where I spent a considerable amount of time while growing up, and it brings back wonderful memories. That was the cottage my Grandma Orr shared with our Aunt Joyce on Five Mile Bay. All of us grandkids would spend endless hours during the summer months at that cottage, fishing and boating and generally having a great time. When you live in a northern climate and have to contend with a lot of cold weather, you learn to appreciate the warm summers. We took advantage of every day we possibly could at Grandma’s cottage, and I always enjoyed her company over those many years. It turned out Grandma and I had something in common that I didn’t really think about at the time. She would often make reference to the fact that she suffered from considerable knee pain. “Look at these knees of mine,” she would say, while trying to rub away the pain. Soon enough, I would learn what that suffering was all about.