The CZAR of Downtown I knew George mostly from the 50s and 60s. He was the Prince of Third Avenue and the CZAR of downtown from Ryan's Cash Store to Dump Road and all points in between. ( I would have called him the King, but we already had too many of them in the district John, Bruce, Jim, etc., etc., etc.) George was our leader and very competitive. We had to have the best snow forts, camps in the woods, and killer bonfires. I still have fond memories of our road hockey tournaments on West St. with his brothers Rog and Don, the Downeys, the Kings, with a Trask, Pinsent, Connors, Canning, Hiscock and McKenzie, among others, thrown in for good measure. Of course, we had the late and great Joe Sampson in net.West St. was a great venue, it had low traffic volume, well lit with street lights, central to us all, and just a few interruptions when our ball would go into Mrs. Green's or Mrs Clayson's yards and we would get an ear full. Our games would slowly end when our mothers would yell out from their back porches for us to head home for supper and homework. After his summer vacation in Greenspond and the start of school, George would organize our tire collection for bonfire night we worked like little Trojans finding and moving tires from the sandbar and the banks of the river. Old grader tires from Goodyear's foundry behind Fourth Ave. were gold, and if you managed to get one you were automatically promoted to the inner circle. Our fires were the best! We even baked potatoes ( burnt on the outside and raw on the inside) cooked over the toxic inferno of burning rubber! As we became teenagers we spent a good many nights playing pool at Bride's, sharing flippers on the pinball machines, and going to parties and dances north of the tracks ending the night at Hiscock's for chips and gravy. For me, George's greatest deed was in the spring of '68 when he helped me out of a jam. We both had our driver's license and drove our fathers' cars. I dropped my father off at the mill for his 4-12 shift, and one of the conditions of getting use of the car was that I had to pick him up on time at midnight. I went to a dance, left early for short joy ride west of town. It was a dark night and we had 5-7 inches of snow. I got bogged down in a rut a couple of miles west of the Frost Top. It was 11pm! We walked to the Frost Top, called George, he came immediately with a tow rope, got me out in time to pick up my father and no one was the wiser. Many years later I met George at a school reunion,he didn't realize that I had retired and living back home for almost 10 years. He couldn't believe it and said, well you don't go to Kelleys!. More recently we met this past spring at a flipper dinner at the Odd Fellows Hall. We exchanged a few jokes he told a few funny stories and he suggested that sometime in the future we would get together with a couple more and play the board game RISK. George my friend, we will play that game later. Terry