A Taste of Maple

These days many communities seem to have an event that includes eating at various local restaurants, and they have trendy names like “The Taste of Brampton” or “Auroralicious”.  There weren’t many restaurants or eateries in Maple in the 1960s and 1970s, but who needed restaurants in a town that offered great tastes at non-traditional eating establishments?  For me Lawrie Hardware brings back memories of sponge toffee, not wrapped, just sitting in the open box, ready to be consumed by a young boy eager to part with his change in exchange for that first crunch. Perry’s Pharmacy was the place to go for a small paper bag of black balls, or a new pack of hockey cards that came with that slender piece of pink gum covered in a white dusting of something. The gum didn’t taste nearly as good as it smelled and typically broke from staleness, but it meant I had new hockey cards to rifle through.  Becker’s Milk was always the destination for a banana popsicle. For me there was no other reason to go to Becker’s other than to buy that banana-flavoured treat.  The Maple arena meant maple syrup, pancakes and sausages courtesy of Johnson’s.  Pancakes that were mass produced by an assembly line of men who probably rarely made breakfast at home and somehow they were the best pancakes of the year.  The Presbyterian Church was pie, lots of pie.  Sure it was called the Strawberry Dinner, but to me it was all about those home-made pies made by the women of the church.  I thought they were just trying to fill me up with cold cuts and salads so that I wouldn’t eat as much pie, but it didn’t work. The walk home always felt like I’d gained 10 pounds.  Of course, Shur-Gain Farm was the annual chicken dinner.  Chicken that you could smell from anywhere in town, which was much better than what we smelled from Shur-Gain some days.  And for a completely different chicken experience, each year boys headed to the Community Centre where the hockey banquet provided buckets of the Colonel’s chicken on every table to feed hundreds of growing boys.  In later years a grape Lola from the corner store seemed a good idea until it somehow ended up on my shirt each time.  In the 1970s Johnson’s Meat Shoppe became the go-to place for flavoured soda unlike anything sold elsewhere in town and Rick Johnson and Jim Brass brought us the Pop Factory in the back of the store.  It is true that there were good restaurants in town where we ate, but the real taste of Maple could be found throughout the village.

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