In my Grade 12 year at Glenview, at the same time as we were doing Second, Brian announced that the senior theatre arts class was going to write a play, then stage and perform it, with no other help (beyond supervision) from him. The subject of the play would be our home town itself: Galt (now Cambridge) Ontario. It would be called The Galt Play.

The Galt Play’s concept wasn’t woven from whole cloth. It came from two professional Canadian plays of the 1970s that were tremendous successes, The Farm Show and Ten Lost Years, both mounted by the legendary Theatre Passe Muraille of Toronto. In the first of these, Passe Muraille actors traveled to the small farming community of Blythe, Ontario, and there lived and worked with farmers and their families for an entire spring and summer. As the weeks passed they gathered firsthand experiences of farming, plus plenty of late-night fireside yarns. Drawing on both they created a funny, sad, thoughtful, tragic, glorious play called The Farm Show which they first premiered for their hosts, then took back to Toronto, where it became an instant smash hit. So much so that, years later, it was still touring Canada when I saw it with the rest of the Glenview theatre arts class up in Kitchener.

Ten Lost Years was a show in a similar vein, but this time based on the Great Depression. Again, Ten Lost Years was a terrific success for Passe Muraille, and they won a great deal of awards and much well-deserved acclaim for it.

The Galt Play was to be created in the same mold. We had only a few ground rules to go by: Everything in it had to be true, taken from Galt's actual history. Nothing could require elaborate set-pieces or costume effects - because everything was to be performed on a modular stage by actors wearing neutral costume. All sound effects, music, etc., if any, were to be live, not recorded. Oh, and we had two months to pull it off.

Did we hesitate? Of course not. We were young. We all fairly ran down to the library to start reading up on Galt's history. Finding a story we liked, or a passage in some book or other we found interesting, we'd follow up - often by contacting real city old-timers, either in retirement homes or nestled in wheelchairs in their little, quiet apartments or houses. In fact, half the fun of working on this play was the people we met while gathering material. I didn’t make any lasting friendships that way, but it was certainly novel and interesting to go spend a couple of afternoons with Peter Perrie, an old gentleman living in the retirement home just down the block who knew all about Galt during World War I.

The stories we began hearing were amazing, quaint, and full of local color. Galt used to have its own car company. Galt was the number one maker of buffalo robes for open-carriage riding in Ontario (until artificial buffalo robes made in another city put us out of business). Galt used to have a main street that turned to waist-deep mud each year. Galt had an annual turkey shoot where everybody got roaring drunk (and nearly shot each other). Galt was founded by a bunch of dour Scotsmen. Galt had barge traffic on the river. Galt had the plague.

Sometimes singly, sometimes, in pairs, we began to write scenes and bring them in to class, where we would then perform them for everyone else. By sheer trial-and-error we found our groove, and although a lot of scenes were rejected, it’s surprising how many were well-written and inventive (even when I read them today). Within a month we had concocted 50-odd minutes of ribaldry out of all this and by the end of two months we were ready to perform it for the GPSS student body. This we did, twice, in the big gym, at school assemblies.

It was a sheer delight, pure bravado and tremendous fun. To this day I can still see Kelly Idel yelling at his old horse to get moving, while Mike Royston ‘waded’ through the mud of Main Street, coming to his rescue.

Pack rat that I am, I still have the script of “The Galt Play,” and someday I’ll convert it into PDF format and post it here so you can read it, if you like.