Rochdale – My chronicle as Head of Maintenance©2020 Brian H. Lumley, photos by Alex MacDonald My name is Brian Lumley; I worked in the Maintenance Department of Rochdale College from January 1971 to October 1973. From September 1972 when the building went into receivership until October 1973, I was the Head of Maintenance. The person in charge of keeping the building together. I was 24 when I left. These are some of my stories and memories. I come from Beamsville, a small fruit growing town, under the escarpment on the Niagara Peninsula. It was a sleepy fruit farm and chicken hatchery town across Lake Ontario due south of Toronto. We used to say that Yonge Street in Toronto was on the same line of longitude as Mountain Street in Beamsville. Beamsville is now an internationally recognized wine growing area of Ontario. In the 1960s, you needed to drink ginger ale with the local wine to get it down. Pot came in via the sailors on the lake freighters plying the St. Lawrence Seaway. You could buy pot from them as their ship went through the Welland Canal. In reality pot was growing wild all over the back fields and along the railroad tracks. Residue of the hemp trade from WW2. We didn’t know what it looked like back then. Just another weed. We would sit on the top of the Niagara Escarpment and stare out across Lake Ontario at the lights of the big city. Only twenty-six miles away across the lake. We would sit in our cars and trucks or set up camp on the edge of the cliff, everything shut down. Maybe a little music. Drinking our homemade hooch with ginger ale, smoking some African Violet fresh off the freighter. Wondering what we were going to do next. Stay in school? Get married? Get a job? Travel? All of it? Attitudes were changing everywhere about everything. It was only a matter of time before it came to Beamsville. We knew there was a party going on across the lake and we wanted to be part of it. Fifty years later the Niagara Peninsula is supplying Toronto’s legal pot market. Rochdale to me was an extension of the utopian movement of the 1960’s. It was Toronto’s youth experiment in living a different way of life. It was in many ways a black-market, free-market existence. It housed and mixed all elements of the Canadian society. It was a freak out and an outrage to the elders of our day; they didn’t understand sex & drugs & rock & roll the way we did. They did not want to accept the racial mixing that started to happen. We assaulted the morals and bigotry of the day with a vengeance. I describe the building as 18 stories of hippies & freaks partying all the time and trying to get some sleep in between. At full capacity the building was designed to hold about 1000 occupants. Rochdale had upwards of 1600 occupants much of the time until 1974. Many occupants rotated around the building and many were only temporary. One fellow lived in his apartment from 1968 to 1975. Some people wanted their privacy and some created communes. Some doors were open all the time and some were always closed. There were solid groups that held fast; holding the building and its ideals together. There was a large group that just took advantage of the situation we held together for them. While partying we were trying to figure out how to keep it together. We were a village of multi tribe nomads with very few rules to keep order. Somebody always wanted to challenge and bend those few rules. On top of it all you had to figure out how to drive your own bus. I first saw Rochdale in the fall of 1968. I moved into Rochdale a year later, in October 1969 after hitchhiking, carpentering and folk singing my way across Canada and the US, then back again. At that time the whole building was pretty much of a full tilt boogey party. Something was happening around every corner and in every room. I remember asking myself when the party was going to stop; it didn’t until 1975. Seven years of partying involving perhaps 10,000 people. Rochdale was very real and a full cross section of life. We came to the building as if it was a sanctuary. Some people were going to school, some people were new in town and trying to make a go of it. Some people needed affordable housing, some people were escaping abusive home situations. Many Americans were escaping the tyranny of the draft. We had European draft dodgers as well. Some were looking for a new chance at life. The building had internal stores that supplied the residents with some basic necessities. Some of us were always poor and some of us made a lot of money in a short time period. The black market created an internal and external economy. All of us came to party. |