Brenda’s Wedding

In 1972 my baby sister Brenda decided to get married so I offered to have her reception at my place in the park. She and my parents agreed and we began to make plans. 

My house was a little small but if the guest list got too big we could always spill out into the park.  It was a beautiful setting and many newly weds already used the location for their wedding photos. 

At the outset it wasn’t going to be a particularly fancy affair. There wouldn’t be any expensive caterers or rented décor. Like all the Leeson family functions, my mother and sisters would kick in and provide the food and spend a little time making my bachelor pad a little more presentable. Mom would make the cake and my sister Noreen would decorate it. A few yards of crepe paper streamers and some tinsel and we would be in business. 

The date was set and a church was found a few blocks away from the southern entrance to the park. 

About a week before the big day Brenda decided that she would like to be taken from the church to the reception in one of my horse drawn vehicles. It was an excellent idea; I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it.

I had several buggies to choose from but when I hauled the best one I owned out of the shed I realized that it was not really suitable or fancy enough for an occasion as important as my sister’s wedding. 

Luckily, I knew a man who had just imported an antique wedding coach from Germany.  I had recently loaned him a pair of quiet, city-broke horses so he could carry out an advertising promotion for Simpson Sears and he owed me big time. 

It took a bit of persuasion but he reluctantly agreed to loan me the coach. 

He delivered the rig to my stables three days before the wedding, reminding me that he had about twenty-five thousand hard-earned dollars tied up in it and that it's loss would ruin him. 

“Don’t worry Udo, I’ll handle it with kid gloves” I reassured him. He didn’t seem convinced but he gave his pride and joy one last loving pat and reluctantly drove away.

I had a close look at the coach as I was backing into my garage for the night and I had to admit that it was truly magnificent. It was snow white with brass fittings and carriage lamps. The driver’s seat was at the front, perched high above a glass windscreen that protected the ornate passenger cabin. It’s pristine condition belied the hundred years or so it had been in existence. It looked like something Cinderella would ride in and I knew Brenda would be over the moon when she saw it but I also knew that I would, indeed, have to be very, very careful with it.

In fact I decided that I had better not trust the driving to anyone else on the wedding day.  I would drive the coach myself. Of course I would bring someone along to hold the horses while I was in the church attending the ceremony but then I would nip outside and put on my top hat and coachman’s cloak and drive the happy couple to the reception myself.

Everything fell into place and when the wedding day rolled around everyone assembled at the church; my other sisters being the last to arrive because they had been busy all morning preparing food and decorating my house. I had given some thought to the team of horses I would use. All of the teams had been quiet and working well of late but I was still experiencing a tinge of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrom from my wild ride down Leslie Avenue so I immediately eliminated the horses I’d been using on that fateful day.

I decided instead to use a pair of foolproof bays that my father had trained. Dad assured me that they were as quiet as mice. “They're more like insurance policies than horses," he bragged. 

I gave myself plenty of time to get to the church that morning; I had arranged for the parks superintendent to remove an iron post that was normally placed in the center of the narrow bridge that crossed the Don River; it was kept there to stop cars and trucks using the bridge and only removed on special occasions. After crossing the bridge I reined in the horses and watched while the super replaced the post locking it in place. When he was finished I thanked him and reminded him that I would be calling from the church when the ceremony was over so that he would have time to remove the post again to let me and the rest of the wedding party back across the river then I tipped my top hat and was off.

As I drove my horses through the residential streets on the way to the church that morning it appeared that Dad had been as good as his word. The geldings trotted along like real gentlemen and never showed any inclination to shy or misbehave. 

When I arrived at the church I turned the horses over to my stable man Dick and headed inside. The pews on both sides of the aisle were both occupied, but the Leeson clan on the bride's side of the church was clearly superior in numbers. All my sisters and their husbands and children were present decked out in their ‘Sunday Go’in to Meetin’ finery and my parents were sitting in the front row, Mom sporting a tight Tony perm and Dad wearing the oversized dentures he only used on special occasions.

The wedding went off without a hitch, vows were shared, people cried and kids misbehaved; it was all quite normal.

I nipped out of the church ahead of everybody else and slipped into my coachman’s attire then waited while Brenda and her new husband John ran the gauntlet of confetti tossers.

Then couple was hustled over and into the coach and the rest of the family ran for their cars. As I glanced back and down through the glass panel that separated us I could see my sister comfortably seated, flowers in hand with her wedding dress and crinolines filling the small compartment and covering most of the lower half of her new husband. 

She looked up at me smiling serenely then nodded so amidst the hoots and hollers of the crowd off we went. 

The coach had been a dream to drive on the way to the church virtually silent on its rubber shod wheels but as we set out it immediately started to make a strange rattling noise. I couldn’t figure out what was going on at first but then I realized that some of the revelers had secretly attached several tin cans to the back axel. 

The horse perked up their ears and danced a bit but after I gave them a quiet word and they started to settle down. They were still a little apprehensive but it would have been manageable if the column of twenty or so cars following us hadn’t decided to follow the age old tradition of hanging out of the car windows and shouting while they leaned on their horns.

The horses immediately responded to the cacophony by breaking into a fast trot and then a canter. Clutching the reins in one hand I took off my top hat, turned around and waved it frantically at the pursuing vehicles. They seemed to think that I was trying to inspire and encourage them so even the people in the line up who would have had the good taste to refrain from behavior of this sort joined in and an unholy din of shouting, blaring horns and rattling cans ensued. 

It was too much for the horses; they totally lost it and took off at breakneck speed heading for the stables. There wasn’t much I could do, our fates were sealed, we were doomed. The only saving grace was that the team seemed to remember their way home and were negotiating all the turns on their own; albeit with the coach tipped up on two wheels and threatening to turn over in the process. When we hit the steep hill that led down into the valley and the horses felt the extra weight on their rear ends they pulled out all the stops and bee-lined  for the stable, hell bent for leather. That’s when I remembered the metal post in the center of the bridge; I hadn’t phoned to have it removed. 

Well that was that, it was all over, and there was no way of stopping the stampeding horses now that they could scent their stable. 

The horses could pass either side of that solid post but the coach could not. My borrowed twenty-five thousand dollar coach would be reduced to match wood and me and my passengers would probably be pitched over the bridge rail and into the Don River. At the very least the coach would be sliced into two frank pieces and the bride and groom dragged independently to their destination. It was too much to bear so I just closed my eyes and gripped the driver’s seat in anticipation of the impact. 

There was an impact but it wasn’t on the bridge. For some reason the post had been removed again while I was away and not immediately put back. The impact I felt was a result of the horses coming to a sudden halt as their noses crashed into the stable door. I ended up ass over teakettle in between them, shaken, but glad to be alive. The newlyweds had crashed their heads into the windscreen and both were disheveled and looked a little worse for wear but they also were otherwise unharmed. 

As I helped my little sister out of the carriage I noted that she had lost her bridal blush, her face was ashen white and her hairdo had exploded into a bizarre puffy lopsided coif that was sprinkled liberally with the remains of her bouquet. After shaking herself off and straightening her wedding dress she, in true Brenda form, was the first to appreciate the humor of the situation and broke out laughing hysterically. 

A good time was had by all at the reception that evening but as it turned out the marriage itself was doomed to failure and short-lived. They were quits before two years were out. 

I never told them about my fears concerning the post on the bridge or how close they were to being parted a whole lot sooner. 

Runaways

Ask any old timer who has spent his life around horses and he’ll have a story to tell about the horse that spooked and ran away with him. Cowboys, farmers, loggers even retired city milk wagon drivers- they’ve all had similar mishaps. 

When you’re breaking in a young horse you expect that it might have a go at taking matters into it's own hands and running off with you.  It’s only natural; flight is the horse’s first line of defense against predators with bucking coming a close second. 

It’s the unexpected that throws you for a loop, like when that old team of nags that you have been driving through all kinds of scary conditions for several years, for no apparent reason, takes a bad spell and suddenly bolts and drags you and whatever you’re riding in down the road at breakneck speeds. If you're lucky you might get them stopped and under control before too much of your rig has rattled to pieces or ended

upside down in a ditch.

My father was full of advice about how to handle these situations. “Let the bastards run, he would say, and when they get tired and start to slow down whip their asses and keep them going. Drive the buggers 'till they nearly drop. They’ll think twice about trying that trick again.”

That would have been good advice and if I had been living on the prairies where my dad had learned his trade, out where he had miles of straight open road or vast areas of open Saskatchewan grass land to work with. But I wasn't. My stables were situated in a park in the heart of Metropolitan Toronto and much of the time I had my horses and carriages out on the busy city streets. When things went wrong in that environment the consequences could be horrible. Intentionally letting a team run off their fear was not an option. The streets were too full of pedestrians, buses, streetcars  and other traffic.

Back in the days when horses were the main mode of transportation in our big cities traffic fatalities were almost exclusively due to runaway horses. The newspapers at the time were full of accounts of horses running amuck and charging through the streets dragging disintegrating buggies full of women and children. These events were so common that big city policemen were, as part of their training, given special instruction on how to deal with them. Awards of valor were frequently given to cops and private citizens for successfully intervening and saving the day but there were just as many stories about men who had died in the attempt. It was a terrible way to die; men were often impaled by pointed shaft ends or wagon tongues, crushed under heavy wooden spoke wheels, or pounded to a pulp under steel shod hooves. 

No, it was no laughing matter, which, when I look back at the times when I found myself in these hazardous situations, is why I wonder why all I can remember are the funny aspects.

For example there was the time I decided to take my team and democrat buggy along a very busy city thoroughfare to pick up a girl I had been trying to date at the office building where she worked.

I had been unsuccessful in all previous attempts to get her attention and was leaning heavily on the shock value of this latest ploy. I figured she would have to be pretty hard hearted not to respond to what I had in mind. When she came out of her office at the end of the day I would be waiting, all spiffed up and sitting flowers in hand in a fancy rig behind a pair of prancing horses. You couldn’t get more romantic than that. 

She had been playing really hard to get but I figured that if I could get her into that buggy and back down the road to my stables and bachelor pad and then I might get the green light. 

I know it sounds crass but she had been so unaccountably standoffish that I felt duty bound to defend my reputation.

When she found me waiting for her, she was still a bit reluctant to join me, but then she saw several of the women she worked with swooning around the horses and looking like they would willingly take her place so she threw caution to the wind and climbed up in the seat beside me. 

Yes! My plan was working and we set off at a brisk trot heading south on Leslie Avenue with me brandishing my whip and her clutching her posies.

For the uninitiated to understand what happened next I will have to digress and explain a bit about the mechanics of horse drawn vehicles.

Like any other vehicle it’s essential that a buggy should have the means of going forward, backing up and stopping. It’s the last of these requirements that I fell afoul of almost immediately. Without becoming too technical I should explain that the main component of the stopping apparatus on these horse drawn vehicles is a device known as a neck yoke. Put simply, the neck yoke is a short cross bar of wood perched at the end of the buggy tongue. It’s hooked to the horse’s collar and then a series of straps and buckles winds around the horse’s butt and causes the vehicle to stop when the horse does. 

Therein lay the problem.

I had been so anxious to make a dashing impression on the lady in question that I was a little too exuberant with my whip so the horses made a bit of an extra strong lunge forward as we swung on to the main drag and headed for the park.

No problem I thought turning and smiling confidently at my companion while hauling back on the reins to slow the team down. 

I could tell she was starting to respond to my efforts to woo her and for a few seconds our eyes met and we stared longingly at each other while I thought fondly of the candles and wine waiting at my tender trap. But then something went awry. The horses weren’t responding to the several sharp tugs I had given on the reins. When I looked forward to see what was going on the spell was broken. My ardor melted away and was replaced with panic and cold fear. The leather strap that held the neck yoke to the end of the tongue had snapped and now there was nothing to stop the buggy crashing into the horse’s rear ends, which now it was doing. 

Each time it hit the horses they became more frightened and increased their speed. When I hauled on the reins I just made the buggy slam into the horses all the harder so all I could do was sit there with the reins held limply in my hands and hope for divine intervention.

Within seconds the horses were totally out of control and going full tilt down the road with the buggy periodically slamming into their asses and egging them on. 

I knew what could happen and I was consumed with terror but when I glanced over at my passenger she seemed oblivious and just sat smiling like she was enjoying the whole thing. She thought this Ben Hurr esc. performance was part of my attempt to impress her. 

Within a minute or two we were insight of the entrance to the park but we were going so fast that I knew that we could never negotiate the turn safely so I gave the horse their heads and we galloped past. 

It was only a short distance to where the road we were on ended at Eglington Avenue, a large main street, where I knew I would have a better chance of turning the corner without flipping over, provided I didn’t crash into any of the busy traffic that was flying in both directions through the intersection. 

Taking the reins in one hand I swung my arm around my companion and pulled her in as close to me as possible. I needed all the weight on my side of the buggy to keep it from flipping over. She still seemed very calm  and even snuggled in closer than I intended. She still had no idea of the danger we were in and I guess she was assuming I was trying to get to second base. 

We hit the corner at breakneck speed with sparks flying from the horse’s shoes, the steel wheels of the buggy skidding sideways on the tarmac and pedals and leaves flying from my passengers bouquet. Somehow, I guess somebody up there likes me, we made it around the corner and fate provided a large gradual incline on the road in front of us. 

Now I was able to pull on the reins without the buggy hitting the horses and gradually got them to slow down and eventually stopped.

I made a temporary repair to the neck yoke with a bit of wire I had in the buggy and with me still badly shaken we took an alternate route back to my stables.

God does punish the wicked because as it turned out, as the evening wore on and we shared each others company the lady, so impressed and stimulated by the events of the afternoon, became totally compliant and was ready to grant me my every wish. 

I, however, was so shaken, stressed, and traumatized that I was not able to reciprocate in any meaningful fashion.