Super 8:  Canada, part two Written January 25, 2013   In Part 1, Terry Rockhold, my Richwood High School friend with whom I had graduated eight years before, speculated on the current whereabouts of Canadian figure-skating star Petra Burka.  Then we took my car around Lakes Erie and Ontario on a weeklong vacation trip.  He snapped a number of pictures with his 35mm camera, while I filmed several scenes in the Super 8 movie format. The first half of this article featured movie stills from Dearborn, Michigan, and Stratford, Ontario, which we visited on Monday, July 23, 1973.  To return to Part 1, click here.   Little more than a hundred miles east of Stratford is Niagara Falls, where the water of Lake Erie flows towards Lake Ontario. Here’s a closeup of the water going over the edge of the Horseshoe Falls. My parents and I had been here before, too, joining the other tourists on the Canadian side (where there's much more to see) looking across the Gorge to the American Falls. The afternoon sun behind us created a rainbow in the mist from the waterfall.  Down below at the end of the rainbow was the Maid of the Mist, carrying sightseers to a close approach to the 174-foot wall of water. We less adventurous folks found other vantage points farther down the Gorge. There were more floral plantings in Oakes Garden. Terry took a photo of me standing at the Podium of the Three Loons.  If that’s not what it’s called, it should be. I was addressing my followers gathered below in the expansive Oakes amphitheatre (postcard picture at right). The sun was setting, and we had heard that the falls — especially the smaller American Falls on the opposite site of the Gorge — would be illuminated at night. So we splurged on a nice dinner at the restaurant on the second floor of Queen Victoria Place while we waited for it to get dark. When it did, the lights proved to be too dim for my movie camera, but Terry managed this shot.

Then we got back in the car and headed for Toronto, looping around the western end of Lake Ontario with Terry falling asleep as we passed through Hamilton on the way. My parents and I had visited Toronto as well, but not the places we were going to see on Wednesday.  Our first stop was a shopping mall on the north side of the city.  Probably Terry needed to make a small purchase. Next he had me drive down a certain residential street, where he pointed out Petra Burka's house! I noticed that the suburbs included more than the usual two-story houses; there were also scattered clumps of tall buildings.  I was somewhat reminded of such urban schemes as Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City or Le Corbusier’s La Ville Radieuse.

Another Toronto destination was the impressive building below:  the Ontario Science Centre, which had opened only four years earlier. As former science students, we were both interested to see what was inside. I had been a physics major at Oberlin College — before I switched to broadcasting.   For his part, Terry had started out in physics at Case Institute of Technology — before he switched to business administration and Case switched its name to Case Western Reserve University. One of the world’s first interactive science museums, the Ontario Science Centre had a number of demonstration areas and hands-on displays. And it had more light bulbs.  This one was attached to a thermometer, showing how the incandescent output dimmed as the temperature dropped. On Thursday, we drove another 150 miles or so to Kingston at the northeast end of Lake Ontario.  There Terry wanted to see Fort Henry, established by the British during the War of 1812. He got to take some more photos . . . . . . as the uniformed guides and Canadian soldiers . . . . . . put on a demonstration for us. The show even included firing a cannon — at a safe distance, and away from the spectators. I had attended graduate school about a hundred miles to the south, so that would be our final destination.  We re-entered the United States that afternoon to drive to Syracuse, New York. We parked near the Greek houses on Walnut Place and walked up to the Syracuse University Campus. One of the new buildings I wanted to see was the Bird Library, which had been completed only a year before. The bottom floor was at ground level, but a ramp led to the main entrance one level above.  (At Oberlin, the Mudd Library would employ the same arrangement when it opened the next year, though it was built on level ground.) In front of Syracuse’s old library, meanwhile, the statue of the Saltine Warrior still shot his arrow into the air. Another obsolete building I wanted to see was behind the old library.  This was the studio of WAER-FM, which moved that year to a much more modern facility. Yet another old building was Archbold Stadium, the home of the Syracuse football team.  This 1907 structure would be torn down after the 1978 season to make room for the Carrier Dome. Terry climbed up to get a better angle, above the orange barriers. And then it was time to put the cameras away for the 490-mile trip back to Richwood on Friday, July 27, 1973.