Friday Random Quotations: And when the Zambonis ran during the intermission, we drew the curtains, so the children wouldn't be exposed to the rougher elements

"Class didn't mean anything to Leaf fans outside the Gardens, but inside, in the red seats, upper-middle-class Anglo-Saxon protestantism counted for almost everything.  The reds were a bastion of old Toronto; Eatons sat there, and Laidlaws and Parsons, Amells and Airds and Ryners and E. P. Taylor.  When the Gardens opened in 1931, the city's first families rushed to subscribe to the reds, and they kept a lock on them forever after, all the better to preserve an orderly succession.  There were exceptions.  I remember a man named Tarshis, big in manufacturing something or other, who had reds.  He was conspicuously not a WASP.  There were Catholics, too.  The McNamaras had seats somewhere close to my uncle's, the father of the immortalized Judy, and the O'Connor family, beginning with Senator Frank O'Connor, sat in the first row behind the visiting-team bench.  Not everybody was WASP, but everybody seemed WASP.  The reds were a very polite place to be."
--The Leafs in Autumn, Jack Batten


I think being somewhat nostalgic for a time when everyone seemed WASP is perhaps the most WASP-ish sentiment I've ever heard.

Later Days.