Toronto Sketches 11

Mike Filey’s column ?The Way We Were” first appeared in the Toronto Sunday Sun not long after the first edition of the paper hit the newsstands on September 16, 1973. Now, almost four decades later, Filey’s column has enjoyed an uninterrupted stretch as one of the newspaper’s most widely read features. In 1992 a number of his columns were reprinted in Toronto Sketches: ?The Way We Were.” Since then another nine volumes have been published, each of which has attained great success.

Included in this latest compilation are stories about the controversial, though not altogether new, improvements to the TTC’s St. Clair streetcar route, as well as accounts of such fondly remembered gasoline brands as Joy, B-A, and White Rose. Then there are those popular Great Lakes passenger ships that carried thousands to such ?foreign” ports as Lewiston and Rochester in New York State. Recounting the unforgettable Toronto snowstorm of 1944 and the tragedy of the fire aboard the SS Noronic prove that not all memories are pleasant ones.

Mike Filey was born in Toronto in 1941. He has written more than two dozen books on various facets of Toronto's past and for more than 35 years has contributed a popular column, "The Way We Were," to the Toronto Sunday Sun. His Toronto Sketches series is more popular now than ever before.