Dave Moczulski

Old Victoria Tavern, 466 South Street, Corner of South and Maitland Streets

My name is Dave Moczulski and I’m standing in front of the old Victoria Tavern at the corner of South and Maitland Streets. Commonly referred to as the old “Bucket of Blood,” my Dad, who was a railway worker at the time, never drove a car. Instead, he had a bicycle and he had bicycled anywhere he wanted to go, whenever he wanted to do it. As a young boy out playing on a Saturday afternoon, if I seen my Dad’s bike parked at the Vic Tavern, for a period longer than it would take to consume just one beer, I always knew that there was going to be an interesting conversation at home between my non-drinking mother and my “gently lubricated” Dad.

After the exchange of ideas, my Dad always had a habit of sending me down to Lapowicz’s, and Lapowicz’s was about a block west of our home on South Street. Lapowicz’s was a butcher shop and my Dad would send me down there to get five pounds of hamburger for a dollar…carry five pounds of meat home with you in a bag. I’d bring that meat home in a bag and Dad would make it into these little patties. He would fry it up in a frying pan of which, by the way, he would do two patties in a pan and it was covered in grease. It tells you the quality of the five pounds of hamburger that we got. And then he would sandwich that burger between two beautiful slices of Wonderbread and accompany that with a nice slice of onion on top. This, at that time, was food for the gods, in the old Soho neighbourhood.