IT WAS THE Sunday of Labour Day weekend in 1958, a late-summer’s day, still and overcast. My mother, her five brothers, and their mother piled into the family’s wood-panelled Ford station wagon. Slung low, it crunched down the gravel driveway of their cottage on Lake Muskoka and turned north onto Highway 11 towards Huntsville, Ont.
My mother, ten years old at the time, remembers the excitement. For the first time, she was going to watch her father race. To her, he was a beloved dad, the one who improvised jazz on the piano, told spellbinding stories, and could make nickels disappear in a sleight of hand. But on that day, she was going to see him as Will Braden, one of Canada’s fastest boat racers, doing that legendary thing: flying…
