It is clear, at the tender age of four, that Cathy McClure is no ordinary child. Her parents put their rambunctious child to "work" at her father's pharmacy. Already able to read road maps, she accompanies Roy, the deliveryman, on his routes. In memories that are by turns hilarious and deeply moving, she shares some of their more fantastic deliveries - sleeping pills to Marilyn Monroe (in town filming Niagara), sedatives to Mad Bear, a violent Tuscarora chief, and fungus cream to Warty, the gentle and painfully lonely operator of the town dump. As she reaches her teenage years, Cathy's bold, irrepressible spirit spurs her from dangerous sled rides that take her "too close to the falls" to tipsy dances with the town priest."
Catherine Gildiner
Gildiner was born in Lewiston, New York, was later raised in Niagara Falls, New York, and spent her teen years in Amherst near Buffalo.
Gildiner's latest biographical segment describes her time at the University of Oxford's Trinity College starting in 1968 where she was one of only two female students (both American) studying literature, and where the clashes of American and British culture provided many interesting and entertaining episodes. She managed her entry into Oxford partly on the strength of a poem on Milton's Paradise Lost which she wrote after ingesting a friend's psycho-pharmaceutical that was supposed to keep her awake long enough to finish her essay. According to her autobiography, this was the only poem she'd "ever written before or since", and it allowed her to leave the US where she had been questioned by the FBI over her involvement with a boyfriend who was a part of the Black Panther Party movement. Her time in England included encounters with both Bill Clinton and Jimi Hendrix.
After Oxford, Gildiner finished her bachelor's degree at Ohio University, followed by teaching at Thomas Paine High School, scene of recent race riots, where she successfully engaged black students that had been given up as a lost cause by some of her colleagues.
A scholarship allowed her to attend Victoria College at the University of Toronto for her master's degree with leading Coleridge scholar Kathleen Coburn. First she shared student quarters with men that turned out to be allied with the FLQ, resulting in her being questioned again, this time by Canadian police, followed by free rent at a high-rise that was revealed as a centre for illegal drug trade. Despite her turbulent residences, she managed to finish both her master's degree, and her PhD
Gildiner lives in Toronto with her husband of 40 years, Michael, and their three sons.
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