While wandering around a neighbourhood party at little Healey Willan Park last weekend (kids getting face-painted, people raffling Blue Jays tickets), I signed a petition to call the lane running from the park up to Harbord Street Frank’s Alley.

Nice idea — and no gimme, given the bureaucratic hoops. I’d noticed Frank’s Garage on Harbord, which I used for decades, was up for rent. Frank Kovac must have retired. He had said his kids didn’t want to take it over (too greasy) and he’d been ill, his frame had dwindled, his hands tremored, which is not great for tune-ups. But no, I learned, he died in April.

Lots of people felt warmly toward him, it turns out, though he wasn’t one of your standard colourful characters. He “kept your car on the road,” even if he didn’t always use top-of-the-line parts; he let local people park there; he installed car seats for newborns as a present. He didn’t do it for “goodwill,” he wouldn’t have known the concept. Gratitude discomfited him. He was understated, and amiable.

Like Marv Freeman, come to think of it, who ran a fabled corner store at Bathurst Street and Olive. Marv put a pay phone in so people wouldn’t have to stand outside in bad weather. If a mom came to the cash with something her kid had bought earlier that day, he’d tell her not to bother.

He was laconic, too, so when he heard I’d be moving away, and I came in to get some stuff from the fridge at the back, his voice floated hoarsely over the shelves: “Gonna miss you, Rick.” For him, that was an explosion.

One day he just quit, irked past the limit by one of the endless irritations of small business. People massed a few weeks later for a communal photo in front of the store, but he didn’t show. He’d have been amazed. Last thing I heard was through my mother. She said a guy named Marvin who delivered her Meals on Wheels sent regards.

So their “public” side, their sense of service and community, was no mere offshoot of business needs. If anything, it was the opposite. They were shy guys with a public sense, who used their small enterprises as an excuse to express that impulse. You see the impulse all the time.

When Korea beat Italy early last Tuesday, the short stretch of Bloor that’s largely Korean, but never assertively so till now, erupted with joy. By noon, the vans with flags had extended their runs to Yonge Street. I wonder if they’ve reached the Danforth Avenue yet.

Little Italy on College Street, meanwhile, was funereal. People wafted ghostlike from the cafés, looking nowhere, seeing nothing. I’d say this is no more about sports than Frank was about business; at bottom, it’s human connectedness seeking an outlet.

It’s odd how hard it can be to find that public spirit in actual public institutions such as government and Crown corporations. Partly, that’s due to the mingy, privatizing mood of our age. I happened to sit in a dentist’s chair this week, looking over at the logo on top of the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) building, and I recalled how proud it once seemed: the efficiency, cleanliness, the spiffy new subway lines.

Now it’s s just beleaguered and bedraggled, begging, like so many others in the city’s streets, for money and threatening to do something mean, like a fare hike, if it’s unheeded.

But even the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) was never fully public in the Frank and Marv sense. It always followed a corporate, top-down model, imposed by well-meaning elites for the good of the hockey-stunned masses. It was ever ambivalent about its demotic side, like its embarrassingly popular C & W shows.

These days, it’s more so. Someone who works there says every CBC employee should be required to teach a high school course on the value of public broadcasting. Or just take one.

At least private corporations don’t try to impress you with their public spirit — except when they do, which is always a pain.

Yesterday, we learned that Toronto’s new opera house will be named after Four Seasons hotels, in genuflection to a twenty-million dollar tax write-off. “It’s not just about philanthropy,” said the company flack. Yeah, right, we’d never have guessed. She said they liked being linked with places as “prestigious as the Sydney Opera House, the Kennedy Centre in Washington or Lincoln Center in New York.”

Two martyred presidents, one of whom emancipated the slaves, one great city, and a hotel chain. What’s wrong with this picture?

Centuries from now, I predict, archeologists will puzzle as they dust off nameplates on public gathering spots such as museums and stadiums that began appearing in the late 20th century.

These once honoured beloved teams or national heroes; suddenly, they refer to hotels and corrupt energy conglomerates (Enron Field). What odd, morally diminishing turn did these societies take, and why? And will the archaeologists also puzzle as they unearth a modest sign for Frank’s Alley (assuming the city says yes) and vainly try to match it with the well-preserved data on economic titans easily able to purchase their own memorials?

rick_salutin_small_24_1_1_1_1_0

Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.