Bo was his name and he called everyone else Bo, so you would say "Hi Bo", and he would answer , "How are you Bo?", us kids would say "Hello Bo", just to hear him say, "Good morning Bo."
Most times we saw Bo, he was on his way to or from the bootleggers, and as he came along with his exaggerated limp, we would always say, "Hi Bo", just to hear his cheery " How are you Bo?" He didn't limp like most people limped ,he almost fell over backwards with each step he took.
That was about the only contact most of us kids had with Bo and none of us knew why he limped so badly,he just did.
One summer morning as I was coming through the path near his backyard, Bo was standing looking at a dory. I wasn't going to say Hi Bo this time, because that was something we kids did only in a gang to hear his response. But, I didn't have to say anything, he said," Good morning Bo, come here a minute!" I was scared, I was going to hear it for teasing him on previous occasions, but no, he asked me if I knew how to handle the other end of a cross-cut saw? I said yes, and the next thing I knew, Bo and I were working together, sawing off the last few feet of a dory, in the first step to reducing it to a rowboat of smaller proportions.
Over the next few weeks of summer vacation he and I became working partners on this rowboat, that was to be launched in Bedford Basin when we finished. He was Bo and I was Bo, though Bo was over fifty years old and I was around eight or nine, and except for the fact that he disappeared once in a while for a cool quart of ale at the bootleggers, you would think Bo and I were two kids building this boat. I was learning some valuable carpenter skills and looking forward to the fishing that Bo promised once we finished.
When the boat was finally launched, I wasn't the only neighbourhood kid in the boat, but I had a position of importance, I was the bowman, responsible for look-out duties while Bo rowed, also responsible for the anchor and keeping the anchor rope neatly coiled. Bo depended on me. I thought of myself as first mate, but Bo still just called all of us Bo!
We used mussels and periwinkles for bait most times, sometimes we cut up a perch or used the eyes from fish caught earlier. We caught lots of fish, cod, tomcod, perch, pollack,catfish, sculpin, flounder and eels. Bo taught us the art of handlining, where the shoals were located in the Basin, and sometimes some of his salty language, if his leg was bothering him and especially one time when someone stole his oarlocks.
That was another position of responsibility I held; only Bo and I knew where he hid the oars and oarlocks along the shore, and when Bo dissappeared for a few days with a hangover, or maybe a few weeks in Camp Hill veteran's hospital with his leg, I was allowed to take the boat out on my own. When Bo did return after one of his many trips to the hospital, he always had lots of what he called his Kotex, this was cotton and gauze bandages that they gave him in ample supply for the open wound on his leg.
On one of our trips alone together, he finally told me the story of his leg. He had been guncrew in the navy during the First World war, and shortly after the war he was sent to the Cdn National Exibition in Toronto to man a gun mounted on a railway flatcar. The gun had recoiled and hit him, breaking his leg and taking most of the muscle with it. The wound never did heal properly and continually festered, more than thirty years later. The government was paying him a medical pension and supplying us with loads of Kotex to clean our hands while fishing. Bo and I fished together most of that summer and the next, he taught me where the fish were, how to catch them,and how to row a boat, but the best came one evening when Bo suggested we go get some lobsters at night. I had to tell him I couldn't go because my mother expected me home at dark. After two years of partnership, Bo finally asked my name, over that period, I had learned his last name,but don't know his first to this day. When I told him my name,he said,"Is your mother Jean? '' I said yes and he said, let's go over to the telephone at the train station and I'll call her. I was really scared this time, my parents didn't know I spent so much time in Bo's company, in fact, I was told often to stay out of boats in the Basin, it could be dangerous.
Bo called anyway, and I couldn't believe my mother gave her permission, Bo had went to school with my mother and knew she loved lobster,he had played on her weakness and their schoolday friendship.
I was elated, I was going to learn to catch lobsters without the aid of a trap. We poled our way along the rocks adjacent to the Rockingham railyards, I kept the boat moving along, while Bo would shine the flashlight on the rocks just under the surface, when he spotted a lobster, he stuck out the net with the seven foot handle on it and scooped the lobster into the boat. When I took a half-dozen home to my mother at two o'clock in the morning, I was one proud poacher!
Bo and I drifted apart once I developed an interest in girls, but he will always remain the most interesting character in my life.

Handlinin'
Many are the men today that can recall their boyhood on Bedford Basin, handlining or jigging from the Irving Oil wharf at Fairview Cove. If many of them could or would return today and see a three acre container pier , and a beautiful picnic park where they spent many happy hours, it would amaze them. Pollack and mackeral were often jigged three or four at a time. Halibut and eels were often caught. Us kids would melt lead at home and fashion our own treble hooks. In the years after WW II, and before the Fairview underpass became the Fairview overpass many a happy and productive hour was spent fishing from that wharf by boys and men from Africville, the North End, and Fairview. Not far from this wharf was the Halifax city dump, they dumped the city garbage,and bulldozed it into Bedford Basin in those days, also an abattoir, with it's alluring odours, and within viewing distance was an old whale oil plant at the narrows. On top of the hill was Rockhead city prison, a miniture Dorchester penitentary. While fishing you could often observe men going though recent truckloads of garbage, competing with the seagulls, and another entertainment was watching men fill brin bags from passing railroad coal cars, throwing them over and later retrieving them to take home. When an Irving oil ship was tied up pumping oil ashore to the storage tanks, sometimes the cooks would offer us kids hot cinnamon buns to eat from our fishy fingers.